The Ellen Latham Story | Orangetheory Fitness
Three weeks into marathon training (not a runner, by the way) I hurt my foot. And the frustration of being forced to slow down right when I'd finally found my momentum sent me straight to Ellen Latham's story. Ellen was a single mom in her forties when she got fired from her dream job without warning. No plan. No backup. Just a Pilates certification and a spare room in her house. What she built from there eventually became Orangetheory Fitness. A billion dollar global company with over 1,300 studios in 23 countries. In this episode we talk about her dad's "momentum shifts up" philosophy, what it actually looks like to rebuild from nothing, and why the forced stop might be the thing that creates the opening. This one's for anyone sitting in a pause they didn't choose.
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Welcome back to Fifteenish. This is Leah. Hey, friends.
Okay, so some of you might remember a few episodes ago, I told you that I signed up for a marathon. After 15 plus years of not really running at all, except for a teeny tiny stint last year doing a 6K. Yes, I signed up for a marathon, 26.2 miles.
And truthfully, I signed up before I could talk myself out of it. And then, three weeks into training after what seemed to be a good, steady build, I hurt my foot. And the weirdest part is that I don't even know what happened.
I don't know when it happened because the last run I had, it felt completely fine. You know, I had found this really good rhythm. I was getting up early.
I was doing the runs. I was actually showing up for myself consistently, maybe for the first time in a long time. And then one morning out of the blue, I woke up and my foot hurt so bad, I could barely walk to the bathroom.
And I just sat there on the floor and I was crying, but it wasn't really all about my foot. I think it was more about finally getting momentum and then having it all taken away and not by a choice that I made.
It's not like I gave up or got lazy or decided that it wasn't worth trying. It was something outside of my control that just stopped me right when I was finally getting going and feeling really good.
Now, this last week was really hard in a way that's kind of tough to explain, and I've kind of been asking myself, well, rather dwelling on, what if I can't make this up? What if I lose the pace and distance that I had just built?
What if this happens again? Because like I said, I have no idea what even happened. Now, I know I have so much time before the marathon, but knowing something and actually feeling it are two very different things, aren't they?
1:55
Ellen Lathamʼs Early Life
And that exact feeling is exactly what made me want to talk about Ellen Latham today, because Ellen knows that feeling, being forced to stop, having her momentum interrupted, and basically the ground falling out from underneath her.
And what she did with it ended up changing the entire fitness industry. This is the Ellen Latham story. She is the founder of Orangetheory Fitness.
Ellen grew up in Niagara Falls, New York, and her dad, Arthur, was a football coach and PE teacher at the local high school.
He never made a lot of money, probably never cracked $50,000 a year, but Ellen always says that he walked around like he was the most successful man on the planet. For him, it was never about the money.
It was about doing something he loved and doing it fully. And she saw that play out in the smallest moments growing up. There's a story that she tells about when she was about eight years old, she was in a skating race.
She came in dead last. The organizers were already actually picking up the orange cones off the ice when she crossed the finish line. She was about to hang her head and feel sorry for herself.
But her dad came running towards her with this huge smile on his face. And he said, did you see how you took those turns? Not, oh, bummer, you lost or not better luck next time.
Did you see how you took those turns? Like she had won the whole thing. That's who her dad was.
And that's the lens that Ellen grew up seeing the world through. And she took that with her into her adulthood. She went on and got her master's in exercise physiology from the University of Buffalo.
She spent the 80s teaching group fitness. Yes, I'm talking the full Jane Fonda leg warmer era. She has been in the industry that long.
And she's worked her way up through some of the most prestigious spas in Florida. The Bonaventure Spa, which was literally the fitness retreat for the stars. Williams Island, the Eden Rock Spa of South Beach.
She was a fitness expert on TV for six years. She wrote fitness columns for the Miami Herald. She had built a real career and a name for herself over decades of work.
And eventually she ended up in what she thought was her dream job, managing a high end spa in Miami. She had 30 employees. She had a reputation that had taken decades to build.
