For years, if you lived in Captain Cook or Kealakekua and wanted a real workout, morning meant one thing: merging onto Highway 11 for the twenty-minute run down to Kailua-Kona, working out at Club Kona's flagship location on Kopiko Street, and driving back up before the day got hot. That was the trade every South Kona resident made for a lap pool and a squat rack.
On April 4, 2026, that trade stopped being necessary. Club Kona opened its second location, Club Kealakekua, on the lower level of Kealakekua Ranch Center in Captain Cook, tucked below the Choice Mart most residents already shop at weekly. The opening didn't just add a gym to the neighborhood. It finished a loop that was already three-quarters built, and most people who live here haven't noticed yet how complete it now is.
What Actually Opened Below Choice Mart
Club Kealakekua is a 7,000 square foot facility, smaller than the 20,000 square foot flagship in Kailua-Kona, but built for a specific kind of workout rather than a scaled-down version of one. It has cardio equipment, weightlifting machines, a dedicated Olympic lifting station, and a functional training area with turf and sled pulls. There's a group fitness studio running Les Mills classes, plus saunas, showers, and changing rooms for anyone commuting straight from the farm or the office.
What it doesn't have is the flagship's lap pool, steam room, or hot tub. That distinction matters more than it sounds. It means the new location solves the daily strength-and-cardio problem completely, but doesn't replace every reason to drive to Kona. More on that below.
Membership at Club Kealakekua carries a kama'āina rate that's worth knowing about if you live here: a ten-visit day pass runs $99 for local residents with valid Hawai'i ID, against $120 standard. The pass is good at both locations for six months, and visits don't need to be consecutive. For households training together, the annual Duo Membership runs $849 for the primary member and $749 for each additional person under the same plan, up to three.
| Club Kona (flagship) | Club Kealakekua | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | 75-5699 Kopiko St, Kailua-Kona | Kealakekua Ranch Center, lower level, below Choice Mart |
| Size | 20,000 sq ft | 7,000 sq ft |
| Pool, steam room, hot tub | Yes | No |
| Sled pulls, Olympic lifting station | No | Yes |
One ten-visit day pass, $99 for kama'āina or $120 standard, works at both locations for six months, so the choice of which club to use on a given day doesn't change the price.
The Museum and the Tasting Room Were Already a Short Drive Up the Highway
The reason this opening matters more than a typical new-gym story is where it landed. Kealakekua Ranch Center sits on Mamalahoa Highway in the stretch of Captain Cook that already functions as South Kona's unofficial mauka hub, the spot locals point to when out-of-town family asks where to go for coffee, groceries, and a walk through actual Kona coffee history. Greenwell Farms runs a walking tour of its coffee fields and processing facilities a short distance up the road, and the Kona Historical Society's H.N. Greenwell Store Museum sits nearby too, both easy stops if you're already parked at the Ranch Center for Choice Mart or the new gym.
That's the shift. Before April, a resident's morning might have been: drive to Kona for the gym, drive back up to Captain Cook for groceries, maybe swing by Greenwell's on a separate weekend trip because it wasn't worth a special drive on its own. Now the gym, the grocery store, and the coffee history stop can happen back to back without ever merging onto the highway toward town.
What Still Sends You Down the Highway
None of this means Kailua-Kona becomes optional. If swimming is part of your routine, the lap pool, steam room, and hot tub are still only at the Kopiko Street location, and the Duo and All Access memberships are priced specifically so members can use both clubs rather than pick one. Big-box shopping, the airport, and most of the island's larger medical offices still mean the drive south. What changed is narrower and more useful than a headline like "new gym opens" suggests: the specific loop of strength training, functional fitness, and errands that used to require town no longer does.
Sunday Still Belongs to the Green Market
The Ranch Center's new gym slots into a rhythm that predates it by close to two decades. The South Kona Green Market, held every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden across from the Manago Hotel in Captain Cook, has been the weekend anchor for produce, coffee, and local crafts long before anyone built a gym down the road. Vendors sell fresh produce, Kona coffee, and handmade goods in a setting that still feels more like a garden than a parking lot market, and it remains the one weekly stop that hasn't changed shape at all this year. Pair a Sunday market run with a Saturday gym session and the whole weekend stays within a few miles of home.
The Dinner Rotation That Was Already Local
The restaurant side of this loop was never missing, just spread along a few miles of highway that residents already know by heart. Teshima's in Kealakekua has served Hawai'i-style Japanese breakfast and dinner in the same old-school room for decades. The Manago Hotel's restaurant in Captain Cook is still the place for pork chops and a chow-hall feel that hasn't changed since it became a fixture of the town. The Coffee Shack, just south of Captain Cook, pairs its own estate coffee with a view over Kealakekua Bay that makes a weekday breakfast feel like an event. Annie's Island Fresh Burgers in Kealakekua runs on 100 percent grass-fed Big Island beef and a back deck built for lingering. Black Rock Pizza and Rebel Kitchen round out the casual end, and a few miles north in Kainaliu, the small strip of restaurants, second-hand stores, and galleries along Mamalahoa Highway gives the loop a reason to stretch a little further on a slower evening.
None of these are new. What's new is that they now sit inside a loop that also includes a real place to work out, which means a resident can string together gym, museum, tasting room, market, and dinner across a single stretch of highway without the twenty-minute run to town factoring into the plan at all.
The Actual Shift
It would be easy to write this as "South Kona got a gym," and move on. The more accurate version is that South Kona already had almost everything it needed to function as a self-contained mauka district, and the one missing piece, a place to train that wasn't a twenty-minute drive away, closed in April. For residents in Captain Cook, Kealakekua, and Kainaliu, that means the calculus around a Tuesday morning or a Friday evening changed this year in a way that has nothing to do with real estate and everything to do with how the neighborhood actually functions day to day.
If you're already living the loop, this is the kind of shift worth knowing about even if you never think about buying or selling a thing. And if you're the person a friend or family member calls when they're finally ready to make a move in South Kona, Kona Pacific Realty is the local team that tracks these changes as they happen, not after the fact. You can browse the current South Kona neighborhood guide or read more on everyday life in South Kona's coastal communities when you're ready to talk about what living here actually looks like.
