Blog Love: Steve Edwards wins the day!

I'm going to give my fellow Fitness Nerd Steve Edwards some love today. If you hop over to his Straight Dope blog, you'll find a great post on staying motivated 24/7.

Why is each day so important? Looking back through my calendar I noted that I had only 6 full climbing days 2011, my preferred sport. My favorite workout of last year, Asylum Strength, I only did 5 times. PAP sessions: 12. When you have a full schedule and begin to analyze how it’s broken down the importance of each workout becomes clear; each time you slack off is missing an opportunity to improve yourself. If you lay each workout on a graph you will see exactly how a bit more effort or concentration here and there would have yielded greater overall improvements. Over time it’s the difference between champions and everyone else.

If you're like me, your head explodes a little when you try to wrap it around the amount of exercise Steve does. We can't all be him -- but that's a good thing because if we were, it would mean that the next time you climbed Mount Everest (as you do every Wednesday night), you'd get to the top to find a bunch of skinny guys in fancy running shoes drinking black coffee, playing with their dogs, and swapping movie quotes. It would ruin the ambiance, to say the least.

El Steve-o has a good point, but this "win the day" thing doesn't need to apply only to those hell-bent on world domination. In many ways, physically, I'm the anti-Steve. Unless the only qualifications are willpower and brute force, new sports don't come easy to me. Furthermore, I'm prone to weight gain and I have a true gift for injuring myself. Yet his M.O. still makes sense, particularly when applied to that age-old question, "How do you eat an elephant?"

As some of you may recall, I spent much of 2011 under the knife. ("Why?" you ask. See willpower and brute force above.) I'm still in the middle of rehab. I finally got the limp in my left hip under control about 2 weeks ago and I'm still months away from lifting my right arm above my head. But I do the boring, painful junk that the PT assigns me. Every. Single. Day. Each time, my hip feels a little stronger and my arm reaches a little higher. I take one more bite out of the elephant.

The hardest part about this process is that I haven't been able to surf since last March. Hopefully, I'll be back in the water around this April, putting an end to a 13 month lull. When that happens, I'll surf like I've always surfed. Just as Steve uses each day to push himself, I will use each day to be grateful. I will go out with the bittersweet awareness that my board-riding days are finite. I'll also look back at the challenging days of rehab with the knowledge that they were even more finite.

Whatever your goal is, you're never going to get there unless you get there.