Free Fitness Movement. All you need to do is show up!
We’re still relatively new to the November Project universe, so we don’t have all of the standard features spun up. City-specific #grassrootsgear tag? Nope. Personalizations to the #positivityaward from each person who’s received it? Negative. Regular blog posts? Sorry.
But we know who we are, how we roll, and what we value – hella.
The theme at the top of the hill today was the trickle-down effect of positivity, how you never know what small (to you) action you make is going to have a large (to them) impact on someone seeing or receiving your action. We mentioned it in the context of Bear, to whom we’d quickly given the #positivityaward in the parking lot before he’d had to sprint off to work and we sprinted up the hill to catch up with the tribe. Bear shows up most every week in a superhero outfit, his simple act of spandex-clad outlandishness putting a smile on the face and a lift in the legs of those around him. Of more direct impact, last week Bear shared from the office on Facebook:
I was in a shit mood this morning. I was in pain. I’m not entirely sure of its root causes – perhaps a hard mountain bike crash in 2010 in which I was knocked out, concussed, and left with whiplash; perhaps it’s the two arthritic cervical vertebrae that show up on a CT scan; perhaps…who the hell knows, it’s a mystery – but from time to time I get this fuck-off nasty neck pain. It doesn’t seem to require any particular movement – I don’t have to “tweak” it – but seems to stem instead from simply flexing my neck under some kind of load. Last year it was in the middle of a 4 day sea kayaking trip, following having to hammer into shore to avoid getting tossed on a reef; today it’s from doing strict press in the gym. Whatever the cause, the effect is to make me shitty.
It was Christmas in February yesterday. No, no jolly old fellow was handing out gifts, but the jolly Baller did present us with a return of the 12 Days of Christmas workout from December. Newbies showing up for the first time, getting through only part of the workout, may have thought a better name for it was the 9 Circles of Hell. But that’s something else. A workout yet to be conceived…because hot damn it smacks of being a gooder! But I digress. Back to those newbies, or whomever, and not making it all the way through the workout. Hell, we’ve had some Fast As F new additions to our tribe, but I don’t know that anyone made it through all 12 Days (Jeff, did ya?). But that’s not the point. Winning, being Victorious, on our Wednesday definition of it, isn’t about ripping as quickly as possible through exercises. Yes, charging hill sprints as fast as you can – whether that’s at Usain Bolt speed or at a speed more akin bolting through a vat of molasses – IS the goal, but the movement pattern of forward progress is something we all have perfected (ish). But when it comes to our body weight based strength movement patterns, there’s room for improvement for most all of us. (Which is why we recently introduced our newbie movement pattern intro session with Coach The Shannon Kane.) And, when it comes to trying to hit it as hard as possible in a workout like the 12 Days, all of us are susceptible to form breaks in our quest for speed. This tribe, though, is about quality over quantity. Yes, we’re recruiting like MFers and proud of how fast we’re growing and how big we’re becoming. But we’ll never sacrifice the quality of the people who make up this ground and how they fiercely support each other to simply add a few more bodies to waggle in our sunrise photos to the rest of the world. Similarly, when it comes to our workouts and our movement patterns, our goal is quality. Better to maintain full range of motion in a squat jump and take more time doing your 20, than to short them in the interest of keeping up with the gal next to you and in the process shorten your muscles. We’re about strength and fitness gains here, not crossing some arbitrary finish line first. It’s your workout. It’s your fitness improvement. It’s your enhanced ability to adventure. Give it the quality you deserve.
I’m going to keep it simple today. And yet deeply important.
I’m writing to every one of the 124 people who showed up today, and to the dozens others who’ve shown up in the past 5 months. I’m writing to every single person who might read this and wonder, “Should I?” I’m writing to everyone who dismisses it, disparages it as a cult, or otherwise wonders what the hell all the fuss is about.
When your hill is long /
And the fight, the fight is yours alone /
When you’re sure you’ve had enough /
Of this rep, well hang on
Don’t let yourself go /
‘Cause everybody cries /
And everybody hurts sometimes /
~ R.E.M. (adapted)
Chapter 1
A buddy of mine has been taking a shit kicking lately. In the midst of that shitstorm, it was her birthday Wednesday. Birthdays deserve a least a how-do-you-do, if not a coffee or a breakfast, so I reached out the night before to check on her plans for the morning.
bundle
noun bun·dle \ˈbən-dəl\a group of things that are fastened, tied, or wrapped together
a group of things that are together or are associated with each other in some way
a person who has a lot of some quality or who is known for a particular kind of behavior
I can’t remember whether it was during some elementary school lesson or a lesson taught more informally, in the forest or on the beach. Pick up a single stick. Break it over your knee. Easy. Pick up two, bundle them together, try again. Harder. Bundle together enough, and no single stick with break.
In #NP_Vic’s coming out post we described that we here in Victoria, BC, believe in setting goals. This does not make us unique in the November Project tribe. We described the goals that led to us to becoming a part of this global tribe. And we described the goals we set to lead us forward from our official NP beginnings:
When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love, to do 100 goddamn burpees before 7:30 a.m. ~ Marcus Aurelius
Many of our tribe arrived tired this morning, having been woken in the middle of the night by a 4.9 magnitude earthquake with an epicentre only 11km (6ish miles) from our workout zone. Kept awake by the adrenaline coursing through their veins and versions of the question, “What. The. Fuck?!?”
I’m not a man of faith, but I do know enough to be able to cite Ecclesiastes’ “…there is nothing new under the sun.” On the other hand, I am a man who believes deeply in the point of view of artist Austin Kleon, who advises – in a vein similar to the scriptures, perhaps – in his book Steal Like an Artist: “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.”