No conference this year

by John | May 24, 2012 | Latest News

What began as a crazy dream I had while face-down and bored with swimming laps, turned out to be a lot of fun. Hosting a conference is a lot of work to be sure – huge amounts of stress and plenty of anxiety… but getting the chance to meet so many of you in person was actually really special to me, Amy and everyone else on the ICI/PRO team 🙂

Boston is a wonderful town and really worked well for our first two events. The hotel was very accommodating and Boston is local to a number of the people on our team including; Tom Scotto, Bill Pryor and Andrea Flaherty, our event coordinator. I'll never forget the experience of navigating a U-Haul truck, full of indoor cycles (courtesy of Bill Pryor who shut down one of his studios for the weekend) through the madness of New England traffic.

After two successful events in Boston, survey respondents asked that we move West. So we began looking for a new venue to host the ICI/PRO conference somewhere in the middle of America. Of course it needs to be in a city that is easy to fly into… which limited our search to a handful of cities with major airports. Understanding that a big part of the charm of our first two events was having everything under one roof – most everyone stayed in the hotel where the all the events occurred – had us looking for a similar facility. The venue we were looking for also needed to be open to hosting a fitness conference of 150 or so people and most importantly be somewhere we could afford. Hotel ballroom and meeting room rentals are incredibly expensive – which has me petrified at the prospect of financing two weddings, for my two daughters, in the future.  

In the end we were unsuccessful in finding a location. To be perfectly honest the effort left me exhausted and without the passion and enthusiasm needed to champion a third event.

I can't let the opportunity pass to again thank everyone who attended our two ICI/PRO conferences! Your willingness to spend hard earned dollars to attend one or both of the events humbles me to this day. Thank You.

And I need to extend the same thank you to everyone (presenters, sponsors and volunteers) who had a hand in the actual events. In particular I need to thank the the major sponsors who literally took a big risk on me. Each of the following invested a considerable amount of time, money and effort. Missing any one of their contributions and we would not have had either of our conferences.

• Darren Pelkey from Keiser Indoor Cycles
• Gene Nacey with Cycling Fusion
• Bill Pryor from Spynergy Consulting
• Laurel Mylin and Cameron Chinatti with Stages Indoor Cycling
• Barbara Hoots from Indoor Cycle Design

Will we have another event in the future? Who knows… Through this process I've developed relationships with a number of other event producers. We weren't able to make anything work this year, but you never know.

Now if you got to the end of this and you find yourself thinking; “so what are you going to do with all your extra time John?”  I have a good answer for that. We are at this very moment planning and designing a number of new features that we feel will really benefit Indoor Cycling Instructors and ICI/PRO members. We'll be rolling these out in time for the next indoor season, this Fall.

After all, my passion for innovating is as strong as ever. So stay tuned 🙂

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We have some very talented Instructors

by John | May 15, 2012 | Latest News

All I can say is “WOW!”

We have received a bunch of very well designed class profiles, from some very talented Indoor Cycling Instructors.

Now the hard part as we review each and try to decide which one is the Ultimate Instructor Class Profile.

Thank you to everyone who entered and we hope to have some winners for you this weekend 🙂