Get Driver Fit

Get Driver Fit, or GDF as most people involved just called it, was a public fitness programme backed by Daman’s ActiveLife initiative. The idea was simple: give residents free access to proper fitness coaching in the run-up to the Grand Prix, at venues people already knew and could get to easily. Classes were held at Zayed Sports City, at Yas Marina Circuit itself and in public parks around the city, and the format was deliberately varied. Functional training sessions sat alongside yoga classes, boxing sessions and full bootcamps, so whether someone wanted a calm start to the day or a proper sweat, there was something on the schedule for them.

We were the ones on the ground delivering it, though at the time we weren’t HARAKA. We were Haddins.

Each year the programme built towards a bigger moment. In 2014, that meant an obstacle course on the Corniche, the kind of event that turned a normal Friday morning on Abu Dhabi’s waterfront into something closer to a festival, with people queuing up to test themselves against a course rather than just following an instructor through a routine. By the time GDF reached its 2017 edition, the programme had grown into seven full weeks of free fitness and nutrition coaching, structured to build community health and engagement in a way that a single event day never could.

That’s really the detail worth sitting with. A lot of public fitness activations are one-off spectacles: turn up, get people moving for an afternoon, take some photos, move on. GDF wasn’t built that way. It ran across multiple years, it evolved its format each season, and it stretched into a multi-week coaching programme rather than staying a one-day stunt. Delivering something like that takes a different kind of operation to delivering a single class or a single event. You need consistency across venues, coaches who can hold a bootcamp one morning and a yoga session the next, and a plan that can flex around the realities of running public sessions in parks, at a sports city and at a circuit that’s normally reserved for racing.

For us, GDF was an early proving ground for exactly that kind of large-scale, sustained delivery. Free public classes across three years, multiple venues, multiple formats, and a partnership with Daman that anchored the whole thing in a genuine public health goal rather than just marketing around race week. It’s the sort of project that doesn’t always get talked about years later, but it’s the reason we already knew how to run big, multi-venue wellness programmes long before the word “wellness” became as common in Abu Dhabi as it is now.

From Haddins to HARAKA: the story behind the name

If you worked out in Abu Dhabi any time before 2022, there’s a decent chance you knew us as Haddins rather than HARAKA. The name goes back further than the city itself. Haddins started life in Australia in 2004, and it made its way to the UAE in 2009, setting up in Abu Dhabi and gradually becoming one of the more familiar names in the local fitness scene. Get Driver Fit ran under that name, as did a lot of the gym work and early corporate sessions that built our reputation here.

We rebranded to HARAKA in 2022. It wasn’t a cosmetic change. By that point we’d grown well past being a gym operator running the odd fitness class, and the business needed a name that reflected what we’d actually become: a wellbeing company Abu Dhabi residents and organisations could turn to for a lot more than a workout. HARAKA is the Arabic word for movement, and it fit what the company had turned into far better than the old name did.

Today HARAKA runs six core services, from our flagship gym at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City through to Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, School Outreach and Active Youth Holiday Camps. We work with individuals, corporate teams, schools and government entities right across the UAE, and Get Driver Fit is a good example of why that range exists. You don’t get invited to help deliver national-level public health programmes without first proving you can handle the scale and reliability those programmes demand, and GDF was one of the projects that helped us prove exactly that, years before corporate wellbeing Abu Dhabi companies now take for granted was even a phrase people used.

That track record has only grown since. We spent six months delivering the Sports, Fitness & Wellbeing Hub at EXPO 2020 Dubai with a team of 32, and more recently we ran ACTIVE Communities with Ma’an across 49 parks and 6 malls, reaching more than 34,600 participants. Along the way we’ve built relationships with partners including Sanad, Mubadala, Yas Marina Circuit and Daman, the same partner that backed GDF all those years ago. Put together, it’s over 15 years of delivering large public wellness programmes in this region, not as a side project but as something we’ve kept doing, year after year, under two different names.

If you’re planning a large-scale wellness initiative, whether that’s for a government entity, a corporate group or a community programme, and you want a partner who’s actually done this before at scale, we’d like to hear from you. Get in touch with the HARAKA team and let’s talk about what we can build together.

Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026

Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026