At first glance, Mid Mitten CrossFit in Lansing looks like any other gym.
Inside the warehouse, dumbbells thud, pull-up bars rattle and music blasts over the speakers. Motivational quotes line the walls, such as, "Which is stronger, your desire or your excuse?"
Then there’s Harriet, an overly friendly 7-year-old wirehaired pointing griffon who greets everyone in class and demands pets. A young boy and girl sit on the couch, passing the time on iPads while their dad, Derek Gabany, works out. The kids aren’t strangers here. They’ve practically grown up in the gym, and the boy’s arrival was set in motion mid-workout, when their mother, Katie Gabany, had her water break.
“He and his wife were in here working out when she was pregnant with their older boy, and she was like, ‘Oh my God, my water broke!’ and she said, ‘Derek, you can stay and do strength for a half hour, then you have to come home,’” co-owner Anne Witherill said.
“I’ve watched those kids grow up. I would wear them when they were babies in their little BabyBjörn while I was coaching.”
Mid Mitten CrossFit is not just a place to work out, but a community 13 years in the making. It was built by Witherill and Sara Troutman, two physical education teachers who kept teaching before the school day started and long after it ended.
The married couple have spent a combined 49 years teaching PE in schools. Witherill taught for 27 years at Holt Public Schools before retiring in 2020. Troutman has taught 22 years at DeWitt Public Schools, the last eight at DeWitt Middle School. She is set to retire in November.
Both are driven athletes outside the classroom, always looking for the next challenge. Witherill competed in Olympic-style weightlifting, while Troutman did triathlons and completed bike tours.
However, by 2011, Witherill’s workouts had gotten stale. She asked her weightlifting coach about CrossFit, and he invited her and Troutman to try a short workout. She wasn’t sold at first.
“Okay, yeah, I still don’t get it,” she remembers thinking.
Afterward, the two looked up CrossFit’s free workouts online and started following the Kids program, which turned out to be harder than they expected. They were hooked.
Both trained on their own, then started teaching out of their garage in the summer of 2013 before opening their current location that November. An industrial warehouse with cinder-block walls, black rubber floor mats and overhead fluorescent lights. The goal wasn't to be flashy or get rich; it was a “labor of love.”
“It has to be a happy place because when you’re a teacher, it drags you down a little bit,” Witherill said. “I felt like I was getting yelled at all day long, and the last thing I wanted was to come here and have unhappy people.”
The gym may have been a passion project, but mornings meant coaching before school, afternoons meant instructing after the last bell, and Sundays were open gym.
“I mean we didn’t have as many classes as we do now, but it was pretty nonstop all the time,” Troutman said. “We were working like seven days a week.”
Then they started noticing the members who kept showing up and encouraged them to get certified, covering the cost up front and letting them work off the hours. Today, the gym has nine coaches serving about 35 monthly members. Every one of them started as a member, and the gym has never posted a job ad.
Mason Cordell is one of them. He’s been coaching at Mid Mitten for almost two years, but he first knew Witherill as his PE teacher.
“Anne had been my teacher in eighth grade, and then again in high school, my junior and senior years, and I knew she owned the CrossFit gym, but I was honestly just a little intimidated,” Cordell said.
He moved back to the area after college and wanted something besides a standard gym membership, so he finally joined.
“They’re not just running a gym,” Cordell said. “They’re actually focused and caring about what their athletes are improving on and how they’re doing outside the gym.”
The care runs both ways. Witherill and Troutman spent years starting and ending long school days at the gym, and nearly 13 years in, it’s the people who keep them coming back.
“This group of people here are some of our closest friends, which is funny because most of them are quite a bit younger than us,” Witherill said with a chuckle. “But we have created some of the best and most lasting friendships here.”
The relationships are so strong that even though Witherill has stepped away from coaching at night, it’s still hard for her to stay away.
“I’ve come a couple times just to sit on the couch and chat with people,” she said, “Because I love the people at the gym.”