The Back Story

It is not an uncommon scene.

Trevor Blyden bolts into Beyond Limits Fitness in Kennett Square – he has owned it since 2016 -- completely breathless, and actively removes his tie as he runs to his office and pulls a Clark Kent level transition from business attire to gym rat. He is less than a decade removed from the life he once knew – that of a prison inmate -- and he has accomplished more than many who didn’t have to restart their life several times. His best advertisement for training, for motivation, is himself.

“I have a whole wall in my house – a chalkboard -- and I put my goals on my wall and write what I’m willing to do, what I’m not willing to do to achieve my goal and I re-evaluate every month,” he said. “It could be a fitness goal, and it could be any goal.”

I have been training with Blyden for several years and have noticed the buzzing energy he brings to our sessions. He is always working on new endeavors and ways to expand the gym and is genuinely one of the busiest and most focused people I have ever met. I had to know the story of how Beyond Limits came to be, and how Blyden seamlessly blends his fitness and training career with an ever-expanding career in workforce development, and what he plans to do next.

“I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “You can decide what to use.” I pressed record on my phones’ voice memo app and turned it towards him.

Trevor Blyden can bring anyone into the fold. He attributes his welcoming and approachable demeanor to his early years growing up in Harlem in the Jehovah’s Witness community, the son of a woman who owned a hair salon for over 15 years as well as an insurance billing company, and the son of a man who manufactured leather for what were used in the making of Chanel handbags, often as many as 20 hours a day.

“My father’s side of the family is from the Caribbean, near Tortola and St Thomas,” Blyden said. “He didn’t know how to read but was good with his hands and opened up a leather factory. We grew up in the factory. He had 60 employees working for him. We barely saw him. He was just working.”

Despite his religious upbringing and his honor roll status throughout school, Blyden was derailed in his teens and twenties. When his mother and father divorced in his early teen years, his brothers, Yento and John, moved with their mother to the East Side of Wilmington.

“I stayed with my dad but eventually, when I came to Delaware, my mother had another child and there were four of us,” he said. “She was a single mother of four boys, and we were out on the streets. We got involved in dealing drugs. We never hurt anybody, we never robbed anyone. We were just making money.

“I was trying to start businesses because I wanted to stop dealing drugs. I didn’t like the lifestyle, I didn’t make friends, and we were just kind of the outcasts.”

His first conviction was when he was 13. His second came when he was 16.

“At the time of my sentencing, the judge asked me if I had anything I wanted to say, or if I had any suggestions,” Blyden said. “I suggested that I go to the Ferris School for Boys. The judge wanted to send me to a program in Tennessee for sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds, and I told him, ‘You don’t have to send me to Shelby Training Center. Just send me to the Glen Mills School (a youth detention center and reformatory school in nearby Delaware County). I told him that I have good grades, and if I had the right structure I’d do well there.’

“The judge told me, ‘Nope! I’m getting you ready for the big house.’”

After his second long stint in prison on drug-related charges, Blyden started making plans for his life beyond incarceration.

“I did everything,” he said. “I studied nutrition, I studied law. I studied business. I wanted to be ready to take advantage of the opportunities I had because I realized if I have a felony, I can’t work in 90 percent of the jobs out there – law enforcement, banking, teaching, medical -- so I needed to become a successful businessman. I was taking advantage of everything.”

Eventually, Blyden began classes at Delaware Technical Community College to study Computer Information but left to enroll in the National Personal Training Institute where he developed his structure for training, which led to becoming a contracted trainer at Snap Fitness. There, he developed a large roster of clients, trained athletes, and eventually asked the owner to buy into Snap. After his offer was rejected, he opened Beyond Limits, and brought a sizable client base with him.

The Gym

Beyond Limits occupies the end lot of the shopping center at 739 West Cypress Street and boasts 24/7 access with a key card, up-to-date equipment, free weights, a smoothie bar, and the option to include flexible personal training sessions, cryotherapy, and meal plan development. With more than 20 years studying health, fitness and nutrition, Blyden is the architect of his client’s health journeys, even down to designing specific workout and nutrition plans to help meet their goals. A few of his clients have become the architects of Blyden’s journey. He points to a woman working out at one of the machines.

