Who Would Have
Thought
Last night, I was out to eat with my friend Leanne from
Australia. As we sat there chatting about the differences and similarities
between Australia and America, I realized what an important role God has given
me in this precious life here on earth. Sometimes I feel like I am living in
some kind of dream. I grew up spending most of my summers barefoot and dirty
deep within the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. If you follow me on a
regular basis you probably already know that. However, it’s an important part
of this story.
Most people in that beautiful part of the world grow up with
an idea of the work that they are going to do, and they very quickly move
towards that work and raising a family. Normally it’s a very beautiful thing.
Several of my old high school friends have been married to each other since
right after high school or maybe college and have a beautiful family filled
with amazing children. Off the top of my head, I can think of Chad and Paige,
Kevin and Amy, Charlotte and Jimmy, and Tammy (my beautiful cousin) and Steve.
I miss this area and the closeness of the people. My friend
Chad has been with the same company since high school, and now he basically
runs the place. Most of them have been with the same company since high school,
and now they are set to retire and enjoy their lives. I’m not saying that their
lives are without stress, but they took very calculated steps to avoid creating
chaos in their lives. There is a part of me that is very envious of all of them,
as they appear to have lives like you might see if you looked in the dictionary
under “The Perfect Upper-Middle Class American Family”. If you ever watched
“Leave It to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best”, you know exactly what I am talking
about.
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| West Jefferson, NC photo cred Dale Carlson |
As they were planning to have the perfect American Family
since what seems middle school, I was growing up with a restless spirit. From
the first time I traveled, I knew that I was going to explore this world
someday. Minus the attraction near my home, I didn’t travel all that much. Up
until high school, I had only gone to Myrtle Beach once, Maryland to visit
family once, and I actually moved to Michigan with my mother and stepfather a
couple time in my youth. Later in Middle School and High School, I was allowed
to venture out to places like Washington D.C. and Orlando Florida my senior
year in high school.
Every time that I traveled, the excitement would build
leading up to the day of the trip. The night before I could barely sleep with
the anticipation of visiting a new place and exploring the surrounding
adventures. I loved traveling with my Aunt Brenda Osborne because her husband,
my uncle of course, would get us up at 3am to get a jump on traffic. I loved
getting this early start because I was so excited that I had trouble sleeping
anyways.
I can remember seeing the ocean for the first time ever
during my first trip to the beach the summer before 6th Grade. It
was simply mind-blowing staring out over a body of water that seemed endless. I
get to see the Ocean a lot more often nowadays, but I have never gotten over
the beauty of the Ocean. Every time I see it for some reason I feel like the
possibilities of life are just as endless. I think that trip to the beach
actually changed the direction of my life forever. As I stared out over that
immense blue mass, I wondered what was beyond that horizon. What are the people
like? What do the different countries and landscapes look like? Yeah you can
get all of that from a book or on the computer, but there is nothing that can
replace the experience of visiting these foreign lands for yourself to see and
experience.
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| Beach with my Family |
I never would have dreamed that I would affect the lives of
athletes from all around the world. This brings me back to dinner last night
with Leanne from Australia. She was telling us about using the programs from my
books to coach her athletes and herself. So last night right in front of me was
a lady from Australia telling our group that she has used my programs to win
the 100% Raw World Championships in Powerlifting and to set World Records in
Master’s Olympic Weightlifting. She’s also used them to coach her athletes at
her club including Jaspa Hope, who won the Australian Youth Weightlifting
National Championships and took Silver in the Oceania (a geographic region
comprised of 14 countries) Youth Championships.
Yesterday, I found out that the Icelandic 94kg Weightlifting
National Champion, Bjarmi Hreinsson, uses my programming. Mash Elite has
athletes either on our online team or using our ebooks for programming from
countries like England, Ireland, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands. A lot of these athletes are like
Jaspa and Leanne in the fact that they’re National Champs, World Champs, and/or
World Team Members. I so look forward to the World Championships coming up in
Turkmenistan because I will get to meet and hang out with a lot of these
athletes from all over the world.
I’m not writing all of this to brag although I am very proud
and thankful. I am just writing all of this to say how very blessed I am.
Things could have gone totally the other way for me meaning that I could easily
be broke right now. I blindly followed my passions without any consideration
for the future. So am I telling you all to do the same thing? Not really! I
admire the peaceful life that my friends from home have built. Most people
would say that I just got lucky. I’d say that God had a plan for me despite the
way I was living my life at the time.
Now I have a chance to influence the lives of thousands of
people all over the world including the few hundred at my gym in Lewisville,
NC. They can learn to get stronger from me while hearing about my love for my
family and God. Life is beautiful in that way. It’s like a living peace of art
that all of us are creating each and everyday for our children and
grandchildren to ponder years after we are gone.
More and more often, I think back to that young boy running
barefoot on my grandparents farm tucked back so far in the Blue Ridge Mountains
where most people will never know the beauty of such amazing land. I had an
incurable wanderlust in my heart much like a thirst that one would acquire
after spending days in the Sahara without water. It was a thirst that had to be
quenched, or I would have probably died a young death.
The only regret that I have is the reckless approach that I
took, and I am not even sure that it’s a regret. I am really just saying that I
wouldn’t recommend my approach to my children or any of you. I literally followed
my passions with a blindfold on without any consideration to the future. That’s
why it’s so amazing that I can now affect so many people around the world and
at home.
I mean let’s look at one major event in my life, which was
me packing up my belongings and driving to Colorado Springs with $200 to my
name. A lot of you have heard this story so bear with me as I tell it one more
time. After college, I wanted to try the sport of Olympic weightlifting. At the
time Colorado Springs was the place to be, since the Olympic Training Center
housed the Nation’s best lifters.