She was, in her own words, the it person in fitness in her world.
4:11
Fired From Dream Job
She thought she had arrived. She thought this was it.
And then, in 1996, she dropped her 9 year old son Evan at school that morning like any other day, pulled into the parking lot at work, said hi to her clients, and then she got called into her boss' office. She got fired. And that was it.
She said later, I don't even know how I got home that day. She was that devastated. I want you to think about this moment for a second.
This wasn't a stumble at the beginning of something like in my situation. No, Ellen had spent decades building her career, and she was in a really good place. She thought she'd made it.
But like me, her momentum just stopped without warning, without her choosing it. Now, at this time, she was also a single mom of that nine-year-old boy. So there was no taking a few months to process it.
There was no hiding and figuring yourself out. She had a kid and bills and a life that needed to keep running. And she had to figure out what to do next fast.
She said she just wanted to climb under the covers and hide. And honestly, I get that. I think most of us would.
But her dad had this concept that he had lived by his whole life. He called it momentum shifting. It came from sports psychology and from coaching.
When your team is losing, you don't just pull them to the sideline and go over everything that went wrong. No, you remind them of what they do well. You focus on what you have and then you build off of that.
He used to say, you can either momentum shift up or you can momentum shift down. Momentum shifting down is obsessing over what you don't have, what went wrong, what you lost.
And momentum shifting up is looking at what you do have and building off of it. Gosh, that is such a cool way to think about it because no matter what you decide, momentum happens either way. So which way are you going to decide that it goes?
6:01
Building From What Remains
Well, momentum shifts up, that was his motto. The same guy who ran towards his eight-year-old daughter after a last-place finish and said, Did you see how you took those turns? And Ellen just fired single mom, no plan, asked herself his question.
Okay, what do I actually have right now? A Pilates certification, decades of experience as a fitness instructor, and a spare room in her house in Pembroke Pines, Florida. That's it.
That's what she had. And so she started there. She took a job teaching group fitness at Gold's Gym just to keep the bills paid.
And in the spare room of her house, she started taking Pilates clients one-on-one. For a full year, she ran the side business out of that room. A single mom, no backup plan, just showing up every single day doing the work.
She has talked about what kept her going during that time. She said that she had to sit in a mantra of why not me? Why couldn't this become something real?
If she didn't stay in that belief, she wouldn't have kept going. And now word spread, her client list grew, and she borrowed money and eventually opened a small Pilates studio. And things started working.
But her Pilates clients kept showing up frustrated. They were spinning, running, working with trainers on the side, and still not getting the fat burning results that they wanted. And Pilates wasn't doing it.
They knew it and she knew it. She could have said that that was not my department, but instead, she spent eight months studying every workout that existed. Between CrossFit and spinning, boot camps, all of it.
And she couldn't find one that had everything that she'd put into a class if she built it herself. Something science-backed. Something for every fitness level.
Something that actually changed your body long after you left. So she built it. Treadmill, rowing, strength training, heart rate zones.
The goal, get your heart above 84% of its max for at least 12 minutes, which then triggers what she called the afterburn effect, which is when your metabolism stays elevated for hours after the workout ends. She called it Ellen's ultimate workout.
And she opened that studio in 2008. The wait lists were immediate. People were bribing the front desk to get into class.
One of her clients told her, Ellen, one of these needs to be on every corner. And Ellen's response? She looked at her and said, I know nothing about franchising.
She genuinely didn't think it was for her. The client walked out and then came back a week later. Her husband worked in franchising.
They met and then Orangetheory Fitness was born in 2010. By 2016, a new Orangetheory studio was opening every single day of the year. Every day!
They hit a billion dollars in sales in 2018, over 1300 studios in 23 countries, more than a million members. All starting from a spare bedroom. And a woman who got fired at 40 and just kept asking, why not me?
9:02
Personal Reflection
Okay, so I've been sitting with my foot injury and Ellen's story at the same time this week. And I want to be honest about what that's actually been like. Because my first reaction was not momentum shifts up.
