But one cannot waste time idly worrying about what may or may not befall him. So I set path on what may be and return to what I know best, training and racing in an effort to heal and improve my body, my spirits and my mind. Below is my race schedule for 2012. It shows a return to experiences that challenge me even now as I still struggle with physical challenges, all self imposed or a result of uncommonly bad luck.

That said, I am excited to get back at it and approach these challenges with great, if not anxiety-filled, enthusiasm. Included in this year are a half marathon, a team relay, a 24-hour run, a 385-mile ride, a Half Iron Triathlon and finally a full marathon. All in all, I set to purpose within the belief and foundation of what it means to Race with Purpose, both in terms of the physical challenges as well as in the belief that one can only be ones best when they are willing to sacrifice for something larger than oneself..

The Los Angeles Marathon I run with our great friend Rick on behalf of Noah’s Wish, an amazing charitable organization that sets in own purpose to save the lives of animals during and after disasters. They do this by acting swiftly and by training ordinary people like you and me to effectively do so as well. If you are interested in knowing more, go to their website. They have trainings coming up in Indiana on June 9th and in Malibu on June 16th and 17th.

The Ragnar Relay is always one of my favorites as it places 8-12 people in vans for 30 hours and then asks them to take breaks to run a marathon each broken up into 4 pieces. This year we will be running as The Cupcaped Crusaders honoring the sponsorship of the amazing Cupcapes of Falmouth, the location which is also at an historic nexus of running lore, including being at the end of the Cape Cod Marathon and near the bus pick up for the Falmouth Road Race. If you find yourself in the area for any of these races, do stop in and say hello to friends and teammates Tammy and Sean when you do.

Relay for Life and the Pan Ohio Hope Ride will challenge me beyond reasonable expectations on behalf of those who we have lost to cancer. I plan on getting back to my roots with at least a 12-hour run and a 385-mile ride here in Ohio. If nothing else, I’ll have burned a bunch of calories in the process. Setting these two goals makes the focus on my weight that much more real because I’ll need to be as light as possible going into these two challenges.

The Rev3 Cedar Point Half Ironman pulls everything together in what should be a reasonable challenge by September, followed 20 days later with the Akron Marathon, the first marathon I will have run in years, far too long.

Assuming I survive all of this, and it is ambitious, I should find myself back where I was at the end of 2006, and that would be a really nice place to be physically. This weekend puts together the task of developing the plan that, all things willing, will allow me to get there. The plan is what makes it possible and the execution of that plan makes it real. I am lucky to have great friends participate with me along this journey. Feel free to join me as well.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. — Michael Jordan

I am so tired of hearing this, seeing it and listening to people say this to me – the inevitable “you have to fail to succeed” quote. This is right up there with “practice makes perfect”. You’re wrong! Practice doesn’t make perfect if you have NO IDEA what you are doing or if you are reinforcing the same mistakes over and over and over again.

I always find it funny when I hear people use their fail to succeed mantra, as if failure is the key ingredient. It isn’t!

There are people who fail and continue to fail and there are people who fail and learn from their mistakes. Why isn’t that part ever included in the motivational quote? Is it too hard? Did you run out of room? Wasn’t it catchy enough? It’s like the “wisdom comes from judgment, and judgment comes from bad decisions, therefore wisdom comes from bad decisions” quote. No, it doesn’t. Wisdom comes from the insights derived from making bad decisions by being intelligent and applying analysis to it so you can identify an alternative path. You know what also comes form bad decisions? Teen pregnancy, getting hit by cars, bungee jumping without tightening your harness, cracking your skull when you roof dive into the pool deck. All of those come from bad decisions and bad judgment, oh yeah, along with wisdom.

Beyond the second step of recognizing you made a mistake and learned from it is doing a self analysis to determine if you have the capabilities to be able to do anything different the next time to achieve a different and hopefully better result. If you don’t have the capabilities, can you gain them? If not, move on. I guess you could say that success comes from failure if you move onto a different activity because you came to the conclusion that you sucked at that one, alternatively choosing one you were better aligned to. I could fail and fail and fail and fail all I want and I will never win an NBA MVP award, no matter how much I learn or how hard I try.  Can I go to the guy who sells the “Fail to Succeed” plaques and ask him for my money back?  Can I tell him that this causal relationship implied may not pass the sufficiency test?

