Shortly before he turned 65, Bob Cheek took a plane to the US and turned up at a 24-hour gym in California. He had read about this new type of gym in a magazine, back in Australia, and ended up outside one in San Diego, wanting to see how they were run. He knocked on the door; a man opened it and told him he couldn’t come in because he wasn’t a member. “I said: ‘Can you just talk to me about this gym?’”
The man explained how it was run – that it was only supervised sometimes, and members could let themselves in at any time – and Cheek was sold. “What a great idea,” he says, smiling. He couldn’t wait to get back to Tasmania to open one. He already had a gym – a high-end, loss-making one. “So I had to do something.”
