Trumbull runner shifts her approach and opens studio
TRUMBULL — Gabriella Longobardo grew up in a small village in Hungary where she would spend hours with her grandfather as he tended the farm they lived on.
“I always ran,” she said. “My grandma always said that as a little girl I always used to run beside my grandfather’s tractor. Distance was never an issue for me; it was always in me.”
Longobardo, 44, took this experience and started running in major races after moving to the U.S., including completing the 2008 New York City Marathon in four hours, six minutes.
But after an injury from a practice run while training for the 2009 marathon, she was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis and was forced to retire her running shoes, switching to a different form of exercise.
Now, she has opened Refine Fitness, her own fitness studio at 5718 Main St., specializing in total resistance exercise, known as TRX.
TRX uses adjustable straps attached to a suspension system to perform a wide array of exercises designed to engage the core and improve strength and mobility.
“The good thing about TRX is that almost every exercise challenges your core because it gives you an unstable environment and you have to use your core more to workout,” she said.
When she moved to the U.S. in 2001, she first settled in New Jersey working as an au pair living with a host family and started attending SUNY West Chester Community College in 2002.
She graduated college in 2005, and married her husband Jason in 2008. The couple settled in Stamford, where her love for running continued.
“I was running at that time, doing a bunch of half marathons and the New York City Marathon,” Longobardo said. “Then I qualified with my time for the 2009 marathon.”
She had planned to do a 26 mile practice run, when she experienced a pain that she said almost came out of nowhere.
“Once I reached 11 miles, I started to feel my hip hurt,” she said. “Then when I hit 13 miles and turned around I realized something was wrong, so I started to walk.
I was over 10 miles from my car and left my phone in there so I couldn’t call my husband to have him pick me up. So I just ran back to the car and went to see a doctor.”
Longobardo said she assumed the pain was just a symptom of overtraining, not expecting it to stop her from running in the upcoming New York City Marathon.
She visited a rheumatologist a month before the marathon and learned that joints in her lower body were swollen.
“I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis at 30 and I couldn’t run because I started to have arthritis in my hip,” she said. “I haven’t done any full marathons or half marathons ever since because it’s too much of a distance at this point.”
Longobardo welcomed two children, having her first son in October 2011 and her second son in May 2014.
In 2015, Longobardo’s eldest son was diagnosed with autism, so she and her husband decided to move to Trumbull.
It was also around that time Longobardo decided that though her marathon days were behind her, she still had a love for fitness and became a personal trainer.
“My thing with personal training started and I began to play with the idea of opening my own place,” she said.
She became a certified personal trainer and started to venture out and gain a clientele.
“I realized there is a lack of small, local-owned, nonfranchise fitness centers here in Trumbull,” she said. “As a personal trainer, I would go to houses and I talked to some women who traveled to nearby towns like Fairfield and Shelton because there was really nothing here in Trumbull for women.”
Longobardo decided to find her niche, and that is when TRX training sprang to her attention.
“I was trying to figure out what would set me apart from the others. There are bootcamps and strength classes everywhere,” she said. “I want to build mine to be something different and TRX is what I feel sets me apart from the others.”
She rented out a small studio adjacent next to Physical Therapy for Women. Her studio accommodates four people at a time,
which she says is a good start while she balances work and motherhood. She eventually hopes to have a large enough space to host classes for 12-15 people and hire a couple of personal trainers.
“If you want to go to a fitness competition, I’m not your type of personal trainer,” she said. “But if you’re a busy mom or middle-aged woman that just needs some help to feel strong, wants to lose a couple of pounds, wants to get stronger or just wants to maintain where you are, then I’m the right person for you.”
Longobardo said she designed
her 30-minute workouts to be short and compact, filled with exercises that target everything a client needs without having to spend hours out of their week.
“A lot of people, especially in January, have all these New Year’s resolutions and they go from zero to working out three or four times a week for an hour at a time and they burn out within two weeks because it’s too much,” she said. “The goal is mostly to have them make it become a habit so it becomes part of what they do and it seems very popular.”