Sunday Story…Beauty and Pain

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains”…Renoir

I read this quote recently and it has stuck with me. It strikes me as so true in so many ways. Pain is inevitable. This is a given fact. Whether we are engaged in a physical pursuit, an artistic one, or an intellectual one there is, inevitably, some pain involved if we are really putting some intensity into our activity.

After the pain passes, though, what is left? Beauty. Even if the workout leaves me on the floor, gasping for air, and wanting to die, when it is over I am left with a beautiful sense of accomplishment.

After the pain of learning and growing in knowledge, after the struggle of acquiring new information there is left a brand new thing all shiny and pristine ready to be put to work.

After the birth of a new artistic creation, after the fear of baring your soul, after the stuttering steps of begin and destroy and begin again, after the tearful culmination there is the part of you on the canvas or marble or page that is so raw and visceral that is can only be described as beautiful.

How many times have we failed to start for the fear of the pain being too great, too much to bear yet again? How often do we lose sight of the beauty that is lying right past the pain? How often will we allow pain to subsume beauty?

Trust the beauty to be there when you are done. Trust the crucible that forges beauty from pain, diamonds from coal, and new life from nothing. The process is integral and instrumental and inseparable…pain passes, beauty remains.

Namaste

John Mariotti

www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.martialartsnevada.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Get Up and Go

…even when your get up has gone. We all have days when we really don’t want to get up and do what we know needs to be done.

So what are you going to do to get your Get Up going?

Revisit your goal(s). Go back and take a look at what you are trying to accomplish. This is the reason we write our goals down. We want to go back and take a look and remember the what and why we are doing what we do. No goals? Get some. Now. This is the now that is right now. So…Write.Them.Down.Now.

Revisit your success (es). Take a good long look at how far you have come already. You are tracking your progress aren’t you? Of course you are. Take a look back and see how far you have come. Way back in the day before GPS we used a paper map. This map would show us where our journey began, where we are presently and how far we had to go. Looking back and seeing how far we have come will remind you of why you are doing all the work you are doing. Gaze back at were you started and see all the dividends your hard work has already paid.

Revisit your nemesis. Are you going to let that so and so beat you? Whether it is someone else in the gym, a skill you are trying to master, or a weight you are trying to lift are you really going to give up in your quest to get that goal done? Sometimes the best motivation is hitting a short term goal or matching a score on the board. Something got your goat? Get in there and get after it.

You started on this journey with fire in your belly and steel in your eye. You had a place you were going to get to come hell or high water. Your get up and go is still there but sometimes the going is going to be boring or hard or tiring or just resistant. That is when you get out your goal book, your progress book and remember just what it is you are on this crazy boat ride for.

And if none of that works…Suck it up buttercup and do it anyway. Do it because you said you would do it. Do it because you know it needs to be done. Do it because it is what you do.

Just Do It.

Namaste

John Mariotti

www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.martialartsnevada.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Over Night Success

We are also enamored of stories of people who become an “overnight success.” The rags to riches stories are pervasive in our world. We love to see people shift and change overnight. The people who are living on the street one day and a millionaire the next. The ones that go from being 200 pounds overweight to fitness model in 6 weeks. We love these stories…they give us hope that if we just find the magic pill, the secret workout regimen, or the book of double top secret skills we can turn on a dime and be all the things we know we can be.

I have good news and bad news for you. Rarely are these stories true. We don’t see the years of failures, the attempts that crashed and burned, the times that success wasn’t just elusive but impossible.

Real change takes time. Real change is incremental and often goes unnoticed by you, the one making the changes. But those changes are real and they are happening. You don’t always recognize the changes you are making. Change rarely comes in large leaps. It comes in small, hardly noticeable increments. So small that you will think nothing is happening. But all those little changes start adding up and one day you have lost the weight, written the book, and improved your fitness.

How did you do it? You started. You put down the bad food one bite at a time, you went to one class at a time, and you wrote one word at a time. Then you did it again, and again, and again. I don’t have to turn the wheel of my car ninety degrees to end up in a new destination. A one degree turn will send me on a completely new trajectory.

I have seen, in relatively short periods of time, people lose amazing amounts of weight without knowing it was gone until they needed to buy a new belt or new pants. I have seen fitness levels go from non-existent to very respectable in sixty days. All because someone didn’t quit. They started, they stayed the course and then one day when measuring day came they were surprised at what they had done. I wasn’t. I knew that if they just kept on track they would become the person they were bent on becoming.
You don’t have to be great to start BUT you have to start to be great. Start now, start today, start tomorrow but get started on getting where you want to go!

Let me help you on your journey!

Namaste

John Mariotti

www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.martialartsnevada.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Points

Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, is quoted as saying…”men will die for points.” I am not sure how true that actually is (the whole death thing) but I do know that we will drive ourselves to the edge and beyond for points, time, bragging rights or “glory.” We don’t have to playing for the championship of the world, a 5 million dollar check, or a date with the world’s most eligible to put everything we have on the line.

