Though the owners, bikes, showers and name are all new, the location is the same for ZenGo Fitness, a boutique cycling studio that will take over the Cordell Avenue location of the short-lived Velovoom, which opened in January and suddenly closed two months later.
ZenGo co-owners Penny Bortnick, Melissa Kullen and Marc Caputo are planning for an early September opening for ZenGo Fitness, which is a completely separate enterprise from Velovoom.
“It’s been a crazy ride,” says co-owner Caputo, one of the original Velovoom founders who provided the initial concept and the passion behind it. Caputo says his life was transformed when he first tried a similar cycling studio in New York. He lost 50 pounds and didn’t feel the self-consciousness there he’d felt in other gyms.
Caputo says he was devastated when he had to leave the venture he’d helped found, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the owners, who Bortnick says eventually went out of business and were evicted from the space.
When Velovoom went dark, clients were left wondering what was going on and some had unused class credits. The turmoil was played out on the Velovoom Facebook page when shortly after Caputo’s abrupt departure, the studio’s website went down and the club was closed. Clients were promised that the studio would reopen and they’d get to use their unused class credits, but that didn’t happen. At that time, Caputo said he didn’t know what the partners were planning, and my emails to then co-owner Kelly Weinberg were met with no response, as were the comments on the Facebook page.
Bortnick says they will review the unused credits of former Velovoom clients on a case-by-case basis and “will be compensating them in some way” in a gesture of good will.
“The month that it was actually in existence, it was a phenomenal place. That is why we’ve all been fighting so hard to bring it back to life,” Caputo says.
Bortnick was a former client of Velovoom and Kullen was an instructor. Now regrouped, they are ready to bring the concept back to Bethesda. “We think that this method of exercise is great and we stand behind what we believe it can do for people,” Bortnick says.
Bortnick calls ZenGo a “sanctuary” from the outside world where people can go to “recharge their mind, their life and their body.” The 45-minute cycling classes incorporate light weights and stretching to work the entire body, while instructors provide personalized one-on-one coaching. They also plan to offer after-school cycling classes for teenage girls, as well as mat exercise classes, similar to Pilates. The new facility well offer men’s and women’s showers.
Clients will be able to choose their class and bike online at www.zengofitness.com. At this point, the site isn’t yet complete but interested parties can use it to sign up for email updates. Classes will be about $21 each, with multiple-class packages available.
