WASHINGTON, DC
March 19, 2025
STRANGER: Raine Storm McKeython
LOCATION: Sichuan Pavilion, 1814 K Street NW, Washington, DC
THEME: A former college basketball player launches a personal training brand
The first thing I notice is the muscles.
Personal trainer Raine Storm McKeython shows up to our lunch interview in shorts and a black t-shirt. His biceps are bulging out from the sleeves like a balloon squeezed so much it’s about to pop. His jawline could cut steel. His pecs would give department store male mannequins envy.
The second thing I notice is what’s on the shirt.
Raine’s professional logo is the words “The Team” with a gold-and-white lightning bolt. In just a few years, he founded and built an ever-growing fitness training business that’s as much about his positive personality as the routines he teaches clients.
“I like to change the stigma about exercise,” he says. “It comes off as that I’m truly having fun. Once you’re on that side of it, you’ll feel that sensation of feeling fun.”
He applies this upbeat approach to one-on-one training sessions through his brand Drizzle Fitness (a play on his middle name). Raine, who was born in Washington, D.C., and still lives here, teaches sessions at gyms or clients’ homes throughout the DMV. He also regularly teaches group workouts, including energetic weekend sessions that end with a mimosa toast, and hosts entertaining events.
Join the thousands of people following Raine’s Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, and you quickly get a taste of his wisecracking, can-do style. His posts alternate between training session snippets, workout advice, and occasional humorous weather reports. “I think DC weathermen are, how do I say this, frauds. They’re wrong 60 to 70 percent of the time. And I’ve lived here my whole life,” he says with a laugh.
Raine is a goofball disguised as a jock.
He’s quick to joke, smiles and laughs often and is relentlessly optimistic about the members of The Team and their fitness journeys. Training with him is a relaxed, funny vibe with proven results. He sports numerous glowing testimonials from clients seeing transformational weight loss and building muscle.
That unique persona, combined with the outstanding physical results he can help people achieve, might explain why he’s cultivated such a broad range of clients.
His story includes 15 years playing basketball, dozens of injuries, and a shift to his current role. But there’s more to learn, including his brief flirtation with a career in finance, and that’s what we’re discussing during the lunch interview on a sunny midday.
We’re sitting across from each other at Sichuan Pavilion in downtown Washington. Raine suggested the place, saying his dad turned the family on to it years ago. He’s clearly a regular, enjoying a cheery greeting and fist-bump from the owner.
The 26-year-old tells me that Wednesdays – the day we’re dining – typically see him work shorter hours. Shorter hours for him doesn’t mean nothing is happening. Any time throughout the week you can find him teaching individual and group classes at the gyms SWEAT DC and Barry’s, or at gyms in clients’ apartment buildings. In between sessions, he produces social media video content, refines workout plans for members of The Team, and spends time with his fiancee.
While he’s enjoying a thriving career as a personal trainer, it’s not the first or second life path he thought of growing up in the District.
It all started with basketball. “I started playing when I was in daycare,” he says. Raine’s father encouraged his interest in the sport. “So I fell in love with it before elementary school. Growing up, I wanted to be in the NBA. I wanted to play professionally.”
During his teenage years, he first went to a school in DC and then another in Maryland, switching for a better opportunity to get seen by professional basketball scouts. They attend high school games looking for the next big thing on a future college team.
Raine ended up at central Florida’s Stetson University. “I did a gap year down there. Basically you get to work out and take classes, but you’re technically not in college.”
He moved to California and attended Fresno Pacific University for the rest of his college career, spending three years there and majoring in finance. Between his experiences with competitive basketball and learning about money, he slowly changed his plans.
“I started to realize that playing in the NBA wasn’t impossible, but that dream is very rare,” he explains. “And for a basketball player that doesn’t make the NBA, it’s not a bad track. You end up playing pro ball. You’re in a couple of leagues overseas. But you’re away from your family, and COVID had just happened, and I didn’t want that lifestyle.”
And basketball wasn’t without its difficulties. Raine has had six shoulder dislocations, a broken hip, a disc herniation, more than 20 sprained ankles, and a dislocated knee. He has battled asthma. Even without a professional basketball career to show for it, the fact that he makes most of his living using his body is incredible.
After school, Raine was thinking of a move to New York and a job in finance. Then he hit on the realization that his true calling might be turning his training into a viable career.
