Community In The Middle

Growing up, you don’t really notice how social momentum works because it’s built in.

School gives you homerooms, hallways, and lunch tables.
Sports hand you locker rooms and late‑night bus rides.

Later, your job hands you shared desks, meetings, and the suggestion of Friday‑at‑five happy‑hour that feels risk‑free because you already spent forty hours a week together.

You collide with the same faces over and over. No strategy required. If you want community, you just look up. Sure, the job part of that might’ve shifted a bit since remote work became more common, but that’s a whole different issue.

I used to be a high‑school math teacher, so my crew was baked into the bell schedule. The people around me got it. They knew what it felt like to hit fourth period with no voice left. We spent lunch duty debriefing about test scores or pedagogy issues.
There was a rhythm to it. Shared chaos. Shared caffeine.
The kind of community you don’t realize you rely on until it’s gone.

I left teaching shortly after my second child was born. It was the right choice, but I won’t lie: it shook something loose. My days were still full of things that mattered (diapers, preparing meals, the kind of love that knocks you sideways)... but I didn’t feel like me anymore. At least not the version of me who belonged to something.

The Whole “Village” Thing

Everyone says you’ll find your village in motherhood.

Moms at the playground. In music class. At daycare pickup.

But for me, early motherhood felt more like an empty room. Full of love, yes. But also silence. Distance. A strange sense that I was the only one still looking for my people.

Maybe it was the season I was in, Walker was born during peak Covid (April 2020). Maybe it's just part of my personality to isolate. But I missed the version of me that felt connected. Seen. Part of something that wasn’t just laundry and nap schedules and dinner planning.

The Gym I Joined (and Then Quit)

A little over a year ago, I joined Core Blend (the gym I train at now) and quit just a few weeks later.

Not because I hated it. Honestly, I barely gave it a shot. I was just so hyper-focused on tennis at the time that strength training felt like a chore. A necessary one, maybe, but a chore nonetheless. And when you think about it, that kind of makes sense.

A chore, by definition, is something you do because it’s good for you or your household or your future self, but not necessarily because you want to. It's something your body benefits from even if your brain would rather skip it. Strength training, at the time, felt like that: something I knew was important but just couldn’t bring myself to enjoy. Not when tennis sounded more fun.

And when life got busy or plans changed? Strength was always the first thing to go. I’d cancel, reschedule, promise myself I’d do it later—until eventually, I canceled my membership altogether.

The wild part is, I knew better. I knew strength training would help my tennis. I knew it would help my knees, my back, my long-term health. But knowing doesn’t always mean believing. And believing is what makes the difference.

It reminded me of teaching. I could tell my students all day long that a concept was important. I could assign three practice problems and explain why they mattered. But if they didn’t believe it? If they didn’t see the point? It didn’t land.

They could go through the motions of the worksheet without actually getting anything from it. I could plan several days of lessons—scaffolded, visual, exploratory—that I knew would help them discover and deeply understand a core concept. But if they didn’t authentically engage? If they weren’t present? None of that planning mattered.

That’s how it was with me and strength training. I knew it was good for me—but I hadn’t bought into it yet.

Now, though? It’s a different story.

Now I find myself choosing strength workouts over tennis if I have to pick one. I’m texting my trainer while on vacation, asking how to modify workouts at a hotel gym. I’m actually invested—not just because I know it’s good for me, but because I feel the difference it makes.

It’s all about mindset (and timing) and being ready to believe in what something can do for you.

Another fyf in the books

Last Friday, I went to FYF (our gym’s team-style Friday workout, mentioned in an earlier blog post). If you’ve never been to one, just picture organized chaos with a soundtrack of sleds scraping across turf and someone yelling encouragement through labored breathing.

Here was the setup:
In teams of five, we had to ski 2,000 meters… then do 25 sled push laps.
Then ski 2,000 meters again… and do 20 sled push laps.
Then again. 15. Again. 10. Again. 5.
Then ski one final 2,000 meters just in case you had anything left in you.

It was long. It was heavy. And it had no business being that much fun.

The teams were intentionally mixed—different fitness levels, different paces, different strengths. The only thing we all had in common was thinking that this sounded like a good way to spend our Friday morning.

There was one moment that really stuck with me. The team next to us was rotating sled pushes when one of them said, without hesitation:

“Hey—I’ll take an extra push so she can catch her breath.”

No annoyance. No weird energy. Just: our teammate needs a second, and we’ve got her.

It wasn’t about keeping things even. It was about making space for people to do their best.
That’s teamwork. Not everyone carrying the same load, but everyone carrying what they can, when it counts.
No scorekeeping. No guilt. Just trust.

And it wasn’t just the sleds. It was everywhere:
From basic things like "how should we break up this 2k ski?" to more detailed stuff like how to pass the ski handles in a way that kept the rhythm smooth. We were tinkering. Solving. Adjusting on the fly so each person could maximize their effort.

And that part felt oddly familiar.

When I was a teacher, it was never really about the math. It was about the puzzle. The challenge of figuring out different ways to explain an idea depending on the student in front of me. Their strengths. Their learning style. Their confidence that day.

Team sports—and honestly, team anything—has that same core. Not just working hard, but working together in a way that draws something better out of everyone.

That kind of quiet adjustment? That’s community. And I didn’t realize how much I missed that until I found it again.

And Then There’s This Week

Earlier this week, I thought I’d go on a casual run. Nothing structured—just something to shake out the 12 hours spent in the car the day before driving from Georgia to New Jersey. But about a mile and a half in, I was feeling surprisingly strong. So I figured, why not? Maybe I’ll turn this into my 10K benchmark.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve restarted my watch and called that first stretch my warmup—I’d definitely been cruising at warmup pace. Still, I went for it—and finished in just under 50 minutes.

Not perfect pacing. Not a clean plan. But still: a real sense of progress. And it reminded me, sometimes you don’t need the perfect setup to go for something. You just need to decide to do it.

This Isn’t About a Finish Line

The morning after that run, I opened my email and saw a Reddit thread titled: “Is Hyrox really worth it, or are we just paying for the hype?”

Naturally, I clicked.

The responses were mixed, but one stuck with me. Someone wrote:

“It’s both an investment in your fitness journey and an experience. You don’t need to do multiple races a year to say you’re a Hyrox athlete. Most of the community and growth happens in the gym. Race day is just a celebration of what you’ve built.”

And that last line has been echoing in my head ever since.

Because that’s what all of this—this blog, this training, this fifth lap—is really about.

It’s not about race day. Not entirely.

It’s the work in between. The sessions no one sees. The tiny adaptations. The invisible mindset shifts. The community that builds around effort, not performance.

Hyrox race day might be the party, but the prep is the point.

And that sounds like something worth showing up for. I haven’t completed a Hyrox race yet. No bib, no official sled push, no finish line photo.

But I’ve felt the shift.

I’ve found a place that asks for effort, not perfection.
A community that meets you where you are and pushes you in a way that feels more like support than pressure.
And I’ve been reminded that maybe you don’t need a structured “village” to feel seen.

Maybe you just need a few people who keep showing up beside you.
In the workouts. On the bad days. For the long game.

Even if you quit once. Even if you’re still figuring out where you fit.

Because connection for me is shared effort.
And maybe that’s the point.