Don't vegetate, INNOVATE!

I spent part of yesterday afternoon with my father moving eight yards of shredded mulch, spreading it around the gardens he and my mother planted around their home here in Cedar Rapids. The time I have spent over the past few months with my Dad have been enjoyable and I have learned from it. At times we talk at about Mom, remembering the good and in doing so process the emotions that come along.

Often I write of fitness, in how I have defined fitness, in that “Fitness is the ability to engage in the day to day activities that bring one joy and happiness”. Our neighbor from across the street, age 82 comes over usually on Tuesdays to have me start her lawnmower so that she can mow her own lawn. I know not to offer to mow the lawn for her as a part of her fitness is being able to be independent and take care of herself.

I had two choices to find fitness with my Dad yesterday as we moved mulch. We had two wheelbarrows and I could have moved my mulch faster than him but then I would have not been able to talk with him at the ends of the trips. In that awareness I learned a little bit more about what Dad had planned for the summer, how his week had gone, the like. On that day, in that time it was clearly the most appropriate way to move the mulch. It was part of how we would find fitness that day.

How we find fitness changes from day to day. There is no one best way to work out, if I were to say that working out at The Crucible was the best way to work out I would be in the same room as the fitness clubs, recreation centers, on-line training services and late night infomercials who hawk their systems as the end all for all of one’s fitness woes. I would be as Jeff Spicoli says, “bogus”. I am not willing to embrace “bogusity”.

I spent many years within the “hell realm” of the fitness industry. It, along with some of the some of my choices almost killed my ability to innovate. My choice recently to move away from the noise and the vitality that came with that choice only serve to confirm the observation detailed in the WSJ by Christian Crandall, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas – Lawrence, that “being too much a part of a group may constrain one's ability to think outside of convention”.

This week we have had 6 great open sessions at The Crucible and today’s session was particularly strong - in that everyone attending had been a regular at our sessions last year and it showed. People simply used the skills they had gained in previous sessions and simply applied them to their own workout – using cinderblocks, sandbags, chains, fence posts, and even wheelbarrow and their own bodyweight to get after it, finding fitness on their own terms, finding their crucible.

How do you or will you innovate to find your fitness, to find your crucible?

Reject the awful normal ©