Spokane Boxing, Mellow Monkey Yoga Gym adjust to state shutdown
Rick Welliver and Sara Teal don’t know each other, but they are in the same boat.
Welliver operates Spokane Boxing, a nonprofit gym that teaches boxing and mixed martial arts. Teal owns Mellow Monkey Yoga in Millwood. Both were ordered to shut down by Gov. Jay Islee in the state of Washington’s on-going efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19.
While the governor’s order affects all gyms and exercise studios in the state, the shutdown will hit those run by owner-operators the hardest.
Welliver and Teal came to the conclusion that closing their doors now was the only right choice to make before the executive order came down.
At first, Welliver said he was committed to keeping his gym open and announced it on his Facebook page. He and some of his students performed a deep clean on his downtown Spokane operation.
“I tend to be kind of a conservative guy, but at the same time I believe in science and I trust what the doctors tell me,” he said.
It just so happened that two members of the gym are local doctors. So he pulled them aside and asked for a consult.
“I asked them what I needed to know about this virus,” he said. “The first thing they said was that we have no idea just how bad this could get. We’re nowhere near as bad as this could potentially get.”
At that point, he said, he decided to close his doors.
“Boxing is a tough sport,” he said. “No one breathes as hard as a boxer, so if they’re breathing in this virus …
“I don’t want to be the guy who waited too long. I would rather shut things down too soon than too late. I don’t want to be the guy who allowed someone to get sick.”
By the time word filtered out that the governor planned to order business to close, Teal was hard at work on an alternative: She’d just completed a test-run of an online yoga session. She was ready to go Monday morning with an online continuation of her schedule.
“I don’t follow the news that closely, but my friends and colleagues who do kept sending me articles to warn me about what was coming,” she said. “I just want to make sure our clients can stay with their routine.”
By the time the edict came down on Sunday, Teal was ready to announce that she was closing the physical studio. But she coupled that by unveiling the online class schedule.
“When a self-employed single mama closes down shop, you can safely bet she didn’t make that decision lightly,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Please support your small, local businesses right now.”
Teal said her student base was large enough that she wanted them to maintain their daily routine.
After two full days of online classes, Teal was ready to call the online operation a success – so much so that it may well get incorporated into her regular offerings.
“Technologically, it was more simple than I thought it would be,” she said. “Part of the challenge is that my teachers were really uncomfortable doing things on video.
“But afterward, several of them told me they wouldn’t mind doing some of their classes online.”
Teal offers her online classes through the Mellow Monkey Yoga website (mellowmonkeyyoga.net) after preregistering.
“It’s important to me that we can keep this going,” she said. “One of the advantages of practicing yoga is that you are better able to handle stress. That’s pretty important right now.”
Welliver has chosen to look on the bright side.
“I am telling my kids that there is something really great that the City of Spokane has,” he said. “They’re called parks. I’m telling them to go outside, breathe, do whatever they want to do.
“I am looking at this as a chance to reset what I’m doing. I am going to get some coffee and sit and think about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”
Teal has already seen an upside.
“I heard from a former student who had to move away from the area,” she said. “She saw we were doing classes online and she signed up right away. She messaged me to say that she was so happy to be able to be back with her Mellow Monkey Yoga family.
“I hope we can get more new people to give yoga a try, since they can try it out at home,” she said. “I know of at least one person who has been following us on Facebook but hadn’t come in for a class. That makes me happy.”