Jess Clancy

In 2008, Jess Clancy had just moved to Hopkinton and was pregnant with her first child, Taylor, when she heard Boston Sports Club was about to open in Westborough. She joined before the doors even opened, timing it around her due date. She put her membership on hold through the birth and a few months of newborn life, then walked in for her first real workout that November. The club assigned her a trainer: Brian Zancewicz.

She and Brian hit it off right away, and she kept training with him at Boston Sports Club for years — it's also where she first met Mike. Then one day, Brian called with news: he and Mike were leaving to open Prototype. She didn't hesitate. "Of course I'm going to follow you," she told him. "You guys know what you're doing — I trust you." Even before the doors opened, she was doing workouts with a small group at the Westborough High School track, back when the building that's now Prototype was still a clothing store under construction.

Thirteen-plus years later, she's still showing up — most mornings before the sun's up. That kind of tenure doesn't happen by accident, and it hasn't come easily. Jess is a tax CPA and a partner at an accounting firm, a job with its own brutal seasonal hours. She's raised four kids largely on Prototype's schedule, training through three pregnancies at Prototype and rebuilding her mornings around a 5 a.m. alarm because there was no childcare when her son Finnegan was born. And in November 2012, just months after the gym opened, she had a tumor removed from her neck in a surgery serious enough to keep her in the hospital five nights. It left her right vocal cord permanently paralyzed — she can't take a full breath anymore, and during a hard workout, her breathing gets loud enough that strangers sometimes ask if she's okay.

None of it has ever been enough to keep her away. "Even if there's new people here, for some reason there's just such a comfort level coming in," she says. Show up, do the work, however loud or however long it takes — that's the only rule that's ever mattered here, and it's the rule that's kept her coming back for thirteen years.

The First 95-Pound Clean

Jess's favorite memory from her earliest days at Prototype doesn't come from a benchmark WOD or a class record — it comes from the very first CrossFit Open the gym ever ran, back in 2013. The workout was a short, brutal ladder of clean and jerks and toes-to-bar, roughly seven minutes on the clock. She had never cleaned 95 pounds in her life. She decided to just try, and to just get one rep. With Brian coaching her through it and a room full of people working the same clock beside her, she got the bar to 95 pounds and locked it out overhead.

That's still what she loves most about training here. It's competitive, she says, but not against everybody else — you're competing against yourself, all the time. At a typical gym, she points out, nobody's cheering when you hit a milestone lift. At Prototype, the whole room does.

Her kids grew up in this building right alongside her. Finnegan and Keira used to sit in a stroller courtside while she trained, Keira took her first steps inside these walls, and her youngest, Amelia, started coming to class with Jess the moment she got medical clearance after giving birth in December 2019.

Fourteen Years, Still HBIC

Ask around the 5, 6, 7, and 9 a.m. classes and you'll hear Jess's nickname before you hear her last name: HBIC. It started as a joke on a bar-hopping trip to Charleston with a group of Prototype women — the same group that now vacations together every year — and it stuck. She's got the shirts and the gym bag to prove it. She'd rather think of it as encouragement than bossiness: if she sees someone not working up to their potential, she tells them what she thinks.

That's the part she says she'd miss most if Prototype were just a regular gym. When she stepped back for a stretch during a busy season, Coach Jon put together a missing-persons poster with her face on it. At a normal gym, she says, nobody does that. Here, people notice when you're gone, and they want you back.

The training base Prototype has given her shows up outside the gym, too — Jess has run the Boston Marathon, and these days she's working her way back to more regular running on top of her usual barbell work in class.

Thirteen Years of Numbers

Thirteen years of Wodify logs tell their own version of this story. Jess pulled 155 pounds off the floor in her first recorded deadlift back in June 2013. By the summer of 2017, that number was 240 pounds — an 85-pound climb in four years. She's still setting deadlift PRs today: 207 pounds as recently as October 2025, more than a decade after she started. Her clean followed a similar arc — 95 pounds overhead for the first time in 2013, a career-best 136-pound hang power clean in 2024, and a fresh 115-pound power clean and clean PR just days before this story went up. Across all of it, she's logged 2,125 classes and counting, and she's still on the whiteboard almost every week.

Jess came to Prototype before it was Prototype, looking for a way to stay in shape after having a baby. Thirteen-plus years, four kids, a demanding career, and a permanently paralyzed vocal cord later, she's still one of the first names on the whiteboard most mornings. What she found here wasn't just a routine — it was a place that's kept her showing up longer than almost anyone else in the building, through every version of her life it's had to make room for.

"I do this because when I'm 80 years old, I want to be able to jump around and move around and get down on the floor, maybe play with grandkids and pop back up. That's really what we're training for — to live a long life, and at the end of it still be able to do the things you love."

Jess is an original member — here before we even had a name for what we were building, back at the track, back when this space was still a clothing store. She's also hardly ever on time, she'll ask you a hundred questions (sometimes complaints, too), and she shows up in that robe more often than not. Somehow all of that is exactly what makes Jess, Jess — and exactly why we love her.

She trusted us before Day 1, and she's spent every year since helping build the culture and community that this place is for everybody else who walks through the door. She's trusted us to coach her through multiple pregnancies, through Boston, and now through her kids and her husband Kevin, who I get to coach personally.

I've got a running list of Jess stories most people don't know about. She'll pop in at random hours asking to borrow cash to tip the nail place next door — so now I just ask her if she needs money the second I see her coming. And somewhere around COVID, she borrowed a 20-lb dumbbell from us that I was convinced had never made its way back — I gave her grief about it for years. Writing this, I actually found out she brought it back a while ago and I never even noticed. So I owe her an apology on that one.

That's classic Jess. We love her here, and I'm glad she's here.

Want more? A few years back, Jess sat down for a full episode of the Community Conversation — her career, her kids, HBIC's origin story, and the movements she loves most.

This story was developed through a recorded video interview and shaped with the help of AI writing tools. The facts, quotes, and experiences are Jess's own — AI helped organize and present them in a format worthy of the story she's lived.