Weekly Announcement 12/16 - Medal Monday + Endorphins App Updates!! Live Coaching Call w/ Jonah Rosner + City Lead / Pace Lead Renewals + Community Vote #25!
Hey everyone
Welcome to the 50 people who joined the Endorphins community in the past week across the country. Our collective mission is to spread positivity and happiness through movement and exercise! We do this each and every week by hosting 25+ group runs across the US! Whether you live in one of our 11 cities or are a virtual member, we are all united by our mission!
We have a lot going down in the world of Endorphins this week. We will get right into it!
Medal Monday in Dallas
I must say. Dallas went so insanely hard this weekend. Our shakeout run in collaboration with a handful of local run clubs and New Balance (run your way) ended in true Texas fashion. Line dancing, two stepping, and some of the most insane shakeout run vibes we have seen to date. Im not sure any city can replicate the energy that was created at the shakeout, it was truly one of a kind!
Congrats to ALL Endorphins members who raced in Dallas yesterday in both the half and full marathon. And a huge congrats to Dallas member @Tate Alvarez who won the 8k on Saturday!! Insane!!
Endorphins App Updates
If you’ve been keeping up, you may know about the incredible journey behind the development of the Endorphins App—built entirely by a talented group of engineers from within our community. This storyline is nothing short of inspiring and speaks volumes about our commitment to keeping Endorphins truly community-led. Every feature, every line of code, and every round of testing has been driven by our own members. SO epic!!!
We’re now just weeks away from launching the app, and things are getting real! Once it’s live, we’ll be retiring Circle and fully migrating everything to our new app. This marks a HUGE shift in how we host events and communicate across the community, and we couldn’t be more excited for this next chapter!
Over the next 2-3 weeks we will be posting frequently in the Beta App Forum to collect last minute bugs and feedback so we can ensure the app is super silky smooth come launch day.
If you would like to help test the app, you can join the beta app forum here. In the forum, you will see a link to download the Beta App on TestFlight. Once you’re in there, try to break stuff! Create posts, create (fake) training plans, link your Strava, join a race chat etc.. If you see any breaks or bugs, let us know!!! so we can make sure we can fix any issues ahead of the launch!!!
Disclaimer the app is in a test sandbox. Any posts and training plans are for testing purposes only and will be wiped clean before launch day!
Why are we moving away from Circle?
Over the past few months, we've been actively gathering feedback from our members (as we always do!) on ways to make our virtual community and coaching experience even better. One key takeaway from Community Vote 23 is that we’ve outgrown Circle.
Members cant find Events (smh)
With the sheer number of emails and notifications, it’s become difficult for members to navigate and find event details. We host so many free events across the US, and the most common frustration is that people don’t know when or where they’re happening.
Race Chat Spam
Our race chats on WhatsApp have also become super noisy, with spam making it harder to connect meaningfully. It’s clear that we need to simplify and streamline everything. The stock advice is great lolol, but not really want we are about smh smh.
Coaching is not personalized enough
On the coaching side, the most common request from our Endorphins 365 members is for more personalized training. Next year, we’re leveling up by integrating with Strava, Garmin, Coros, and more. This will allow us to analyze historical activity data and tailor pacing and programming to fit each member’s specific goals. In your program, you’ll be able to link activities from your wearable devices which will allow our coaches to offer real time training optimizations for your overall program LET’S GOO! 🚀
To address all of this, we’ve been hard at work building an app that brings every part of the community into one place. Our MVP is nearly complete, and now it’s time to dive into testing so we can polish it before fully releasing it to the community early next year. Stay tuned—it’s going to be worth the wait!
The idea will be… we fully move away from Circle and into this app! Will be a huge migration but likely for the best in the long run (pun intended here).
If you want to be involved and stay up to date, here’s how you can best support:
We are creating a private thread in circle for anyone who wants to be involved, and help with the app. If you want to be a tester or potentially more hands on… feel free to join the thread here so you can stay up to date with everything going on.
We have a link for anyone to download the beta app and start submitting bugs and testing things!! This is really important to make sure the app is awesome before we release it! If you download it… please try to break things. We are in the early early days and there are bugs! Before moving the entire community over to the app, we need your help identifying where things are breaking so
We built a public Roadmap of all the features we are working on!!
We opened threads for people to submit feature ideas i.e. leaderboards, live tracking at runs, sync Endorphins 365 workouts to your watch etc! The features with the most engagement in the thread are then added to the roadmap for people to code!
Major shout out to @David Wolfand (DC), @Jeffrey Xiao (NYC), and @Brianna Goldstein (NYC) for making huge contributions to the codebase last week!! These folks have been working directly with our coaching staff to ensure the coaching side of the app is polished. Additionally, they have been supporting features like race chats, and community tooling that mirrors our existing circle community!
Additional shoutouts to @Brooke Goldstein, @Meghan Murphy, @Hannah Seabert, @Fahd Ksara, @Samuel Rodriguez, and @Alex Kerpelman for diving into the code and getting onboarded!!
Coaching Call with Jonah Rosner
Tomorrow we have a live coaching call with one of our Elite running coaches Jonah Rosner!!
Jonah has quickly become one of the most critically acclaimed sports and data scientists in the running world. He has trained most of the US’s elite runners after having served as the youngest sports scientist in the NFL! Jonah hosts monthly calls with our 365 members and is stoked to be hosting an additional call this month for the entire community. It is completely free and will be a great way to speak with and learn from one of the brightest minds in the sport of running!
If you’d like to join, you can RSVP here! (there are already 185 attendees)
City Lead + Pace Lead Renewals!!
Over the past six months, we've been hard at work developing community standards, guidelines, and defining roles and responsibilities. This process was really important and involved gathering feedback from our city leads, pace leads, and members to clarify what it truly means to be part of Endorphins and the different ways people can get involved.
One key takeaway was that being part of the Endorphins community doesn’t require attending runs. You might be wondering how that works! We have members worldwide who are active in different ways—engaging in conversations on Circle, participating in our training programs, or proudly wearing our gear on race day.
Another important outcome of this initiative was defining the roles and responsibilities of our leaders. For the first time, we recently asked our city leads and will be asking our pace leads to reflect on their ability to effectively lead the community and decide if they would like to continue in their roles. We understand that life is filled with change and transition and that the City Lead role is not a forever role. This process is vital for the long-term health of our organization, as it allows leaders to transition when the time is right for them and opens the door for other members to step into leadership roles. This renewal ensures that Endorphins can thrive for years to come!
In the coming weeks, you may hear more about this renewal process. We want everyone to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and that leadership transitions are a welcomed and natural part of our community’s growth!
For additional context about the processes, you can take a look at our community guidelines section within circle!
Stay tuned for more details on this in the coming weeks!
Community Vote #25!
In the coming days we will be sending out our last community vote of 2024! For context, we send out periodic votes on the global and city level to ask you for input on the future direction of Endorphins. We do this to ensure that every decision made has the community’s best interest in mind.
Last year we sent out the SAME vote and asked members to give feedback on the year as well as brands you’d like to see integrated into the community in 2025. We took the results from this vote and helped shape the events, programming, and partnerships that fueled our community over the past 12 months!
Stay on the look out for this vote in the next week. This is probably the most important vote of each year and as you know the city leads really would value your feedback on how we can continue to crush it in 2025!!!
You all rock. Have a great Monday!!
Only the best,
Tyler