By Paul Post
Nick Marcantonio didn’t need a small-business loan to get his personal training firm off the ground.
His reputation as a world-class triathlete is worth its weight in gold.
In only 18 months, he’s developed a full spectrum of clients, from highly motivated athletes competing at elite levels to people with more general health needs such as weight loss or rehabilitation from orthopedic surgery.
Each person’s program is specifically tailored to where they are now, where they’d like to be and how best to get there.
“I basically interview people beforehand to make sure we’re the right match,” the 33-year-old Marcantonio said. “I like to give people individual attention, so I know they’re getting the right things and can work with them. I want people to say, ‘I’m working with a coach that has my back and understands everything’.”
His business, Marcantonio Training Systems LLC, is in a second-floor studio at 238 Bay St. in Queensbury.
From Glens Falls High School, where he excelled in track and cross-country, Marcantonio went to SUNY Cortland, which he led to Nationals as a Division III All-American runner, graduating in 2015.
But grueling competition and the expectations that go with being a team leader prompted him to keep racing through minor injuries, which eventually became bigger problems.
“So I decided to mix things up and start riding my bike a few times a week,” Marcantonio said. “I also had a lingering Achilles issue. That’s when I started swimming. It was the only thing I could do that didn’t put stress on the Achilles. I couldn’t run, couldn’t bike. But I could swim laps and eventually got the idea to sign up for an Ironman competition.”
His first foray into triathlon, after training for a full year, was at Ironman Maryland in fall 2016. To his amazement, he won his age group, which qualified him for the World Championships at Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, a year later.
To prepare, he did Ironman Texas in April 2017 and blew the doors off his 18-24 age group, easily winning by more than an hour.
“At that point I was pretty hell-bent on turning pro and raced as much as I could, although my focus was on half-triathlons because you can do them more often,” Marcantonio said.
In 2018, he went to the half-triathlon World Championships in South Africa and, after a second trip to the full triathlon World Championships in Hawaii, qualified for his pro license in 2019.
His surprising, meteoric rise in the sport hit its first major obstacle with the onset of COVID-19, which brought competition to a screeching halt.
In 2021, Marcantonio lined up on the beach at Oceanside, California, for his first pro race. Unlike baseball and hockey, there are no minor leagues in triathlon. First-year pro racers compete against the world’s best.
“It would be like someone in the ECHL playing against the NHL,” he said. “The guy next to me had been to the Olympics. The person to his right had won half-triathlon World Championships and a guy in front of me was a multiple-time World Championship qualifier. They’re the cream of the crop and I was thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ But I had a good race, held my own and finished mid-pack.”
The next couple of years brought ups and downs with recurring knee problems that eventually required surgery. But he enjoyed one of his best seasons in 2024, with personal records in half-triathlon.
All the while, Marcantonio juggled workouts with a sales job at Grey Ghost Bicycles, which allowed him to save enough money to buy equipment, open a studio and begin personal training without going into debt.
It began with one client, which soon led to several others. Now, in addition to local residents, his roster includes triathletes in Arizona and Colorado, whom he works with online to prepare specialized regimens.
“That’s a big part of my business,” he said. “They’re people I’ve met through mutual connections. I create a week’s worth of workouts, day by day; do these runs, these swims, these rides; very specific to the individual, structured and fine-tuned to their goals, followed by a new program the next week.”
His business acumen comes in no small part from his late father, Gary, a financial services specialist.
“It was kind of scary in the beginning because you don’t know if it’s going to work out,” Marcantonio said.
But as the old saying goes: “No risk, no reward.”
“It’s all been word-of-mouth so far, which has proven to be pretty successful,” he said. “I’ve been lucky enough to have a good reputation. If people get the results they want and they like me, they’ll spread the word to the right people and I’ll get more clients.”
And if all goes well, he’d like to eventually get a larger space with more specialized training equipment such as an Endless Pool, which allows people to swim continuously without needing a long pool. However, he isn’t focused on simply gaining more clients, similar to a commercial gym, but rather on keeping the business right-sized so he can continue to meet each individual’s needs.
“I would never want to get too big where it’s like a zoo in here,” Marcantonio said, smiling.