This morning, November Project Boston worked out at one of our favorite spots, the Stata Center Amphitheater. Construction made the space interesting, but we squeezed in, respected our neighbors, and did a good old-fashioned circuit workout, with Bojans, hoistees, running, stairs, skaters, push-ups, tricep dips, split-leg squats, planks, and burpees. If you’ve been around a while, you might remember this location from a previous celebrity shot by Lisa and Adam: https://november-project.com/the-old-man-and-the-sugarmans-celebrityshot-were-calling-it-trust-fall/
…or from a workout in March 2015, when a couple of retired co-leaders took the stick one more time for this little here book:
…or from so very many tiny screens in the DIY stair Zoom era:
…but this time Roz and I (Joev, inset above) took the reins, and did our best to bring out our community’s strength, power and light.
Wait, that’s Kansas City’s Power and Light. Belated thanks for the inspo, sister city #NPKC!
Alright, enough with the history session. Today 45 people came together from all over Cambridge, Boston, and beyond to support each other in free fitness fun. There was confusion, there was joy, and there was effort. People sweated, and laughed, and were willing to take what we threw down and make it work for them. It was really great to see.
We’re the first in a while but hopefully not the last for a while to take a celebrity shot at leading the workout. It was a lot of fun, and I advise everyone to think about what you might do if you were in our shoes – your chance might come sooner than you think! With enough warning, you’d be surprised at what you can do to give the community a memorable experience. And it’s also an opportunity to appreciate the work our regular leaders put into keeping this clown car in motion. Not every workout has the same amount of preparation, but every one of them has a chance to be great, because of the joy people bring to it. Thanks for bringing the joy this morning.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
WEDNESDAY 5/25 morning:
5:55am and 6:30am groups climbing stairs at Harvard Stadium. It’s the last Wednesday of the month, so we’ll be racing #PRDay stairs, where you try to do a full tour of 37 sections faster than you ever have before, or try to do more sections within the workout time than you ever have before (a Personal Record), or go for another benchmark that means something to you right now, like your best effort since recovering from an injury or returning from a pandemic.
There’ll also be #grassrootsgear tagging, where we paint white or light-colored shirts with the November Project logo (like we do on the last Wednesday of every month in which our paint cans don’t freeze), but unlike most months when we tag in flat black, this month we’ll be celebrating Pride by tagging in rainbow colors with an optional pronouns tag.
One of our core values as a community is that we welcome everyone, regardless of their fitness level, age, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, or political beliefs. But Pride month is a good time to think about what that welcoming really means to you when LGBTQ rights are under attack, and people are having their basic humanity debated in the service of divisive fear-mongering. Your friends need you, so think about what you’re saying when you wear a rainbow tag. We’re none of us perfect, but we all have to try to put our best effort into supporting each other. Here’s another old blog that goes into this in more detail:
WEDNESDAY 5/25 evening:
6:30pm, yoga with Louise at Summit Ave/Corey Hill Outlook Park. All levels are welcome. Please bring a mat and anything you prefer to use for yoga practice.
FRIDAY 5/27:
6:30am hills, at Dorchester Heights with Capoze-from-Dedham or Corey Hill Outlook Park with Dana-and-maybe-Willow-from-Brookline. Sometimes people go to Cannonball Cafe after the former or Tatte on Beacon-or-Harvard after the latter – if you can make the time, breaking breakfast sandwiches together is fun and helps build community!
MONDAY 5/30:
Whaaaaat, it’s sarDDines! And I’m not going to miss it this time! SarDDines is like hide and seek, only the co-leaders will be hiding at a location and your goal is to try to find them. The way it works is that they’ll post a picture of a map to IG stories ahead of the Monday workout that displays a neighborhood. The location will be within that specific map, and every 10 minutes they’ll narrow that picture down for us to keep trying to find the workout. In the last 10 minutes, they’ll post the exact location so everyone can come together. If you are successful at finding the location before they call time, you’ll quietly do a circuit while waiting for everyone to convene for the group photo at 7:20. The best way to do this is to try to group up with friends on foot, bike, or blades and search together. It’s sure to be a memorable workout experience that you won’t want to miss.
SATURDAY 6/25:
We’ll be racing a 26×1 relay against a bunch of other local running club teams, hosted by the Somerville Road Runners at Hormel Stadium in Medford: https://www.srr.org/26-x-1
Each person on the team runs a single mile, as fast as they can, and as a team this adds up to a whole marathon!
If you’re ready to #RaceEverything and run your fastest mile, please join the team! Even if there are more than 26 people registered when you sign up, that’s okay – STILL SIGN UP. We’ll include as many NP Boston regulars as possible on the final team, and do our best to make sure everyone has a great time. But it’ll be a downer if we can’t field a complete team, so please make sure you’ll be able to attend before signing up. We’ll need to have an even split between males and females, but non-binary folks can be counted on either side.
I (Joev) am coordinating the NP team, and I fronted the team registration fee, so if you end up running, we’ll ask you to then (not yet!) pay me back $15. If this is a hardship, see the co-leaders (Dana Bogan or Chris Capozzi) and we can work out other arrangements – we don’t want finances to keep anyone from racing.
To sign up, fill out https://runsignup.com/Race/Register/RaceGroup-1109172?raceId=75237 and select “Join an Existing Relay Team”, then select “November Project”. You’ll be asked for a password, which is “AwwwYeah”. You’ll also have to put in a guess for your mile time. Do your best to make an aggressive but accurate prediction, and we can use that information to help decide what order the racers will run.
And if you don’t end up racing, we still want to see you there cheering! Awww yeah!
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, 9/17-9/18:
November Project Summit in Philadelphia! https://november-project.com/npsummit-10/
WEDNESDAY, 11/2
OMG our eleven-year #NPVersary stair workout at Harvard Stadium!
[…sounds of Joev being dragged away from the blog…]
–Joev
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Kansas City Power and Light image by jotoya from Pixabay!
https://pixabay.com/photos/kansas-city-dusk-beautiful-city-5111832/
CELCo = Cambridge Electric Light Company.
That was the Cambridge utility until it was absorbed.