CrossFit Typhoon: A Retrospective
In 2014, I sauntered into CrossFit Typhoon in Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, and the trajectory of my life changed.
Today, I just learned that CrossFit Typhoon was closing its doors forever, in late 2025, so I wanted to write this brief history of how it featured in my life story.
CrossFit Typhoon was a place that had an outsized impact on me, in retrospect. Don’t get too full of yourself, Steve! It wasn’t all you, though it was partly you (more on who Steve is below).
But anyway, Typhoon in 2014-15 was a place where I evolved significantly as a person. It was where I began to see myself as an athlete. It was how I started existing outside my relationship, and outside the community of friends I mostly shared with my then-wife and my former religious community (the story of leaving that behind is here).
CrossFit Typhoon was where I made a ton of friends about whom I knew nothing other than how they expressed their values in the gym and with other people. It’s where I learned you can get to know someone just as well — if not better — through how they behave in a high-stress environment, rather than conversations about what they do for a living. In fact, it was after months of considering them friends that I even deigned to ask that question!
Finding CrossFit Typhoon coincided with what turned out to be a major inflexion point in my life — getting divorced, leaving religion, and moving to the US — and so it holds within it a ton of emotional weight.
Years after leaving Typhoon, the then-owner, Steve, admitted that on seeing me on my first day, he thought to himself, “Who is this brown nerd,” expecting me not to sign up or stick around. He was surprised to see that I did both those things, and that later became a “Total beast!!” in his words (possibly flattery, but I’ll take it).
During my time at Typhoon, a friend, while taking a video of me doing bar muscle-ups, commented, “I have to stop taking videos of you. A friend asked me ‘Who’s that hot guy you keep posting videos of?'” I laughed, but thought, “Hot guy? Me?” It was the first time I had ever heard of myself referred to in that way.
Before I started CrossFit, I could best have been described as a “nerd”. In fact, I’m still a nerd! I mean, come on, I program, I have strong opinions on grammar in multiple languages, and I understand most XKCD comics (but some of those really are for nerds).
But now, I’m “jacked”, as my friend puts it. My arms fill my sleeves. I have an upright posture. When someone told me carrying something was a four-person job, I picked it up, saying, “I am four men.” I call people “bro”. Fist bumps and high fives are second nature.
Some of that has just come with the passage of time as I’ve grown in confidence. But I know I talk differently from other people in my age group. While I still am one myself, I now call other people “nerd”. What happened?
It’s almost random how I found CrossFit Typhoon, considering the impact it had on me.
I found Typhoon because I was doing a videotape-based fitness course called P90X at home and wanted to go to the next thing. P90X was basically a circuit course using home fitness equipment. People laugh when I tell them I did it, as it was the subject of cheesy infomercials (that I never saw myself), but I liked it. Anyway, it was one of my only options for practical fitness while living in Beijing.
P90X was hard — each video was 1-1.5 hours long — and doing it did require a level of discipline. But in the end, it was home fitness, and that can only take you so far. So I looked up what to do after P90X, and found references to CrossFit. I didn’t even know what it was. All I knew was that it wasn’t anywhere near me in the inner northeast of Beijing.
But when I moved from Beijing to Hong Kong in 2014, I saw that a CrossFit gym was just around the corner from my house. I sauntered down there and was immediately intimidated by jacked dudes, back slapping, barbells, graffiti, a faint smell of sweat, and a giant, sceptical Scotsman at its helm. But whatever, Steve, I’ll show you. I signed up, turned up the next day, and set off on a course of attempting, unsuccessfully, to leave my ego at the door.
Thus began an addiction that lasted around five years. Anyone who has gotten into CrossFit — or heck, any other fitness culture, including Yoga, Boxing, BJJ, cycling, climbing, or whatever — knows what this is like. It became my life, or at least a huge part of it. The gym was a central part of my day. I’d sweat it out with my friends, forgetting my stress, enjoying the camaraderie of shared misery, and revelling in the post-workout glow together. Sitting in silence with exhausted comrades bonds you in ways it’s hard to explain.
But I’ve also learned since then that it’s not just the workout that bonds you. This doesn’t happen at any gym. Culture is top down, and Steve was at the top, both organisationally and physically (is it my memory, or is he like 6’5? He seemed that way!)