“When I first met Celeste, she had bad scoliosis,” he said. “She was just on the bike all the time at the gym, and I asked her to begin working out with me. Now she’s deadlifting 200 pounds.”

Celeste has since started working with Trevor not just as a client, but in a business capacity too, as his accountant. Her husband, who works with Bancroft Construction, has become a mentor for Blyden in business and construction, and encouraged him to focus on his other career - developing business strategies for minority contractors in the tri-state area.

“I had many people helping me when I put my company together,” he said. “I met a contractor who was still working on the labor side in his seventies, and I told him that I would pay him $30 an hour to be my project manager. I asked him to teach me everything he knows. He taught me how to read blueprints and estimates, and I did about $2.5 million in construction projects, residential and light commercial that first year.”

It led to Blyden starting his own construction company called Community Labor Empowerment Alliance for Redevelopment (CLEAR).

The Pathway

Blyden is also working alongside his brother, John, the Chairman of the Board of LIUNA (Laborers International Union of North America, Local 55, and co-founder of L.E.E.P (Labor - Economics - Education - emPowerment), an organization that provides opportunities for minority contractors. The union’s mission is a constant upward climb against the privatization of the modern prison system. Historically, the black population has been overwhelmingly supportive of unions and the idea of collectively organizing in the workplace since unions protect them from wage theft and racial discrimination. With the privatization of prison, however, the incentive for the carceral system shifted to filling cells and making a profit, a decision that pulled the most disenfranchised off the street and took them out of the workforce.

The results have drastically impacted the minority landscape in unions. Whereas the black population completed 80 percent of construction jobs prior to the privatization of prisons, the percentage of black contractors contribution to union work is now less than five percent.

L.E.E.P.’s first program -- Pathway to Apprenticeship – arranges for individuals to receive an eight-week training program that leads them to a union job.

L.E.E.P has just been awarded part of a $14 million dollar grant for workforce development programs which will looks to funnel people from Chester, Pa. into job opportunities for the newly announced MACH2 (Mid Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub) Plant as announced by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration. In all, the Hydrogen Hub anticipates that it will create 28,000 jobs – 14,400 in construction and 6,400 permanent jobs.

John also founded the Pathway to Business, which Trevor now runs. The prototype, which already exists in Wilmington, will eventually be implemented in Newark, N.J. and Penns Grove, N.J.

“Pathway to Business is a minority contractor development program that helps our clients how to create business plans,” he said. “I’m teaching them everything from soup to nuts about their business. We also have a business incubator space where they can work out of and learn how to manage their companies.”

Blyden’s achievements continue to roll off like a must-do list of accomplishments. He has been a key donator to the Delaware Center for Justice, conducted job fairs to identify minorities with construction experience, served as one of the founders of 100 Black Men in Delaware and was its economic chair in 2023, and is also the co-owner of Mobile 1 Audio with his brother, Yento.

The Photograph

As we wrapped up the interview, I pulled up a photo on my phone and turned it towards him, pointing to a Wikipedia photo of a tintype of a 19th century man by the name of Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was known as the “Father of Pan-Africanism.” Blyden was a scholar, writer, diplomat from Saint Thomas, went on to become the Secretary of State of Liberia, and then the country’s Secretary of the Interior.

“You have a famous last name,” I told Blyden. “Are you familiar with this guy?”

“I remember that picture!” Blyden said. “My grandmother was the first person to take out a loan in Saint Thomas, and my family over there are all entrepreneurs. You look at all the other groups of people that come over here - they do the same thing with their franchises. My Dad has two storefronts in New York City and has a whole supplement line on Amazon and is in 120 different retail locations.”

This is the stage of the profile where I could invent some cheap nod to “overcoming adversity,” but the profile is so much more than that, so I am ending this with the revelation of the photograph, to illuminate that Trevor Blyden comes from an ancestry of self-made people. His ability to challenge himself, and to challenge others to become the best versions of themselves whether through health and fitness or helping them open the doors to new job opportunities and personal development. It’s in his blood. It’s in his family. It’s in his ancestry. It comes from a raw and honest place. I am constantly asking him how he gets it all done.

“I am making up for lost time,” he said.