“I realized I’m actually pretty good at school, and I could probably make just as much money, or more, with training,” he says. To stay in shape for college basketball, Raine was constantly in the weight room, learning and refining workouts. “I liked the training aspect more than basketball. I gravitated naturally to everything I did in the weight room. And then basketball was kind of like, I got good because of basketball.”
“So that was a very interesting switch,” he adds. “I started to lean into that to the point where I was training my teammates. Once COVID hit, our coach couldn’t even talk to us, so somebody on the team had to train them, and that’s when I got more disciplined.”
Everything Raine was learning led him to think he’d head to the Big Apple, get a lucrative financial career, and perhaps charge for personal training as a side gig.
When he returned to Washington after college, Raine spoke with two mentors who suggested that he flip his plans and make his primary living as a trainer, with investing on the back end. He started training basketball players and family members. His charisma, coupled with deep insights on how to get solid, long-lasting results, led to great word-of-mouth advertising and a solid reputation. Soon more people were asking him to teach them, and demand kept growing.
By then, Raine had secured his certifications and necessary professional training. He worked as an independent trainer using DC’s SWEAT gym as a base of operations. Then he started to assist their classes, and that’s how he ended up with his current mix of working for gyms and leading The Team.
What makes a lot of his work possible, he says, is Washington’s DC large number of luxury apartment buildings with gyms. That’s still where he meets many of his clients. “So working for SWEAT, being in the city, it was all just like the perfect storm,” he says.
His middle name has an interesting story behind it. “My mom got sick immediately when she was pregnant with me, and she was sick for nine months up until I was born, so they were always going to make my middle name Storm” based off how rough the experience was, he says. “Raine came later, playing off it.” Drizzle Fitness seemed a natural play on the rain theme.
He truly wants to make every person he works with feel part of a bigger mission, and The Team hearkens back to his basketball days. “When a client would first sign up, I would always say, ‘Yo, welcome to the team.’ And I kind of like that experience of when you first make it on the team, the coach congratulates you. And they’re just as excited about your process as you are.”
With The Team, Raine tries to recreate the feeling of excitement for every client.
“I would say my approach is designed to change your mindset. What that will do is pretty much make every other goal fall into place. My ultimate goal is that you feel confident in the things I see in you, and sometimes that’s what it takes, someone having that vision of you. Change the mindset, change the body. It’s a mix of mental and physical,” he says.
“What I found works for me is a relentless pursuit of focusing on the future and the positive. Like I said, the mindset of it all — if you’re focusing on the negatives, you’re going to look at it, you’re going to find it. My thing is flipping it to the positive in any situation,” he adds.
He pauses as our lunch arrives, Raine is having the chicken lo mein. The portions at Sichuan Pavilion are hefty, and the aromas of both his dish and mine are fantastic.
I chose the General Tso’s chicken: golf ball-sized clumps of poultry, perfectly coated and cooked, with a sauce that hits just the right amount of spice. I can see why the McKeython family are regulars, and it’s definitely a venue I’d return to.
As we eat, I ask Raine to tell me more about getting his online presence started. Around 2022 he began taking social media seriously. These days his multiple accounts are updated by his Canada-based assistant Kendall. She’s got a good sense of the jokey but useful content that works well for The Team. “Anything you see on Instagram is me [posting], but outside of that it’s all her,” he says. “She’s the brains of the operation.”
Raine’s videos stand out by featuring clients with a broad range of ages and body types, which he says is deliberate. “A lot of influencers get paid to work out and just show what they’re doing. Mine is real people and real training,” he says.
A regular YouTube series features what he says is the world’s first live workout podcast, where he goes through sets with clients while interviewing them about their stories.
He should have called it Exercising With Strangers.
This half-workout, half-interview approach “helped me in terms of learning more about the client. So I definitely wanted to kind of showcase them,” says Raine.
“I feel like so many influencers, like I said again, they get all the status, all the showcasing,” he adds. “But this other person works out three times a week, just like that, they don’t get paid to do it. I feel like they should get showcased too.”
As lunch comes to an end, I ask Raine what’s next for The Team.
“I really like entrepreneurship and the ability to support myself and my family through this,” he says. “It was a grind for the last four or five years, but now I am looking to do more with my family, traveling and living life, travel the world and explore.”
Raine says he gets the same buzz out of training as he did at the start. “Seeing how I can switch somebody’s mindset is mind-blowing. I realized I have the power to build my own strength, hone my own strength, and get stronger, and then being able to instill that in others keeps me motivated,” he says. “I naturally feel good when someone does well.”