How Long Can Gyms Survive?
After a wave of bankruptcies and no end to the pandemic in sight, gyms are taking desperate measures to stay alive
When CNN anchor Chris Cuomo announced his positive coronavirus diagnosis in late March, Americans were rapt as the usually robust newsman, ashen and quarantining in his basement, struggled with the then-mysterious virus that had brought schools, businesses, and air travel to a standstill. As for me, I thought about the gym.
Just weeks earlier, I had seen Cuomo at a Long Island training facility, where we both packed into a class of more than 30 people who circulated, panting and sweating and bumping into each other, from shared kettlebells to rowers. That day, I remembered that my usual self-satisfaction from exercising was tempered by an unfamiliar twinge of uneasiness that — in light of the encroaching virus — maybe I was acting recklessly rather than virtuously by hitting the gym. Then, almost overnight, the very spaces that millions of Americans for decades diligently patronized in noble, mostly uncontroversial pursuit of health and fitness, morphed into hazard zones.
Seven months in, the situation looks dire for gyms. The leading industry association, the International Health, Racquet, and Sportsclub Association, estimates that Covid-19 will cause an…
