We’ve been getting a little deep with our blogs lately, examining the meaning of life, the meaning of NP, how the only difference between a waffle and pancake is the available syrup:batter ratio. Our resident philosophizer, Uncle Mike Bell, has kept a working mental journal of this thing that is NP. If you’ve never had the opportunity to sit down with Mike to discuss his thoughts on his experience with NP, I strongly encourage you to do so – bring booze, because shit gets reeeeaaalllly interesting when you add booze. If you don’t have a chance to sit down with Mike, make it someone else. Why did you start? What kept/keeps you coming back? Let’s dig deeper in 3…2…1…
I am November Project?
Here are a lot of words. None of them make sense, because this movement doesn’t make sense. Please proceed with caution.
While it’s been 658 days since I decided to #justshowup, it’s been 364 days since I decided to stay.
My first trip to NP was at the 4th of July workout at Red Rocks…and I loved it. It just didn’t quite fit into my life yet. Life was a little in disarray and the power of excuses was a little too strong (too far, too early, etc.). That was until I found myself driving downtown at 6:00am a year ago with the nervousness of a first date. Except the date was with someone you had heard about long ago, met in the past, hit it off but you were dating someone else, still stalked them on the internet after that first meeting because you were kind of unhappy in your routine, then had run into socially the few weeks before and realized you were both ready to mingle. You know, like that.
Once I arrived, it just felt right. A little bit of awkwardness as Woody failed to get us to pay proper respect to Prince, a hard workout running antibodies at Gov’s Park, and a quick acceptance into the NP family with high fives, hugs, and a tag.
Since that day I’ve probably written about 10,000 words about NP to myself over the past year. All of the thoughts are incomplete because after I spew the initial emotion onto the page, there’s no story to tie it together. My words all seem too extreme, a bit hyperbolic, and overall, just a little unfamiliar. When I try to explain it to friends, it kind of just sounds like we just work out and hug. Which we do, but there’s more.
To me NP is about the people. People united around movement. The thing that kept me at NP is that fitness wasn’t the goal, but fitness was the vehicle that has brought good people together to move. We come from different places and different backgrounds, we have different goals and different measures of success, but what we seem to have in common is the desire to make our sum greater than our parts. We move our bodies, we move our community, and we move our baseline to realize the greatness within.
And we do it together. My favorite part is the together. My biggest problem with all of the running groups I ever joined, and I have tried many, is that I only spent time with the people who ran the same speed I did. Weirdly, speed doesn’t necessarily align with personality, so after a couple of runs, I have become bored with the conversation, which leads me to run alone. I love that here, you can be good at NP without being the fastest or the best at the workout. You get to be good at NP, by being a consistent cog in the machine. You are a cog in a machine that is moving the human race forward. Even if you aren’t the one who succeeds today, maybe your “fuck yeah” motivated someone to go a little harder today. So therefore, if you inspire the person who makes change happen, didn’t you kinda make that change happen?
When we decide to #justshowup, we initially take from the machine. We feed off the energy of the group, let it inspire us, get us hyped, and gives us more energy in the rest of the day. Some of us do this quietly on the edge of the bounce, pretending that we’ve been there before, but inside wondering if we just joined a cult. Others jump right into the chaos, the energy clicks, you learn the terms and forget people’s names. Call and response. Either way, most of us have a memory of the first person who made you feel welcome to the group (Mine were Tiger and Troy. Why do these people remember my name?). The person who made the energy personal. Who gave your cog a place in the machine. And once it has a place, you’re fucked. Because then you start to give energy to the machine. And that energy is even better than the energy you got from it. You are the person giving someone their first awkward hug. And then a few months later you look over and see them giving someone else their first hug. It’s like a pyramid scheme of love.
One of my favorite moments in NP came last summer at a time when my cog was pretty rusty. I had done the whole “dive into NP headfirst” thing; fuck yeah everything, tag half of my clothes, but had grown exhausted by over extending myself through a summer of adventure and work. Waking up at 5am was a chore again and I showed up cynical with crossed arms. It was on one of these days, when I was standing on the edge of the group, avoiding eye contact and interaction, that Christine came up to me, laughed at my palpable discomfort of being awake and said something to the effect of “I don’t know what this all is,” *While waving a hand in front of my face,* “but it looks like you need a hug.” And she gave me a big hug, and my day was better. I was still stressed, exhausted, and grumpy, but I was smiling now. This moment of appreciation of the community that I had made my own. A moment of remembering that when you give to the machine, sometimes it’s ok to take back. Not only to get hyped on race day, but just to prime the pump for the struggles of everyday life. Some days you are going to try to change the world. Some days you need to be the world somebody else changes.
The word community is thrown around a lot these days. I think that most of the “communities” I have belonged to have been based around an interest: science, sportsball, beer, work. All a thing that brings us to the same place and becomes the focus of most of the conversations. Because we tend to gather around a thing, it’s harder to branch out into the deeper discussions about why we care about the thing in the first place. But when the thing is human connection, positivity, and a little funk, then coming back to the thing only makes the community stronger. It allows you to build relationships based on a common understanding.
We all show up for our various reasons. It’s why people decide to stay that really interests me.
My name is Mike Bell. I am November Project?