This mantra has now been so embedded into business that we have people that use it as an excuse, especially those coming right out of school, as if failing is something to be proud of. It isn’t. Personally, I want my teams to try new things and they can make a new mistake every day, because it means that they are trying new things and innovating. But let’s be realistic here. I don’t hire idiots and I expect that coming in, they have a certain set of capabilities and the intelligence to know the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. And let’s also reinforce that I’m talking about a new mistake each day, not saying it’s okay to make the same mistake over and over again. Applying this philosophy and using it as an excuse for someone to make the same mistake over and over and over again shouldn’t be applauded. That just means that they lack awareness of the objectives of the job or they lack self awareness of how their capabilities map to those requirements. Either way, I’m not going to recommend them for a bonus because they tried and failed numerous times, no matter how many times they tell me they are on the path to success nirvana through their actions.  These people  clearly missed the important second phase of this process – learn from that failure/mistake and don’t do it again.

Jordan may have lost more than 9,000 shots, and 300 games, but according to his Wikipedia page he also received acknowledgment for:

• Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2009
• 2 Olympic Gold Medals – 1984, 1992
• 6× NBA Champion
• 6× NBA Finals MVP
• 5× NBA MVP
• 10 NBA Scoring Titles
• 3× steals leader
• 3× minutes leader
• 14 NBA All-Star Selections
• 3× NBA All-Star Game MVP
• 11 All-NBA Selections
• 9 All-Defensive First Team Selections
• 2× NBA Slam Dunk Contest Champion – 1987, 1988
• NBA Rookie of the Year – 1984–85
• NBA Defensive Player of the Year – 1987–88
• NCAA National Championship – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 1981–82
• ACC Freshman of the Year – 1981–82
• 2× Consensus NCAA All-American First Team – 1982–83, 1983–84
• ACC Men’s Basketball Player of the Year – 1983–84
• USBWA College Player of the Year – 1983–84
• Naismith College Player of the Year – 1983–84
• John R. Wooden Award – 1983–84
• Adolph Rupp Trophy – 1983–84
• Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year – 1991
• Named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996
• Ranked No.1 by SLAM Magazine’s Top 50 Players of All-Time
• Ranked No.1 by ESPN Sportscentury’s Top 100 Athletes of the 20th century
• Elected to North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame

We don’t recognize how amazing Jordan is because of the 9,000 shots he missed or the 300 games he lost or the game winning shots he missed. We are in awe of him because he achieved all these awards and honors IN SPITE of this.

Tonight a friend of mine posted the following comment on facebook in response to the report that the United States Attorney’s Office closed their investigation into Lance Armstrong’s team developing a doping program while partially receiving government funding as a member of US Postal:

“Its about time they realize…Lance Armstrong really is that good.”

My response was that we shouldn’t equate a dropped investigation with a finding of innocence. This then turned into a discussion about how Lance is a hero to which I took a pause.

The list of people above are all people that I believe have influenced people’s lives, aside from Lance, I’ve listed a few other athletes such as Tim Tebow who uses his celebrity to pursue his faith in his religion and for his missionary activities. Is Tebow a hero?  Another commenter on facebook posted that a hero is someone who walks the walk not someone who talks the talk. By that criteria Tebow would certainly measure up until you listen to those who believe he is anything but a hero. He is determined for sure, but do missionary activities help those for whom they are intended or are they similar to the crusades of old, imputing a belief system onto societies that have no wish or need to have this done to them?

Captain Sullenberger walked the talk by saving the lives of those on Flight 1549 when he safely landed the distressed plane in the Hudson River. Is he a hero or was he simply executing his duties as a pilot and doing everything he could to do that? What if he failed? What if a wave had caught an edge of the wing and the plane hadn’t landed safely, would that make the Captain any less of a hero? Does this mean that heroism must be decided by the outcome?

If outcome is now a criteria then what about Todd Beamer and Jeremy Glick? You remember these two men who lost their lives on Flight 93 presumably as they fought to take over the airplane from terrorists on 9/11. Their famous words of “Let’s Roll” became synonymous with heroism, but in the end, they died as did all of the other passengers on that flight. Does the fact that they weren’t successful make them any less heroic?

John Elway, another celebrity athlete who’s fourth quarter comebacks are legendary, is often described as being a hero and his efforts heroic. Like Captain Sullenberger, he was using his ability and executing his job to the best of his ability. He won football games. He did it in dramatic fashion. Does this make Elway a hero? What do we really means when we say, “He was the hero of the game?”

