Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeff Palkevich.
Hi Jeff, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was born in New Jersey with a congenital heart block. In layman’s terms, my heart naturally would beat really slow. I never played sports growing up; I didn’t even take gym classes from middle school on. I was the kid sitting on the bleachers reading while everyone else played. So my parents pushed me toward the arts. I played piano. After a lot of practice, I actually became pretty good. I was playing in the local mall department stores by freshman year of high school and at bars not much later. In college, I did some stints working as a touring member of some pretty big punk bands, I even played on some records here and there.
Suffice to say, athletics were not a part of my life, which is odd because my dad and brother were extremely athletic. My dad woke up before dawn multiple days a week to play racquetball, he even won multiple tournaments when I was a kid. My brother played every sport growing up, went to one of those Catholic Schools that is really known more for their sports dominance than they are for their academics, he was even a borderline professional skateboarder.
I received my first pacemaker during college. Basically, my heart never went over one hundred beats per minute, and when I’d sleep, it was in the mid-twenties. The problem is that when your heart is beating this slowly but pumping the same amount of blood that a normal heart is doing at around sixty beats per minute, it’s going to make my heart grow larger. So after my first pacemaker, my heart never went below sixty beats per minute. I lived a pretty sedentary lifestyle.
In the summer of 2015, I was ready for my next pacemaker, but now they had the ability to tell when you were trying to be active and the pacemaker wouldn’t just keep my heart from beating too slowly but could also speed up like a normal working heart is supposed to. I could finally try and be more active… At my post-surgery checkup my doctor told me “Go see what you can do, just don’t raise your left arm above your shoulder for the next six weeks or you’ll pull the leads out of your heart and bleed to death.”
So given the chance to finally try and be active, I joined my local gym. But it sucked. I had always wanted to get on a treadmill and just run or get on the exercise bike and just grind it out, but I had a lifetime of watching NFL games and sports movies where every good set ends with a high-five or words of encouragement, and sadly this just doesn’t happen at the gym. I kept going to the gym, but sadly my technology-enhanced heart just wasn’t in it.
Then something weird happened. My dog got fleas. They were everywhere. In the carpet, on the couch, on all our clothes. So we had to spend a weekend at my girlfriend’s mom’s house doing about fifteen loads of laundry while the flea bombs did their job back at our place. Luckily for me, she had a subscription to the LA Times, and starting there in the face between loads of laundry was an article about a run/fitness club called November Project. It talked about the exact things I was looking for in a workout, high-fives, sweaty hugs, and loads of encouragement. So that Wednesday my girlfriend and I got up at four forty-five AM and went to our first workout. It was everything I needed. Sure I was one of the slower people, but no one cared; they cheered me on so much I almost thought people were messing with me.
I finally realized what I didn’t understand about sports growing up and what I didn’t get at the gym, it’s not really all about winning or how well you play, but it’s about the community that you find. I became the guy who liked to do races, I liked to drive an hour just to find some challenge to try and conquer with my new friends.
So in October of 2018, it was Yom Kippur, and we had the day off, so Melanie (my girlfriend) and I decided to go to The Hollywood Bowl. Most people in Los Angeles don’t even realize it’s not just a place to see a concert; it’s also a public park, so if there isn’t a show you can just go in there during the day and walk or run around. I’ll say we jogged every step in the Bowl twice. It was two miles of stairs, hundreds of flights, and it was the best time. We were the only people in this huge concert venue just running around, and it was awesome. We started telling friends we had made in the running community about it and the next Saturday we got one person to join us. The week after, there were four more.
Slowly, we started coming up with different workouts. They were all a mix of stair running and body weight exercises. I never intended for this to become a thing, but my friends kept inviting their friends, and I got sick of answering dozens of texts every Friday asking if we were meeting up on Saturday morning so I made an Instagram account. I named it Saturday Stairs, mostly because I like alliteration and it pretty much sums it up, on Saturdays we run stairs. There was no promotion, just two posts a week, one on Friday confirming that we were working out the next morning and then one on Saturday with a couple of pictures of the workout.
By early 2020 the group was approaching nearly fifty people every Saturday and then well you know, the world shut down. The Hollywood Bowl was closed to the public until April 2022. From March 2020 until May 2021, we did workouts on Zoom. It was goofy and super awkward. I felt like some sort of Jane Fonda trying to lead a HIIT workout from my living room to a couple dozen of my friends scattered around LA, but people were lonely, and they loved it. We’d do our workout, and then people would make a pot of coffee and just stay on the call just talking for hours. Seriously, there were times I left, walked the dog, went to the supermarket, got the car washed, and I’d get home, and people were still there talking about how much they missed each other on the Zoom call.
