That First Day by Edoardo Valvo

This week’s blog post is brought to you by Edoardo; he is the founding father of the bunny pose and he makes cursing sound like a lullaby. There’s also a lot of other reasons we love him, but you’ll just have to find out for yourself when you #justshowup on a Wednesday morning for a Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu singalong. For all OCTOBER EVERYTHING, go HERE!

The First Day

Alarm goes off at 5.50am…..first thought is “Che cazzo sto facendo? – What the f*#ck am I doing?” (the messed up morning thoughts in my head are alway in italian first). I stand up from my bed and I can hear it screaming at me “Come back is warm and I got cookies!!!” -btw this is true I always have some cookies in my nightstand if I wake up hungry.-

I go to the bathroom….turn on the lights…look at myself in the mirror…..my face looks like a bad botox inplant…second thought “Mai na gioia – Never a joy” (typical way of saying from Rome when something is messed up). I zombie walk back into my room and dive into the closet.

I walk then to the meeting point (yes my house was 800m from Nemo Museum in Amsterdam) realizing that being 25 years old, I should understand when it is time to mind my own business, not be driven by curiosity and stop throwing verbals at people like there is no tomorrow (Kami, I see you), and maybe sometimes relax my assumptions about word of honour etc. etc.

13494962_1719263541623726_7760266661997305050_n — he showed up.

6:30 am. “Ok Let’s bounce!” I don’t remeber exactly how that day went exactly. I just recall bear hugs with perfect strangers, bouncing on my feet like a kid, shouting my name as loud as possible, high five the same strangers shouting f-words, initially in a polite manner as if I was actually sorry to push people with foul language, and then just euphorically smashing people hands while bombing my way down the stairs …..none of this was absolutely weird of course. IT WAS AMAZING!!

14608915_1760773817472698_992872096703487265_o — he never stopped showing up.

Pushing yourself to the maximum up the stairs until you can feel your heart pounding between your teeth, try to catch up the fastest group while keeping a distance from the ones behind you. Never stop cheering, never stop smiling. I don’t remember what the workout was about, I remember that I didn’t want it to end.

When I got home and got ready to go to work, I looked myself in the mirror again, I was still smiling. I kept that smile the whole day and I never stopped smiling on Wednesdays ever since.

PS: I would like to thank and give credit to some people for making my Wednesdays great and actually looking forward to this family time. My early recruitersc to whom I threw my first verbal, Kami from DC tribe, Saskia, Sjaak, Annelise and all my NP-AMS family.

Commitment – “Why do you do this?”

When I tell people what I do on Wednesday mornings they look at me puzzled and in disarray. For them, a person that wakes up at 5:45am and shows up for a workout at 6:28am to run up and down some stairs is like seeing a drunk panda bear in suit and tie eating bambu amidst commuters on the rush hour train to central station. The common and (for them) obvious question is “why do you do that?” So you sit there and you are thinking “whatever I tell them is a bloody mess…Ok let’s try…mmm….because I love the struggle!…no I ain’t no braveheart….it’s because I love hugging strangers…ok now they are dialing the police number.”

My personal reason to just show up, is for the faces of the people that are around me. Look at them, everybody shares the same electricity, the same willingness to get up those stairs, feel the momentum in which you beat gravity between a stride and the other. It has nothing to do with simple passion for running or working out. It has everything to do with a firm feeling of belonging. You do not commit for the sake of committing to something, you commit because you do not want to let your people down.