The Phoenix at 20 years.
How a free CrossFit class in a Denver gym became one of the most important sober communities in America.
The dues to join The Phoenix are simple. Forty-eight hours of sobriety. That's it.
No application fee. No annual membership. No insurance card. No drug test. No religious framework you have to accept. You just have to be willing to walk in the door and say you've been sober for two days, and the next class is yours, for free, forever.
That's how it's been since Scott Strode opened the first Phoenix gym in Denver in 2006. The model has not changed in twenty years. What has changed is the scale: from one gym in one city to over 150,000 members across all 50 states, with chapters in cities you've heard of and chapters in towns you haven't.
What it actually is
The Phoenix is a sober active community. That's the official description. In practice, it's whatever the local chapter decides to do that week: CrossFit, hiking, yoga, rock climbing, boxing, cycling, ice climbing, mountaineering, book club, sober coffee meetups. The activities vary city to city, but the constant is the people. Every Phoenix event is, by definition, full of people who are sober and choosing to be there.
That distinction matters. Most workout classes in America are followed by drinks. Most weekend hikes end at a brewery. Most rock climbing gyms have a bar in them now. When you're new to recovery, the question of what do I actually do with my time isn't trivial. It's the whole game. The Phoenix exists because Scott Strode realized, twenty years into his own recovery, that the answer for him had been climbing and CrossFit, and there were thousands of other people who needed exactly that and didn't have access to it.
Why it earned recognition
A few things make The Phoenix different from every other sober community in the country.
The first is the 48-hour requirement. There are recovery programs with stricter requirements (30 days, 90 days, a year). And there are recovery programs with no requirement at all. The 48-hour line is, on purpose, low enough that almost anyone can hit it and meaningful enough that it actually signals something. You don't get to come to Phoenix events still drunk. But you also don't have to be perfect.
The genius of The Phoenix isn't the CrossFit. It's the recognition that recovery needs a physical home, a calendar full of things to show up to, and a community that doesn't require you to have your shit fully together before you walk in.
The second is the cost. Free, forever, no asterisk. The Phoenix is funded by foundations, individual donors, and partnerships with public health agencies. They've turned down sponsorship deals that would have compromised the editorial integrity of the community. They could charge a small fee and still be the most accessible thing in the space. They don't. That's a choice.
The third is what happens after. Most recovery programming has a beginning and an end. The Phoenix has neither. Members at five years and ten years and fifteen years still show up. They lead classes. They mentor new members. They become the structural backbone of the local chapter. The community sustains itself because it never asks anyone to graduate.
How to find them
The Phoenix has either a physical location or a virtual chapter in essentially every major metropolitan area in the country, plus a growing list of smaller cities and towns. The main directory is at thephoenix.org. You enter your zip code, they show you what's near you.
If there isn't a chapter where you live, they have a virtual model that's been steadily growing since the pandemic. Live-streamed classes, online community spaces, and discussion groups that meet weekly.
And if you want to start a chapter where you live, they'll help you do it. The Phoenix has been quietly training community leaders for years. The infrastructure is portable. The model is replicable. The only thing that doesn't transfer is the people, and that's a problem only the people in your town can solve.
Where to learn more
The Phoenix is the centerpiece of our Move & Play category, where you can also find programs like Sans Bar (sober bars and pop-ups), the Wilson-Smith Golf League, and Devin's Rec Room. Each one is a different answer to the same question: what do we do now that we're sober?
If you want to read more about why we built this directory in the first place, see Why We Started the Sober Service Awards.