055 - Sandlot JAX Fitness Festival
This is a special episode of Glorious Professionals where Jason breaks down the upcoming Sandlot JAX Fitness Festival - a big party presented by GORUCK, Rogue Fitness, and Savage Race.
In the throes of COVID-19, Emily and I started working out in our driveway every day, just to keep sane. We invited our friends and then they invited theirs — we did some push-ups, tossed some sandbags, and flowed through some down dogs, but that wasn’t the best part. The best part was getting together, in the real world, drenched in sweat, talking about our lives, watching our kids run around (chaos!), taking in the long summer nights together with smiles and a few cold ones, as God intended. This is how friendships are forged and communities are strengthened — it also happens to be a great way to get healthy and live that life. No technology required, all you gotta do is show up..
Acting on the Inspiration. We’ve spent our entire professional careers in fitness, sports, and community-building in service to our country and at GORUCK. We’ve put on thousands of events and been to tons of spectator events and tons of races and we’ve read the books and watched the TED Talks on health and human performance. Many of the thought leaders have become dear friends of ours over the years. We all agree that there are times to be academic, and times to spectate, and times to race the clock — and then there are other times to just get together and crank the music up and have some fun. We thought, what if we invite all our friends to this town we love, to join us and do what they do best? People make the party, and we had no interest in doing this alone. We’ll take over a field in a big park right on the river and turn it over to the trainers, rent out a first class speakers’ venue, put up some obstacles so you have to earn the best view of the skyline, and invite everyone to join us, and let these global leaders activate their communities however they want, where their only limitation is their imagination. I envisioned this as the South by Southwest of fitness, which people seemed to get, and when everyone we asked said yes, they’d fly to town and lead classes and speak and stay up late and wake up early — “We’re In” they kept saying — we knew we were onto something.
And so Sandlot JAX was born. Because my dad was and is such a Deadhead (a Grateful Dead fan), I learned that the best of life at a festival is about a lot more than just what goes on center stage, so of course we have camping, and glamping laid on. If you make it easy for people to have fun, they will. Based on who’s coming, I know we’re going to sweat and smile, learn a bunch of new ideas we can bring back to our daily lives, see a bunch of old friends, stay out super late and wake up super early, eat a bunch of hot meals made in a food truck, explore some rooftops late night, and squeeze as much life (and fitness) into a long weekend as humanly possible. And I know we’ll look forward to this kind of festival style reunion every single year. We hope you’ll join us.
– Jason McCarthy
Founder, GORUCK & Sandlot JAX
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