Author: Nicole

Our guest blog today is by Ross. He just returned from a two month road trip – we’re glad he had fun, but happy he’s back and thankful for the insights he shared from this adventure.   _ The road trip was planned around three things: friends, national parks and November Project. After I was accepted into grad school back in December, the obvious first step was to plan my preceding summer vacation. A two-month odyssey crisscrossing the country seemed a ridiculous-enough option and Summit 5.0 in Boston was the natural starting point. It didn’t matter that I had only been going to NP workouts for less than a year. November Project Madison had already become such a huge part of my life. I don’t need to go into the details on how amazing the entire Summit weekend was. Anybody who was there experienced first-hand all of the love, and any NP member who wasn’t in Boston that weekend has surely heard about it by now. But the more important things I took away from visiting seven NP tribes over two months started materializing two days after Summit in New York. I hopped off the subway, legs still throbbing from the marathon two days earlier, and walked to Morningside Park for NP NYC’s Monday workout. Outside of Summit, New York was the first NP tribe for which I had thrown down a #traverbal. The warm-up was a bit different. The workout was a bit different. Even the bounce was a bit different. The same held true for Dallas and Austin and San Francisco and Kansas City and Chicago. Every tribe had their local differences in how they conducted their sessions, just like we have diversity in our daily language, diets and lifestyles. But the energy, the passion, the camaraderie, and the overall sense of community that I’ve come to love in NP was the same. Everywhere. New York co-leader Mary was the one who pulled me through the final five miles of the Summit marathon course. She was the one who gave me water out of her own pack between aid stations even though she was running low. And so I had to #justshowup on that following Monday in New York, to greet her with a huge hug. After reuniting at Summit, Nathan from NP San Francisco gave me a place to stay, took me out for dinner/drinks with fellow NPers and made sure I was at their Wednesday workout in Alta Plaza Park. And November Project Kansas City had more than a dozen people show up to a last-minute Friday pop-up workout they organized because I couldn’t get to the weekly Wednesday session. Those are merely just a few examples of the genuine kindness shown to me by the co-leaders and members of all the tribes I was so fortunate to visit. They serve as a huge inspiration to pay these thoughtful acts forward to others and are a big reason why my trip around the country was so special. It’s why no matter how far away I was staying or how late I was out the night before, I made sure to get to the November Project workouts that I could. It became a small taste of home while spending two months on the road. There are so many amazing and altruistic people in this world. A lot of them are in your home tribe. But even more can be found in the 40-something other NP communities all around the world. Go meet them. Be inspired by them.