Rowing with the Hero Within

I have a love+hate relationship with my rowing machine.  I love the feeling of having rowed for an hour—my whole body gets a solid workout and I burn enough calories to drink a twelve pack of beer!  But I’ll be damned if every minute of that hour doesn’t feel like an eternity.  I distract myself by watching cars pass by my driveway.  When that gets boring, I try to keep my pace at 1m55sec for as long as possible… usually less than a minute. Then for long periods of time I wind up convincing myself that a 2m30sec pace isn’t the most embarrassing thing I’ve done.

I do that a lot. Row for an hour. Or bike for 2 hours…mostly so I can eat as much as I want. But those moments of vacillating between going all out and wondering how I got so out of shape remind me of the journey to realize my hero.within. Some days I wake up and I can’t focus on anything until I get a workout in. Other days I want to push that rowing machine into the middle of the highway. Similarly, there are days I can feel my hero.within straining to get out of my chair and push away from the computer screen (I work from home still)—to get out there and create something that’s never been seen before. Other days I just want to sit on my couch and watch more Netflix than my brain can possibly process.

And I’m OK with that. I spent 13 years obsessed with the Middle East—going to the worst places to do the worst kind of work in the worst situations. My adventure now—my hero work—is to create a new life centered around who I am and the people who support me. That means I’m figuring out how to be a partner, stepdad, neighbor, 9-5 employee, and suburbanite. I joke that it’s the most difficult environment I’ve ever had to live in!

But that’s how hero work goes. Sometimes we wake up and the weight of the world couldn’t keep us from being the hero we know we were born to be. And other days we sit on the couch and enjoy the life we’ve built. In truth though, it’s all hero work. Even the mundane aspects of life allow us to strengthen the armor we need to bring our hero work to the world.

realize.your.hero.within

alexs