All About April (Ottawa) - November Project

Greetings, YOWzers and readers everywhere! It’s been another splendid month of early morning playdates, and we can’t wait to tell you all about it. So we won’t. Here you go:

Workout Highlights

WEEK 1 – EMOM (every minute on the minute)

It was straight to business on our first workout of the month. Four rounds. Four minutes. A different exercise each round. A goal to hit each time. The great thing about this style of workout is that each person can really pick a number that offers the level of challenge they’re looking for, and no matter what that number is, everyone finishes up at the same time. The less great thing about this style of workout is that your body gets really angry with you by minute #4 if you have not taken the rest period that your trusted co-leaders strongly advised you to take…

Lesson learned: squats are important, rest is importanter.

WEEK 2 – F*ck Yeah 5K

This week featured the inaugural #FY5K Challenge with our sibling city, Virginia Beach. The goal was to get as many people as possible to show up and participate. After all, showing up and participating is what we’re all about, right?! Sometimes, all it takes to get out of bed is knowing that some friendly faces will be there to greet you with a smile and a high five…

…and if that doesn’t do it, there is always option #2 of using burpees as your primary motivator!

This was an option #2 sort of day.

This meant the city with the smaller turnout was “motivated” by doing the same number of burpees as the winning city’s number of participants. More details on that in Week 3… Thank you NP VB for this fun challenge!

P.S. Shout out to Rennie and Dean, both of whom successfully ran their first 5k ever!!

WEEK 3 – Facing the Elements

In recognition of Earth Day on Apr 22, four stations were set up around a running loop and the group split into two teams. Everyone did a great job of:

Mountain-climbing over Earth
Windmill-ing across Wind
Swimming through Water
Fire hydrant-ing (?) on Fire

Teams Earth-Water and Fire-Wind both competed fiercely and commemorated each loop of the elements with some collaborative Hoisties!

If Hoisties are a new concept to you, flipping back and forth between these two photos should give you a pretty good visual demonstration…(beautiful form, well done André and Amy!)

Finally, if you recall, Week 2’s F*ck yeah 5k came with an extra spice. The competition was close… NP YOW had a great turnout of 29 people and NP VB came in strong with a total of 32 participants. Unfortunately for us, that meant doing 32 burpees. Fortunately for us, we discovered that burpees are much more fun when you turn them into a burpee wave! (Also – credit to VB who showed great sportsmanship and participated in some burpee fun, too!)

You can watch our burpee wave here. It was such a beautiful burpee wave that we may be inspired to include it in future workouts…

WEEK 4 – PR Day

We wrapped up the month with PR day at the locks (maybe our last PR day here this year…?!). Plenty of familiar faces and some new ones made running up and down a hill look like such a good idea. I mean, look at this group… 24 full size humans, 3 babies, 3 dogs… all in all, 30 awesome beings in one place. A pretty great way to start the day.

The Coveted Bedazzled Frisbee

This month’s recipient of the one and only bedazzled frisbee is … two recipients! Two new members showed up this week, not knowing anyone. They jumped right in, pushed themselves right until 7:00am, and earned themselves eternal glory in bedazzled form.