Well I’m Lombard’s newest Firefighter! Thanks to everyone who has been supporting me in this process…You know who you are
I’m Kind of starting to Freak out!
PLEASE WATCH FROM 0:00-0:25
What is true strength? For the longest time I thought strength was binging in control of your emotions. Keeping everything enclosed so the world wont see what you are going through. Putting on a front that says everything is ok and you are fine even when the world knows that things are bad. I thought being strong was having others not see you struggle in the face of adversity, being solid like a rock. But the more I have been thinking, and the more I have watched the men that I consider strong the more flawed this view becomes. As I sit and watch the men that I want to be it’s not the ones who act like nothing is wrong, it’s not the ones who act like they have it all together that I admire. It’s the ones who will stand in the face of adversity with tears in the eyes and proclaim to all the world that you may beat me down, but I will never give up. You can throw your best punches, but I will move forward and the more you see the pain and the hurt on my face the more I will come. That’s the strength that I want to strive for.
I think this buzz-word concept is a strange one. Because there’s no playing around when it comes to hard training. Hard training isn’t a game. It’s a battle. Because what is always at stake is your life!
For people that don’t take training seriously… that’s a game. You know the types. Those you see in and out of the gym balancing on bosu balls and using their spinning cycles as a couch to watch tv- and as a perch to spy for real LIVE BREATHING girls walking around! The locker talkers. And I’m not limiting this to “trainees.” I went into my campus gym a couple of months ago. Great facility and brand spanking new, but something was missing… a power rack.
When I asked the “trainer” behind the counter why they didn’t have one he looked at me like I was crazy. “A what?” he said completely bewildered. “You know,” I tried to break it down for him: “It has four posts, and safety bars. You use it to safely do squats, benches, rack deadlifts, and pretty much everything else.” “Oh,” he said still questioning himself. “We’ve got one of those.” And he pointed me at a Smith machine!
This kind of “game” mentality is akin to playing paintball. Sure it might hurt a little, but you’re around friends and you KNOW you’re walking off the field no matter how much you get hit.
This is not hard training. Hard training involves something deeper. The KNOWLEDGE that you CAN’T mess up. The knowledge that you ARE fighting for your life. You are lifting that weight and eating right because it sustains your life! Because you don’t want to be a fat pig outside of the gym. Because you don’t want to be crushed by that ton of iron inside the gym.
Because you don’t want the collateral damage of cluster bombing yourself with heart attacks, obesity, cancer, emphysema, and several other nasties. Because you want to roll through the streets confident with a Sherman tank, not wheezing atop a moped. And to those who say it is a game, because you can have fun. Sure. You can have fun. You should have fun.
If this stuff doesn’t excite you, or you’re doing it to prove something to SOMEONE ELSE, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. You do it for you. To know you can continue to press on. To know that you can take the hill, and have the courage to fly in the face of society’s heavy machine gun fire of dirty living, drugs, and shitty food all around you. But you are courageous to know that you WONT get hit. Because you are a friggin’ superhero. You are bulletproof.
What if there’s an emergency and you have to save someone else’s life- OR your own! Then will you think it’s all a game? You are Captain America in battle. Your own Hulk or Superman. You CAN bounce back.
And you can do it because you are strong. And nothing will stop you or hold you back from that. The bodybuilders, the strongmen, the power lifters, the athletes, the gym rats. These are the superheroes. And these are the soldiers of the T-Nation army. And you know what…
they’ll win the battle. Because everyone else refuses to fight.
It”s true for me…Is it true for you?
