By June Mathews Photo by Jordan Wald
Sixteen years ago, Leigh Karagas and Paula Windle barely knew each other. They frequently heard each other’s names through mutual friends, and they were both members of the Junior League. Otherwise, they were about as familiar to each other as distant cousins at a family reunion. “I would hear her name and think, ‘Oh, Leigh Karagas. I really need to meet her,’” says Windle. “I knew two or three of her best friends, but I didn’t know her.”
They finally met when Windle showed up at an early morning boot camp that Karagas was leading. “I’d been in fitness since I was married, and it was a good part-time job for me while raising four kids,” she says. “Some of the teachers at a local preschool where I had been subbing asked me to do a boot camp for a group of friends, and I agreed. Paula was one of the attendees.”
Windle picks up on her part of the story. “One of the teachers was a friend of mine,” she says. “I had been wanting to get stronger and to be better at fitness. So that’s how I got involved.”
Windle’s interest in getting fit soon turned into a desire to help others get fit, so she turned to Karagas for advice on becoming a certified trainer. “I was like, okay, here’s how you do it,” Karagas says. “You study, and you take the certification exam, and here’s the place to go.”
At the time, Windle was a semi-retired pharmacist, working one or two days a week to maintain a presence in the profession. It had been a while, though, since she had taken a test, so her concerns about passing were real. But Karagas assured her that anyone who had studied pharmacy could pass the trainer exam with ease—a correct call, as it turned out. What she didn’t expect was that Windle’s certification would mark the beginning of a long term business relationship.
By that time, friends of the group Karagas coached who couldn’t make the 8 a.m. camp time requested a second one at an earlier time. So, the Monday after earning her certification, Windle approached Karagas to let her know she had organized a boot camp for the following Monday at 5 a.m. “I was like, ‘So you’re starting a rival boot camp already?’” Karagas remembers. “And she said, ‘No, us together,’ and that’s how it started. She wanted to do the early morning camp, and I didn’t think she was ready to do it by herself.”
From that inauspicious beginning, the business began to grow, and the friendship became closer, inevitably extending to their families. With four Karagas daughters and three Windle daughters, the moms, in many ways, each became moms to seven. When one wasn’t available to deal with a routine crisis, the other one usually was.
In the meantime, Windle had taken on the administrative tasks of owning a business, like bookkeeping, obtaining release forms, applying for insurance and creating a website. “Leigh has always been the broad strokes type, the creative one,” Windle says. “I’m more of the rule follower. That’s why we work together so well. We bring different strengths to the business.”
The business was first named Every Girl Fitness until the partners’ husbands called them out for ignoring half their potential market. So, the name became Stretch2Strength.
Over the past few years, Stretch2Strength has moved from a boot-camps-only format to a wider range of offerings. The business brought TRX (Total Body Resistance Exercise) into the mix early on, which they were unable to easily incorporate into the boot camps. But for TRX training, they needed their own location. “We were blessed for so long to do what we did at churches, schools and businesses,” says Windle. “We didn’t have to pay to use those facilities, but we always gave back 10 percent of what we earned to wherever we were if we weren’t paying to be there.”
They found their perfect spot at Office Park and were later able to expand across the hall when they added assisted stretching to the lineup. “Leigh had the idea of us becoming certified as stretch therapists because she saw it as a trend as people got older,” says Windle. “So, we researched it, tried out some places, then went to Arizona to work with some physical therapists there.”
And as they see needs among the people they serve, they’re likely to add other types of training. For instance, Stretch2Strength now offers balance and posture training since those two things often become problems as people age.
But senior adults are far from being the sole focus of the business. Their youngest client, says Windle, is 12, with the oldest about to turn 89. And many of those clients are different generations of the same families. “We stretch two high school basketball athletes, and we stretch their parents and their grandparents,” says Karagas. “Besides helping people along in their fitness journey, getting to know their families is one of the great joys of this business. And if one family member comes, it’s often easier for the husband or the wife or the children to come. The atmosphere here is not intimidating at all.”
In fact, says Windle, Stretch2Strength is a fun place to be, not only because she and her best friend work together, but because they create community connections. It’s also a great place for keeping up with the latest. “Like today,” she says, “we were talking about new things coming out on Netflix, and one of the girls said, ‘Man, if I didn’t come to TRX, I wouldn’t know what was going on.’”
