Where Everybody Knows Your Name

After home and work, there are “third places.” Eleanor Brown examines why we lost them and how CrossFit affiliates are bringing them back.

Melissa Chernaik spent 17 years working as a political consultant in Portland, Ore. She was driven and focused on her career, and her work was a large part of her identity.

“A big chunk of my friends were all in that same field,” she says. When she met new people, there would always be “that first screen” to determine where the person fell on the political spectrum. Passionate and committed as she was, Chernaik found that her work focused her on the big picture.

“I was so involved on the macro level for so long, thinking about the community as a political body—Congress, the legislature, the city council,” she says.

But when Chernaik joined CrossFit PE in Portland, she found a different kind of connection—to new people, to her local community and, most meaningfully, to herself.

Chernaik had found her “third place.”