Soaking up our 15 minutes

Sam and I are having a good week (and it’s only Tuesday!). Fit at Mid-Life: A Feminist Fitness Journey, published by Greystone Books, had its official Canadian release on the weekend, official US release today, official UK release on Thursday.

We had some great press yesterday, with two of Canada’s major newspapers running feature articles about us, the book, and our message of feminist fitness. See “Feminist philosophers’ book exercise in empowerment” (Megan Ogilvie, Toronto Star) and “How two philosophers got fit, the feminist way” (Adriana Barton, The Globe and Mail). That brought a flurry of emails, tweets, timeline posts, and face-to-face congratulations that just kept coming all day long.

At one point I said to Sam, “Definitely enjoying our 15 minutes this week, Sam. Hope you are too.” And yes, I’m enjoying it, trying to soak it in because it’s unexpected and wonderful.

I have a niggling little voice in the back of my head that whispers stuff to me about how people are probably already sick of us and our book (even though it just came out Saturday!). Are we shameless and insufferable self-promoters? It’s amazing how quickly I can go from “wow this is great!” to “whoa, enough!” I hate to make this about gender, but I think there is an element of feminine socialization to how challenging I’m finding it just to rest in the excitement of this moment and savour the sense of accomplishment.

When Sam and I started the blog almost six years ago to document our Fittest by 50 challenge (that you can read more about in the book), we didn’t think we would blog past 50. We didn’t think anyone would read the blog. And we certainly didn’t envision that our personal challenge (our “midlife fitness pact,” as The Globe and Mail called it) would attract a community of feminist fitness enthusiasts and result in a successful blog with regular readers, guest contributors, a dedicated and incredible core group of regular contributors, and a book, Goodreads reviews, media attention.

I have said a few times when talking to the media about the book that it didn’t even seem like work to write. We spent an hour here and two hours there meeting in the underused faculty lounge on campus with our laptops, working on the same google doc at the same time, chuckling at the bits that we found most amusing, and asking each other to read over sections we weren’t sure of. Of course it didn’t write itself. But, much like the blog more generally, it’s a kind of writing that feels good to do, is fun even.

So it feels like a big gift (to me, anyway) that something that was so much fun could actually have yielded a thing that people seem to want to read. And I’m super chuffed about it and consider myself incredibly fortunate to be riding this particular wave at this time of my life.

We have more media coming up in the next little while, including an afternoon of interviews at CBC radio across the country on Wednesday, April 18 and an appearance on Global TV’s morning show on April 27th.

Our big friends and family events, that is, launch parties that are open to the public, are on April 28th from 2-3 p.m. at the Landon Library in Wortley Village, London, Ontario and on May 3, 7 p.m. at the Bookshelf in Guelph, Ontario. We’ll talk about how the book came to be, read a few pages, answer questions if there are any, and eat cupcakes (enough for everyone). At both events you’ll be able to buy a book if you haven’t already, and we will be pleased to sign copies if you like, whether you bought yours at the event or elsewhere.

We’ve also mentioned before that we like events and if you have something you’d like us to be a part of, please ask. We can’t promise anything but we will definitely take invitations seriously and see what we can do.

With gratitude,

Tracy