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An insider’s look at presidential fitness

 

NEWSWIRE

An insider’s look at presidential fitness

By Brian Davidson, Managing Editor – 04.06.2007

WASHINGTON D.C. – Working as a fitness center director, Ted Vickey’s morning commute started much like anyone else’s.And then he got to work, where a K-9 unit would search his car – an officer checking underneath it with a mirror – while he walked through a metal detector and another officer inspected the contents of his lunch.

Such was the life for the executive director of the White House Athletic Center, a job Vickey held from 1995 until he sold his fitness consulting company in 2005.

“One time I was doing a CPR certification class,” Vickey recalled, “and I brought Annie the resuscitation doll with me in a bag. You can imagine the look on the officer’s face when I put it through the X-ray machine and he saw a body.”

Despite the daily pat-downs, Vickey enjoyed the 10 years he spent on White House duty. And now that those years are over, he said, he finally feels free to talk about them.It all started when he was a 24-year-old intern for Health Matters, a small company the White House hired to manage its fitness facility. Though the company couldn’t afford to offer Vickey a full-time position, the owner called him shortly after his internship ended in 1994 with an even better offer.

“She called and told me she’d met the man of her dreams and that she was selling the company,” he said. “She asked if I wanted to buy it.”

In July of 1995 Vickey bought the company, now known as FitWell, with money he borrowed from one of his old college professors. The professor had his money back five years later, after FitWell designed a corporate fitness center for Fruit of the Loom and doubled the size of the White House facility.

But the 7,000-square-foot White House Athletic Center isn’t as fancy as one might expect, says Vickey.“A lot of people would think it has marble floors and golden shower heads,” he said. “But it’s pretty modest.”

The facility has a membership fee – it was $364 a year when Vickey was director – and could only be used by executive office staff. It was open from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. during the week, with after-hours access for members.While all of that may seem typical for a fitness facility, Vickey said there were some unique challenges he faced as WHAC director. For instance, he said, he had to constantly swap equipment brands so that one manufacturer wouldn’t be able to say it was the exclusive supplier to the White House.

“And you can imagine how getting any sort of shipment would be a pain in the butt,” he said. “After 9-11, we didn’t get physical mail for a year. I got a Christmas card once that came in October of the following year.”

And then there was the clientele.

The presidents worked out in a separate, private fitness area above the Oval Office, or in a cabana by the pool on the south side of the grounds. Former President Clinton had a track installed on the White House lawn to satisfy his affinity for running outdoors. President Bush went so far as to have Vickey buy a portable treadmill to bring along with him on Air Force One. Vickey refers to Bush as “the fittest President we’ve ever had.”

Though the presidents never dropped in for a workout, Vickey said he had many high-profile regulars at the fitness center over the course of the first Bush administration, the Clinton years and the current Bush administration.“I’d have Tipper Gore exercising next to a White House electrician,” he said. That’s what was great. When you get down to it, when we take off our suits and put on sweatpants and sneakers, we’re all the same.”

In 2005 Vickey sold FitWell to Comprehensive Health Services, a Virginia-based company that manages occupational health programs. He was named vice president of CHS shortly after.