#009 - 🎉 The Equipment Cube is ready! - How did we get here?, Better with butter and an Apple Pie in the Sky (kinda)
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Workout Wherever by Mazama Wellness is a location-independent fitness system that offers a dose of travel inspiration.
Our goal is for you to feel more confident and consistent in your workouts and access unlimited workout destinations with our portable equipment.
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How We Got Here
The Equipment Cube
We currently live in Lisbon, Portugal and run an online business. This isn’t something I planned on happening and 5 years ago I wouldn’t have guessed we’d be here. Sometimes when I’m sipping my coffee in the morning, looking out the window at the city view, in a very David Byrne-esque way, I quietly ask myself, “Well, how did I get here?”
I won’t go into all the details of how we ended up at this point, but if you’ve been following the Mazama Wellness journey, you know that we just started selling our Workout Wherever Equipment Cube and I wanted to share some reflections on how we got here with that. Mazama Wellness was started in Portland, OR as a personal training business that operated in a gym. Fast forward 6 years and now we provide portable workout equipment and on-demand workout videos. The business evolved into this out of necessity, but also out of wanting to share with everyone what we’d created for ourselves.
The pandemic changed things - obviously. It changed things for my personal training business because it no longer meant I had gyms as an option to train clients. When the pandemic started, we didn’t even own a car. I had to buy a car, buy workout equipment that fit into the trunk of the car, and then travel from park to park training clients. That was in the summertime. In the wintertime, some trainers and I rented a space from a plant nursery where we could train clients in the green house. There were chickens running around the place and it was cold, but we made it work.
During this time period, I really honed my skills as a trainer. I found that I could provide really good workouts with minimal equipment and my clients enjoyed them. I figured out a good template for hour-long circuit training workouts and I feel like the training I am now providing is better than when I was working in a gym. This really changed the way I approached training clients and also my own workouts.
When we decided to move to Portugal, the pandemic was still happening and I knew that I still didn’t really want to go to a gym. Plus, there wasn’t a very convenient option. So, I put together a kit of equipment that was portable and I could use for home workouts or take with me when we traveled. The Equipment Cube.
With the change in how people work and remote work becoming normal, it seemed that people would also be changing how they saw working out. If you’re working from home, maybe you don’t want to have to leave the house to go to the gym. If you’re bopping around the world, maybe you don’t want to have to try and find a new gym in every new place you go. Or maybe you just want to rent a house in some small town in the mountains. It seemed that freedom from an office was common, so why not freedom from a gym?
We decided to act on this idea and provide not only the equipment, but also the training. Workout Wherever TV provides people with workouts they can do with The Equipment Cube. These workouts are structured in the same way I would structure a workout for a client or myself. We are literally just sharing exactly what we created for ourselves. We didn’t sit down and say, “we need to create a business idea.” Instead we were like “this is awesome, we need to share it!”
After many iterations of the exact components and colors and variants of the equipment - after all the learning how to film and edit video - after all the branding and sourcing and logistics and fulfillment - here we are. Ready to share this thing with you and everyone else we can get it in front of. It’s been a weird and wonderful process and I’m sure there’ll be a lot more to learn moving forward. Because after all, time is a circle, just like David Byrnes said, “same as it ever was.”
Apple Pie At 11,000 Feet
After the previous Substack post about Everest and a recent conversation about apple pie, I’ve been thinking a lot about the best apple pie I’ve ever had - or at least the most notable. It was at a Sherpa owned bakery called Hermann Helmers Backerei-Konditorei in the little Himalayan village of Namche Bazaar. This village gets a fair amount of traffic going up to Everest and some of the other mountains in the area and really is a great spot for a bakery offering weary trekkers a little slice of home.
Like I said, it’s hard to know if it truly is the best apple pie I’ve had as far as taste, but it’s certainly the most memorable. This might be because I had been eating nothing but lentils, rice, and potatoes for weeks on end, as this is what is available in the area. Food is limited because the altitude doesn’t allow things to be grown, so everything has to be loaded on a yak and carried up the mountain. Speaking of yaks, I did on one occasion eat a yak milk cheese pizza, which led to me breaking out in hives and having an anaphylactic reaction that was pretty scary. Luckily I had some antihistamines and took those and was fine. So now when I dine out I always ask the server if any of the dishes contain yak milk. 😛
…But back to the apple pie. After weeks of eating the same thing and having come down from the higher elevations and saying goodbye to the friends I had made along the way as everyone went their separate ways, I found myself spending a few days in Namche in quiet reflection, getting some time to myself. It’s these parts of a trip that are actually the most enjoyable. The downtime after the big event, when you can think about the experience and how it relates to the bigger picture or life as a whole or whatever. It was at this time that I found the bakery and ate the apple pie and I'll tell you what, it was a revelation. We’ve (hopefully) all had that experience with food where it’s almost spiritual. Well this was that, but the apple pie version. It was that right place, right time, I would never go back and taste it again because it could never be the same, type of experience. One that lives in a moment in time, never to be duplicated.
I suppose I’m slowly convincing myself that it was the best apple pie ever because even if I taste one that has more flavorful apples or a flakier crust or a better ratio of spices, it’ll never have all the other stuff going for it that the Namche pie did. It’ll never replicate the feelings I had inside me at the moment and therefore will necessarily fall short of this experience. So I suppose it’s less about the pie and more about all the events surrounding the pie that make it the immovable memory it is today. A lesson in nostalgia and not trying to recreate the past and letting things live in your memory and appreciating them there, but looking forward to new moments. You know, that type of thing.
Or maybe those Sherpa just figured out the secret to making really good apple pie.
Toys For Playing Outside
Before exercise was a thing that I checked off my list for the day, it was running around the neighborhood playing with some of the things below.
Most of the Super Soaker commercials were all about causing mayhem.
This commercial jingle is still alive and well in my memory. It turns out that Skip-It was just a rip off of an earlier toy, Lemon Twist.
Pogo sticks made a comeback when I was in elementary school, but before I ever had a pogo stick, I had a pogo ball.
Bread head
Bread and butter are very important to me. I have no artful story about my childhood or an experience with bread that changed my life. Nope. I just love it. I truly feel that every meal benefits from a gluten-based pairing. Nothing beats a slice of sourdough that has been toasted, cooled a bit down to room-temp, and then slathered with butter that is a bit still in its solid form – not entirely melted. I want to feel the texture of it.
The butter I go crazy on lately is this one from Grand Fermage. It has big chunks of salt that catch your taste buds and crunch a little between your teeth. It is so good.
So, for today’s niceties, I am going to share some aesthetically pleasing imagery of butter + some of my favorite bakeries that I’ve been to!
Munich, Germany - Julius Brantner
Try the Bio Lichtkornroggenbrot with fermented organic apples (light grain rye flour with apple pieces) OR Bio Schwäbische Brezel (Pretzel)
Braga, Portugal - Padaria Nørre
Barcelona, Spain - Coush Armo (mentioned in our post #001)
San Francisco, CA, USA - Tartine Bakery
Grab a sandwich and pastry from the Guerrero St. location and walk to Dolores Park and sit on the hill while you grub! The sandwiches (last I was there) are HUGE so you should probably share with someone you love.
Portland, OR, USA - Tabor Bread
We used to go here ALL THE TIME when we lived in Portland! Such a delightful place. Try any of the pastries any time.
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