Lake County’s Olympus adds cycling course
Olympus, a sports and wellness-themed community underway in Clermont, has announced a new partnership with an endurance event and sports media company as well as plans to incorporate a bicycling track on the property.
Plans for the nearly 250-acre community and its 60-acre sports campus slated for Wellness Way now include a one-mile criterium course for lapped races.
The course is the latest feature Olympus has announced. The massive masterplanned community, which developers hope will become a hub for endurance athletes around the world, will also include a soccer complex, ice-sports center and a championship red-clay tennis complex.
Olympus has also partnered with CLASH Endurance, a Daytona Beach-based company that hosts and markets endurance sports events like triathlons, duathlons, cycling and running all over the world. The company also has plans to expand into sports genres like trail running and relays as well as mountain biking.
Olympus is a major piece of Clermont’s Wellness Way corridor, which, according to Lake County’s economic development arm Elevate Lake, will include upwards of 15,000 housing units and “capitalize on the human performance training, nutrition, sports medicine and health sciences work being done at the National Training Center, South Lake Hospital and Lake-Sumter State College, while protecting existing natural resources through effective master planning.”
Plans for Olympus call for 382,687 square feet of medical office space. That will include orthopedic injury centers, rehab services, spa services and holistic programs as well as physiology nutrition and conditioning programs.
Plans also call for up to 1,088 residential units — townhomes, villas apartments and senior living — as well as up to 1,312 hotel rooms, 225,124 square feet of retail space, 44,500 square feet of restaurant space and 384,659 square feet of office space.
Olympus is set to begin construction later this year, starting with the sports complexes.
From feed store to food hall
The owners of a downtown Apopka restaurant have purchased a long-standing feed store across the street with plans to convert the space into a food hall.
Ella Duke, co-owner of Propagate Social House, told GrowthSpotter that she and her team acquired Hall’s Feed Store last week for $695,000.
The future food hall is located at 15 E 5th St., adjacent to a municipal parking lot. It was formerly Hall’s Feed Store.
After an extensive redevelopment of the building’s interior, it will become Hall’s on 5th with as many as six full-service restaurant vendors, a full bar serving cocktails and locally brewed craft beers, a main dining room area, and outdoor seating.
Propagate Social House, a popular breakfast, brunch, and lunch spot located at 40 E 5th St., will remain open.
“We are super excited,” Duke said. “We think it (the food hall) is going to be really welcome. Everything that we’ve heard from customers and people commenting online has been very positive.”
Hall’s Feed Store had been serving customers in Apopka since the late 1920s.
Chris Hall, who most recently ran the business started by his great-grandfather, told GrowthSpotter that he had been contemplating the feed store’s future before Duke approached him with her idea.
“There are no generations coming up that want the feed store,” he said. “It’s a lot of work. But it’s hard to figure out how to go out when you’ve been in business that long. I just kept praying, and then they came to me. And I said, ‘What a perfect way of going out of business.’ They’re going to carry on the legacy of the building and they’re really good folks.”
Duke said the redevelopment work on the 4,138-square-foot feed store has already begun but declined to provide an estimate on what it will cost.