And then I throw out two other names who you may not be as familiar with: Ethel Krajchir was my mother, a woman who grew up on the South side of Chicago, and was a self made professional, working as a bookkeeper and accountant by day and raising my sister and me into what I hope are productive members of society. She did this all through a failed marriage and while fighting Leukemia and Lymphoma until the day she finally succumbed to this disease. Like many mothers, she sacrificed her life, her dreams and her passions so that me and my sister could grow up to have a chance at ours. Is she a hero or is she just a responsible and caring mother, doing what mothers do? Does the fact that she did this at a weight of less than 80 pounds while her body was ravaged from the inside out make her efforts any more heroic?

And then lastly there is Evelyn Toboco, who is the mother of one of my oldest friends, and who was one of our school principals while growing up. Mrs. Toboco, as we referred to her, for more than 37 years led a cadre of other fantastic teachers at The Buckley School who chose to go into a profession not to make money but to mold young minds and to give young people the tools and experiences to use their God-given talent to their best ability – again, so we could pursue our dreams and have a full and productive life. Was Mrs. Toboco a hero? Were the teachers that sacrificed their lives for ours heroes? And is sacrifice actually the common criteria? What about teachers that don’t feel that they sacrificed anything by choosing to be a teacher? Are they still heroes?

If sacrifice is the common criteria then we circle back around to Lance Armstrong. If he hasn’t sacrificed for the benefit of others, then is he a hero? Yes he sacrificed as a cancer survivor, but it’s hard to say that he is sacrificing his life in his efforts to eradicate the world of cancer. He has the means, he has the time and if you follow his tweets, you’ll see that he seems to have a fairly full and blessed life. I’m not pointing this out to take anything away from what he has given back to society – which is undeniable, but it’s hard for me to state that he is sacrificing anything by doing it. It only seems to enhance his celebrity and his own personal opportunities.

So there we have it, and personally I’m left with even more questions than answers. Is a hero someone who simply does something for someone else? Is a hero someone who does something for someone else so that they can accomplish a dream? Or is that just being a good and productive member of society? What’s the difference between a hero and a caring friend or responsible parent? What’s the difference between a hero and a role model, or a celebrity, or an athlete? Why is it that we so easily apply the term to celebrities and athletes who do things simply because they have the financial means to have their accomplishments publicized while simpler people who sacrifice their lives for the benefit of others seem to go unnoticed and unacknowledged? If you compared the teacher who had the greatest impact on your life or the life of your child against a Lance Armstrong who has indisputably used his celebrity and accomplishments to do so much in the fight against cancer, who would you say is the hero? Maybe they fall into a spectrum.

What I do know is that there are people who have touched my life positively in many different ways, be they heroes, friends, teachers, parents or even strangers. Whether it’s generosity, self sacrifice, a successful outcome or intent that determines a hero, I can’t say. I’m hoping you can.

So instead of skipping my workout, or barely go through the motions, I hit the treadmill for an interval workout that wound up frightening the people in the small room around me. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if I could have been cranking out some Drowning Pool, Disturbed or Steel Panther so that everyone else had to get on board with my schizoid speed party of hell and submission as well.

Now for those of you who could care less about my motivations and only read this because you think you might get a training tip you can try on your own, here’s the treadmill routine I followed, which is pretty darn simple and can be done by a person of any level, simply by adjusting the speeds to your particular capability.

Workout:

• Warm-up: 1 mile at 7 mph
• Main set: 6×800 (.5 mile) at 8 mph with a .25-mile recovery at 6 mph after each interval
• Cool down: .5 mile at 6.5 mph

So to be clear, the workout might be notated:

• w/u 1 mile; 6×800 at 10K pace/400; c/d .5 mile

What this means in English is that I warm up for a mile on the treadmill and at the one mile mark I jump into the first of six separate speed intervals by raising the speed of the treadmill to 8 mph and then after half a mile I do the first of five recoveries for .25 miles. I keep alternating between speed intervals and recoveries and after the sixth speed interval I do my cool down half mile and then celebrate what I accomplished.

When selecting speeds, take the “normal” treadmill speed you might run to do your treadmill runs and use that for your warm-up. That will give you a sense as to how fast to do your intervals. Your intervals can be done between 5K and 10K pace, and your recoveries should be about a half to a full mile per hour slower than the warm-up pace. To close out the session in a solid manner, see if you can do your cool down where you started at your warm-up pace.

This workout gets you 5.75 miles of kick ass quality development of your turnover speed, stride length and lactate threshold. It took me just under 50 mins, which is a pretty darn good use of time.

