A Book, a Bus Ride, and a Hunch

Guest Blog from Justin Lam. Justin, thank you for sharing, we are glad you are here:

Building community through #freefitness

Last week, I was honored with the Positivity Award. I always figured if I were to win it, it would have been after finishing my first race (I still haven’t run one yet), or after completing some insane PR, or after actually having a streak of being on time to workouts (Mary, I’ll try to stop blaming the A train for being in the 6:40 crew).

But none of that happened, and in a way, I think that says more about the award and this community.

A book, a bus ride and a hunch:

Last summer, sitting on a light rail to the Minneapolis airport, I saw an ad for a book whose premise was to holistically boost your life habits: Hell Week. The week has seven overarching rules, and one of them is to work out for sixty minutes a day—working out, that activity I hadn’t done in years. Two days into the week, I was looking for ways to keep up my fitness streak, when I googled and found November Project.

The next day, I found myself on the bus at 5:45 a.m., on my way to a new morning activity with total strangers, the same way I had tried a Daybreaker the year prior. What I remember from my first workout wasn’t just the three-person group activity involving mountain climbers and sprints up and back from the Wards Island Bridge that left me pretty worn. Instead, it was that Winnie Lok came up to me after the workout and said, I saw you on the bus — is this your first time? Thank you for being here.

November Project had intrigued me enough to come back the following week, and to make the 50-minute foggy drive to NP SF tribe when I was back home in California the week after. But what stuck with me the most was, after coming back to New York, going to another workout and Winnie inviting me to breakfast club afterwards. The fact that we weren’t just there to work out, but to build community, stuck with me.

From merbal to traverbal

Over the fall, I kept going. It just made sense. It was something that kept me fit and something I could look forward to amidst a challenging fall of work and GRE studying. It showed me fitness doesn’t have to consist of coming into a gym with no idea of what to do. More importantly, I started realizing how refreshing it was to keep seeing the same familiar, friendly faces each week.

Sometimes you trabel to hill repeats and a cable car meets you. (and stops for a photo)

And I realized what a joy it is that this feeling extends into a global community. I went to LA for the holidays, and Elliot and Nikki inadvertently contributed to my first ever double workout (carpools and LA sprawl make us do weird things, right?). I survived hill repeats in -15ºC and snow with NP Minneapolis. I got to DC and got to do a #sunrise6k, then two days later, a workout on three hours of sleep after launching a website at work the night before. I had the joy of sharing NP with my coworkers in LA (Maggie, they can’t stop talking about it), of greeting one of our then-soon-to-be-tribe in Dallas, and of now seeing the tricolor NP NOLA tag shirt that now hangs in my room (thanks Mia!).

#justshowup

So our tribe is pretty badass (Jeanie confirmed I can say that). Badass enough that I was inspired to sign up for a half marathon four months ago, which I won’t be running due to a heel spur I came down with in March — an injury that showed me you can still #justshowup to workout and to this community, whether you’re on injury deck or cheer squad.

You can be on injury and still be fast and furious.

This week’s winner of the Positivity Award is Winnie. Her experience and the experiences of the NPers I’ve met these past few months confirm one thing for me: that this community enables all of us to achieve more than we ever thought we could on our own. For that, I am grateful.