Weekly Announcement 12/2 - Hoodie Vote Winner + Live Coaching Call w/ Jonah Rosner + Endorphins App Updates!! + City Lead / Pace Lead Renewals!

Welcome to the 65 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!

If you would like to remain involved with the community we recommend you download our community app hosted on Circle! This is where you can stay up to date on group runs, events, and updates and more!

We have a lot going down in the world of Endorphins this week. We will get right into it!

Hoodies For Christmas!!

Earlier this week we conducted our 7th Drop Vote! Endorphins is fully community led meaning we ask our members for feedback and input before making decisions! When it comes to Endorphins Apparel we send out a “Drop Vote” to collect input on styles and designs to ensure the gear we release is perfect for you and the rest of the community!!

Drop Vote 007 closed yesterday and we have a winner! Below you will find what to expect for timelines and the vote results!

• PRE ACCESS - LIVE Tomorrow - Tuesday, Dec 3rd - if you are a member of Endorphins 365 or voted in the Drop 007 vote check your email for instructions on how to bypass the lock screen on the site and get a hoodie before we open the drop later in the week.
  
  For context - we send out a pre access link for each drop to anyone who has voted to ensure our most engaged community members have a chance to get a shirt before we potentially run out!

• DROP LIVE - Thursday, December 5th 9AM ET - drop 007 goes live and remains online until we run out of items!
  

The city leads spend a tremendous amount of time talking about impact and belonging. Endorphins is an impact driven mission oriented organization. Seeing people wear Endorphins gear is so special because it is yet another way to signal your commitment our mission of spreading positivity and happiness!

If you ever see someone wearing Endorphins gear at an expo, at a race, or out in the wild, we ask that you treat that person the same way you would treat another member at one of our group runs! Introduce yourself and say whats up!

Vote Results

With over 60% of members voting for the restock of Drop 003!! We have a winner!!!

Coaching Call with Jonah Rosner

Endorphins clearly has a lot of aspects to it. Obviously from the above we make gear for our members to rep! On a completely separate front we have a team of elite coaches that help members from our global community prepare for all running related goals and ambitions!

One of our coaches is 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!

Endorphins App Updates

This is probably one of the coolest Endorphins story lines since we started Endorphins two years ago! We pride ourselves on being community first…. And if this app doesn’t sing that sentiment from the rooftops… I don’t know what does!!

We have a group of 9+ engineers that have stepped up from different Endorphins cities to help support the last final push of our Endorphins app!!!

Context

Over the past few months we have been taking in feedback from members (as we do) on how we can make our virtual community and coaching stronger!! In community vote 24 it became pretty clear that we have outgrown circle… there are a lot of emails, notifications, and it is super hard to find when events are. We host SO many free events across the US and the MOST common feedback is people don’t know when they are…

We also have race chats using WhatsApp and they have been getting spammmeddddd. It has just become a bit noisey… and we need to simplify things!

On the coaching front, the most common feedback we receive is our members from Endorphins 365 would like more personalized coaching. We intend to offer this next year by integrating with Strava, Garmin, Coros, etc… to look at historical activity data to ensure pacing, and programming is tailored towards your personal fitness and goals. LETS GOO!

We have been building an app to consolidate all aspects of the community. It is basically at a point where the MVP is done!!!… but we need a lot testing to polish it up before we fully release it to the community early next year.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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

3. We built a public Roadmap of all the features we are working on!!

4. 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) and @Jeffrey Xiao (NYC) for making huge contributions to the codebase last week!! Additional shoutouts to @Brooke Goldstein @Brianna Goldstein @Meghan Murphy, @Hannah Seabert, @Fahd Ksara, @Samuel Rodriguez, and @Alex Kerpelman for diving into the code and getting onboarded!!

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!

OK!!!

Woah that is a lotttt!

I hope you have an incredible start to the week, and the month!

Only the best,

Tyler