A bit about beginnings...

Sometime during my sophomore or junior year in college I remember thinking about how I wanted to one day open an outdoor shop. This was back before Baylor had a rock climbing wall, before Lone Star Safari had opened (the previous gear shop in Waco from about 98-2003 or so), this was way back when. Then during long bouldering sessions on the banks of the Brazos river or when I would take my earliest journeys into Cameron park on a mountain bike was when I began to dream. I had a full head of hair then.

My first two years after college I worked as a financial advisor with American Express (now Ameriprise) in Euless and I remember having a conversation with a client about how great it would be to run a nice simple outdoor shop and work with people and product you loved. I wore a suit and tie to work everyday. That was ten years ago.

One of my favorite cards when I graduated from college read "never be afraid to change paths." Paths change. Really I was a bit of a wandering soul then. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. College had been a lot of fun, maybe too much fun and I wasn't giving too much thought to what I would do after college. I spent a month or so in Tennessee after my junior year as a raft guide and I figured after college was over I'd move to Colorado and be a raft guide in the summer and work at a ski resort in the winter. However most of my friends were lining up real jobs after college and I thought I'd better fall in line. So off to the real world I went. When I graduated from college I was 21.

I learned a lot those first two years after college working as a financial adviser. I got to work with and was trained by some excellent people, who taught me the art of relationship selling. Many of the things I learned there are employed at the shop today. I learned to ask the question, "How do we attract, identify and help people meet their needs" and this is how we sell at the shop today. I think it's the best way to be good at sales no matter the product. Thus my twenty-second and twenty-third years of my life were spent selling insurance and mutual funds and wearing a tie to work everyday.

Why I started doing Crossfit. Part: 2

I guess all of this has something to do with the lens with which we view ourselves. For me, my whole life, with the exception of when I wanted to weigh 200 lbs for my senior year of high school football (my goal is to weigh 190 now, what I weighed in high school) I've always looked in the mirror and thought I needed to loose a few pounds. But, beyond that I always saw something more in the mirror. You see, I have never really viewed myself as a shop keeper, or an employee, or a student or any of the other occupations I've maintained over the years. In my head, I've never stopped believing "I'm an athlete."

The term athlete has somehow morphed into an occupational description and we tend to think of athletes only as people who play high school, college, or professional sports. In reality there are great athletes all around us and each of us in as much as we have mental abilities are gifted at birth with some level of athletic competence. We just have to flesh it out a bit. Realizing this, it dawned on me that at thirty-three years old there will never be a time better than right now to be in the best shape of my life.

And then I stood there, staring at the Crossfit waco website reading about the onramp class and asking myself, "Is this really worth the hundred dollar price of admission?" I had heard a lot about Crossfit from friends and customers, things like, "they make you throw up" and "they yell at you a lot down there" or "it's so intense, you have to be in pretty good shape before you ever begin Crossfit."

So arriving at the onramp class I didn't really know what to expect. After checking in at the front desk ten or so of us were led outside to begin learning how to do what would be the essentials of Crossfit workouts. Over three days we learned basic movements like air squats, burpees, and other moves that took me back to grade school P.E. Then we learned some basic Olympic weightlifting moves, many movements I hadn't done since high school. In college a friend told me "I don't think I'll ever do squats again." I agreed with him at the time. But the Crossfit group environment has a way of leading you to do things you might not imagine you'd ever do.

That night, we concluded with a simple workout: 10 push presses, 10 air squats, and 10 kettle bell swings, As Many Reps As Possible (amrap) in seven minutes. No one, including the middle aged woman who said she hadn't worked out in years threw up and no one was verbally assaulted. I left exhausted, covered in sweat and smiling.

This is part 2 of a series.

Why I started doing Crossfit. Part: 1

Around a year ago I started to feel different. I began to start well, feeling older. For the first time I looked in the mirror and started to not see my youth anymore. Most of you who know me, know that I am an avid cyclist and cycling had always been the center of my overall fitness program. I was a classic middle of the packer. On group rides I fell somewhere between the slow group and the fast group. I've spent a lot of time riding alone in my life.

Despite this fact cycling remained one of the great true loves of my life. In August I trained and rode with a group from Steamboat Springs, CO to Park City, UT. We journey'd over four hundred miles in four days. While I had a great time on the journey, I remained at the middle to the back of the pack most days. When I came home to the oppressive Texas heat at the end of August I just hit the wall. I knew the facts. Cycling is entirely about strength to weight ratios: I needed to simultaneously loose weight and get stronger.

Believe me, I've chased a few fitness fads over the years trying to accomplish this. Since the end of high school my work outs had literally been all over the place: heavy lifting, running, swimming, cycling, climbing, Body for Life, the South Beach Diet, an ab machine, and P90x just to name a few. Always chasing.

In my mind I kept thinking to myself, there is a way that I want to train. Every time the olympics would come along I would see highlights of olympic skiers or runners training. Their workouts looked like olympic weight lifting and plyometrics and other wild movements with medicine balls and kettle bells. I would see this and think to myself "I wish I could train like that." But how does one begin to train like that in a public gym? They just aren't designed to be used like that. And most of us don't have the equipment or the motivation at home to go it alone.

