on work or just needing a break. A number of them had hopped planes to join
me for unglamorous stops on the campaign trail, giving me emotional ballast
when I needed it most. Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you,
are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and
over again.
In 2011, I started making a deliberate effort to invest and reinvest in my
friendships, bringing together old friends and new. Every few months, I invited
twelve or so of my closest friends to join me for a weekend at Camp David, the
woodsy, summer-camp-like presidential retreat that sits about sixty miles outside
Washington in the mountains of northern Maryland. I started referring to these
gatherings as “Boot Camp,” in part because I did admittedly force everyone to
work out with me several times a day (I also at one point tried to ban wine and
snacks, though this got swiftly shot down) but more importantly because I like
the idea of being rigorous about friendship.
My friends tend to be accomplished, overcommitted people, many of them
with busy family lives and heavy-duty jobs. I understood it wasn’t always easy for
them to get away. But this was part of the point. We were all so used to
sacrificing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my
years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those priorities
and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to wave this
banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason—and the power of a
tradition—for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues
and say, Sorry, folks, I’m doing this for me.
Boot Camp weekends became a way for us to take shelter, connect, and
recharge. We stayed in cozy, wood-paneled cabins surrounded by forest, buzzed
around in golf carts, and rode bikes. We played dodgeball and did burpees and
downward dogs. I sometimes invited a few young staffers along, and it was trippy
over the years to see Susan Sher, in her late sixties, spider crawling across the
floor next to MacKenzie Smith, my twentysomething scheduler who’d been a
collegiate soccer player. We ate healthy meals cooked by the White House chefs.
We ran through drills overseen by my trainer, Cornell, and several baby-faced
naval staffers who called us all “ma’am.” We got a lot of exercise and talked and
talked and talked. We pooled our thoughts and experiences, offering advice or
funny stories or sometimes just the assurance that whoever was spilling her guts in
a given moment wasn’t the only one ever to have a teenager who was acting out
or a boss she couldn’t stand. Often, we steadied one another just by listening.
And saying good-bye at the end of each weekend, we vowed we’d do it all again