The benefits:

Taking a feeling of malaise and kicking it in the teeth accomplishes a number of things.

• Complete a quality workout
• Gain confidence in your ability to control how you feel
• Provides a great excuse to strengthen your mental fortitude
• Creates an entertaining way get in a bunch of miles that may seem daunting but by breaking it up into intervals and recoveries the miles pas by a lot more quickly
• Reset your day/evening from one of acceptance of giving in to one of unbridled success

Whatever your motivation, doing a workout like this is a positive experience and is just one more way to get you back on track. Love to know your favorite treadmill workouts that help you get past getting “lifed”.

Until next time.

This blog report covers progress through week 3 of 10, January 23rd through January 29th.

This has been a crazy week from a nutritional and training perspective. As most of you know, I’m participating in the 10 in 10 Challenge to lose ten or more pounds of unproductive weight in the first ten weeks of 2012. I’ll post this week’s results tomorrow after I do my weigh in but didn’t want to wait (weight) to give you a few observations and insights I had this week.

In short, it’s the little things that can make all the difference. When striving to achieve a goal, inevitably you’re going to get thrown off course or have bumps (failures) along the way (weigh). For me this past week, I drove back and forth from Ohio to NY to Wallingford, CT to NY to CT to NY to CT to NY to CT and so on until I drove finally from NY to Ohio. I probably lost 40 hours in the car this past week during prime training hours. Add to this the extended hours I worked and I would have had to have woken up at 4am to get my workouts in which I clearly wasn’t ready to do. This only jacked my blood sugar around so badly that I ate whatever was conveniently placed in front of me including three slices of pizza (thanks Vandana and two chocolate cookies.

So why am I actually pretty okay with where I am? Primarily because since the macro issues were so jacked up, I didn’t focus on them this week, but did focus on what I could control – the little things.

Nutrition

From a macro nutritional standpoint my eating sucked, empty calories with no or at best little positive nutritional value. But from a micro standpoint, I didn’t let it get out of control, meaning as bad as it was, I could have given in and it could have been so much worse. For example, after eating three slices of pizza and then driving two hours through traffic to get back to NY, I would up in my hotel with a decision to make. Thankfully, what was left of my self control took over and I passed on the late night dinner an opted to just go to sleep.

I could have easily written off the day and said, hey if I’m going down today, I want to go down in flames and ordered up a slew of comfort foods or stopped to get a pint of Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream before passing out, but I didn’t. And this mattered because instead of saying tomorrow I’ll do better – having no idea how tomorrow was going to play out, I ended the day doing better which means when tomorrow came and I still couldn’t get a workout in, I knew that I had done something to positively stay on course. And since this happened day after day after day this past week, I had five separate opportunities to keep myself from completely falling off the wagon and I feel pretty good because of it.

Training

This is the first week since being laid up in bed from my surgery that I didn’t workout in the morning any day all week long. The drive time consumed my traditional training hours and by the time I got back it was dark and I was exhausted. Again, instead of writing off the week to a taper week without a race in front of me, I found a few opportunities to use the time I did have for a few minutes of quality training, and I do mean a few minutes. For example, I dropped down and did core abdominal work and pushups before jumping in the shower one morning, I stopped in CT to run a 5-mile course in the middle of my drive back south on another and on Saturday, I even ventured out to the hotel’s 13 meter pool and since I couldn’t get a quality swim workout in at 9:30 at night, I focused on what I could do, which was doing kickboard drills back and forth for 30 minutes and then treaded water for 15 minutes to work on my strength and rehabbing of my neck and arms.

When I got back to Canton this weekend, I found myself using an old trick to get a full ten miles in on the treadmill, which corresponded to 90 minutes of mental agony. What I did was pretty simple and you can try it yourself:

First pick the amount of time you want to run and start running with that amount of time in mind. Find something on the television in front of you that has a variable time component – in my case, I chose the Kansas v Iowa State basketball game. What I mean by variable is that in college basketball each half is 20 minutes long with an additional 15 minutes for halftime. But it really isn’t 20 minutes long, it’s 20 mins of time plus all of the time outs, commercials, and time stopped for a whole slew of reasons. In reality each half is closer to 45 minutes, perfect for what I was trying to accomplish. I started my run thinking about 90 minutes and then started playing games with myself, including working hard during the first half to get a solid 7 miles in and then dropping the pace during half time to recover before picking it up again in the second half. I also watched as the real time left on my session got closer and closer to the time remaining in the game until they were both equal and then I switched over to just focusing on the game clock. What this resulted in was me getting in an extra mile or two on the treadmill that I might not have done, as well as walking for an extra 10 minutes after I was done, burning some additional calories I hadn’t planned on. Again, it’s the little things that can make the difference and in addition to my calories spent, I felt really good mentally and emotionally for achoieving a better than expected result.

