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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Quitters Never Win

Quitters never win. That statement was always just part of a saying to me. It never carried much weight and I'm begining to believe it is because I never truely understood it. I never understood it until quitting was staring in the mirror back at me.

I have a confession to make. It's a confession I don't actually think I've mentioned to anyone.

I almost quit running.

I know, big shocker right. I'm not talking about quitting back when I was a child and thought it was too hard. I'm talking about recently. Very recently. Within the past year. In fact a majority of the days throughout my sophomore year quitting was an idea that always came up. Why you ask? Well, to be honest, life wasn't going the way I wanted it to. I had suffered 3 stress fractures within the year that caused me to miss a majority of my Cross-Country season and all of my winter track and spring track season. Every time I had attempted to run again, another stress fracture popped up. I was tired of getting let down and I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. I felt I was done.

But quitters never win. I don't know what kept me from quitting, but I'd like to chalk it up to passion. In the end I knew my life without running wouldn't be better then my "broken" (no pun intended Luke) running life was.

Now on to another confession....it was the greatest decision I have possibly ever made. You see, it doesn't matter whether your an athlete, singer, dancer, painter, or anyone. If you love something, you don't let it go. No, your life won't be perfect all the time, but life is all about fighting through the bad times to get to the good times. Every journey has it bumps along the way. That is what makes it all work it. Trust me, I'm in the happy times now. Things find a way to work out.

You'll win in the end. Don't give up

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The Power of One

I caved....I started a blog. Why haven't I ever blogged before? Well that's a real simple question to answer. I always figured no one would want to hear me talk (or type for that matter) about random topics. You see, for a long time (21 full years to be exact) I figured there was no use spreading your knowledge unless you had a large enough audience. It wasn't that I didn't want to share my thoughts. It was that I always wanted to share my thoughts in front of packed out rooms. I came to the realization one day that none of that matters. I came to the realization that whether I was impacting one person's life, or 50,000 people's lives, the results were the same.

This brings me to the title of my blog. "One at a Time" was not a preplanned name I've been thinking of for years. It was a name I created literally minutes ago. I chose it because of it's significance in every aspect of life.

The first aspect is what we were just talking about, impacting peoples lives. Influence comes one at a time. It does not matter whether 5 people read my blog. That's 5 more people than I had yesterday. Influence starts with one person at a time.

The second aspect, for me, comes with running. Yes, I'm sorry, I had to include running in my blog. Running, however, is very similar to life. I run one step at a time, one mile at a time, one day at a time. If I take care of each step, then the puzzle begins to fit together. The same can be said for life. We live one day at a time. It is all we can do. Each day is different than the one before it and after it. If you take care of each day the weeks and months will fall into place. It's a simple lesson I learned recently. It has been a great help to me, as I hope it will be a great help to you.

Simply take things one at a time