Paul and Christy Kirkley opened six Mississippi gyms in seven years.

The most daunting, said Christy Kirkley, was the Fitness Depot in Meridian. 

“Meridian about killed us,” she said. Set in the Bonita Lakes mall, building the gym “was a process. It was a Goody’s before, and this was our largest gym to date, the largest we’ve renovated.”

The Kirkleys have made unlikely buildings into gyms from the start. In 2010, they built their first, Collins Fitness Depot, from the remains of an abandoned Coke building.

“We try and use what is there,” said Christy Kirkley, adding that her husband does most of the work and all the design. In an email, Paul Kirkley described the process as hand-crafting gyms using “dead real estate” and putting “great, used equipment into a place everyone can escape their problems.”

“I could go on and on about all we did,” said Hunter Trussell, who helped build the Meridian gym and now works as its manager.

The labor behind the project — building walls to square off open areas into different rooms, installing tanning beds and showers, and tearing down and rebuilding the frame, among other things — started in April 2017 and culminated in a November opening that same year.

“The flooring was the only thing we did not have to touch,” Christy Kirkley said.

Now, a year-and-a-half later, they have regular goers and members who vouch for the finished product.

Tim Curry, who moved to Meridian in 2016 after living in California, struggled to find a gym that ticked all the right boxes.

“I actually had to run around town for a bit,” he said. 

The size and regular maintenance of equipment sold him.

For Mikala Evans, who’s been going to Fitness Depot for seven months, the gym being open 24/7 is a plus, as well as the fact that it “is pretty inexpensive” and “laid-back.”

“We have a great staff,” Trussell said. “We’re all friends with the members. It’s kind of a place to just hang out.”

To provide a relaxed setting, the gym offers childcare. Other amenities include private recovery rooms with hydromassage, an indoor walking track, a hundred-foot long turf training area and a core training circuit, according to the gym’s website.

Right now, the Kirkleys are building a new gym in Picayune. But their Meridian gym’s mark remains felt among those pumping iron in Lauderdale County.