Julie Rose is not a women’s boxing champ. She is a Pilates instructor in sleepy Troy, N.Y., a small town just outside of Albany. Julie and her husband had been living in New York City for five years when her husband got a job offer that was too good to turn down. That meant packing up their cute Brooklyn apartment and moving to a new town, leaving friends and family behind. It also meant having to quit her job as a full-time Pilates instructor at one of Manhattan’s hottest studios. I was extremely hesitant to leave New York,” says Julie, but I realized that the move would provide opportunities that the city wouldn’t allow.” Julie was braced for life in the burbs. Or so she thought. Within weeks of moving into her new digs, Julie was restless. The town was beautiful and the people were nice,

but she missed doing what she loved teaching Classical Pilates. Troy offered no Pilates studios, so Julie began offering private classes in her apartment. One client turned into eight, and eight into fourteen. With her constantly growing client list, it was becoming clear that she could no longer work out of her apartment. She started offering group classes in various rented spaces around town, and once those started selling out, Julie realized that maybe she was onto something big. She rented a defunct café on the main strip in Troy and spent the next two months re-outfitting the place. With friends and family armed with paintbrushes and spackling knives, Julie and company spent weekends, weeknights and holidays renovating and re-painting her new Pilates studio. Every night after work, Julie and her husband would head straight to the studio to install fixtures and paint walls.