Before Prototype existed, I was a Master Trainer at Boston Sports Club in Westborough, and there was this really attractive young lady who worked the front desk who was really good at folding towels. That's Erin, if you didn't know… that was the summer of 2012 — the same year, it turns out, I'd start building this gym. Neither of those things happened because of the other. They just happened at the same time, and fourteen years later I can't really tell the story of one without the other.
How We Met
I went to Westfield State for Exercise Science with a concentration in Sports Medicine. That path started with getting hurt a lot in high school — enough injuries that I thought I wanted to get into physical therapy. It wasn't until senior year, when I took a strength and conditioning course and picked up a part-time job as a personal trainer at my professor's gym, that I realized what I actually wanted was to coach people, not just rehab them. That's what put me on the floor at Boston Sports Club.
Erin was a lifeguard and worked the front desk that summer, home from college. I remember seeing her and asking Brian (who was the fitness manager at the time) who she was… he had no idea. So I went up to talk to her, hit on her a bit you know show off some charm but that somehow took a turn to squatting, because that's apparently the move I had.
"I was really good at rolling towels," Erin says now. "Mike came up and started talking to me about squatting. I was like, 'oh wow, I guess I need a personal trainer.'"
"I didn't know he'd been hitting on me. I was like, okay, I guess I just lost my personal trainer. But we went on a date, and that was it."
— ErinI fired her as a client, because I wanted to take her on a date and hadn't figured out how to say that part out loud. I'll take the loss on execution. I got the outcome I wanted.
Passing the Test
Meeting her parents came with its own two-part exam. Erin had told me her mom was tough to impress. I wasn't worried — I train and coach moms all day. I met her at a track workout and put her straight through it.
Her dad was a different story. We were driving back from the beach when Erin mentioned, with about thirty seconds' notice, that he'd be waiting for us in a parking lot. Big handshake. Not what I was expecting. Turns out he's one of the coolest guys I know.
Then there was my first Passover with Erin's family. I'd never been to a Passover Seder before — no bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs either — so the whole thing was brand new to me. I don't remember all the details, but Erin recalls how her Bubby (her grandmother) made me sit right next to her at the table, and her first question to me was, "So... are you Jewish?" My quick answer was, "No, I'm not Jewish, but I love the Jewish people!" Erin says she instantly liked me for it.
Years later, an Ancestry DNA test — which her parents got Erin and all her siblings and their significant others for Christmas, which is funny in itself — told me I'm 1% Eastern European Jewish. I couldn't resist texting her mom to let her know her daughter was dating a nice Jewish boy after all.
Building It, and Testing It
While all of that was happening, I was also trying to open a gym. I'd fallen in love with CrossFit at Boston Sports Club, and within about a year and a half I'd opened Prototype. We ran free workouts at the track — Tuesdays and Thursdays, six in the morning and six at night — just to get people to know we existed.
Erin went back to school that fall, three states away, and neither of us really knew if long distance was going to hold. I was at the gym from four in the morning until eight at night, every day, building a business I had no real idea how to run. Erin was living in a library.
"I had no concept of how much work and time it takes to open a gym," she says. We just kept talking. She came back for a break that winter, and at her family's holiday party that December, I was introduced — officially, for the first time — as her boyfriend.
That same stretch is where this story starts overlapping with another one from this series. In 2013, Erin and I flew to the Bahamas with my old college roommate Steve and his girlfriend Jackie — the same trip where Steve proposed to her. If you read Steve's story on Day 98, this is that trip.
Erin finished her time in Pennsylvania with a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Lehigh, graduating at the top of her class in 2015, still three states from a gym that was starting to take up my entire life. She always knew she wanted to take that engineering background into sales — into medical device work specifically — and we made the distance work anyway. That same year, we were back with Steve and Jackie again — this time for their wedding.
The Proposal
I drove to Falmouth to take her parents to dinner, just to ask permission — no other reason given. Her mom told me afterward they'd figured I was either about to propose or about to break up with Erin, and either way, they'd still love me.
I proposed on Christmas, 2017, with a travel bag monogrammed with her new initials. Erin opened it up and just stared at it, not getting the hint. I was already down on one knee, waiting for her to catch up.
She said yes. She'll tell you she had to think about it. I'll tell you she didn't.
A Challenging Chapter
We got married in May of 2019. By the end of that year, I'd separated from my business partner — by January 1, 2020, Prototype was 100% mine. Three months later, COVID hit. We closed on our house two weeks after everything shut down, in early April 2020. Erin was going through her own change that stretch too — she'd worked as a process engineering consultant before landing a role at Stryker in 2019, then made full sales rep in 2021. New jobs, a business separation, a marriage, a house, all inside about eighteen months. A few months after we closed on the house, we added a dog to the chaos — Koda, July 2020.
I remember pulling up to our house in the middle of all of it, trying to figure out how to keep Prototype running and still take care of the community. I sat in the driveway in my car for a minute before I went inside, and just said to myself, "You will figure this out."
By that fall I was completely burnt out. I told Erin I didn't know if I wanted to do this anymore. We actually mapped out what walking away could look like. That chapter is what pushed me into real leadership work — learning to take personal accountability instead of looking for whose fault something was. It was one of the harder lessons of my life, and one of the ones I'm most grateful for.
I'm probably most proud of just enduring it. Fourteen years of business ownership, and we're still here, still growing, still surrounded by great people.
Erin would add one thing to that: that I should also be proud of the people who worked here and went on to open their own places. Building people up, even the ones who eventually leave to build something of their own, is still building something.
Us, Now
Three kids later — and Erin still shows up. She doesn't train like she used to, but when she does, she goes hard. She doesn't give herself enough credit for it either. And for the record, she gives me a hard time in the gym as much as I give her one — the "no whining" sign wasn't really a joke.
The banter runs both directions. Erin's fond of pointing out that I work out every single day — she means it with love, but there's a passive-aggressive edge to it too. Exhibit A is this photo from the Battle of the Ages competition in 2017, me mid-effort in the foreground while Erin, somewhere in the background, is very much not watching.
These days the audience has grown. We took the girls to Aruba this past year, and this September we were part of a bigger gathering — our family alongside Erin's best friend since high school, Meredith, her husband Ben, and their daughter Sienna, celebrating Sienna's second birthday.
Our Story — Part 1. The Prototype Story — Part 2
This is our story — who we are, how it started, and everything it took to keep it going. A front desk, a bad pickup line, fourteen years, three kids, hard years in the middle of it, and I wouldn't trade any of it.
But this is only half of it. I wanted to save the last story to be about Prototype, about the community.
This 100 in 100 project has been both a lot of work and a lot of fun. All 99 stories leading up to 100, to me, are examples of what makes Prototype... Prototype. But not everyone knows the origin story... there are anecdotes and memories about the people, the community, the events and everything in between... and that is how 100 in 100 will come to a close.
So tomorrow is Part 2 — it's about a mission, it's about Prototype. Day 100 is everything Prototype has become since that first CrossFit workout hooked me, the programs we've built since, and what the future holds.
"I'm glad we did it. And I hope everyone reading this is glad too."
— Mike
