Chris Blanchard thought he was entering a raffle for Tree House Brewery.

He was at the WASA golf tournament last September, dropping tickets into what he was sure was the beer bag. It wasn’t. He’d just won a free month at Prototype — completely by accident.

And he almost let it sit there. He waited a month or two. Then, for whatever reason, he finally reached out — with zero expectations. The plan was simple: use the free month, come a few times, and go right back to his own routine.

That plan didn’t survive his first group workout.

Here’s what most people don’t know about Chris: he’s a former Division I baseball player. He’d always worked out. But somewhere along the way, the training had quietly become a formality — a Peloton in the basement, some weights, a stretch in the morning. The way he puts it:

The first time he trained in a group here, that became obvious. “I loved it immediately,” he told me. “I think it became my release. It also fueled my competitive side.” After that first session, he was hooked.

The timing mattered. When Chris walked in, his life had a lot of moving parts. He was changing jobs. His grandmother was sick — she passed two days before Thanksgiving — and his grandfather’s health was declining too; he passed in January. He’d just taken over as President of Westborough Little League. He’s a dad to two young boys. And he works remote every single day, which has a way of compounding stress and isolation when the rest of life is already heavy.

“For me,” he said, “the people and the workouts helped me through a pretty stressful time in my life.”

Then there’s his knee. After college, Chris had surgery on his right knee — he’s got a cadaver bone and cartilage and two pins in there. For years he avoided strength work because it bothered him. The irony is that avoiding it was making things worse; he was never building the muscle around the joint to support it.

So when I tell you that Chris is now doing front squats, back squats, cleans, and deadlifts — the exact movements he’d spent years steering clear of — understand what that represents. His front squat has climbed from 185 to 235 pounds. He’s pulling deadlifts up to 335. Those aren’t just numbers on a whiteboard. They’re proof that the thing he was afraid of was the thing he needed.

He found his people, too. His 6 a.m. crew — Sam and Coach Jon — plus the mornings he gets to be the “third wheel” with Tim and Greg. On the rare day he snoozes the alarm, he feels guilty enough to drop into the noon class with Brian. “Everyone was so welcoming and made me feel comfortable from day one.”

And it isn’t only his crew who’ve noticed. Each month, our coaches nominate the members they think have earned Prototype of the Month — and they have to stand up and make the case for why. Chris has been on that ballot three months running. He hasn’t taken the title yet. Knowing how he shows up, I don’t think it stays that way for long.

Eight months in, here’s how Chris describes life now: still hectic, still chaotic — but in a good way. His nights are spent at the baseball field watching his boys play, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s found a balance he’d been missing.

This story was produced with the help of AI tools, working from Chris’s own words in his written responses and from his training history at Prototype. Every detail was reviewed for accuracy, and the story was shared with Chris before publishing.