Gett Fitt facility gets new owners

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May 6, 2011 - 12:00 AM

The “Pulse of Fitness” in Iola is pumping with new blood.
Gett Fitt fitness center, 312 W. Garfield St., has been purchased by Iolans Jaime Glaze, a certified massage therapist, and Adam Stockebrand, a former athlete and carpenter.
Contracts were signed Thursday. The new owners will take over June 1.
Former longtime owners Roger and Debi Campbell are pleased.
“My wife and I had a talk and decided it was time to let this go,” Campbell said “Jaime and Adam came to me and asked if I was serious about selling it and I said, you bet.
“I couldn’t think of anyone better to sell it to,” he added. “Adam and his family have used this place through the years. Adam even worked here for awhile. And Jaime has been a member.”
Campbell said the new owners are a perfect fit to take over Gett Fitt.
“I wanted to make sure that if I did sell it that the people were going to have the same type of philosophy as mine, which was a low-cost, high-quality type of place, serving a wide variety of people,” Campbell said. “I had a couple of other people approach me and they had a more big-town fitness center philosophy and I wasn’t interested in that.”
The old and new owners were finishing each other’s sentences last week.
When it comes to enthusiasm for the fitness facility, their hearts beat as one.
“It’s the best deal in southeast Kansas,” Glaze said.
“At the prices we have, there’s really no excuse not to exercise,” Campbell added.
The club’s 150 members should experience no disruptions to their workouts, he added.
“It’s going to flow from my management into their management,” Campbell said. “I’ve agreed to help as long as they want me during the transition.”
Ironically, Glaze and Stockebrand had discussed the possibility of taking over the fitness facility someday.
“We’d talked about it, that it would be a good thing to keep going,” Glaze said. “We thought if he ever retired, we would do it. And suddenly, we didn’t have any other options, but now.”
“We wanted to keep it here,” Glaze added. “It’s been part of the community for a long time, and it helps everybody.”

GETT FITT opened its doors on Jan. 3, 1993, in the old Sears store. Campbell, who is a health/physical education/fitness Instructor at Allen County Community College, started the gym as an alternative to the fitness center at the college, which he said was overrun with varsity athletes, leaving ordinary people no place to exercise.
Today, the exercise equipment found in the 7,000 square-foot facility reflects the many trends in fitness through the years, ranging from free weights to stair climbers, stationary bikes and weight machines.
Campbell has taught a popular fitness “boot camp” every January to help meet the resolutions of Iolans wanting to lose weight, tone up and otherwise improve their cardiovascular health. His aerobic workout isn’t for the faint-hearted.
The boot camps will continue, he said.
“I’m still going to be doing them until they get accomplished enough to do them,” he said. “I’m also going to continue working with my older people that we’re doing some rehab on.”
The new owners are Iola natives. Stockebrand graduated from Iola High School in 2001, Glaze in 1995. He has already been putting his carpenter skills to good use. The facility now has a colorful new coat of fresh paint and a remodeled restroom and he’s adding a room for Glaze to do therapeutic massage therapy.
Glaze, who plans to move her massage therapy business to the facility sometime in the near future, will be preaching a lifestyle of total body fitness that includes exercise and massage therapy, a combination that can benefit everyone, she said.
“It just kind of blends together,” Glaze said. “Working in massage, I have a lot of  people that really need to work on their muscles. They have constant wear and tear on their bodies, and stress.”
Exercise can help relieve stress — massage therapy can help people who exercise.
“For example, there are sports injuries that some people just can’t ever get relief on,” she said. “And I can work in those areas and help with that.”
The gym is open 24 hours a day for members with keys to the facility.
The new owners plan to use the exercise equipment themselves.
“We’ve been active in exercise in the past,” Stockebrand said. “Now we’ve got to.”
Freed from the burdens of business ownership, the Campbells plan to exercise their right to spend more time with their grown daughters and travel around the country.
For more information about Gett Fitt, call 365-5115 or 365-3463.

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