My first reaction was frustration. And then maybe a little spiral or pity me moment. Why now?
I just started. What if I lose the progress? What if I can't make up the time?
What if this keeps happening because I don't even know what caused it? And it makes me go off track even more. What if I can never run again?
Have you ever done that? Have you ever had something knock you back and immediately your brain starts writing the whole worst case scenario? Like the setback itself wasn't enough, so you pile a bunch of meaning on top of it too.
Yeah, I definitely do that. But because of this story, I keep coming back to Ellen's dad's question. Not what did I lose?
Not what does this mean? Just what do I still have? And honestly, when I actually sit with that, I still have seven months of training ahead of me.
I still have the goal. I still have the reason that I signed up. A foot injury in week three is a pause.
It's not a full stop. And the difference between those two things actually matters a lot. I think about Ellen working out of that spare bedroom, that's not someone who had it figured out.
That's someone who got knocked completely off course and just kept asking, okay, what do I still have? What can I do today? She wasn't looking ten years ahead at a billion dollar company.
She was just doing the next thing in front of her. And I think that's the part that gets me most. Ellen built Orangetheory because she got fired.
If she didn't lose that job, she would have never had the push to build something of her own. That forced stop, the thing that felt like the worst possible moment, was the exact thing that created the opening.
Now, I'm not going to tell you my foot injury is secretly a gift. I'm genuinely not there yet. But I do think that there's something that can happen in that pause that you didn't choose.
When you're moving at full speed, you don't look around. You don't question things, you just go. And sometimes being forced to slow down, even in the most frustrating way, gives you something that maybe you wouldn't have given yourself.
Maybe it's rest your body actually needed. Maybe it's a chance to think about why you're doing it in the first place. Maybe it's just learning that you can lose momentum and still come back from it.
Reminding yourself that the goal doesn't disappear just because you had to stop for a minute.
11:36
Embrace the Pause
Ellen said something once that I want to mention. She said, it's okay to be uncomfortable. Use it in the right way.
Don't let it make you smaller. Let it make you bigger. I think about that little eight-year-old Ellen crossing the finish line last.
The cones already picked up. Everyone else was already done. And her dad running towards her like she just won.
Did you see how you took those turns? I want someone to say that to me right now about my foot, honestly. Not that the injury doesn't matter, but did you see how you showed up for three weeks straight?
Did you see that you signed up at all? I am trying to do that for myself. I am trying to let this make me bigger and not smaller.
Some days I'm better at it than others, but I'm still here, still in it, still going. And that feels like enough for right now. Ellen Latham got fired at 40 with a nine-year-old in a spare bedroom.
She didn't know how she got home that day. And yet she still built a billion-dollar company. Not because nothing went wrong, but because when everything went wrong, she kept asking the right question.
What do I have? What can I build from here? So if you're in a forced pause right now, whether it's an injury, a setback, something that stopped your momentum before you were ready, just sit with that question for a second.
Not, what did you lose? Not, what does this mean? Not, is this a sign?
But instead, what do you still have? What can you build from right where you are? Because momentum shifts up, and sometimes it takes a stop to figure out which direction up actually is.
I'm choosing up. How about you? Thanks for being here.
I'll see you next week.
Sources & Disclaimer
Strong Fitness Magazine — Orangetheory's Ellen Latham Found Wild Success After Being Fired at 40
PNC Insights — Momentum Shift: How Ellen Latham Transformed a Career Setback into Orangetheory Fitness
Austin Woman Magazine — How Ellen Latham Made Orangetheory Fitness a Global Trend
Lifestyle Media Group — How Ellen Latham Created Orangetheory Fitness
FranchiseWire — Turning Setbacks into Successes: The Ellen Latham Story
Orangetheory Fitness — Momentum Shift documentary (2019)
All facts shared in this episode are based on information available at the time of recording. Any personal reflections, interpretations, or opinions are my own. If anything is found to be inaccurate, I'm happy to issue a correction.
