**Finding a Workout Partner Can be an Adventure**

“A story about how we got to FitnessChum”

My wife was my most favorite workout partner till her third trimester. At that point, she and I had to find different sports to engage in, and that meant finding new workout partners.

We first tried our own gym but they had no process, manual or otherwise, to help us locate, find, or vet others with whom we might connect and workout. The casual encounters ended up with missed dates, forgotten appointments, and basically an uncommitted bunch that were probably not really interested but were just being polite.

So, we ventured onto the internet in search of places where we might find others of like mind to continue with our fitness plans. We tried most all places that promoted themselves as sites catering to our needs, but ultimately found ourselves at one of three different types of places…

1. Cheesy Dating Sites in Disguise

This first group had all the trimmings and proper sounding URL names. But, they were merely dating sites trying to get you in under the umbrella of finding a fitness partner, and later sell you services to send and receive emails, give stars to the good looking profiles, and such. Here were the giveaway clues:

Upon registration they’d ask for your sexual preference. I mean, does it really matter which way your door swings if all you want is a game of tennis, or to play a round of golf!? The next clue, and my second favorite, was the inclusion of many good looking people’s pictures on the first page supposedly also brand new users from my neighborhood. The odds of 10 good-looking supermodels joining any given club in a year are almost zero. What makes these people think we buy the fact that 10 of them joined the same site from my neighborhood on the same day?

After just a minute or two of looking around, mostly around the registration page, we quickly nixed all these pathetic sites and moved on to what seemed to be a favorite of the community in general but… Caveat Emptor!

2. Craigslist and the Boner Shots

Our second pass at finding workout partners was the use of the ever popular Craigslist. Now, we’ve used Craigslist before with some luck (see article Used Car), and figured why not give it a try. Lo and behold, they have an activities partner section, so we each placed our respective ads. And what fun we had sifting through the responses. Yes, we did get some very nice people who truly wanted to do something, but most of them were people who themselves had placed an ad and somehow found us and responded. However, most times the sports, locations, or levels did not match. God bless their souls for trying.

Then there were the vast majority of responses. My wife got all the perverts who wanted to “coach” her and to be her “mentor” and some even sent pictures of their “tools” even though she specified “women only”. I too got my share of “boner shots” with some claiming we could use that for playing ball, or that it would be a great hiking stick should I want to use it, or in one case I could practice pole dancing. In many cases they feigned interested in the actual fitness activity but were insisting that, after our sporting time, we cool down, shower together, and perhaps see where things go from there!

At first we thought we must just live in a freaky city, so we experimented with similar ads all around America. Let me tell you, we are not the only freaky city!

3. MySpace or FaceBook Wanna-Bes

Now, as much fun as social networking sites may be, we have had enough of them. Yet, people were trying to copy their success by creating a niche market for the same people but within the realm of fitness and health. They just were not for us. The main problems were that they exposed our profiles for everyone to see (and find) without regard for where we lived, what sports we were interested in, or what level partner we sought. On a regular basis -- even to this day -- we get random requests to be "friends" from people who are nowhere near us [e.g., a completely different state] or have no real interest in our sport. We’ve invented a term for this called…

Friend Whorification (frěnd hohrification) – The act of trying to get as many “friends” as possible in your network so people will think you are popular, important, and special.

And, the worst thing of all was the lack of absolute privacy. In the end, we were spending more time at our computers and not actually getting out there to participate in our favorite sport and fitness activities.

The Hunt Finally Pays Off: Real People. Real Sports.

While on our quest, and at the depths of our discouragement, we came across an interesting webpage, www.ChumWorld.com, whereupon we found several properties being promoted, one of which was called FitnessChum (www.FitnessChum.com); a place where they promised to help blend fitness with everyday life. It sounded intriguing so we checked it out.

The site was put online in June of 2008, and is by all measures a very private site. That is to say, at first we thought no one else was there but we were pleased to never see our profile highlighted on the homepage as a new user, nor published to the internet. Later, we found this was intentional and by design.

Firstly, the entire matching feature is such that your partner match criteria must overlap with someone else for you two to find each other. So, you could say for tennis that you want to play with women only, between the ages of 20 and 50, intermediate level and no more than 10 miles from your zip code. And, for golf, you want to find novice level men or women within 50 miles, and so on. Then, when you go to the Find Chums page, you can only see those people that overlap; a perfect match and they’re guaranteed to be interested!

Then, there are all the other features. Our favorite is the Time and Place page where you can broadcast, to your community only, what you will be doing (e.g., Frisbee golf) when (e.g., 4-6pm) and where (e.g., neighborhood park). So, for spontaneous fun, people can check this page and see who is doing what and maybe join them.

Another popular feature is their Venues Page where you can draw, save and share running routes, hiking trails, and the best mountain biking paths.

One other nifty feature is that you can create virtual clubs and have as many groups under each as you want -- a big improvement over Yahoo Groups -- each with its own calendars, bulletins and booking systems and, if you are part of multiple clubs/groups, you can merge all of your calendars to see if you have any schedule overlaps. You can add photos, and if you want, you can even charge and collect club dues through a PayPal interface. You can search for or sponsor events, and make them free or fee-based. As a trainer or coach, you can actually run your business from this site.

The site is extremely community-oriented. You don’t casually come across anyone from distant zip codes. The design concept was that you should be interacting with people with whom you might actually get together with and do something in real life. So the site remains focused and, at times, can almost seem empty if you are not in an active zip code, which was exactly what we wanted after having tried so many other sites and being drowned by unrelated profiles, messages, requests, and such.

The primary place where the entire user community comes together is in the Q&A section where anyone can ask or answer questions in topical areas. You can even win medals for having the best answers. Yes, when closing out a question to further answers, the person who asked the question has the option of granting medals (gold, silver or bronze) for best answer(s).

The site is young, but growing fast, and has great potential. It gets two thumbs up from both me and my lovely wife.

Oh yeah, by the way, we had a beautiful baby boy and now my wife is looking to get back in shape again and I’ve almost got my very favorite workout partner back!

Contributed to Boroumand by M.B., San Rafael, California, 2008

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