Revolution Athletic Club co-owner Michael Bonacuso knows better than most the value physical fitness can play in a person’s life.
After 15 months of active duty in his second tour of U.S. Army duty in Iraq in November of 2008, it was getting back into an exercise regimen that helped the Williston Park native start to turn his life around.
Bonacuso said his service in Iraq had left him “extremely depressed” with an anger problem he was unable to control.
He had missed being with his family while overseas and, ironically, those closest to him were now experiencing the expression of his low moods, he added.
“I was not a good person to be around. I became a very angry person,” Bonacuso said.
At the urging of his family, he started seeing a psychotherapist at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Northport, and started turning his life around. He had gained a lot of weight, and he started working out again.
“I knew that was a big point of confidence for me,” he recalled.
His new exercise regimen brought him to SportSet in Rockville Centre, where he met Samantha Johnson, who was working at the club part-time with her mother, Judy. It was a meeting that would shortly change both of their lives.
Johnson, a full-time architect, lost her job just as Bonacuso found out he wasn’t going to be hired as a full-time assistant coach at NYU as he had expected.
The Chaminade High School graudate said the similarities in their backgrounds, including their attendance at local Catholic high schools, sparked a friendship and a “unique” bond of trust that quickly evolved into another relationship. With their respective career hopes dashed, they sat down and came up with a plan to launch their own athletic club.
“It’s just funny how it worked out. The whole ride has been a fast experience,” Bonacuso said. “We decided to come up with a new dream together.”
They scouted locations around Nassau County and settled on the one they ultimately took at 155 Jericho Turnpike in Mineola that now houses Revolution Athletic Club.
Fate intervened again around the time earlier this year when he and Johnson made an application for their business before the Mineola Village Board. He was nearly called up for active duty, but enough reservists volunteered for active duty in Kuwait so Bonacuso didn’t have to make a third tour.
After his second tour of duty, he accepted a $10,000 bonus the Army was offering to join the National Guard and came back his family in East Williston.
“I’m very close to my family. I decided it was best for me to get out of the regular Army and switch to the National Guard,” he said.
Bonacuso had been co-captain of the Chaminade soccer team that advanced to the state finals in his senior year and had also played soccer at NYU. Approached by the coach at his college alma mater, he signed on as a part-time assistant coach and goalkeeper coach after coming off active Army duty early in 2009 and continued coaching there through 2011.
Bonacuso’s desire to serve was sparked when he watched the World Trade Towers attacked from the window of his dormitory room at New York University. A sophomore history major at NYU, the historical event he witnessed changed his own life, as he immediately enrolled for ROTC training at Fordham University.
So four years after graduating from Chamindade High School, Bonacuso graduated from NYU with his bachelors degree in history in June 2004, received a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and headed for four months of training as member of the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Eustis, Va. He was posted to duty and a very uncertain future in Baghdad on the eve of the country’s post-war elections in August 2005.
“I was outside the wire every day,” he said. “Anytime you went out on a convoy, you didn’t know whether you were coming back.”
Trained as a transportation specialist, he commanded a 44-man platoon that supported an infantry battalion in a mission that centered on setting up “serpentine” barriers to foil would-be truck bombers at election center points.
“I went there with an open mind. I was 23 years old. I didn’t know what to expect,” he said.
Bonacuso’s convoy came under enemy fire once, and often traveled routes where improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs, had destroyed trucks in other convoys. He worked in eight-hour shifts, with his convoys moving between midnight and 8 a.m. each night, and earned a combat action badge and a promotion to first lieutenant while in the field.
“I was definitely scared, but I felt prepared at the same time,” he recalled. “The uncertainty was what was most scary.”
Each night as he strapped on his kevlar vest and prepared for possible combat, he looked at the pictures of his family and the Trade Towers on the wall of his billet. It became a nightly ritual for Bonacuso, who said he became superstitious about it during his year-long deployment.
Growing up in Mineola, Albertson and Williston Park, he had heard his grandfathers’ stories about their experiences in World War II. His father’s father had served with the Army in the Pacific theatre and his mother’s father had landed with the 1st Army Division, the legendary Big Red One, on bloody Omaha Beach on D-Day, and later fought in the Battle of the Bulge. His great-grandfather has also done military service in Italy during World War I.
When he returned from Iraq in July 2006, he spent the next year training in upstate New York at Fort Drum. Then Bonacuso was deployed to Kirkuk in northern Iraq in August 2007, helping to direct logistical convoys delivering supplied to his unit from Kuwait.
“We coordinated for all the supplies to come from Kuwait for our brigade,” he said.
Promoted to captain a few months after his deployment, he was now involved in setting up forward operating bases for troops, assembling building materials and barriers with the construction cranes required to build those field posts.
“My team was in charge of building it and planning what we needed to build,” he said.
Now, he’s building a new life for himself in the fitness business, and taking satisfaction from helping others engage in a healthy fitness regimen. Revolution’s routines are built around Real Ryder Indoor Cycling, TRX Suspension Training and Interval Circuit Training. Its high intensity classes are geared for athletes of all ages, ability levels and background.
The village board approved the new business, and what became a two-family project is now a going athletic operation. Bonacuso’s father did all the electrical work in Revolution Athletic and his mother Marianne, washed the floors so her son could cut and lay down rubber matting. Judy Johnson is working as a fitness instructor and Carlton, Samantha’s father, helped build the Real Ryder stationary bicycles that are central to the hour-long classes at the club, which has a Web site that explains its exercise and membership plans at www.revolutionathletic.com.
Bonacuso said he fell in love with the Real Ryder bicycles, which simulate a real ride by enabling the rider to turn the front axle to engage upper body muscles, while working out in Rockville Centre.
Barring any call-ups, Capt. Bonacuso is home to stay in Williston Park, and very happy with his new mission, which includes coaching soccer part-time at Chaminade.