It help to turn a negative week, where I’d already missed three days of training, into a positive one where I felt I ended strong and set myself up for an even better one next week.

The key message here is that, similarly to what I explained above, I didn’t throw in the towel on any particular day or on the whole week. I found small things to get me back on track and I know that while my weigh in tomorrow won’t be as good as it could have been, it’ll be a whole lot better than it otherwise would have been if I hadn’t make these small positive choices.

Lastly, I wanted to throw out a shout out to my good friend and RacewithPurpose holistic nutritionist Christine Lynch, aka @holisticguru who will be hosting a free Nutritional Resolution workshop tomorrow Monday, January 30th at 6:30PM in NYC at Jackrabbit Sports at 140 West 72nd Street, New York, NY. Check out all of the deets here at Christine’s blog. This is a pat of Jackrabbit Sports Resolve series. If you set a resolution and didn’t stick to it, or if you just want to participate in what will be an awesome exchange of ideas to super charge your efforts going forward, do attend. And it’s FREE!

Until next time.

This blog report covers progress through week 2 of 10, January 16th through January 22nd.

This blog report covers progress through week 1 of 10, January 9th through January 15th.

Healthy living should be a part of your life like brushing you teeth. Unfortunately healthy living is more like flossing, everyone knows that we should be doing it, we know the negative effects if we don’t, but unlike brushing our teeth, flossing hasn’t become a habit and therefore most people in the US simply don’t do it on a regular basis.

Here’s the good news, a series of studies have shown that by just getting off the couch of doom and making walking around, moving around, and exercising a part of your daily routine you will dramatically increase the years you will live as well as the quality of life in those years that you live.

Check out this great and entertaining video from Dr. Mike Evans that explains all of the scientific details:

That’s it. It’s that simple. Throughout the next ten weeks, many of you will be exploring a variety of behaviors that will help you lose weight in a healthy manner, and in the process you’ll probably also find a few that you thought would work but didn’t. This is the fun part, keep trying. Try a variety of things and use your network to seek out advice until you find what works for you. The thing to remember is that while you are trying all of these things out, keep moving. This alone will help make daily exercise a regular part of your daily routine and once its part of your routine, it’s really hard to strip it out.

HAPPY NEW YOU!

It’s January 9th and today we begin our 2012 10 in 10 Challenge.  Our goal? To lose 10 pounds in ten weeks and then, of course, to develop the habits and rituals necessary to keep improving on our new healthy and active lifestyles. As of last night we have 42 participants in this year’s challenge. That is OUTSTANDING. When everyone is successful, we will have collectively lost 420 pounds in just ten weeks.

A few tips to remember today. Whatever number shows up on the scale today, do not react, either positively or negatively. It is a number, like any other number. It is neither good nor bad, it is just a number, a starting point from which you will begin to measure your performance. Additionally, remember what you did today before your weigh-in as you’ll want to do the same thing each week, every week for the next ten weeks. Do your best to limit variety in this part of your challenge.

Chose a scale and stick with it.  If you can, pick a scale that you can control or one that will maintain stable performance over the next ten weeks. In past years, we’ve had people use their own scales, scales at gyms and even one person go into Restoration Hardware every week to get her weigh-in done. Whatever you do, recognize that scales need to be calibrated every so often, so its best to pick one scale and use the same one for the next ten weeks.

Do it at the same time of day. Your body will fluctuate a few pounds up or down throughout the day, so my advice is to weigh yourself in the morning, before you do anything else, including eating or working out.

Do it without clothes. For the lady at Restoration Hardware this might be a bit tricky, but do your best to stay consistent and not include the factor of different weights for different clothes. In fact, like most things in life, it is best to do your weigh in nekkid.

Limit any exogenous factors: What this means in plain English is reduce potential variability in your week-to-week weight at the time you’ll be doing your weigh-in from sweat loss, food weight gain, etc.

Putting all of these items together creates a scenario like this one – Weigh yourself every Monday first thing in the morning right after waking up, after using the facilities, using the locker room scale at the gym, wearing nothing, not eating or drinking anything beforehand.

That’s it. Happy New You!