Note to my Athletes

Note to my Athletes

A Facebook Post from four years ago popped up on my Facebook feed this weekend.  It was a pic of Lisa G. and my wife that we took working out on a cruise just a few months before Lisa passed away.  Lisa started out as a client of mine.  She was a nurse that wanted to get in shape.  It was so funny watching her in the beginning.  She literally couldn’t stand up from an air squat.  However fast-forward a year, and not only was she still training, but she was competing in powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting.  She could deadlift over 300 pounds and she was Clean & Jerking 176 pounds.  It was a real transformation.  It was one that I am most proud of.

She was so much more than a client or athlete.  She was a friend.  She was a part of my family.  Wherever Drew and I would go, you would find Lisa G.  At that point in my life, I loved my gym with all my heart.  My athletes consumed my thoughts.  I loved each and every one of them, and we had a community that most gyms could only dream about.  My athletes were my family as much as my family was. 

When Lisa G. passed, something inside me died.  It wasn’t just me.  The heart of our gym was broken.  We were all crushed.  I spoke at her funeral, and when I walked away from that church, the love for my gym was buried with Lisa G.  That was the same time that MuscleDriver USA offered me a full-time position.  I quickly took it because my gym was the last place on earth that I wanted to be.  We could all hear Lisa G.’s laugh echo through the halls of Mash Elite.

I tried to keep the gym going by hiring a manager, but the gym was built with me as the head coach.  People were there to be coached by me.  The gym quickly faded.  At first I was upset that people were leaving, but my wife reminded me that I was the one that left first.

When MDUSA started failing, I returned to my gym.  By the time that I returned, I only had my weightlifters and few OGs.  My heart was walled up to protect it from ever being crushed again.  The problem with me is that when I let someone in my heart, I let them all the way in.  I’d say that’s a good thing unless one of them dies.

It has taken me until now to finally let those walls down.  This weekend I was at Salem Lake with some of my athletes.  I was at the playground with my boys, and my athletes were off in the distance sitting at a picnic table.  I caught myself staring out at them, and I realized in that moment that I loved those boys and girls as if they were family.  They are my family.  I don’t know how my heart opened up again, but it did. 

When I walk in my gym, I look around at our members, and I feel that same feeling again.  A lot of our members are from that original gym.  Heck two of Lisa G’s training partners, Molly and Lisa S. are members of my gym again.  They are so very precious to me, and I am so thankful that God has given me back that love.  I have learned so much in the past years, and I can promise that I will never take that love for granted again.  I will appreciate and love each and every one of my athletes and members every day that God grants me the opportunity.

There is a moral to all of this especially for all of you coaches and gym owners that I would like to discuss.  I hear the word ‘community’ thrown around all the time nowadays.  It’s a catch phrase that supposed ‘experts’ use like some kind of  business tool.  People are not a marketing tool.  You can’t use some fancy technique to form a real community.  If that is really what you think, you are in the wrong business.  I baffles me that people like that want to be in the gym business.  If money is the priority, there are a lot of other easier ways to make money.

Do you want to know how to form a magical community, one like others can only dream?  You do this by loving your members, and I mean really loving them.  When I look at Hunter Elam, I see a young woman that dreams of the Olympics.  She wants it so badly that she moved from Oklahoma away from her family to reach that goal.  I want her to reach that goal as much or more than she does, but there is so much more that I want to teach her.  I want here to leave the sport of Olympic weightlifting a better person than when she began her journey. 

I want our general fitness members to fall in love with fitness.  I want to watch their lives transform.  I want to see Derek make it on Team USA.  I want Tate to surpass the accomplishments of his amazing brother.  I want Morgan to become the greatest strength athlete of all-time.  Once again I find my thoughts consumed with the hopes and dreams of my athletes and members.

Am I vulnerable again?  Yeah but I am so thankful for this vulnerability.  I wrote this to my athletes.  I want them to know that they cracked the ice away from my frozen heart, and I am thankful for each of them.  I am thankful for the laughter that December brings to the gym. I am so pumped that Hannah trusts me enough to move with her entire family to train with me.  I am thankful for the loyalty that Nathan has shown me over the past three years.

There is not one athlete at my gym that I am not 100% loyal to.  You guys might not have the greatest coach in the world, but you have a coach that won’t stop trying to become the best coach simply because he loves you with all of his heart.  You guys and gals have made the gym a place that I want to be once again.  I will do everything in my power to help each and every one of you reach your dreams.  I am so excited for the next few years.

