Lisa Zancewicz

Nobody in the history of Prototype Training Systems has signed in more times than Lisa Zancewicz. Not a coach. Not a founder. Not her husband. Thirteen years on the whiteboard, 3,447 sign-ins, 6,110 logged results, and a 335-pound deadlift that has been sitting at the top of her board since 2016.

Ask her how it started and she'll tell you it was the showers.

That isn't a joke and it isn't modesty. It's the actual answer. But to get to the showers you have to go back a long way — past the barbells, past the gym, past her husband — to a kid in Framingham who was not the athlete in her family.

The kid who wasn't the athlete

Lisa grew up in Framingham with a younger brother who, the way she tells it, played a million sports. She played some.

"I feel like girls' sports was so different back then," she says. "Maybe they signed me up for something, but if I didn't want to do it, nobody was really making me do it. Or maybe they were like, oh, she's not really very good at it."

She found her way into it eventually — swimming all four years of high school, a year of lacrosse, softball after that. She quit lacrosse, she says, because she didn't like to run. That detail matters later.

Somewhere in there she was waiting tables at Bugaboo Creek, the kind of restaurant that hands its staff a fake name along with the apron. Hers was Cookie. There was a guy on the floor with bleached white hair who everyone told her to find when she couldn't figure out how to close out, because he was the nicest person there. His fake name was Slippery. His real name was Brian.

She was reluctant to go out with him. She went out with him anyway.

Then she started running

They got engaged, and Lisa decided she wanted to be in shape for the wedding. So she took up the exact thing she had once quit a sport to avoid.

"I just ran because it was easy," she says. "I could leave my house with a stroller, by myself, and just run."

It didn't stay easy for long. She ran her first marathon in the fall of 2006, the same year they got married, and trained for it on their honeymoon. She ran Boston more than once — twice before Marshal was born, once after. When the full distance stopped fitting her life she moved to halves, because halves were more doable.

That's the first real clue about how Lisa works, and it has nothing to do with talent or intensity. It's access. Something she could do on her own terms, at her own hour, without needing anything from anybody. Hold that thought, because it's about to explain the next thirteen years.

The gym and Macy are the same age

She was five months pregnant with their daughter when Brian came home and told her about the gym.

"He's like, here's what I'm going to do," she remembers. "And I'm like — oh."

She still says it the same way now: the gym and Macy are the same age.

She was around before the doors really opened, doing track workouts back when this whole thing was mostly an idea. But being around isn't the same as being consistent, and Lisa is precise about the difference. What made her consistent wasn't belief in the mission or excitement about barbells. It was that we put showers in around January of 2013, and the gym was on her way to work.

She'd been going to a gym in her own town before that. This one wasn't in her town. It was just on the way, at an hour that worked, and Brian was already here. When somebody suggested she'd be better off somewhere closer to home, her answer was that it sounded dumb.

That's the entire conversion story. No rock bottom, no transformation moment. The logistics worked.

Back when the 5 a.m. was two people

The class she walked into barely existed. Some mornings it was Lisa and Mary Gemme, and that was the whole roster.

She was learning to clean a barbell from absolute zero, and hoping not to be the only one in the room while she did it. That's worth sitting with, given who's saying it. The member with more sign-ins than anyone in this building's history walked in as somebody who didn't know how to do anything and found the whole thing uncomfortable. She wasn't a natural. She was a beginner who kept coming back.

The room looked nothing like it does now — turf down the middle, an MMA cage in the building. On Saturday mornings people watched each other's kids so the parents could get a workout in, and Lisa remembers carrying Macy in and setting her car seat down on a box. There were parties back then too, when everybody was young and nobody had kids yet. Her assessment of the people lining up at the pull-up bar after the ice luge: "I don't think that's going to end well for anybody."

And people were saying things to her about this place that she still remembers. The one that stuck was I hope the gym really makes it — because what else would you do?

"I was like — what are people talking about right now?"

Thirteen years on the whiteboard

The beginner who couldn't clean a barbell turned into one of the strongest women on the floor, and the log shows exactly when it happened. Her heaviest window was a four-month stretch in 2016: a 335-pound deadlift in June, a 265-pound back squat in July, a 230-pound front squat in October. A decade later, all three are still the ceiling on her board.

But the progress didn't stop when the barbell peak did — it just moved somewhere else. Her best snatch and her best clean both came in 2021. Her best push jerk, push press, bench press and Turkish get-up all landed between 2021 and 2022. Her heaviest hip thrust, 300 pounds, was 2023. That's a second wave of lifetime bests arriving five to seven years after the first one, which is not what most people's training looks like.

