The sun had yet to come up in Edmonton, Alberta, and it was more than 20 degrees below zero. Tanis Smith layered up anyway, ready to run up and down hundreds of stairs among the trees in the Saskatchewan River Valley.
When she arrived at 6 a.m., 10 other people joined her. It wouldn’t be the last time they braved the cold to get in a workout while the rest of the world slept.
“You’re pretty much just putting everything you own on,” said Smith, an accountant. “If you look at the pictures, you don’t know who you are unless you remember what you were wearing.”
Since that winter of 2013, Smith has rarely missed a workout with the group, called the November Project, a network of free outdoor group exercise classes that started in Boston. No matter the month or weather, participants roll out of bed before dawn at least once a week and shield their faces from the blistering cold.
One part intense training and one part abject silliness, the project is a model for how to stay motivated to exercise outside throughout the winter.
It started when a pair of friends challenged each other to exercise every morning in November. By the end of the month, they were recruiting others.
“A party is better when there’s more people around,” said Bojan Mandaric, who created the project with Brogan Graham in 2011. “We would talk to anybody who would listen.”
Soon, their meetings were attracting a few dozen people, who then brought the idea to other cities when they moved. Now there are 52 chapters in eight countries, including 44 in the United States and Canada.
The workouts, which attract all ages and fitness levels, begin with a “bounce,” a hopping, call-and-response chant to loosen people up physically and mentally. How the classes continue varies on the location and day of the week, but most include running and body-weight exercises like squats or burpees.
To promote the idea that exercise can be fun, they also might weave in activities from childhood recess in the schoolyard.
In Edmonton, they’ve played an intense version of duck duck goose, gone sledding in winter and done Slip ‘n’ Slide in summer. One workout in Boston involved a kind of Easter egg hunt, in which participants searched for plastic eggs at a sprint. The eggs contained commands to walk like a gorilla, do a cartwheel or dump grass on Mandaric’s head.
The point is to lower inhibitions, which helps people make connections, said Jason Shaw, co-leader of the Indianapolis chapter.
“Nobody’s cool at November Project,” he said. “At different gyms, especially, you always have the people who just are so cool, or think they’re so cool. We try to nip that in the bud.”
