Kim Harari, renowned fitness trainer and Co-Founder of Come Alive 215, takes us through her journey of addiction, and in her recovery how she has found fitness as a new platform of community.

Bean2Bean Coffee Co ComeAlive215 Kim Harari Fitness Instructor Meet Philadelphia hello series

We know you as the lead trainer at Fitler Club and you started Come Alive 215. How did you get into the fitness world and have you always seen yourself here?

I did not see myself in this world. Growing up I was a soccer player, so my dream was always to play professionally. I got introduced into the fitness world while working with a personal trainer and a soccer coach. That was the first time I really got introduced to the human body and how to make it work, but I never saw myself as a fitness professional.

When did soccer come into play and how far did you take that?

I actually grew up in Israel; I was born in Israel. I was about four years old when I first started kicking a ball around. I was 6 years old when we moved to the United States.

When we moved, my dad signed me up for a girls soccer team, then I started playing throughout high school where I got recruited by a club team. Basically I was playing soccer every day of my life.

Then my life took a little bit of a detour when I got injured.

I tore three major ligaments in my ankle when I was 16, it was my sophomore year, and that’s when the recruiting started for colleges. I fell into a huge depression at that point. Soccer was my identity. And that was ripped from underneath me.

My ankle never healed up properly, so every time I got back on the field, I would re-injure it to the point where I needed surgery. When I got surgery, the doctor prescribed me Percocet, and that was really a recipe for disaster. I felt like my world was completely over. I know that’s dramatic, but as a 16 year old, that was my whole life. I wasn’t really good at school. Soccer was my one real claim to fame.

My school was known for having a major drug problem, and I didn’t know what to do, so I just started partying. Drinking took the pressure off all the stress of not being as ‘good enough or fast enough or strong enough’ as the other players, and not being good enough to be recruited. I started smoking weed, doing Percs, and drinking almost every day--it wasn’t long before heroin came into the picture.

When you found yourself on Percocets and migrated to heroin...did the people who were close to you know?

Not at first. There was a point, thought, when even the people I was partying with started getting worried.

I got clean for the first time when I was 17. I was at a party, and in a blackout -I was told this by other people- I answered a call from my mom and told her “yeah I’m f*cked up right now. Come get me.” She came to get me and I told her everything--gave her my drug dealer’s number, I gave her my stash. I don’t remember any of this. I woke up the next morning and she was laying in bed next to me. She told me everything about the night before and said “You’re going to rehab.” At that point I was crushed. I had no idea what recovery was, I was embarrassed. I just thought I would go to rehab, get clean, go to college, and live my life.

I was 17, stayed clean for 4 ½ years.

And then I relapsed.

What was your life like in those 4 ½ years?

It was wonderful. I was 18, I was shipped out to a halfway house out by the Poconos where they teach you and reintegrate you into life. I was going to meetings, got a bank account, got a job, started going back to school, and eventually I got a job at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility as a regional health technician, and soon got promoted to supervisor.

I was so passionate about working here, I would work 60 hours a week, I’d get promoted after 90 days, and then they’d need me. I felt like I had a purpose. It became my identity. And in that sort of obsession, I started neglecting my own recovery. Everything from the outside looked great--girl 4 ½ years clean, supervisor at a drug and alcohol rehab, without a college education, and I let my ego get big. I was suffering internally.

Walk us through what that was like.

At this point I had met a girl. I wasn’t open about that yet, so I was hiding everything that I was doing. She was also in recovery and about 3 months into us dating, she relapsed.

During that time I was trying to fix, manage, and suppress her addiction and really I was enabling her. I was lying at work; I felt like a fraud. Eventually, after 8 months of being around someone doing heroin, I just relapsed.

How did you cope with this relapse after being clean for so long?

Throwing away 4 ½ years of clean, it was time to get honest. It didn’t feel right being at my job so I resigned, and I couldn’t stop using.

The thing about addiction, the way your brain works, if you get clean and relapse, you go back to the same level of using as you did the first time.

I would keep everything in the car in the glove compartment. I was on my way back home one day, I’d been up for 2 days using cocaine... I was exhausted. I pulled up to a red light, and shut my eyes for 2 minutes, and woke up to a cop car behind me.

I got arrested, and at the time, Trump was in office. Remember, I have a green card. Now, I get a drug charge, which is grounds for deportation. So I landed myself in the immigration prison in York county.

I got myself out, and the whole cycle started again. I got to a house for a month, got back on my feet, got a job. We started using together again. And eventually at some point we were both homeless. We were staying at drug dealers houses, abandoned houses, renting rooms and leaving when we couldn’t pay...it just got real f**ed up real quick.

What was it that ultimately broke this cycle?

I went back to treatment in December 2016, and something happened there. I got a glimpse of that feeling of connection to self, others, community, and some kind of faith in the world in myself. Thank God, at that time my mind was open just enough to hear the message of recovery, and I developed a belief again that it could work for me. It’s not going to be the same, it might be very different, but this could work.

How did Come Alive 215 come to be?

I was working at City Fitness where I met Shannon, now my partner at Come Alive 215. We tossed around the idea of doing a birthday bootcamp (we’re both Pisces haha) and started thinking about venue, DJ, other local brands we could get involved. We ultimately had the event at Field House and it was perfect. We capped it at 87 people and sold out. Didn’t even have a website at the time, and it just worked. We were originally planning to drop one of these community bootcamp every 2 months or so; each with a different theme and at a different venue.

And then COVID hit, we both lost our jobs and had to pivot, developing our own brands separately, and decided that we wanted to take Come Alive 215 virtual.

We had no idea what were doing, but we knew we had to keep going because of the mental freedom, and physical and spiritual fuel it gives us as trainers. And we wanted to be able to provide that for the community at this time.

What’s next for Come Alive 215?

We don’t really know, so it’s cool in a way, but also a little nerve-racking since everything is so uncertain right now. But what we do know is that we’re able to give people an experience. We had our first Art Museum workout this week and will continue to do outdoor workouts Wednesday nights at 6pm every week and we might sprinkle Saturday in there. We had to pivot into virtual, learned how to work zoom, and now we’re going green...so we’re going to have to pivot again. This new world of fitness right now is allowed outdoors, and soon is going to be allowed indoors.

We’re just gonna keep it moving. We’re going to continue adapting and pivoting to continue to give people the experience that they want.

A theme you bring up throughout your life and recovery is a sense of community. Do you feel that you’re building a new community in the fitness world?

I think community is so important because it takes away all the bull shit that we’re socialized to believe in society, and I want to continue to build that and again for Come Alive 215.

What’s cool about recovery is that it brings people together, from all different walks of life, that we might never give ourselves the opportunity to get to know or be friends with on a day-to-day basis, because we’re socialized to be attracted to what we’re like. But in recovery, you’re forced to connect with these human beings because it’s going to save your life.

That’s what's beautiful about fitness as well. You walk into a studio and you get to leave all the shit behind. And you just connect over movement. Regardless of if you’ve never worked out before, if you’re a drug addict, if you’re gay, if you’re trans. Doesn’t matter where you come from, we embrace it all with open arms. Once you develop a comfort and trust, that opens the door for you to connect on another level.

When you teach a class it’s all about personal experience. First, it’s having the knowledge of personal training. But it’s also about putting on a performance, and the first thing is being authentic; for it to be good and for people to feel that energy. I would feel so good helping other people feel good and if i just help 1 person that’s good enough for me.

Photo by: John Michael Szczepaniak-Gillce

hello. meet Kim.