All of a sudden, we are now in our fifth week of the program. Working at Leverage has kept me busy during the day and the program still manages to give us many good speakers and sites to visit. I loved the trip to the NFL Headquarters last Friday, especially.TUESDAY July 3rd: Josh (my Calisthenics partner-in-crime) and I were really busy wrapping up all the logistics for the July 4th Coney Island Calisthenics Invitational. We started off working on various sponsorship deals, but over the last two weeks, both of us have worked full-time on this event. We ended up having to do everything from booking the car service for the staff, to ordering radio sets and trophies, to working on the event’s finances and assembling the pull-up bar. It is certainly a very different experience! How many people can say that they have helped a new sports league grow from scratch as their internship:)

Today was also Ben’s Birthday. Have a great year ahead! We had a surprise birthday celebration at our office too, with food and birthday cards signed by everyone (Thanks Ashley and Rebecca for leading the charge on that).

WEDNESDAY July 4th: This day was the biggest day of my internship so far. Josh and I started our day at 7 a.m. The sky was grey and it looked like it would rain, but when we got to Coney Island at 10 a.m., it cleared up and we had only terrific sunshine for the rest of the day. We were running around all day carrying stuff and sorting out the logistics. The event went rather smoothly, which was great. The sound system for the beach event was missing, but we were able to improvise and make it work, allowing all the athletes to show off their best moves and personalities to the general public. We had a good crowd come to watch the whole event on the beach from 3 to 5 p.m. We then moved on to stage the Finals at the Brooklyn Cyclones MCU Park, where the crowd was treated to man-up displays from Abs and D-Real. Congratulations to the winners of the first ICF event, POWERHOUSE for freestyle and best trick championships and JUICE for Man-up championship. Now I cannot wait to see the feature that will be produced from the different video cameras filming the whole competition throughout the day! Thank you also to the MSBA and Leverage people who came out to for the show (Jacob and Athena especially for hanging around until the end to help out). Your support was very much appreciated by all.

We finished the day off watching the July 4th Fireworks at our colleague’s, Hal, place. This was the first Independence Day Fireworks that I had seen and it really was quite a display. We had a really good view right in the middle of the four sets of fireworks that went off at the same time. It was a nice way to wrap up the day:)

It was very gratifying to see an event that I was a part of from the beginning come into fruition. I imagine that the first Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest also must have started out equally small, if not smaller. Look where it is now, with thousands of people attending. Calisthenics has the potential to generate that kind of crowd, or even bigger. I cannot wait for the day that it breaks into the mainstream, so I can say that I was there for its very first event! Here is to the success of ICF and the calisthenics movement from today onward.