I drove 23 hours straight to get to Colorado Springs. The
only research that I performed was the best place to learn Olympic
weightlifting. There was a gym, World Gym on 8th Street, where two-time
Olympian Wes Barnett coached athletes. I drove straight to the gym without a
job and without a place to live. Within thirty minutes of arriving in town, I
had my coach, I had a job managing the gym, and I had a roommate, one of the
personal trainers Ryan Mitchell.
What are the odds? I am guessing 1 in 1,000. If that hadn’t
of happened, I would have been broke within a day or two and on my way back
home. I would never advise my children to follow in those footsteps. I want my
children to follow their passions for sure, but I want them to consider:
·
Do I have enough money to survive?
·
What kind of life am I building for my future
family?
·
What are the best steps for continued success?
I believe in my era of growing up parents simply encouraged
their children to go college. As my children grow up, I want to help guide them
a bit better. I mean at the end of the day that’s all any of us can hope to do,
and that’s simply try to do things a bit better with the raising of our
children.
You can still go after your dream just like I did, but I
recommend taking a bit more calculated approach much like my friends at home.
I’ve witnessed a lot of people in my industry not get so lucky as I did. It’s
easy to end up without a job and broke in the strength industry. I got so
lucky. I look back an think of countless times where things could have so
quickly derailed. There isn’t one doubt in my mind that God wasn’t driving the
boat the entire time.
I met the right people not because I thought they might help
me in the future. I met them because they were cool and because I thought that
they might help me get stronger. Now I am friends with some of the most amazing
people in our industry. I get to host people on “The Barbell Life Podcast” like
Cal Dietz and Mark Bell. I get to research the latest finding to write my
ebooks. All of this adds up to knowledge that I can pass on to all of you, and
it’s all because I wanted to be the strongest man on the planet.
So many times, I was told by people to get a real job. I
know now that some of these people weren’t “haters”. They were actually people that
cared about me and didn’t want to see me broke and homeless. In spite of it
all, it worked out and here I am influencing lives from around the world.
I am thankful for this place in life that God has given me.
I love working with so many people. I am so excited to take my four Senior
Athletes to the World Championships in Turkmenistan next week. It’s a beautiful
life I live, a crazy one as well. If you are a barefoot country boy exploring
the countryside like I did with aspirations slightly different from all of
those around you, here is what I recommend to you.
You need to find someone that can guide you along your path.
I don’t recommend blindly following your dreams and passions. I recommend
putting some thought into your future. If you want to have a voice in the
strength and conditioning industry, I recommend committing to a PhD, getting to
know all of the strength sports, and participate in a sport. You don’t want to
be the great athlete trying to give advice without any true understanding of
the body. However, if you’re a great athlete that also possesses massive
amounts of knowledge, then you are capable of amazing things in the industry.
If you’re an exceptional strength athlete like I was, I
recommend looking past the sport for what you might become. What’s the long
term plan? I recommend chipping away at that goal while you are dominating the
world in your chosen sport. It’s quite bewildering how quickly it can all come
to an end. You might think that you have ten years left, but no one on earth is
guaranteed anything. You could get injured on this very day and never be able
to return to your level of strength and/or athleticism.
This advice applies to all aspects of life. When you think
about it, pretty much anything amazing like being a doctor, a famous singer, President
of the United States, or a Gold Medalist Olympian comes with risk. You have to
ask yourself some hard questions like:
·
Do I really have the talent, brains, and/or
support group to accomplish this goal?
·
If I have the talent, do I really have the
desire to put in the work?
·
If I have the desire, do I have a solid plan?
·
If I have a plan, am I committed to that plan?
First off, if your answer to the first question is ‘no’,
then you might want to consider altering your path. If anyone has ever told you
that ‘anything is possible if you want it bad enough’, they are lying to you. I
hate to be a bubble buster, but I am just being a realist. If you are 5’3” and
slow, you are not going to the NFL. I am sorry, but that’s a fact. At some
point, you have to be honest with yourself.
However, if you have the talent, but your answer is ‘no’ to
any of the other questions, then you either have to sort that out or find
something different. That’s another realism for you. I am all about dreaming
big, but dang it you have to have the talent, desire, and commitment, or it’s
not going to happen.
So what are the two takeaways from all of this?
1. I am so darn thankful that God has led me down this path.
I am so blessed to be able to influence so many people from around the world,
in my country, and locally here at home.
2. I recommend taking a more calculated approach to reaching
your own dreams that I took.
I’m thankful for a mother that always supported her crazy
son, raised him to be strong, and insisted that he be smart. I am thankful for
a wife that continues to support me, believe in me, and most importantly that
loves me. I am thankful for a friend like KJ that has always inspired me to be
better. I am thankful for my friends like Ox that are still by friends even
after times when I was the most selfish human on earth. Last I am thankful for
my athletes that put their faith in me to help them reach their incredible
dreams (we getting it done too y’all).
I love writing these personal blogs because I know that
someday my children will read them. I want them to be able to look deep inside
the heart of their dad long after I am gone. I wish that my father had kept a
blog or journal, so I could read his thoughts. If you’re a dad out there, I
recommend that you do the same.
God bless y’all, and may all your lives change the world
forever in a way that leaves it better than you found it. I know from what the
bible says that world will probably get worse, but that doesn’t mean that we
shouldn’t try and make it better by spreading love with our passions.
Thanks for reading,
Coach Mash/Trav
P.S. If you want to hang out, I am teaching a Snatch and Pull Clinic at our gym LEAN Fitness in Lewisville, NC Dec. 15th from 11am to 2pm. Check it out at:
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