(NewsNation) — When Dale King returned to Ohio after serving in the Army for 10 years, he found his hometown of Portsmouth was undergoing a drug abuse epidemic. That’s when he decided to open a CrossFit gym to help recovering addicts.
King joined NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” to share his journey, saying while there is an element of brain chemistry to it, fostering community is an important part of the work his gym does.
“Essentially, people use drugs or opioids as a way to cope with pain, and we try to teach them that pain is not their enemy. We want to do that when we’re surrounded with quality instruction and more importantly, we want to surround it with really, really good people that are sweating, suffering alongside,” King said.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, King said he felt more afraid in Portsmouth than in Iraq.
“In Iraq, you knew you knew who the enemy was,” King told NewsNation. “I was gone for about 10 years. The town just seemed to be completely devastated and devoid of hope. So it is just an overall feeling of eeriness and lack of hope. And that’s why it was scarier for me to be there than Iraq.”
Portsmouth, Ohio, was once known as the “pill mill of America,” as addiction swept through the community.
“I think it’s a snapshot of every neighborhood in America,” King said. “We’re just … giving them an opportunity to come together. We’re giving them opportunity to do really hard things. But more importantly, we’re giving them an opportunity to endure and conquer those together.”
The veteran also highlighted the diversity of his gym, saying, “We’ve got everybody from literally millionaires to guys who are on parole, to immigrants who just came here from Brazil. It’s truly an island of misfit toys. But but everybody loves one another.”
King says he fell in love with CrossFit in the army and wanted to open a gym for a while before getting the idea to use the gym to help others who were struggling.
“It wasn’t until 2018, when a friend of mine, who was in long-term recovery, said how instrumental CrossFit was for his personal recovery, and that we should develop a partnership with our local counseling center to provide CrossFit to their classes,” King said.