Ali’s Beach Boot Camp

I live right on Hollywood Beach, and have for nearly four years now. It’s a quiet part of the beach, about a mile North of the heavily tourist-trafficed area. I like to rollerblade and bike on the Hollywood Broadwalk, and I do so sometimes two or three times a day, rarely missing a day on the beach. A regular feature on Hollywood Beach is Ali Witherspoon, and his Beach Boot Camp.

I have seen this guy regularly leading excercise classes on the beach. Actually, Ali has been doing this for more than nine years now. A few weeks ago I followed his class along the beach, waiting until they were through with class and then I introduced myself to Ali and asked if he had a website, and if he didn’t would he like one. He didn’t and he did. Ah, the beginning of something wonderful.

I offered to help him develop a site, provide free hosting and tech support for him for a portion of his future advertising revenues from his site for an extended period of time (several years). So far so good. His site is up and Ali is a natural blogger. He’s already populated his site with many pages and posts and I expect his site to grow in traffic tremendously over the next few months and years.

I spent several days on the beach following Ali and his class along the beach, taking photos and videos of his classes and his boot-camp trainees began to get familiar with me. As Ali’s site took shape, a couple of his clients began to inquire about me building sites for them, and one of them might even turn out to be a mega-client, with multi-millions in annual sales.

This is far from being like a real bootcamp. While Ali likes to say things like, “The beatings will continue until morale improves”, and he’ll get in the face of some trainees with “how many candy bars did you eat last night”, and “My mother can do more pushups than you”, he’s really a very nice guy and keeps people from dropping out of his classes by talking them through the pain.

In another way, his classes are quite brutal and I had difficulty keeping up with his class while taking pictures and then hopping on my bike to get to the next spot for some more photos as they would march, jog, pant, and sweat past me down the beach.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 12:13 am and is filed under Hollywood Beach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.