E-MAIL & EXERCISE

Santa Cruz Sentinel, Monday, June 28, 1999.

By Chris Watson. Property of Santa Cruz Sentinel

It's a vicious circle. Excited by the Internet, you start sitting at the keyboard more than you should. You start getting out of shape. You get fat.

So you do a search on health and fitness sites, find some online experts and begin a one-on-one fitness consult that inspires you to get back into shape.

Ironically, your online fitness coordinator has inherited your problem - now he's spending too much time answering e-mail and maintaining his Web site. Now he's got to reconfigure his relationship to the Net.

Dave Draper, local fitness guru and owner of World Gyms in Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley, is grappling with just this problem.

Relative newcomers to the Internet, Dave and wife Laree (who maintains the www.davedraper.com Web site) are trying to figure out how to handle an enormous influx of e-mail from Dave's fans in Russia, Switzerland, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the U.S and every other corner of the globe.

Their site has been up a couple of months but already 1,500 daily visitors are taking advantage of the 200 or so pages of information covering everything from nutrition, weight training and workout schedules to magazine articles on bodybuilding, one-on-one consultations and a subscriber-based e-mail column sent weekly to 670 fitness loving net surfers.

So far, the Drapers have been able to personally answer each of the 20-40 e-mails they receive each day.

So far.

But the avalanche of training and fitness questions continues to grow.

In an e-mail column he wrote after a recent two-week vacation, Dave confided:

We love the e-mail. It's our source, the voice of our audience. It's you. But when it mounts while we sleep, e-mail makes us dizzy. Upon returning form our trek across the fields of grain and purple mountains majesty, we had 381 new e-mail messages. Laree shrieked, I reached for the monitor but she held me back. "Strangling the thing's not gonna help," she reasoned. Laree's always right, so we buckled down and got to work - like reps and sets, chins and dips. Keep the pace, stay focussed. Keep pumping. You can do it. One more rep. The fact is the e-mail was exceptional - real people, real lives, real loves, frustrations, problems, delights and discoveries. Thank you. A privilege.

A privilege, yes. But a time consuming one.

"I spend maybe 20 hours a week responding to e-mail and writing my e-mail column," Draper said. "And Laree spends at least that amount."

It's getting to be too much, he confided.

"We know it's valuable and it's been a big thrill and very complimentary," he said. "And we want to see if maybe we can find a way to prosper without charging for it."

They're considering an extensive FAQ's page, pumping up the weekly newsletter and undertaking a moderated mail list.

Dave loves writing - he toys with the idea of a book - so answering e-mail is not an insurmountable hardship. With Laree's wizard computer skills, they make a perfect Web team.

"I've been online for three years but didn't use it much until we decided to do the Web site," Laree said.

"Now I'm on all the time and we put up new pages two to three times a week." Laree answers the easy e-mail queries and forwards the tougher training questions to Dave.

"But realistically, I don't know if we can handle the volume. We're probably close to maxed out," she said.

Building the Web site was a learning experience for Laree who redesigned the Web site three times before she was satisfied. She dumped a QuickSite Web-building product (to generic, she said) for the Corel Webmaster Suite and chose Highway Technology of Texas to host the site. They have the speed, she said.

But the best part of the whole experience, Laree said, has been the fans, many of whom knew Dave "back when" - back when he was Mr. Universe, back when he was on the covers of all the muscle magazines, back when he won his first title in 1962 as Mr. New Jersey.

Ed Whaley knew Dave from their days working out at the old Vic Tanny's gym in Jersey City in the early 60's. Even back then, Draper was respected by his fellow bodybuilders, Whaley said.

"I found his Web site by accident," Whaley e-mailed the Sentinel recently.

"I was so delighted I brought my daughters to take a look at it. They, of course, had to listen again to my chatter about Dave and the Tanny days."

Kevin Cummings remembers Dave from the days Draper hosted a TV show in L.A. in the '60s. Back then, Draper was known as David the Gladiator and, a little later, as the Blond Bomber.

All the kids knew who Draper was, Cummings recalled recently.

"Kids growing up in southern California in the '60s knew who Sandy Koufax was, you knew who Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were, and you just knew Dave Draper.(he) was an icon for the Southern California lifestyle."

Vincent Fitzpatrick, a regular visitor to davedraper.com, has been a fan for 30 years - ever since he first saw a photograph of Draper in a magazine.

Finding Draper's Web site and communicating with him via e-mail have, he writes, "turned a remote, childhood hero into someone I think of as a friend."

All three men agree that the most important aspect of davedraper.com is the motivational and inspirational support it gives them to stick to their training.

With advertising like that, it's no wonder the Drapers no longer have an advertising budget.

"We've spent $50,000-$100,000 in advertising over the years and now we do none," Laree said. "It's always been word of mouth; we just never knew it."

The Web site may be a successful, content-rich Internet venture, but, in truth, it merely augments what was an already successful enterprise.

Other online fitness Web sites include www.trulyhuge.com, www.absolutefitness.net and www.e-shape.com.

Chris Watson is a Sentinel staff writer. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].