Master's Athlete of the Year, Rita Hanscom

Rita Hanscom was selected as Master’s Track and Field Athlete of the Year for 2009.

Rita Hanscom (San Diego, Calif.): Named World Masters Athlete of 2009 by the IAAF and World Masters Athletics after winning five gold medals in Lahti and setting a world record in the W55 heptathlon. She’s a deputy attorney general for the state of California.

The photo above is from the 2009 Master’s Track & Field Outdoor World Championships in Lahti, Finland. It was a privilege to meet Rita and her son and daughter.

In Finland, there was a sense of community and fellowship among the 5,300 athletes from 80 countries. It’s challenging to explain. It was unique, competitive, healthy and vibrant, supportive.  Amazingly supportive.

Who couldn’t use as much of that that the law will allow, in pursuing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle?

Shot Put

USATF Press Release, February 8, 2010: United States Largest Master’s Track & Field Indoor World Championships Ever, heading to Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

Click here to read the official USATF Press Release.

The past few weeks have been a painful reminder how challenging it is to stay motivated. Most of us can eventually find a compelling reason(s) to get healthy.

Few of us find compelling, long-term reasons.

That is why it is essential to figure out a million ways to stay motivated. A million.  Are ya with me.  Succeed or fail.  There is no middle ground.

USA Track and Field does it for me.  For now.

What’s doing it for you?

You Can Do It

There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-million blogs on the Internet, and growing daily.

There are 221-million results if you Google “Health Blogs”.

What are all these health-blog people trying to say? Please let me summarize for you:

1. Dream Big
2. Get There
3. Stay There

If your goal isn’t impossible, you’re not reaching high enough.

PS. Do your excuses make you stop or make you sick? Mine made me sick. Sick to think that I’m the only one responsible for my actions and I wasn’t doing anything about it, except making excuses.

Excuses be damned.

Just Do It

Do you know your blood pressure? And do you know your resting heart rate?  How often do you check?  Do you know how and why you have the numbers you do?

Also known as a no-brainer, putting it off and being afraid to know are not good. I check it virtually every time I’m in a Wal-Mart or Publix Grocery Store, for free, at one of those testing stations.

What would happen to your results if you walked five days each week, fitting in 15-30 minutes (or more) each time? And what would happen if you did that for five years in a row?

Last night’s results at Wal-Mart:

Show Me The Money

USA Team Jersey...Priceless

Last night at Gold’s Gym Orlando in the Dr Phillips area, I meet Pleasant Lewis, the owner of several Central Florida Gold’s Gym facilities.

As a 50-year old, I struggle like everyone else, to find time and motivation to exercise.

This is one of life’s big truths.  We all are given the same amount of time. Successful people figure it out, plan for set backs, never give up and they find a million ways to motivate themselves.

And sometimes, if not more often, the thought of, “Is this worth it?”, enters their mind.

Gold’s Gym, Lifestyle Litness, Bally’s, YMCA’s, all struggle too – with finding a way to inspire people to make a lifetime commitment of healthy living.

I proposed to Pleasant that I could help.  We’ll see if “Goliath” has any interest in “David”.

Gym owners have the same challenge as their customers – finding time to do the important things that make a difference.

Hayward Field Inspires Impossible Goals

Lane 8 is the worst lane.  The slowest competitor is placed there. You know this already.

There is an art to being in Lane 8.

Huh?  Exactly.

Although it doesn’t seem so, striving for (metaphorically) Lane 8 is really impossible.

Getting healthy and staying healthy, until we die, is really quite impossible too.

Or is it?  There is an art to not quitting, not giving up, no matter what.

Age Knows No Limits

Bernard Lagat, 35, won his eighth Millrose Games Wanamaker mile last night, in Madison Square Garden.

The Millrose Games is the oldest Indoor Track & Field meet in the world, at 103 years.

Bernard Lagat is 35 years old.  Age, accomplishments, and  barriers continue to be broken.

It’s fun to see it happen before your eyes.

Motivation is like a fire.  You have to continue to add fuel to it.

But will you.  Today, I mean?  Will you?

What Motivates Them?

Are your 2010 Health and Fitness goals still burning inside you?

Or has the fire of your resolution started to cool?

Or maybe there’s a feeling of being somewhere in the middle – not on fire and not ready to quit, but stuck.

Today, simply by looking around you everywhere, you will see that the hardest thing to do is to be a great example.

Why is that?

Poison or Passion?

“Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable.  It may get tough.” — 2006 Fortune Cookie

A Lane 8 reader commented recently that part of her motivation, as she was training for a Marathon, came from a fortune cookie saying.

Had to read it several times.

Each time, it got better.  Each time it had more power. Each time it made indomitable will seem more like an antidote than a pain.

Be willing to be uncomfortable.

Be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Body

Hello everyone. Hope you had a healthy week.  It’s challenging isn’t it?

Diet and exercise.  Sounds so simple.

Then why are we an obese society? An unhealthy society? Why?

Can someone help explain why this is so, and even more compelling, why we as a society, just put our heads in the sand and pretend like it doesn’t exist?  Why we pretend like it’ll go away if we ignore it long enough?

It’s a grand wish that our son (9) will get and stay healthy as a lifetime goal. With Inflammatory Bowel Disease, he’s 20 times more likely to develop colon cancer than the average person.

Last time I looked, colon cancer is bad news.

Lane 8 is a metaphor for life.  For trying your best to do important things – like lead a healthy life.

And it started over a decade ago, with me running one mailbox a day for a week.

As my health improved, my desire to maintain it became harder to find.