What is this drive? What is this part of us that wants to excel and be the absolute best we can be? Why will we drive ourselves so hard just to be a little better?

This isn’t about beating the person next to me. This isn’t about the extrinsic reward. This isn’t about bragging rights or “glory.” This isn’t even about anybody or anything but me. It is all about me. But then, isn’t everything in your life all about you?

You may tell yourself that you live for your kids. You may tell yourself that you are doing everything for your career. You may tell yourself that you are all about giving and service above self. But the fact of the matter is that you are doing everything in your life for yourself. Not selfishly, not to the detriment of others, not to be mean or sociopathic, but to further your view of who and what you are. You are the star of your movie.

When we line up at the starting line of the marathon, when we get ready to write the next article, when we are waiting for the 3,2,1, GO we are at our purest point of presence. Everything else, every concern, every other thought fades into the background and your focus narrows to this single point, this singular moment. At that moment you are just you. Not the you of yesterday or last week, not the you of tomorrow or next year…no, this is the moment of just You.

Will you die for points? I don’t know. Honestly, I hope not. I do hope you will put it all the line, though. I hope you will line up at the starting line and give everything you have to give to the task at hand. I hope you will reach down after you think you have given all you have to give and find something else deep down inside that will propel you to the next level. This is what we talk about when we say “dying for points.” It is the metaphorical death of the person who started the task and the rebirth of the person who is left standing at the end of the quest.

It isn’t a quest unless you might lose your life. The search for the Holy Grail cost many men their lives. This may have been an actual search, a real life quest that resulted in death. The Holy Grail is still out there. You get to search for it every time you line up, every time you get ready to compete (against yourself), every time you have an opportunity to reach inside and find a place, a pocket of strength and resolve you didn’t know was inside you. You have can die for points and live a hero in the attempt to get one more point, cut one more second, write the sentence that pulls the tear from my eye, or change the world through your service.

Go ahead, line up, let the world drop away and start the quest. The only thing you have to lose is the person you thought you were…and you will gain more than you can imagine.

Namaste

John Mariotti

www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.martialartsnevada.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

Sunday Story…Fat Phobic

We live in the most over fed and under nourished country in the history of the world. Never before have so many people eaten so much and been so sick from the food they are eating.

How did this happen? What shifted to create a world where, in 1806, Britain’s first obese man weighed 53 stone or 335 kilograms or 737 pounds? That man, Daniel Lambert, was considered a medical oddity. In today’s world that man would not even get an honorable mention. As a matter of fact, in the UK they have specialized ambulances designed for people who exceed the 700 pound mark. It isn’t until you exceed 1000 pounds that the crews of these ambulances sit up and take notice. This is the top end of the obesity epidemic. But that isn’t where the real problem lies. The real problem is that all of us are 20 to 30 pounds heavier than we were 50 years ago. We haven’t noticed because our world has cooperated in the gradual expansion by making things bigger…car seats, xl pants are now L, large pants are medium…everything’s bigger so we think bigger is normal.

Why are we so fat? Have we become more gluttonous as a people? Have we become lazier? Maybe we just aren’t moving as much so we are fatter. Unfortunately neither of those things is true. A recent study shows children’s physical activity is the same as it was 50 years ago. The big change is in the food we eat and more specifically the amount of sugar we consume. This is sugar that we are consuming without really knowing it.

About 40 years ago a tectonic shift took place in the way we look at food. Someone decided that fat was the culprit behind heart disease. The food industry seized this opportunity to create a new class of food called “low-fat.” The problem is when you take fat out of food it tastes like crap. So in order to get people to eat “low fat” the industry added sugar. And much of that sugar showed up from a chemical product called high fructose corn syrup. This gave the corn producers a big boost to get rid of excess corn production and allowed the food producers a cheap way to make “low fat” the preferred choice for the consumer.

Unfortunately we started getting fatter. People who ate low calorie diets and exercised were gaining weight. People who ate and drank a lot of calories got even fatter. A disconnect was in place and no one put it together that our sugar intake was off the chart. In 20 years the proportion of people classified as obese (BMI of 30+) went from just under 2% on average to over 12% on average.

The real problem is that the more sugar we eat the more sugar we want to eat and the hungrier we are. We became, we are insatiable in our desire for sugar. Eating sugar is highly pleasurable, it give you momentary happiness and this takes over your brain. This is why it is so hard to give up or cut back on sugar.

We traded a healthy relationship with fat for a dysfunctional one with sugar. Sugar now owns us. Stop eating low fat food unless it is naturally low fat like broccoli or green beans. Every time you are eating food labeled as low fat your alarms should go off for high in unnatural sugar. All those years ago when we were told to eat less fat it didn’t mean to eat more sugar, it meant to eat more kale!

Don’t be afraid to eat healthy fat…coconut oil, avocados, coconut, nuts, seeds, ghee, tallow, butter, eggs…all the things our grandmothers used to use all those years ago. It turns out she was right about this stuff too!

Namaste

John Mariotti

www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.martialartsnevada.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com



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