At SIRO One Za’abeel, I came looking for performance. Somewhere between the training floor, the run club and the recovery spaces, I found a reminder of why I fell in love with fitness in the first place.
WORDS BY MARK EKE
At some point during my first afternoon at SIRO One Za’abeel, I found myself sitting in a sauna with three complete strangers. Not long after, we were around the cold plunge, collectively negotiating those first few seconds of regret that come with voluntarily lowering yourself into freezing water.
It was a small, slightly ridiculous moment, but it ended up capturing much of what stayed with me from the weekend. We did not know each other, we had probably spent the morning training in completely different ways and likely had very different reasons for being there. Yet there was an immediate familiarity to the interaction – sort of like a shared language that did not really require an introduction.
SIRO One Za’abeel is a hotel built almost entirely around fitness, recovery and human performance, so naturally I arrived expecting to think about my own: how I was training, how I was recovering and what I could improve. Instead, I became increasingly interested in everyone around me. Dubai has an enormous fitness and wellness community – something I have been fortunate enough to become increasingly immersed in – but there was something different about seeing so much of it concentrated under one roof. Everywhere I looked, someone was moving. Lifting, running, stretching, recovering. Everyone pursuing something entirely their own, while somehow existing within the same collective mission.
What I also liked was that the hotel never forces that sense of community on you. I was staying in the Recovery Suite – a stunning space, I must say, complete with its own massage room – and it felt like a retreat within the experience itself. The interiors are incredibly considered without feeling overly clinical or like you are staying in some sort of futuristic wellness laboratory. The space feels calm and lived-in, and the floor-to-ceiling views over the city make it very easy to do absolutely nothing for a while, which, admittedly, is not something I am particularly good at.
It became somewhere I could properly switch off after spending hours training, recovering and being around people. That balance ended up being one of my favourite things about SIRO. You could completely throw yourself into the Fitness Lab and the energy happening around you, or retreat to your room, slow down and have time entirely to yourself – to, let’s say, sink into the sofa and read your favourite Colleen Hoover novel (guilty). Even spending an afternoon by the pool, with nowhere particularly urgent to be, felt like part of that same philosophy. Like I always say, performance does not always have to mean doing more. Sometimes, it means knowing when to stop.
The contrast became even more apparent the following morning during the SIRO One Za’abeel x On Run Club. After enjoying the stillness of the Recovery Suite, I found myself back in the middle of that collective energy again – and realised how much I had missed training in a group. There is something completely different about running beside someone rather than simply running against yourself.
The person next to me kept asking what speed I was running at. I would tell her, she would adjust her pace, and before long I was doing exactly the same thing. Neither of us ever acknowledged that we were competing, but we just kept nudging each other a little further.
It was playful, slightly competitive and incredibly motivating. More than anything, it reminded me that perhaps the best part of fitness is having both: the space to focus inward when you need it, and the people around you who somehow manage to pull a little more out of you when you don’t. For something that is ultimately so individual, fitness can be remarkably communal.
Your goal is yours. Nobody else can run the sub-five-minute kilometre, lift the weight or do the work for you. But so much of what makes training enjoyable comes from the people around us. The person who speeds up because you did. The glance across the room halfway through a difficult set. The stranger convincing you to stay in the cold plunge for another ten seconds. There is a particular kind of understanding among people who have chosen to make movement, health and performance part of their lives.
That sense of belonging is a large part of what drew me to training in the first place. It gave me a space where effort was understood, where discipline did not need to be justified and where wanting to become stronger or more capable felt completely normal. As my own relationship with fitness has evolved, I think I had forgotten slightly how much of its appeal came not just from what I could achieve individually, but from the world that existed around it. Being at SIRO One Za’abeel brought that back into focus.
By the end of the weekend, I realised that SIRO One Za’abeel had reminded me of something much bigger than whether I was training or recovering well. It reminded me why I wanted to exist in this world in the first place.
Of course I want to become stronger. I want to run faster. I want to see what my body is capable of and continue setting goals that scare me just enough to keep things interesting. But I also want to be surrounded by people who care about those things too – not necessarily in exactly the same way, or for exactly the same reasons, but enough to understand the impulse.
There is something energising about being in a space where people are actively choosing to invest in themselves. Where one person is chasing a performance goal, another is simply trying to feel better in their body and someone else has come to slow down and recover. None of those motivations have to look the same to create a sense of community.
And perhaps that is what I took away from SIRO One Za’abeel most. Fitness has given me a lot over the years – discipline, confidence, goals to chase – but increasingly, I think what I value most is the sense that there is a place for me within it. A community big enough to keep discovering, contributing to and hopefully carving out a space of my own. I went into the weekend thinking about what I could take from the experience. I left thinking much more about what it means to be part of it.