Underneath all of it is the number that actually explains her: 166 logged back squats. 153 deadlifts. 140 front squats. Nobody accumulates that many entries in a single lift without showing up, over and over, for years on end. And she's still adding to it — her most recent logged result, in August of 2026, is a 235-pound deadlift double with a PR flag on it.

Which brings her to now, and to the part of the story she finds hardest.

Ask Lisa the hardest thing she's ever done at Prototype and she doesn't name a workout or a weight. She names backing off. She hurt her hamstring, and the difficult part wasn't the injury — it was listening.

Ten years ago, she says, she'd go as hard and as fast as she could and then pay for it for three days. The question she asks now is different: what do the next few days look like, and did I still put in real effort? Not "what's my max," but "what percentage of that can I still feel good about?" It isn't that she stopped caring. She had to care differently.

The schedule shifted too. For most of thirteen years Lisa trained at 5 a.m. — not because she loves it, but because it was the one hour that cost nobody else anything. Brian got the kids out in the morning. She got to work early. She was home in the afternoon. What she likes about that crowd isn't the energy. It's that nobody needs anything from her.

This past summer, with the kids old enough that nobody had to be anywhere, she did something she hadn't done in over a decade. She didn't set an alarm. She came to the 9 a.m. instead, and admitted out loud that it felt nice. Maria Maynard texted her about it — are you coming back, do you even go to the gym anymore? Lisa told her she goes at nine now. Maria's response: what kind of time is that?

What thirteen years taught her

Watch Lisa string double-unders together now and you'd assume they came easily. They took her two years.

It's the same thing she says to her own kids and to the fifth graders she teaches. Lisa teaches math and science in Holliston, and this is her twenty-fifth year doing it. "You have to put the work in," she says, "and you have to be okay with not being okay. You have to feel okay messing up. Being uncomfortable."

She says it applies everywhere. On college tours with Marshal: "People can go on a thousand tours and still might not know what they're doing, and that's okay. You're not the only one who doesn't know. That's across the board — you're not the only one in the gym who doesn't know where to start, either."

And then there's the part she never came here for at all. Ask her what her life looks like if you subtract this gym, and the answer isn't about fitness.

The vacations. The birthday parties. The weddings — standing up at Jon and Lily's in Jamaica. A trip away with the women from the gym. Thirteen years of people who started out as the other bodies in a 5 a.m. class and turned into the people her family actually knows.

She came here for a shower and a commute that worked. She stayed thirteen years, signed in more times than anyone in the building's history, pulled 335 pounds off the floor, and built most of her adult life out of a room she walked into because it happened to be on the way.

Nobody comes here for what they actually find.

I get to coach Lisa at 5am at least two days a week. Before I cut back to only coaching two classes, it was every single 5am.

I remember opening the gym for the 5am and nobody would be there... or it'd just be Lisa, maybe one or two more. I didn't mind.

What got me was sitting down for this interview and realizing I'd almost forgotten those days. The gym was still being built. All the stuff we had to figure out, the all-in mentality it took to make it work... it still takes that, honestly.

Lisa's a unique one because she knows more than most. She's in the arena training here every day, and then she goes home to Bri. She's seen both sides of it.

And I think about the stress of a brand new business with little kids at home. I get it now. I've got three of my own and I'm still trying to navigate it. She was doing that thirteen years ago.

On a lighter note... in all my years knowing these two, I never knew about the Bugaboo Creek names. I think I'm going to start calling her Cookie and calling him Slippery. I still have no idea what any of that has to do with Bugaboo Creek, or anything really, but they're hilarious.

The other thing that stuck with me is what she said about 5am. Some days you want to talk and some days you don't, and people give you the space for either. I'd never really thought about that before. It's hard enough to get up and get after it at that hour... but the fact that the crew at that time lets people ease in and be themselves, no judgment if you just want to get your workout and go or if you want to hang around and talk — that's a real thing.

I'm glad we got this story. The 100 in 100 wouldn't be what I want it to be without Lisa in it. She's seen all of it. And with everything we never tracked before Wodify in 2013, she's probably got well over 4,000 workouts in this building.

But the number I keep coming back to isn't 3,447. It's the mornings when I'd unlock the door and it was just her.

She was here when nobody was watching. She's still here.

Thank you, Lisa.

— Mike

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