Then I found Crossfit. Customers started coming in the store telling me about Crossfit Waco and it sounded exactly like how I wanted to train. It also sounded exactly like what I needed to do to become a better cyclist. So in October I enrolled in the onramp class at Crossfit Waco. (This is part one of a multipart series. More tomorrow.)

Best Day: February: Mountain Bike to my Face

A new mountain bike came into my life this year and it would be safe to say we got off to a ruff start. On our maiden voyage while riding with a friend down at Canyon Lake I took a dinger. I had already crashed once pretty hard earlier in the day and was just starting to feel good again. Then while climbing slowly up a steep hill I sort of ran out of power and fell over. When I fell over, I remained clipped into the bicycle and the bike just came down on top of me and the handlebar hit me square in the face. We were a mere hundred yards from the end of the trail and the car.

A trip to the doc in a box, a few stitches to my eye (ouch) and six months later you can barely notice a scar.

Matt Hoffman the BMX rider who is credited with creating "Big Air" (see the ESPN movie "The Birth of Big Air), said once that he viewed his body similar to the way he viewed his bike. Like a piece of equipment that has replaceable parts and can be fixed. He also said that when he's old he hopes it's completely worn out and that he's used all of it.

I can say that in my 30s injuries seem to take longer to heel and if I don't crash again in 2011 I'll be just fine.

Selling out.

We have all got to find something to do for a living and when you get right down to it we only have two choices really: goods or services. Everyone has to sell something to someone else in order to make a living. Lawyers provide legal service, doctors provide medical service, and ministers provide spiritual service. Construction workers provide construction services, educators provide educational services and so on; you get the idea. So while many are selling a service you may not otherwise be able to do or want to provide for yourself, others still are actually selling something tangible you can feel in exchange for your money. As human laborers we really only have two choices as to what type of sales we want to be in, but any way you slice it, we’re all salesman (except maybe fireman, law enforcement and those in the military).

To a certain extent, this can be sort of a letdown. You grow up being told by your parents and in school, you can be anything you want to be. Most of us will spend between twelve and twenty years in pursuit of an occupation and for many the arrival there is not as enjoyable as the journey. Each of us must ultimately ask only one question though with regards to occupation.

Does what we do to make money define who we are as people?

We spend maybe half of our life laboring, but is labor the defining element of who we really are? I’d hope we are more than our jobs, but think about how when you meet someone for the first time how quickly and how pervasive the topic of work is in our conversation and this isn’t to say that there is something wrong with talking about work. But who are we really?

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness. -Thomas Merton

Best Day: January

It's a toss up. Bookends round out the month. January first found me in Taos riding up a chair lift on a day with a high temperature of five degrees. It was biting cold. At one point I had to stop skiing when I started to loose feeling in my toes and fingertips. However I was skiing under otherwise pristine conditions. It had dumped nearly fifteen inches of snow the two days before and Taos is what Taos always is when the conditions are good: great. Ordinarily I would say a day like this would be a lock for a best day.

However last Sunday sort of slipped in and stole the month. The day started early. My wife was running a half marathon and I was charged with getting her an early breakfast and primed for her long run. Ordinarily you won't find me out of bed before 7am. My biorhythms just aren't synced up that early and I typically try to avoid the early mornings. But I wanted to help see her out the door to start her run. She didn't ask for much, a simple breakfast of toast topped with peanut butter, bananas and honey and that was within my culinary capacity, so I obliged and she was off. Next I woke up my boy Fischer, stuffed a pop tart in him and we headed off to stand by my friend Ian and his Bicycles Outback rest stop where they were serving Shiner at thirsty runners. Fischer and I waited there for Kristi to pass by. Making good time she passed by (Fischer cried when she kept running) and we then headed downtown to try and catch her at the finish.

We made it, she finished in under two hours and we had a great time hanging out at the finish line and then headed home. Oh yeah it was like 70 degrees all day too. Later that day I got in an amazing bike ride with two good friends and then fired up my big green egg for some wood fired pizzas and beer with some good friends to round out the day. It was indeed the best day.

Best Days Series Intro

Everybody deserves to have at least one really good day each month. For that reason, I'm going to begin a series of post that will continue for the next twelve months entitled “best days.” They will come at the end of every month and will be a summary of what I deem as my best day each month. Some may seem exciting to you, others may seem boring, but either way they are my best days and not yours, so your opinion doesn't really matter.

I might post the best day when it happens and then expound on it later, or I might wait until the end of each month to tell you about it. There is even a chance that I might tell you about an event that is great, but then remember a moment of a day later and then convert that moment to my best day. Or I might not tell you about my actual best day at all. I might keep that day a secret and tell you about some other day instead.

The goal here is to remind us that best days aren't about what happens in twenty-four hours, but what happens in moments. Best days are about laughter, friendships and moments worth remembering. What's relevant is that we remember to create such moments.

So here's to you; and here's to me. Do something great each month.