SEATTLE FITNESS MAGAZINE

A showcase of the city's electrifying fitness scene and the incredible community thriving on the gym floor. Join us on this exhilarating journey to elevate your fitness game!

Foreground: a red-felt pool table with balls racked. Directly overhead, seen from below, the gym's 'rolling pin' rotating climbing feature — a huge plywood-and-blue-panel cylinder studded with holds, suspended on posts. Beyond it, two members are mid-boulder on green and blue walls under it, one with arms raised on a hold, one climbing past a corner arete.

3 min read

Castle Climbing Club Opens in an Old Grunge Warehouse

Harrison Neel used to blow glass in the same West Seattle warehouse where he now runs the floor at Castle Climbing Club, the bouldering gym that opened January 1, 2026 at 6327 W Marginal Way SW. He's the general manager, not a founder, according to the two outlets that have named him in print. He watched this room change use, again. Before the chalk and the harnesses, before his own glass studio, this address ran as NAF Studios, a rehearsal and rave warehouse. Climbing Business Journal traces the building further back still: it went up in the early 1980s as a wine warehouse, long before any band plugged in an amp inside it.

A long line of trail runners/hikers strung out along a golden alpine ridge in the Olympic National Forest, walking away from camera toward a rocky peak. Several in the foreground wear the group's signature black-and-white cow-print running shorts, one wears a matching cow-print bucket hat.

4 min read

Cowgill Trail Collective, Seattle's Free Trail Group

Aaron Long started an Instagram account called Cowgill in 2018, posting silly, deliberately non-elite trail running content out of Seattle: in-jokes, shenanigans, nothing that resembled a training log. For a few years, that's all it was. In the spring of 2021, Long and two friends, Rachel Dam and Brad Leatherbarrow, turned the account into actual trail runs, meeting up on trails around the city instead of just posting about them. The result, now called Cowgill Trail Collective, has grown into a free trail running group with no fee attached.

A climber runs up the Space Needle's open-air stairwell during Base 2 Space, fists raised, as another climber heads up the steps in the foreground.

3 min read

Space Needle's Base 2 Space Marks 10th Climb

RunSignup lists two different closing times for online registration to the Space Needle's 10th annual Base 2 Space stair climb. One page, the event's own FAQ, sets the online cutoff at September 25, 11:59pm Pacific time, then reopens registration in person only, from 6:30 to 11am on the morning of the climb, Sunday, September 27. A separate registration page on the same platform lists a single deadline of 11am on September 27, the day of the event, without mentioning an earlier online window at all. That distinction is not cosmetic: under the FAQ's version, anyone signing up online loses that option after September 25, two days before the climb, and can only join in person, on the morning of September 27. Both pages come from the same organizer. Same platform. Neither has been fixed.

4 min read

UW's $12.3M Fix For Burke-Gilman Trail's Root-Cracked Mile

Braden Kelley manages commute options and transportation planning at the University of Washington. He does not soften it. His subject is the mile of the Burke-Gilman Trail that runs along the east side of campus, from Rainier Vista to NE 47th Street. "A little narrower and darker," he said of the mile. "There are roots coming up through the asphalt." He added that the stretch "doesn't feel as welcoming and it doesn't feel as safe." Kelley raised a second concern. People coming from the north or east side of Seattle, he said, might be less inclined to travel through that area to reach campus at all. That is the assessment from the university's own transportation office, and it now has a fix attached: a $12.3 million construction contract, awarded to Granite Construction with KPFF Civil as design partner, to rebuild the mile before it drives away any more of the people it is supposed to carry.

4 min read

Ian Cox Memorial Dick's-A-Thon Hits 26.3 Miles

Connor Cox was leaving Seattle in 2018, and on April 21 he and his twin brother Ian ran one last loop between all five Dick's Drive-In counters in the city. How far they went depends on who tells it. The organizers' own history page and a post on Washington's National Park Fund both put the loop at 20 miles, and an older version of that history page, still live on the same domain, gives the same date and the same distance. A syndicated Yahoo News feature on the family calls it roughly 22, and nearly a perfect circle. The two figures have never been squared. Eight years later, on Saturday, October 17, 2026, that same loop runs as the Ian Cox Memorial Dick's-A-Thon, a 26.3-mile event with a $135 entry, a start line at The Mountaineers Seattle Program Center, and aid stations that are still fast-food windows. The distance grew. The reason changed entirely.

Kora's storefront on Stone Way North, its name on a hanging sign above the steps.

4 min read

Kora's Unheated Yoga in Bala Yoga's Old Fremont Room

The room was already a yoga room. Danica Koos took the southwest corner of the ground floor at 3636 Stone Way N in Fremont and named what she put there Kora, after a Tibetan Buddhist practice of walking a circuit around a sacred place. Kora is unheated. The studio's own Instagram account posted on August 28 that all inspections had passed and gave opening day as August 29, 2026. The city file says the rest. Kora's build-out permit, record 7128389-CN, sits directly linked to an earlier permit for the same corner of the same building, and the tenant named on that earlier record is BALA YOGA. Bala Yoga's Fremont studio is closed. What went in instead is a narrow idea about temperature: no added heat, classes deliberately sized, mats and props laid out before anyone arrives. The permit covering all of it records no change of use and no change of occupancy.