Gun Control v Gun Rights

Gun Control v Gun Rights

I am going to be honest with all of you right now on my thoughts of this matter.  Truth is that I don’t care one bit.  I am over it!  Here’s what I know.  Every week it seems there is some kind of mass shooting.  Everyone’s reaction is the exact same.  Democrats scream gun control, and Republicans scream gun rights.  The problem is that No One is doing Anything about it.  Nobody!

When can we all just be Americans?  There is a problem, and I am sick of hearing about a political party’s agenda.  I want to see some politicians that are more concerned about the lives of the American people than reelection.  What has happened to us?  Do you all remember what happened after 9/11?  We all came together. 

I have news for all of you, and that news is we all live in the same place.  I am 100% certain that Republicans and Democrats want to protect their own families.  It’s time that we all came together to protect each other’s families.  Let’s face it.  Most of us have political ideologies based on our parents, friends, and wherever we grew up.  If you had been born somewhere else with different parents, you would probably think something totally different.  So you grow up Democrat or Republican, and you grow up hearing exactly what that specific party believes.  You come to accept that as the gospel.  Guess what?  Neither side is perfect, and most of it is simply BS anyways.  It’s just something for us to cling to, complain about, and spend useless time on.

Meanwhile our children are getting murdered on a weekly basis.  Dang it, I am sick of hearing about the Middle East.  We have a problem right here.  Dang it we have war right here in America and it’s high time we call it what it is.  Here’s what a quick search on Wikipedia found: “A comprehensive report by USA Today tracked all mass killings from 2006 through 2017 in which the perpetrator willfully killed 4 or more people. For mass killings by firearm for instance, it found 271 incidents with a total of 1,358 victims.”

February 15^th 2018 the “New York Times” published the following:

“When a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults with an assault rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, it rattled Newtown, Conn., and reverberated across the world. Since then, there have been at least 239 school shootings nationwide. In those episodes, 438 people were shot, 138 of whom were killed.

The data used here is from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that began tracking school shootings in 2014, about a year after Sandy Hook.”

I don’t know about you, but I have three children.  I don’t want any of them to have to worry about this, and I want to protect them.  That’s my job, but I can’t get any help from my government.  If our government’s job isn’t to protect our children, what is their job?  That’s the dang question right now.

Here’s what I know.  Americans aren’t going to turn their guns over to the government.  Plus there are over 300 million guns in America that we know about.  Lord only knows how many guns that are hear illegally.  So, you are not going to be able to collect all of those anytime soon. 

Here’s a couple of things that seems to be common sense:

1.  Let’s reinforce the laws we have.  Before we talk new legislation regarding guns, let’s handle what we have.  Otherwise we can pass some more laws that no one will adhere to.

2.  Then we can talk about new laws that might help.

3.  Parents or anyone else that supplies someone with a weapon that is used for a shooting should be held just as liable.  I am mainly talking about the parent of the Waffle House shooter, but this goes for anyone that does this. 

4.  If someone is deemed mentally unfit, they simply can’t have a weapon.  There is no time for political correctness on this one. 

Other than this, I have no idea.  I want to see the Democrats and Republicans sit down together and figure this out.  I don’t want to hear about immigration, Russia, or anything else until this is figured out.  Look men and women of Congress and the Senate, it’s time to put your differences aside.  I just want you to start making some progress.  I don’t want to hear any statements or empty promises.  I want to see results. 

I am not just talking about guns because look what happened in Toronto today.  I have several friends up there, and I was scared to death when I heard the news.  Look who cares what religion, race, or belief someone has.  The beautiful thing is that if I don’t like what someone else believes, I don’t have to believe it.  I can believe whatever I want, and I don’t have to hate the person who believes opposite. 

Thanks to my career, I have friends from all over the world.  I have Muslim friends.  I have friends from Iran, Russia, and Egypt to name a few.  I’m a Christian, and I love Christ with all my heart.  No one has to believe like me for me to respect and love them. 

I get it.  I know the world is flawed and filled with sin.  I know that the world will never be perfect not even close, but we can all try to make it a little better.  We can listen and learn from each other.  If we really try to put our heads together, we can create change. 

This is my plea to all of you.  Can we stop identifying with some political ideology and simply start identifying as a human being on planet earth?  Our children depend on us to protect them.  Let’s come together to do just that.

End rant,

Coach Travis Mash

A Letter to Me in High School

A Letter to Me in High School

I’m on the last day of a 10-day family vacation, and I’ve had a lot of time to think.  Everyone needs time to defrag a bit, and it always brings out the best thoughts and ideas.  Right now we are snowed in a hotel in Kingston, Ontario.  Luckily I love my family, or I would be going crazy.  However we just took it as a chance to cuddle and play.  I did however sneak away for a run and workout downstairs, and that’s when I started thinking about my younger self in high school.

