Starring Kimberly Novosel. Photo by @jasonmyersphoto

BEING YOUR BEST SELF THROUGH FITNESS

Some of the most important creations come from a pretty simple inspiration: seeing a need for something and thinking, “Why doesn’t this exist yet?” For Kimberly Novosel, Co-founder of indoor cycling studio Verticity, the fitness culture in Nashville was missing something crucial.

“When we first started planning Verticity, I had just moved back here from a couple of years in New York and then Portland, Oregon, where fitness is way further down the line than Nashville had been and when I got back here I was disappointed by where we were and I wanted to change that,” she says. “What I’d seen elsewhere was fitness is a part of living your best life. We were missing that sort of self, internal aspect.”

For Kimberly, some of her biggest internal shifts were tied to cycling. “There’s this moment on the bike where you are like, ‘Okay, I didn’t die, I’m almost at the end of class, I am super impressed with myself right now,’ and you’re at this exhausted moment where it’s physical and emotional and all of a sudden starts to feel like everything all at once. And it’s been in that moment where I’ve made big decisions in life, like when I decided to leave New York for Portland was on the bike, and got out of a relationship that wasn’t going well, the decision was make on the bike.”

“It sort of calls you at your strongest and yet most vulnerable moment.”

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Though Verticity is a cycling studio, Kimberly and her business partner Lindsay Brooker are more interested in the community and the internal moments like that than they are the fitness aspect itself. “We are about the fitness, that’s kind of how we do it, but it’s not really what we do,” Kimberly says.

“We are so much more about being a community, being a group of people who share the same goal of living our best lives as our best selves and doing it together.”

Kimberly is a serial entrepreneur; prior to Verticity, she owned an artist management company, and while she runs the studio she continues work on the side teaching self-development and businesses development. She’s written a book on the subject, and is launching a podcast soon.

Though she’s seasoned at starting new ventures and bringing them to success, that hasn’t made it a breeze each step of the way. “It is so much harder than I ever would have imagined, and I’m really glad I didn’t know that at the time,” she says, laughing. “Those things might have caused me to hesitate. But I definitely wouldn’t do it any differently.”

“I heard this quote my cousin had posted about planning a wedding, but I’ve applied it to entrepreneurship. It’s like looking both ways before you cross the road and getting hit by an airplane.”

When the entrepreneur life gets tough, she finds strength and motivation through the community around her. “Having somebody who understands what that lifestyle is like and what those challenges are like, even if it’s not their challenge too, just having somebody to make you feel less alone can make a really big difference.”

It’s something her team and riders are finding as well. “We are really lucky that our business involves so many people,” she says. People coming into the studio have made friends in class, to the point where they created a hashtag, #RideBikesMakeFriends, about the Verticity community. She’s empowering her team as well; three of her nine instructors have launched their own companies on the side. “This thing has become so much bigger than me,” she says. And as Verticity continues to win awards and accolades as one of the best fitness studios in Music City, it’s easy to see why.

Learn more and book your first class on their website.

Follow them @verticitycycling