About Beyond Walls.

Beyond Walls didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a conversation.

Julie and I both trained regularly for years, and it was Julie who got me into CrossFit. Our working lives were elsewhere: Julie was Global Head of Talent at Chanel, and I worked in commercial roles, including running a large part of the Apprenticeship division at QA Ltd.

When the chance came to step away from those careers, we took it and spent three months travelling around Europe. Somewhere along the way it became obvious that neither of us wanted to go back to working for someone else. So the question became: what next?

We spent hours talking it through, and landed on a simple idea. Find something we cared about deeply, then work out how to make it a success. For us, that was helping people get fit, get stronger and feel better in their lives.

Finding the right home

Location mattered more than anything. Many CrossFit gyms end up on industrial estates or under railway arches, often because those are the only landlords happy to take on the noise, the dropped barbells and the footfall. We wanted something different.

We searched for six months and saw a lot of places. Then a mutual contact introduced us to the Copas family and Lower Mount Farm in Cookham. We fell in love with it straight away (the space, the sky, the field and the chance to build the gym we’d always wanted) and made an offer that day. It also had plenty of parking and was well placed for the surrounding area. It wasn’t close to where we lived, so we moved.

Building the team

Julie brought years of experience building teams and culture. I brought experience running commercial teams. But we knew we needed someone with deep health and fitness expertise, and that’s Barry, now our Performance Director.

Starting outside

Our first session was at 7am on 15 July 2024, outdoors in the field, with 12 people. While those early bootcamps ran, we turned an empty shell of a building into a gym, and on 15 September 2024 we welcomed 21 people to our first indoor class.

Since then, more than 900 people have trained with us, and our three founding coaches have grown to a team of ten.

Why “Beyond Walls”?

Partly because we train outside whenever we can. But mostly because of what we do every day: help people push beyond the walls that hold them back.

Jamie Thomas, Founder