I’m sure that a lot of us look back at our lives and contemplate the good and the bad.  To a lot of people high school was their glory days.  Some might say that high school was the best time of their life.  Not me.  I liked high school just fine, but I grew up a lot more in college making it my favorite.

High school for me did land me the best friend that a man could ever ask for, Kevin Jones, so there is that.  We’ve been best friends for 32-years, and I don’t take that time lightly.  Not many people ever get a chance to have a friend like him, so it’s a real treasure to me.  He was a rock to cling to during a rough and trying time for me.  It was a time where I was really struggling to figure out exactly who the heck I was.  I guess in a way we all where, but it was a real struggle for me. 

This blog isn’t about my struggles.  In this short blog I am explaining the things that I would tell the younger me.  My hope is that other young men and women that might read this will learn a thing or two.   It’s also to my young boys that are yet to experience school at all.  I want them to be better young men than their dad was. I mean really our past is useful if we use it to help others.  It kind of makes the bad not so bad.

This letter is also to my classmates.  I think of you all a lot, and some of you deserve apologies from me.  I hope that my boys will grow up respecting women.  I’ve learned that lesson, but it took me about 34-years to learn.  I wish that I could go back to my younger self and tell him, “Women are amazing creatures created by God Himself.  They deserve respect.  They deserve to be heard.  Heck if you put your ego aside, you will learn a thing or two from women like your future wife.  Truth is that most women are smarter than you anyways, so respect them.”

I had a few female friends, but for the most part I was simply looking at them as objects or sport.  Sad really!  I wasted so much time and energy on all the wrong things.  I could have cultivated lasting relationships with some amazing people.  For a small school we had some really smart people.  I would love to have taken them to get coffee and learned more about their hopes and dreams.

I would also have taken more time out to inspire and encourage others.  I was an athlete and one of the popular kids whatever that means.  I wish that I would have sat down with the boys and girls sitting by themselves and just taken the time to listen.  I can look back now and see some of the faces of the loners walking down the halls, and those faces looked sad, lonely, and angry.  What if I had taken the time to just listen?  What if I had simply let them know that someone in the universe cared about them?  Would that have changed their path?  Would that have made them smile?  I will never know.

What if I had stopped people from being bullied?  Look bullying is something that needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.  If you want to stop some of these school shootings, then start by addressing the bullying that goes on.  You know what’s crazy is that there are teachers that know it and sometimes help perpetuate the behavior.  That’s wrong and in my opinion that’s criminal.  Bullying sometimes ruins kids childhoods.  Let me tell you one thing right now. If someone bullies my boys, hell will have no fury like this papa bear.  God help the kid and the parents of the kid.

I just wish that I had taken the time to stop that mess.  If you are an athlete reading this, use your status as an athlete to end bullying starting right now.  Being a star athlete is of no value if you are not using that status to inspire and help others.  I’m telling you that as a three-time World Champion Powerlifter.  If you aren’t doing good with your accomplishments, you are wasting your time.  I wasted a lot of time. 

The high school me had the opportunity to help the athletes on my team that weren’t as driven.  I could have inspired them to be better.  I could have pointed out their other talents that were way cooler than football.  My friend David wasn’t the best football player, but dang it he went to West Point and the last I heard he was working for NASA.  I’d say that’s a lot cooler than scoring a few touchdowns.

Guys you have one chance to do this thing right.  I didn’t and I regret it.  If you are a young man, respect women.  If you are one of the cool kids, take time out of your day to love on and encourage the not so cool kid.  You might very well change the direction of their entire life just by showing them that someone cares.  Don’t tolerate bullying for one second.  I suggest you all take the time to encourage and inspire others every chance you get.

To my old classmates, I miss a lot of you more and more as the years go on.  I think of you all almost every day nowadays.  I wish that I could see Chris, David, Richard, Anthony, and Kevin at least one more time to tell them how much they mean to me.  I wish that I could see Tamar, Celena, Pam, Heather, Hillary, and Shannon to tell them how much I wish that I had just hung out with them, talked to them, and listened to whatever was on their hearts.  I pray that raise my young boys to be much better.

I didn’t name everyone of course, but this is to you all.  Love you guys and gals and I hope to see you someday soon.  To Charles, I will see you on the other side soon Brother.

The more I write, I realize that all of this would have been accomplished if I had come to know Christ a little sooner.  However, Christ  allows us to walk these paths to have stories to share.  I walked a dark path, so hopefully some of you won’t have to.  See you all soon!

P.S.  Tamar are we ever going to have a reunion? 

KJ and I! 32-Years of Friendship!