Sometimes in life, things don’t always go as planned.

Take my life for example.

I’m just getting started in this whole blogging/online fitness/social media world, and I’m loving every minute of it. At first it was a little hard putting down the things that I knew inside my head through the keys of a keyboard, but the more I do it the easier it gets. So naturally, I’m getting hooked (much to my fiance’s dismay).

Yesterday, I blogged about low back pain and promised you that my next post would be about how activate and strengthen your glutes. I was pumped and ready to give over some great content and share a few key exercises that other people may not know.

So I pull out my trusty camcorder and….the battery is dead and the charger I have for it doesn’t work. Damn. Guess we’ll have to can video til I can get that sorted out next week.

No problem though – I figure I’ll just record some audio instead and upload that to the blog. It’s not quite video but hey, it’s a more interactive medium than writing, right?

So I whip out my headset, record a little piece, try to upload it to the blog, and….not enough bandwidth to just post it up here. Turns out I have to get it hosted before I can put it up.

Double damn.

Since I want to do the glute piece justice and really show you guys what it’s all about, I’m not going to just post a written article. I want to make it interactive and informative, as well as entertaining, and I’m not sure that a written post on its own can do that.

So instead, I decided to write a little post about what I’ve been going through today, to emphasize the point that in fitness, just like in life, things don’t always go as planned. Sometimes you show up to the gym and there’s someone totally hogging the piece of equipment you were dead set on using. Sometimes you start your workout and your energy just isn’t there to pull off the exercises you had hoped to do in the way you had hoped to do them. It happens, and often too.

So what do you do in such a situation? One of two things. Either you take it as an excuse to give up and let yourself down, or you look at it as a positive challenge, and find a way around it. If there’s someone in the squat rack and you wanted to squat, do some dumbbell squats or single leg exercises instead. If the pulldown machine is taken and you wanted to work vertical pulls, loop a band over a chinup bar and pull down on it, standing underneath. Even if you can’t do that kind of substitution – figure out something you can do. Go play sports with a friend or just run outside with your dog.

With me, I took the challenge of not being able to post what I’d like, and instead turned into an opportunity to make an alternate post about what I believe in, therebye hopefully connecting further with you on some emotional level.

Don’t let challenges and difficulties stop you, becuase there will always be more challenges than successes, and the ones who win in life are those who take the challenges and use them to facilitate growth, not failure.

If you’re walking in a dense forest, the thick overgrowth often makes it difficult to see much light. Many people just keep ploughing on, keeping their head down in the darkness. The bright few lift their heads up and look for the few slivers of sunlight streaming through the cracks in the canopy, reminding themselves that outside this darkness, the sun still shines.

And then they forage forward, singlemindedly looking to find a way out of the forest and into the sunlight proper.

If you’re finding too much darkness or difficulty in your life or in your exercise, don’t forget to stop and look up once in a while. Realize that at some point, you will emerge from the forest and the sun will shine again.

Find that sliver of sunlight and grasp it with all your might.

(photo by Peter Kaminski)

Two famous phrases are going through my head right now:

1) 90% of success in life is just showing up

2) A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Up until a little while back, I never really related to these sayings or understood their meaning.

But lately the gravity of their meaning has been hitting me more and more. As I attempt to get started with my presence on the web so I can reach out and connect with as many people as possible, I find myself often overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to get done to take care of the little things that are needed to get started. And so, inevitably, I put things off until later.

The thing with life is that if you wait until everything is perfect, you’ll never get started because let’s face facts – things are never perfect. The longer you wait, the longer it goes undone. And so there comes a point where you have to stop and say to yourself  that all you need to do to get started succeeding is just show up. Just grab ahold of whatever situation you’re in right now and get started, regardless.

Starting something off – creating a new beginning – is the hardest part of any endeavor. But once you’re going, once the ball is rolling, then you can just take that momentum and run with it and things exponentially get easier. Once you’re rolling, you can’t gather any more moss. The little things don’t get in your way anymore. If there’s an obstacle in your way, you either roll around it or you just hit it with such force that you end up knocking it out of the way and moving on ahead regardless.

And that’s the way it is with everything in life. Work. School. Fitness. Love. You have to get yourself out there and take that stab at it in order to make it happen. The longer you sit on the sidelines, the harder it gets. Conversely, the quicker you get it moving, the easier it gets.

So, from today, no more excuses. I’m here and I’m alive and I’m using this website to reach out to as many people as possible. The 90% is done, and I hope to deliver the 10% with the momentum I’ve now created. The moss had been gathering for a while, but it’ll be gone now.

I’m showing up, and I’m excited beyond words about it. Can’t wait to see you all as we attempt to conquer that final 10%.

(Photo by Sir Mervs)