A recovering addict is hoping to lend a helping hand to others on their journey to sobriety by providing them with free gym memberships.
Krissy Mae Cagney runs Black Iron Gym, a fitness center out of Reno, Nevada, that the 29-year-old opened three years ago. The gym, of which she is the sole owner, is where Cagney has built not only physical strength, but the fortitude to stay off the drugs and alcohol that consumed her life for so many years. Throughout her teens and early twenties, Cagney says she was placed into many rehabilitation programs to help find a way out of addiction.
“I’ve had behavioral problems since I was a child, such as diagnosed anxiety and personality disorder,” Cagney tells PEOPLE. “I started using at a really young age because of those behavioral problems so I used for about 10 years, all through high school and college. My addiction got bad enough to the point where it left me homeless several times.”
Cagney says throughout her decade of drug use, she found herself turning to cocaine and alcohol, among other drugs, to mask her anxiety. As her addiction persisted through the years, Cagney moved away from family and friends, and landed in jail multiple times. Despite the repeated visits to therapists and counselors, Cagney found that the only place she truly felt truly herself was in between the walls of a gym.
“Over the years, the only time that I would be able to stay sober longer than a couple of days is when I was really committed to the gym,” she recalls. “For the last year I used, it was a revolving door of trying to get sober, making it 10 days to two weeks and then drinking and using again.”
But when she was 24 and experiencing alcohol-induced seizures, Cagney was told by doctors that if she continued drinking, she would die. This was enough for Cagney to realize that if she was ever going to be clean, the time had come. She took to powerlifting and CrossFit harder than ever before, pushing and pulling her way to a longer lasting sobriety.
Cagney has achieved five years of sobriety, and through Black Iron, she wants to provide other recovering addicts a place that will encourage them to stay sober through exercise and counseling programs. Through her GoFundMe initiative, called “Reps 4 Recovery,” Cagney has offered about 100 recovering addicts—who are anywhere from a day to five years sober—free memberships to her gym. Together, these members motivate each other to stay clean and strong in the face of relapse. Many members, she says, had no other fitness experiencing before signing up.
“Every time one of my gym members looks at me and tells me that they wouldn’t be sober without my gym or the program or me, there’s no other feeling in the world like that” Cagney says. “All I really wanted the whole time I was getting sober was somebody like that to help me and I never had that. To be able to be that to all these people is just so fulfilling.”
Black Iron Gym is tapping into what a number of rehabilitation centers across the country have been realizing over the years: that incorporating fitness into their programs can have benefits.
“For me, you have to chase a high when you’re using and with powerlifting, it was the same thing,” Cagney explains. “Chasing a personal record or the feeling of getting strong in the gym, for me, was the equivalent of getting high.”
The Reps 4 Recovery GoFundMe page has raised more than $77,000 over the last year, just shy of its $85,000 goal. Cagney says she would like to turn it into a full-fledged treatment facility and hire a part-time in-house therapist for members. One by one, Cagney hopes she can lead recovering addicts back into a life of good health and help them see addiction as an illness that can be healed.
“This is an illness and it must be treated, and shoving it off to the side and not doing anything about it is not treating your illness,” she says. “If you’re sober, whether it’s one year or five years or 10 years, you’re never going stop treating your illness. It doesn’t go anywhere, you just get better at managing it. The biggest thing is just taking it one day at a time.”