I was good at school, but I wasn’t a good student.
I had three talents. I could absorb information, take tests, and I liked to please adults. Turns out those are pretty much what’s required to be good at school. Sadly, they have little in common with actual learning.
As long as I got “A’s” everyone was happy, so school became a competition in which an “A” represented the prize. I skimmed the reading and learned to sift efficiently what would be asked on exams.
High school valedictorian, Phi Kappa Phi in college, and at age 22 I’d accumulated a bunch of knowledge and an honors diploma but not much real education.
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Last Friday my bike’s odometer turned over 200 miles for 2014. That’s not a lot of miles for a month, but I’m an old guy in a cold garage, on the trainer, staring at the same patch of unfinished drywall.
And you’re wondering how in the world stationary handcycling and poor study habits are related. My point is: You can’t cram 200 miles of training into a few days at the end of the month.
Training, like real learning, happens along the way as part of life.
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I got grades but I never learned how to enjoy learning…results without training. We want the six-pack abs, but we resent the workout, so we buy the diet books and the miracle machines that’ll make it easier. We live for the weekend while we wish away the other five days.
We go to work to get the money to buy the food to give us the strength to go to work to get the money to buy the food to give us the strength…so we can take a two-week vacation that somehow makes it all worthwhile?
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Whatever we’re doing every day is who we are and what we’re becoming and where we’re going.
If we’re rushing around and chasing every dollar and saying we’ll exercise, rest, and talk to God later, that’s what we’re training for.
If we build in time most days for love and kindness and sit-ups, that’s what we’re training for. But we can’t cram for that stuff, or put it off until the weekends or use the Cliff-notes.
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We’re talking to lots of folks these days about doing FRONT RANGE FREEDOM TOUR ’14, so I’ll use it as an example. If you’ve never done something like that before, it sounds really hard.
The plain truth is just about anyone can do this ride if they train. Just about anyone can raise the funds to support the HOME OF HOPE if they make it a part of their routine for the next five months.
But you can’t cram the training into the last two weeks before the ride. You get to make cranking and fundraising what you do as part of life.
And it’s not about riding bikes. I learned that training for something that matters, whatever it is, is a lot more rewarding than looking for shortcuts and chasing results.
What are you training for?
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