Steve (Wilson, though it took me a while to remember his last name) was and is a huge Scottish dude. Used to play a lot of rugby, possibly professionally, maybe with a small team. He was involved in a big project management way in construction or something (sorry pal, I’ve forgotten the details!), but was an easy-going guy with a gregarious personality and big, boisterous laugh. Steve strutted about the gym, uttering memorable catch phrases in what is, in my definitely incorrect memory, the strongest Scottish accent I know. “All ye haf to du is pick i’ op and pu’ i’ don. Thar yu goh, tha’s pre”y gut!” I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s just how it is in my head, a decade later.
Steve was also the kind of guy with whom I’d never naturally be friends for no reason other than that we’d never have crossed paths. I didn’t go to pubs, I didn’t work in his industry, I didn’t play rugby, and I didn’t work out. Well, I added one of those things to the list of things I do, and that changed.
The gym was actually co-owned by a number of people — Steve was just the operating partner. Joey was another co-owner and another strong personality in the gym. He was the first of a few Canadians I met (mostly at Typhoon) who made me realise they’re not all wusses, as they’re portrayed on TV. Maybe the rest of them are…
The rest of the people in the gym were also new types of friends for me. Teachers, pilots, mums, people from other industries. Regular people who had regular jobs of various sorts, who went out, had dating lives or families, and generally seemed much more normal than the startup geeks and semi-religious types with whom I’d previously hung out.
The way in which Steve and Joey (and others, maybe) influenced the culture was to attract good people and exclude bad ones. I learned of this over time. If someone was a bad seed, they were shown the door. If someone was good value, they were encouraged to stay.
But this wasn’t done in an insular way. The way I know this is that if that group included me, it was an inclusive one! Whether someone could stay or not mostly depended on whether they had a good attitude. If someone was a team player, supported others, and had positive energy, they belonged at Typhoon. So the crew there was phenomenal.
Which isn’t to say culture at the gym was perfect. There was drama, of course, as there is at every CrossFit gym. People dated people, broke up, and rebounded with others. Coaches dated people. Some members developed bad blood and had to leave. In some ways, you can’t avoid this stuff — it’s just what happens in a society. Some of it was unfortunate and affected some of my close friends, but mostly, people didn’t let it spill out into their day-to-day experience. I didn’t have drama at Typhoon, but I did have drama at the gym I went to next, so I know a bit about what that feels like.
With the Typhoon crew, I did stuff I hadn’t done much of since many years earlier, or maybe ever. I hung out in the gym on weekends, chatting about nothing. We went out to the pub (sometimes, though not often, as I still don’t drink). We had parties, occasionally. Honestly, I sometimes felt a little out of place, but only because of sobriety, plus my own hangups and inexperience doing this “normal” stuff. It wasn’t on them, because they accepted — even liked — me, and I felt it.
Hanging out with this group of gweilos let me see myself in a new way. I never had seen myself as physically inept, but nor did I think of myself as an athlete, as I now do, someone who picks up sports and physical things easily. I hadn’t ever thought of myself as someone who socialised a lot, but now I know I can make friends fairly easily in unfamiliar environments. And I had never thought I could be physically, superficially attractive to women, but realised that was now possible. It’s a nice feeling for a nerd to have.
Typhoon set me up for so much. I moved to San Francisco, starting a new life in a new gym (Flagship Athletics) with new friends, confident that I could survive the physical intensity of it and make new friends in the process (I did both). After getting bored with CrossFit later, I started new sports, like MMA and dancing, safe in the knowledge that I had the athletic prowess to become good at them. And Typhoon was the place that taught me that I could be accepted by and form banter-filled chat groups with a disparate group of people, the latter of which is all I want, really.
CrossFit Typhoon went through a number of iterations after I left. New owners (I think a few generations), facelifts, different people, and even a different location. I’m sure many others have had their own stories to tell, and they’d all be different from mine. But there won’t be any more once it closes.
Because in two weeks, in late 2025, CrossFit Typhoon will close permanently. I’m sad that it’s closing, but I also know those memories, friends, and life lessons will stay with me forever.
