Hello,
One of my goals this year is to read a book a month. I just finished a book by a former Navy SEAL named David Goggins called Never Finished. The book is a great read if you’re needing some physical fitness motivation.
Goggins had a bad home life growing up, and he’s found purpose in doing hard physical activities like becoming a Navy SEAL. Since leaving the military, Goggins came to prominence by running ultra-marathons, which is any distance over 26.2 miles. Somewhere in the mid-2000s running hundred-mile races became a thing and he’s run numerous hundred-mile plus races. Sounds like a masochist, right? Goggins pictured below.
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If you saw Goggins you might think, “Wow, what a chiseled guy!” He looks like somebody you’d see on the front of a fitness magazine, but he wasn’t always that way.
He details how he lost a massive amount of weight, and in the book he shares some of the things he had to overcome to conquer his “impossible” feats. He had health challenges, injuries, and socio-economic challenges, among others.
After finishing his book about not making excuses, I was feeling pretty motivated to do hard things. One of the ways I’ve pushed myself is through cycling.
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Do you have a hobby or something you like to do that it seems like you have always done or you always come back to? I’ve loved riding a bicycle since I was a kid.
Some of my favorite childhood memories are making ramps in my back yard with plywood and cinder blocks and jumping my bike off them. We’d start with one cinder block and keep adding to the stack until a catastrophe happened. When I think about that I am really happy I didn’t have any boys!
In my 20s I got into racing bikes and got pretty good. I won a couple of races and I spent a lot of my free time training. Well, all these years later I still get emails about bike races. I got one in April about a mountain bike series in Charlotte every Saturday in the month of August. How I ever thought this was going to be possible with my schedule, I don't know. Here it was the last Saturday of August and I had not made the drive up to Charlotte for a race yet. My other motivation was my disdain for spending money with nothing to show for it. I'm pictured in red below racing in my twenties.
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Back when I was competitive on the bike, on a light week I’d ride ten hours. That’s what it took to be competitive in amateur races, while today I can’t imagine spending that much time on my bike. Last year I bought a new bike to try to get back in shape. It had been probably eight or nine years since I had ridden, and I’ve been trying to squeeze in three hours a week on the trails.
Somehow in April when I got that email about the race series, I thought I was going to make it to Charlotte every weekend in August to race a bike in hundred-degree weather. Well, July happened and we went on vacation and I had a couple of weeks where I had hardly ridden my bike. I hate wasting money though, and I had just finished reading this motivational book from a fitness fanatic where he outlines all the excuses he overcame. If he was preaching, he had my number. I'm pictured below in red.
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So, I told Mallory, my wife, I was going to go to the race this past Saturday. It wasn’t clear on the website when my race started and I ended up being there five hours early. Did I say it was nearly a hundred degrees outside? So, I started looking at the schedule of races, and I decided I would do a more competitive race that started an hour and half earlier. I knew it was going to be a suffer fest.
We lined up on the starting line and I looked around and thought maybe this won’t be so bad… In road cycling like I did in my twenties it was more about what happened in the last tenth of the race than what happened throughout. In mountain biking, because the trail is a single track, positioning is super important. I started in the back fourth and could never make it further up. As I was suffering in the heat, I heard Navy SEAL Goggins on my shoulder telling me to persevere, which I did.
It’s really easy to get down on yourself when things don’t go as well as we had hoped they would. What I find is the harder the things I do the more success I have and the happier I am. It’s never been easier to stay comfortable to not stretch ourselves whether that’s physically, with work, or in life in general. But the most rewarding things happen when we get out of our comfort zone and pursue opportunities.
Until next week,
David C. Treece,
Financial Planner
864.641.7955
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