So many words. . . CHI

(Stay with me, this is going somewhere.)

The cabin was full of at least a dozen folks and several bottles of whiskey. There were some guests who I didn’t know, and as conversations do there, it pretty quickly turned to inside jokes and esoteric stories with jargon set to confuse the non-natives. That was, until #grassroots gear made an appearance. “Oh,” a friend said, “you do November Project, so does one of my friends here.” We were soon introduced. He said he did it in Chicago where, at the time, I didn’t know anyone. (I’d been in Chicago for 2013’s #BetterThanBedtime, but without a local tribe went up to Madison for the festivities.) But then he let it slide: “actually, I’m the co-leader there.”

So we knew, well, let’s just say “a few” of the same people. And that was how I met our dearly departed co-leader Brendan #HotSummerFun Scully. So we turned the tables: instead of having an esoteric, alienating conversation about the huts and excluding Brendan, he and I had that sort of conversation about NP. Or as one of our mutual friends said, as we were ramping up conversation about Summits and Bojans and Hoisties: “oh, here we go.”

We didn’t talk to anyone else for half an hour.

I left the next morning with a vague #traverbal to come visit #NP_Chi. I’d recently and hurriedly applied to grad school and figured I might have some time off this summer. Road trip? Midwest adventure? Who knew.

Fast forward three months. I get in to grad school, and something is mentioned about maybe a summer internship in Chicago. But nothing concrete until early May when I’m told “hey, if you want to go to Chicago you can. Be there in three weeks.” Up to that point I was thinking of taking the summer off and blowing through some savings because that’s a good idea just before grad school, right? (Yes, this included some #NP_TSA.) There were two factors that made me comfortable heading, sight unseen, to Chicago. The first was that at this point of grad school I figured that if I was told to jump, my response should be “how high?” (Kind of like the bounce, right?)

The second much bigger factor? #NP_Chi. (Also, this was maybe a week after Brendan went diving in the lake for a Divvy bike. That seemed about the right speed.)

Moving to a new city is hard. I’ve actually never really done it, I’ve either moved for college (with a forced social group) or known some people where I’ve gone. I had a couple friends in Chicago from college, but had it not been for NP, I would have been a bit isolated here. Just a bit. But I #NP_TSAed last year to Denver before a cousin’s wedding (which I could more truthfully say “I only attended my cousin’s wedding because it was near a #traverbal opportunity) and ran in to several people I knew who’d moved out from Boston. None of them had known anyone in Colorado, but all of them said “I knew that if I were to #justshowup at a certain place on aWednesday morning, I’d immediately meet a huge group of awesome people.”

For me, this was the kicker. I’ve spent about 20 years overcoming being a shy introvert (seriously, any evidence to the contrary is all a ruse). I don’t do well in groups of strangers. I can’t read people at all. But November Project is not a group of strangers. It’s a group of people who have all made a conscious effort to wake up at some stupid time when people should not be waking up. It weeds out the lazy people. The prototypical douchebags populating $90-per-month gyms don’t show up, because they get their climate-controlled (read: lame and totally not #weatherproof) sweat on in at more normal (read: lame) times of day. Being negative at 3:30in the afternoon is easy. But if you’re going to make the effort to wake up at 5:19 (as I have set an alarm everyWednesday and Friday for the past several weeks) you better also make an effort to bring your #positivity.

So I came to Chicago. Found a place to live (cheap and convenient to work, although a bit of a haul from the Totem Pole). Arrived on a Monday. Wednesday morning, I was on a bike to Lake View. Positivity. Bounce. Hugs. Sweat. Swim. New friends.

Since then I’ve biked to 3 Floyds and back, run the Swallow Stairs, and been part of the huge NP_Chi Summit crew. And done a lot of very silly-but-awesome things when most of Chicago is still hitting the snooze button. To put it succinctly: you people are amazing. There’s really not much to be said beyond that. I came to Chicago with a tad of east coast NP elitism * (fine, a lot of Boston NP elitism; although I spent 7 years in Minnesota so there’s some Midwest street cred): Chicago is flat. Chicago is new. (I can pull seniority rank on pretty much anyone; this was my first day. The picture there was the entirety of anyone doing NP in the world. Four years ago. Yes, #WorldTakeover is very real indeed.) Chicago doesn’t have a huge concrete stadium. Or a 200 foot hill. Or a 20 foot hill. Or Emily Saul’s arms.

But it doesn’t fucking matter. Chicago has a group of hardcore, brilliant, beautiful people who #justshowup every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Uh, I mean Wednesday and Friday. For now. NP is NP wherever you go. #NP_Chi is stellar. Everyone—but everyone—welcomes you with open arms for a big sweaty bear hug. And a workout. And breakfast. And dinners, beers, stairs, bikes, weekends. I’m leaving soon (too soon) to go out west and then back east, but I will definitely miss you all. I’ll wear my stars proudly. And you better believe that any chance I get I’ll be back.

If any of you are coming to Boston on a Monday Wednesday or Friday, you have a couch to crash on a mile from the Stadium and two from Summit (okay, from the bottom of Summit, but bike share on the block). If you’re moving somewhere and don’t know anyone, don’t worry. Jump in head first. Because as long as it’s (here we go): Boston, Worcester, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Virginia Beach, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Denver, Phoenix, New Orleans, San Diego, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna (where the fuck is that?!**), Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Reykjavik or Novi Sad***, you have friends. Which is pretty cool. Oh and a pretty baller workout, too.

So thank you for welcoming me with open arms (read: sweaty hugs). I can’t say I didn’t expect it, but that’s only because NP everywhere has set very high expectations.

I love you all too much for words.

(But, as I am wont to do, I wrote a bunch of them anyway.)

* About that elitism, by the way: I’ve been to Ontario twice in the past three years, both times to run a trail race. Once from Chicago, once from Boston. So I know how long of a trip it is from both cities: about 9 hours. So you’d expect NP_Bos and NP_Chi to have similar rates of attendance for #NPSUMMIT. Boston brought a big crew, but on a typical Wednesday Boston will have between a couple hundred and eleventy billion (okay, 1445), so that’s like 5% turnout (I’m bad at math). Chicago brought JUST AS BIG a crew, which was probably half of the NP_Chi tribe. I may have to go back east and knock some heads together.

** It’s on a lake in an inland fjord in south-central British Columbia.

*** Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was straight from memory. Next I’m going to learn them in the order they joined NP. I remember things like this. I don’t know why. By the way, remember how I said I’m shy and introverted? Part of it is that I can’t remember names and faces. But NP tribes? Easy. So, yeah, my brain is weird.