In May of 2021, we started meeting up back in person at the Bowl, but we couldn’t get inside, so we did the workouts in the empty parking lots and hidden hills behind them that most people don’t even know exist. When we were finally allowed back inside the Bowl everything was back to normal; we were getting our numbers back to where they were before Covid when one Saturday in August 2022, there were a couple of people I didn’t recognize in the parking lot so I went over and introduced myself to them, turns out they weren’t just there for the workout, they were from the Today Show doing a story on the Hollywood Bowl’s 100th Birthday, and they wanted to film us for it. I never realized how many people watch that show. For months the one line I kept hearing was “My mom saw this on the Today Show and told me I should check it out.” Instead of a couple dozen people a week, we were now getting around one hundred at each workout.
Here we are a year later, we continue to somehow be one of the largest run/fitness clubs in Los Angeles. It’s still completely free. We get people off all levels from those just starting their fitness journeys, like I was doing a couple of years ago to people that have won Olympic Gold medals.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The first struggle for myself was learning how to be a leader. Sure I lead groups back in high school while we worked on a project together, but I never even played sports. I had no idea how a coach commanded the attention of dozens of people at once, especially in Los Angeles, where half the people there always want to be the center of attention.
Luckily the Saturday Stairs group grew organically and slowly enough that I was able to manage it. Honestly, once I saw someone else yell out “If you can hear my voice clap twice” and people did and they shut up, it was kind of a God send. Who knew one simple line can help you get everyone’s attention so easily.
The other challenge for leading a fitness club is finding the right balance of how hard can I make this so everyone from the beginner to the person who played sports in college can still all get a solid workout in. Sure, there have been some ideas we tried that completely bombed. I’ve realized honesty if the best response. If a workout doesn’t seem like everyone got the most out of it, just own it. At the end of the workout when we’re taking a group pic for Instagram, I’ll just say “well that kind of sucked” and then I promise we’ll do something else next week.
We also work out at a place that is a national landmark that makes millions of dollars for the city. I’ve had to learn how to roll with the punches. There’s going to be weeks where we show up, where we’re supposed to be inside the Bowl for our workout, but the Maestro has added a last-minute rehearsal because he wasn’t happy with their performance the night before. So I have to be able to pivot and come up with another workout without showing my emotion about how annoyed I might be… I now keep a big box of chalk in my trunk and can pull a solid workout out of my hat at a moment’s notice when needed.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve always been a musician. When I was a little kid, my parents would take me to live performances by older jazz musicians and somehow, I’d either wind up on stage playing with them or backstage getting to hang out and hear stories. On the eighth grade trip to Washington DC, while everyone else was racing to go in the hotel pool, I hung out in the lobby and made a couple hundred bucks playing show tunes on the piano.
After college, I started working in the entertainment business. Over the years, I worked for record and production companies, but I always wanted to tell my own stories. A couple of years ago, I started writing. I focused on true-life coming-of-age stories. Most of them were real things that happened to people I’ve known.
One of them is about my older brother who as a sixteen-year-old punk rocker in 1990, took an after-school job as a janitor in an office building that unbeknownst to him when he got hired was occupied by an elderly Richard Nixon just a couple of years before he passed away. Another project I’ve been developing is about the lead singer of one of the bands I worked with who after going platinum had to take a short hiatus and he wound up becoming a little league coach who took a bunch of neighborhood kids to the state championship.
If one thing sets me apart from others, I think I have a weird ability to see stories that other people might miss. I think every person I’ve ever met probably has something in them that could be a movie or a TV show but it’s just figuring out what it is. Recently I reconnected with a woman I’ve known for a long time who turns out was the first girl to ever be on a boy’s high school wrestling team. The daughter of an Asian immigrant who was kicking boy’s assess on the wrestling mat thirty years ago, who wouldn’t want to see that story?
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I think most people that show up to Saturday Stairs have no idea that I have a pacemaker. I lead a group where we have some pretty elite athletes showing up; you wouldn’t think unless I told you that I never even played sports or took gym in high school.
Having a pacemaker makes it a really easy way to help boost some new person’s confidence. I can tell when someone was dragged there by their friend, and they’re wondering how the hell am I going to do this workout. All I have to do is introduce myself as the weirdo that started this workout club, and then while we’re talking, I can pull my shirt collar to the side a couple of inches where they can see the large scar above my pacemaker, then I tell them, if I can do this, there’s no reason you can’t.
Pricing:
- Saturday Stairs is a Free Fitness Club
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saturdaystairs/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saturdaystairs/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaturdayStairs
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SaturdayStairs
Image Credits
Jeff Palkevich/Saturday Stairs
