Five for Friday: Change is Good

"Every day the bucket goes to the well, One day the bottom will drop out"...... Bob Marely

The theme for today is doing the same thing over and over and expecting things to be different. The Bob Marely quote in I Shot the Sherriff speaks loudly to me right now. Doing the same thing day in and day out and one day it will just break. We need to change it up. So here's my top 5 ways to change it up.

1. Meditation - It's new to me so I don't begin to fully understand the impact but I'll try here. In easy to do Breath Awareness meditation you sit for your desired length of time and focus on your breath. Every time you mind wanders and it will, you bring focus back to your breath. I've found myself often recently bringing focus to a situation quickly. Where in the past I would get emotional and animated I don't do it. I quickly asses what is important and focus on that. The only reason I can find to that new found calm is the 5-10 minutes each day sitting in meditation. What's the most interesting to me is I can sit on the floor and get mauled by our chocolate lab Niki. Sit on the floor in meditation and she senses what I'm doing and leaves me alone. Think about that for a second. An Animal who doesn't have our brain senses the calm and remains calm.
2. Shock the System - Arnold talks about his early body building days where he learned to constantly shock his body to get results. He didn't do arm curls over and over and over again to get those arms. He shocked his arms with different movement with different weight with different cadence. This applies to your fitness goals. Do the same thing over and over again and you won't see change. My wife Mary does the same thing most of the time. Recently she started a belly dancing class. Instant change!
3. Quite Your Job - I know it's not for everyone and it's really scary. Believe me I'm sweating bullets each day wondering if I made the right decision. But at the same time it's really liberating. I'm relaxed and energized right now and ready for the new challenge that I know I'll find.
4. Walk Away - I'm so lucky to live in Cardiff by the Sea with the Pacifi Ocean just minutes away but my ocean is your nature trail, country road or mountain meadow. When the stress of the day builds up, walk away. I was always one to stay and fight the stress. Use food or coffee to fight it.  I've come to taking walks on the beach in the middle of the day and it's so refreshing. If I'm dead tired and cranky I walk away and come back calm and energized. It's different then meditation in that there is blood flow and fresh clean air. Sometimes I even combine and sit on the beach and do the meditation in the middle of the walk.
5. Stop Consuming - Oh my this has been liberating. I sat down a few weeks back and penciled out how much money I needed to make for us to maintain our life. The basics, food, water, shelter. It came out to less than half of my previous annual salary. So then I looked at where the rest of the annual salary was going. We were consuming (It didn't all go to consumption at huge portion went to long term saving). After that exercise I stopped consuming. Where swiping my debit card was just easy to do, I've gone days without a single swipe. I don't need to do this, we have money and I have time to get back on the work bus. The point is I forced myself the change a habit and it has been liberating.

It's a good life.....

Becoming a Man

While I'm on leave from working I've decided to take on my life as a man. I've been dabbling in this for most of my life and doing some heavy lifting in becoming a better man made sense at this time. As you can see I've learned to break my life into 4 parts and to really work on what I want in these 4 areas of my life. This practice comes courtesy of The New Man Podcast.

The Body - This one is fairly easy but also difficult to execute correctly with age.

1. I want to continue to be strong 
2. I want to be supple
3. I want to stay lean
4. I value clean eating

The Mind - My Relationship with Myself - We all have a voice in our head. There is no way not to have one. There are two ways to go about the voice in our head, change the voice or quiet the voice. Most of what I've studied through the years is change the voice through positive self talk and clear purpose. I worked a lot this year on the other tool, quieting the voice. I've found quieting the voice to be a much better tool. To quiet I've been practicing meditation daily. It's an amazingly good tool to quiet the voice. The end result is that I like myself more and more and I'm a great deal calmer all around. There is great work to be done in this but I'm confident I'm on the right path. I'm really interested in actually studying in meditation.

Relationship with Others
Through a quiet mind I believe my relationship with others will blossom. I understand that I can be a tough guy to get through and that's not what I want to be. I want to be the guy you can trust, the guy you can lean on, and the guy you want to have around the table. I know for sure at least for me, I have to be right with my own mind for this to work out.

Work in the World
This has been the most fun work over the last 4 weeks. I have options to stay put in San Diego, avoiding flights and heavy travel. I have options to completely set my own schedule and I have options to keep the schedule I was on only with a different brand. I'm in no hurry right now and my decision will be based on what really matters to me. The three above are really important so whatever I do for work will have to fit into the three above. This I know.

It's a good life....

Weekend Report - Santa Barbara Triathlon and More

Quote "OOH" - Body Marking Girl when I told her my age


A few things I learned from the Santa Barbara Triathlon

1.  My Swim sucks - For the life of me I can't figure out why my swim in the pool is so strong and in a wetsuit in open water I suck.
2. That bike course is totally fun to ride but it is one hard ride too.
3. Test your running shoes, test again and test again. I ran in these shoes 3-4 times on various different runs and had no issues. During the race my left foot felt like it had a rock in it the entire way. No matter what I did it was there. I have my theories and one of them is that it's my foot and not the shoe with the problem. We'll see when I resume running again this week.
4. Strength - I said last Friday that I view strength long term. Clearly it's the right strategy and clearly I have more work to do. I look around the transition at the faster 50 year olds and they all have a great deal more muscle mass than I do. Look at #1 and maybe I'm not strong enough, look at #2 and although I rode really well, the tough course took the spirit out of my legs. At mile 8 on the run my strength was gone. It's a sure sign that strength is a weakness and one I know I need to work on for sport and for life.
5. To the guy who set up next to me in Transition. Yes my bike was gone when you got to your bike. Yes my bike was there when you got back into transition. Yes that was me heading back on the run in fact you even said "There you are". I had you worried didn't I? Blame my idiocy that was confirmed by the starter on the beach. I read Men 40+ in wave #1. Apparently that was for those who asked to be in wave #1 with the Elites. When I asked the starter to confirm that all men 40+ were in wave #1 she confirmed. I didn't even know until after the race that there was a separate start. You won the age group but you already know that. We'll have a laugh about it next time.

Traffic - Remind me to take the train. Yes the train is slow but at least on the train I can do things. I take that back a little because to pass the time in the car I listed to a great podcast. For some reason my random selection of Rich Roll Podcasts always hits on a winner. Maybe all of his podcasts are great but I doubt it. This one however is one worth listening to Rich Roll and Dan Harris. It took me 5 hours to get home. That's a bit crazy anytime but even crazier after racing hard. Thanks Rich for some inspiration.

It's a good life...