Reflections on 2 year of November Project, from That Older Chick Who Doesn’t Seem to Like Shirts.
Wait…isn’t this how the buffs are worn?
I don’t remember exactly when I first heard about November Project. I think it may have been a convergence of comments from my badass trail runner/pathologist/puntastic friend Dr. Robyn Reed (“I’m going to run stairs with the kids!” she would announce periodically), and allusions from Boston’s peerless Drew Messinger, host of the Run Nine Million Miles Between Thanksgiving and Christmas challenge that I took part in a few years back.
What little I knew about the group intrigued me; I’m a sucker for anything hard, and the free and fun part certainly resonated. However, I hesitated due to The Coolness Factor. Everyone there would be ridiculously fit, I told myself, and probably have climbed mountains and have their own canoes and three bikes. (Okayyyy, Anika Taylor, Ian Bachman-Sanders, Ben Bauch…as my daughter says, “you’re not wrong,”…but I digress). I did not think I would be fast enough, or woke enough, or free-spirited enough to blend in.
I may be many things, but cool is definitely not one of them. (I tend towards the nerdy.) I like to think I care deeply about the world and have certainly written passionately about a lot, but I am also a single working mom and thus often consumed with the banality of paying the mortgage and picking Arabella up from tennis. My fellow NP-ers were, mostly, not at that stage yet, and I wanted them to blissfully enjoy their wonderfully changeable lives, free of all this fraught adulting for a few more years. I remember exactly how I felt in my tiny studio apartment in Chicago when I was 23, with a view of the lake, a mountain bike, a futon, and a charming black cat. (What more does one need?) Life was an unwritten-on canvas, and even that uncertainty was inexhaustibly exciting.
But, you know, there was the running part. I love running. I really, really love running. I am not at all fast, or particularly strong, but I truly love everything about it—even when it hurts, even when it’s freezing, even when all the normal people are knitting up their raveled sleeves of care with sweet sleep. And these folks seemed to love running, too. They did it every week. In the rain, in the dark, in the cold, in a box, with a fox. And I wanted to join them.
My friend Gwenn, an avid Mill City Running participant (where there is a lot of partial-Venn diagram overlap with NP, kind of like that biblical chapter that lists all the descendants of the tribes), invited me to come one Wednesday morning. Having run out of plausible excuses, I agreed. I believe we did one of those crazy Stone Arch Bridge happenings that involved sprinting to multiple light posts, dropping for burpees, turning around, running back, counting to 7, etc. Right from the start, I loved it. It was tough, it was badass, it was improvised but so challenging, it was joyous, it was transcendent. It was the Miles Davis of running workouts.
From then on, I never looked back. I started coming on the regular, and it became one of the highlights of my week. The workouts took me far out of my comfort zone (Sunrise 6k! Box jumps on really tall steps! The Messenger!), but the pure, unadulterated happiness that suffused each one relegated any accompanying pain to the far back seat of the experience. Also, everyone hugged (YES to being demonstrative! I’m from New Jersey—we don’t know from restraint..), and they couldn’t care less about my propensity for quoting Shakespeare, wearing sparkly skirts, or sharing an age pretty close to that of their parents (okay, that last one was a little weird). It reminded me of my first trail race, where the prevailing ethos of support, camaraderie, and concern for the good of both the immediate and the larger world pervaded the entire event.
Since that fateful day in 2015, I’ve gone to countless NP workouts, parties, races, bar nights, even the truly amazing Summit 4.0 in Ontario, where my finish of a grueling 50k race, surrounded by wildly cheering MSP Tribe members, remains one of my best running memories ever.
I have pushed my body to transcend limits that I did not think were possible, I have gained a whole group of beautiful human beings as friends, and I have realized that being older, while occasionally daunting and funny (“remember that amazing concert in 19— oh, wait, you weren’t born yet, never mind…ask your dad!”), does not in any way preclude one from the bonds of shared struggle and deep joy.
Most of the time, quite honestly, I never think about my age. If anything, November Project has strengthened my belief that there is no too old or too young; there is only experience, some yet to be lived and some to be shared, but all of it richer and finer together.
So thanks, NP. For the testing, and the resting, and the besting of the fear. For the shouting, without doubting, in the mud and the blood and the beer.
See you next Wednesday, for more big exuberant life.
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