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What’s up, fellow Obsessives?
I always love when I don’t listen to my own advice. Last week, I told everyone not to go out too fast in the 1,000-meter row benchmark and then I did just that. I didn’t think I did, but I was gassed by the halfway mark and finished five seconds off my PR.
Oh well, lesson learned. Have a great week ahead!
— Kevin
📅 The Week Ahead
Friday — 🍊 OTF Foundations specialty workout
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A Professor’s View Of The OTF Community
Last week, I came across a letter to the editor in The Swellsley Report, a local news outlet in Massachusetts. It was written by Chipo Dendere, a college professor and OTF member with over 240 classes on her tracker. She wrote that her studio is in danger of closing because of the rent cost and that its closure would hurt the community.
Like any great professor, Dendere led with the data and research:
She cited a study that says more than half of American adults report feeling isolated at least half the time.
She brought up Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”, a seminal work from 2001 about the dangers of social isolationism in communities.
And then she goes into her own experience.
After a move from Atlanta to the Northeast, Dendere felt worried about where she would fit in, particularly as a Black woman. But she not only found instant community at her family’s church, but at her local Orangetheory.
At her studio, Dendere says no one focuses on a member’s gender, race, religion or even profession and political profession. Everyone is on the same level under the lights.
“At OTF, all that matters is whether I start on the treadmill or the rower,” she writes. “I am on rower number 7. Always.”
Dendere has made a wide variety of friends at her OTF, many of which helped pack her latest book release event last February.
She also loves the way another member is quick to offer their advice or help in the studio if someone needs it and how the studio called to check up on her after a medical emergency and to freeze her membership until she could return.
But like many other OTF studios, Dendere’s location is facing questions about its future.
Enough so that Dendere signed her letter “Hoping for a miracle.”
“Orangetheory is an unlikely place to cultivate community, and yet it has done just that,” Dendere writes. “Let us not wait until its doors close to decide that it mattered. Let us act now—not just to save a gym, but to preserve one of the places where strangers in Wellesley still become neighbors.”
Go ahead and read Dendere’s full letter. It’s really good and I think you’ll find yourself nodding along to many of the points she makes.
Yes, it’s unlikely that a corporate chain of fitness studios would become a cultivator of community on par with the local bookstore, ice cream shop or church.
But it speaks directly to the magic of what Ellen Lathem built with OTF … and what all of us have built together inside the studios in the years since.
Best of luck to Chipo and all of her OTF friends!
🏅 Milestones and PRs
• Shoutout to Lane S., who set a PR in the 1,000 meter row at 3:09.53! “I felt like it was just a perfect row,” he says. “Hitting that number under 3:10 made the rest of my day.”
Have a milestone, PR or big win to celebrate with everyone else? Hit me up at [email protected] to share!
🧡 One More Thing
Preach.
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Note: OTF Obsessed is an independent fan-created newsletter and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially associated with Orangetheory Fitness.
