Amélie Kretz was in Australia in March, training for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics alongside her Canadian triathlon teammates, when Covid-19 sent her entire team back to Canada. Within weeks, the Olympics had been postponed to 2021, the 2020 racing season was delayed until at least June, and the gyms, pools and hiking trails near her Montreal home had all closed.
Like nearly a third of the world’s population, Ms. Kretz, 26, who competed in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, has spent the last two months in lockdown. She is riding out the time at her parents’ house just outside Montreal, both to have some company and to make good use of their garage, where she has installed a little round swimming pool that cost her 350 Canadian dollars (about $250) online.
Like many athletes and hobbyists without access to public spaces during the pandemic, Ms. Kretz has found a loophole in lockdown: a creative repurposing of the family garage to pass the time, stay in shape and stay connected.
“After about two weeks of doing elastics in the gym to keep my swimming muscles intact, I was getting fed up with it,” Ms. Kretz said. “I thought, there’s no way I can do that for the next few months. I wanted to get back in the water as fast as I could.”
The pool is 40 inches deep and 12 feet in diameter, making it far too small for laps. (The Olympic triathlon comprises a 0.93-mile swim, a 24.8-mile bike ride and a 6.2-mile run.) So Ms. Kretz trains by swimming in place, with one end of an elastic rope tied securely around the garage ceiling rails and the other end looped snugly around her hips. Her coach, Alex Sereno, often observes via Zoom, offering tips on the arc of her arms and the form of her body as it enters the water.
“I like swimming in a normal pool much better,” Ms. Kretz said. “But without any races happening anytime soon, it can be hard to find the motivation to train, and training keeps me sane. So just moving and pushing myself in the pool every day is getting me through this pandemic.”
It’s not just athletes doing cardio in the car park. Jenny Bernholz, 37, is a co-owner of Pure Barre Manhasset, a group fitness studio on the North Shore of Long Island. When Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered businesses like hers to close under the shelter-in-place order, Ms. Bernholz wanted to offer quality live-streamed classes at home. So her husband, Kyle Bernholz, 37, installed tracked disco lights in the rafters of the garage, ordered a sound mixer and wireless microphone, and went to work recreating the studio experience in the garage of their home in Sea Cliff, N.Y. The space now has the feel of an industrial nightclub, tucked in the suburbs of Long Island.
Ms. Bernholz’s two young daughters haven’t been left out of the fun: The couple set up a jungle gym and obstacle course to help the girls let off steam between virtual school lessons. When their mom isn’t teaching, Caroline, 6 and Cameron, 4, play with a swinging rope, a trampoline and a balance beam as music blares.
“We literally are just shy of living there now,” Ms. Bernholz said of her garage. “We start our day and we end our day down there.”
Other families have turned to their garages to recreate pre-pandemic hobbies and hangouts. Randy Derama’s son, Reydan, 11, plays hockey with the Anaheim Jr. Ducks in Southern California. So when ice rinks across California were shut down in March, Mr. Derama, 38, pulled the cars out of the garage of his townhouse in Lakewood, Calif., and installed a floor of synthetic plastic ice — interlocking polymer cubes sturdy enough to hold his car when he parks on the “ice” overnight. Now Reydan straps on his skates and works on his slap shot in the garage every day.
Amy Casey, 37, and her husband, Matt Casey, 49, grew tired of home-cooked dinner monotony in their home in Wigan, England. So the couple dusted off their tools — Ms. Casey runs a furniture refurbishment business and Mr. Casey is a carpenter — and turned their garage into “Casa Casey,” an at-home bistro modeled after their favorite neighborhood tapas spot. Outfitted with the Moroccan-style lights and furniture Ms. Casey had in her studio, it’s become their new weekend date-night spot.
“It’s given us somewhere new to go,” she said. “So we’re not just stuck watching telly all the time.”
Some people are using the garages as headquarters for community outreach. In Virginia, Rebecca Geller, 40, has transformed hers into a satellite food pantry. Ms. Geller, a lawyer, is a longtime regular volunteer at the Lorton Community Action Center, a local food bank in Fairfax County. Her husband, Brad Cheney, 40, and their three children, Sam, 11, Noah, 9, and Emily, 6, often join her.
When schools in Virginia closed on March 13, Ms. Geller knew that many children dependent on school meals would likely go hungry, and LCAC, with most of its staff working remotely, wouldn’t have the capacity for regular food deliveries. So she drew up an Amazon wish list and distributed it to her network of friends and family, asking for donations of nonperishable food items to be delivered directly to her home.
The response was overwhelming. About 100 boxes of donated food are now delivered to the Geller home daily. The Geller-Cheney family has been focused primarily on creating snack bags for kids, usually consisting of juice or milk, granola bars, rolled fruit leather and crackers. They are sheltering in place with a family across the street, and together, the seven kids and four adults are packing around 800 snack bags a week.
Once a week, LCAC sends a truck to collect the snack bags, then distributes them to low-income people and families across the southeastern part of the county. The food and the resealable storage bags they are packed into are all donated; Ms. Geller, who is president of the Geller Law Group, says her firm is also matching donation amounts dollar for dollar.
In total, the food bank estimates that the Geller-Cheney garage has processed more than 10,000 snack bags over the past two months. They’ve also distributed hundreds of cans of tuna, soup and other nonperishables.
Ms. Geller said the effort has had another positive effect: It has kept her children happy and occupied. “It amazes me when I find my kids in the garage making snack packs on their own,” she said. “We have a lot of conversations about the fact that our family is fortunate, we still have steady income, and they don’t need to worry where their next meal is coming from. And they’ve always volunteered at the pantry. But now it’s become part of their every day.”
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