ALL BETZ ARE OFF!!!

I’ve thought for a long time about being a co-leader. What that would look like, how I would do it. How I would do it differently. What it would mean to me, personally. 

I came to NP for the first time in the summer of 2014, with absolutely no upper body or core strength, and I would say, painfully shy. Tim and I had been in Baltimore for almost a year and we had no friends outside of our coworkers and our next-door neighbors. We attended some random Saturday run thing, and then when 5:30 workouts became a standing time slot, we started going regularly to the 5:30 workouts in order to get to work on time. Both of us were completely clobbered by the volume of bodyweight exercises, having to literally roll out of bed the next day. And with that gap in our fitness highlighted, we kept coming back. And the more we kept coming back, the more people I started talking to, and suddenly, I found I had friends. 

Friends are really hard to make after school- they don’t tell you that when you’re in school, and they really should (but honestly, who is “they”, here?). I didn’t appreciate how much of a difference that would make in my day-to-day life and my mental health. Building a community of friends through NP in Baltimore made it feel so much more like home than it had before NP, and I want as many people as possible to experience that feeling. 

Which leads into where I think NP needs to go (and is currently going, especially in Baltimore)- everyone has a right to that feeling of community, of belonging, of friendship. As it stood pre-pandemic, we strongly catered to people who look like me- young(er), reasonably fit, white, middle class, white collar jobs, heterosexual. And while I myself am disabled, we certainly cater to able-bodied people (and I “pass” as able-bodied). This is a result of many factors that have accumulated over the years- people attract, and are attracted to, people who look like them. A group led by young, fit, white people, attracts young, fit, white people. Our locations for workouts have been in young, fit, middle class, white neighborhoods. Our time slots have catered to people who work 9-5 jobs and don’t have caregiving responsibilities. Even if the workout is free, there’s an underlying classism involved in the structure of people’s days, their ability to have weatherproof workout gear and functional shoes, access to the transportation necessary to get to a workout or access to the expensive housing that borders the workout location. 

These things take time to address, and certainly addressing them is much harder in our current pandemic lives. On top of all of the above, we are all dealing with extra stress, isolation, uncertainty, grief. And that, in my opinion, is when having a strong community is even more crucial. Knowing that I have people I can rely on, who can rely on me, is something that gets me up in the morning. And again, I want everyone to have that.

So be prepared that you’re going to continue to hear about racism, white supremacy, ableism, sexism, classism- all the isms. And while we need to discuss how structural oppression shapes fitness, we absolutely also need to have more conversations about how structural oppression functions in our lives and how we perpetuate it. While we can’t work out in the large groups that we typically do right now, we can absolutely continue to work on these topics and have more conversations so that when we ARE able to gather in large groups again, we’re all intellectually prepared to make inclusive decisions about what we want to be going forward. And I’m so excited to be a part of this with you all. 

*Want to talk about it? Want to share your thoughts, vision, goals? Please be in touch! You can find me on Instagram at @GailForce29 or email at gaildbetz at gmail.com

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