What drives you? What makes you “you”. I know in my life it has always been that driving force to be important. To have someone say they are better because of me. That my life made them who they are. But why? Why do I need this. I was talking to a really close friend a couple weeks ago and she said to me “Greg, when I’m old I want to know i lived life well, with no regrets. I don’t want any do overs…I want to know I made a diffrence.” This got me thinking, you see this freind and I we have like our own languge. We have things we say to each other that make people look at us and go “What are they talking about?” Things we say to each other if we hear the other complaining, things to say just as a pick me up and things just to laugh. But one of our sayings has to do with regrets, and the truth is, my life is full of them. Moments that I want a redo in, moments that I wish i could take back what I did or said. I would love to say they are all in the distant past, but the truth is they go all the way up to last night. So how do we get there? When can we honestly feel good about what we did no matter how the situation might turn out? I don’t know but I wish I did. Let me go back a little bit to what I said earlier about wanting to be remember. All my life I have looked up to people who have been remembered through out history. People that seem to have that one defining moment in time where everyone looks back and says “That’s how they will be remembered!” My whole life I have lived for this momemt, lived for a situation to shine where people would say “That’s why he is here, thats what he was called to do!” But did these situations happend by chance to these people? Did they set our looking for them? Or did it happen because of who they are, how they lived there life. Is the big picture of your life one defining moment? Or is it all the little snap shots that when people look back they see and say “That is who they are because of all of those moments” Are these people remembered because of that one moment? Or because how they lived their life set them up for that chance, that chance for everyone to see. Like I said my entire life I have been living for that one moment, when people siil stand up and say one day “That was Greg!” But I keep letting the little snap shots slip by. I know this kid that over the last year the two of us have gotten extremly close. I don’t know how or why, it just happened, I look back and see that in the beginning I wasn’t trying, i wasn’t trying to be someone to this kid, I wasn’t trying to be their hero, I was just being Greg, just loving the crap out of them. They didn’t need me every second of everyday, but they knew where to go when they did need someone. But then the worst thing that could happen, happened. They told me I was important, they told me I was their hero. And ever since then I have forgotten what made our friendship great, I forgot the little things that made us the partners in crime we were. Every moment I tried to live up to this expectation of what they saw in me, tried to always say the right thing, sound smart, sound deep, tell them how much I loved them whenever I could, Be there all the time and try to fix everything when sometimes they needed to do it on their own. It didn’t mean I didn’t love them anyless, but I wasn’t letting them grow, I was trying to shelter and fix everything. But thats not what made us close, not what made us family. I forgot to laugh with them, and cry with them, joke with them and show my love to them. I started being everything they didn’t need. This kid didn’t want me to act like their hero, they just wanted me to be there hero, and the hero was just Greg. And now, well I don’t know now, I don’t know what I am to this kid anymore, I know I’m not there person I started out to be, I know I changed because I stated to act and try to be someone to them instead of just being Greg. I told you eariler that in my life there are lots of things that I regret, that I want a redo in. I lied, there is only one. I want a redo, I want to start over, and I want to be Greg again, to laugh with you and cry with you. I realized now that I have to work on the little snap shots. It doesn’t matter who it think I am, or who I want to be. What matters is how I live my life now, to truly live with no regrets, to trully want no do-overs.
And I’d give up forever to touch you
‘Cause I know that you feel me somehow
You’re the closest to heaven that I’ll ever be
And I don’t want to go home right now
And all I can taste is this moment
And all I can breathe is your life
‘Cause sooner or later it’s over
I just don’t want to miss you tonight
And I don’t want the world to see me
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am
And you can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming
Or the moment of truth in your lies
When everything feels like the movies
Yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive
And I don’t want the world to see me
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am
And I don’t want the world to see me
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am
And I don’t want the world to see me
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am
I just want you to know who I am
I think it’s coming back again
And I can’t fake the way I feel inside
I don’t want you
I don’t need you
You’ve burned me once, but you won’t burn me again
Why do we do it…Let the world tell us who we are to be, how we will act, live…All my life all I have ever wanted to do is make a diffrence, to be something more than just “living”…Some where through the years I stopped believing I could do it…I still have the dream, but not the faith, faith in myself that I have the power for more. The power to be something to someone…To make a diffrence. I listen to the lies that are whispered in my ear everynight…and now, now I believe them. I see myself the way they wanted me to be seen, as broken, unusable, and destined for failure…I love everything about my life, my wife, my family and friends…but somewhere I started to believe the lies he told me that they don’t love me…That their love is only based on how much i suscessed…how important I become…On what I do in this world. Instead of waking up everyday and enjoying another day God has given me, I look at it as a task…as simply I made it through yesterday, what can I do today that will prove myself to everyone I love, prove myself to me. And when I fall, I fall hard and I fall far…How could I not, look at how high i have set the unreachable bar for myself, and whats worse is everytime I fall, I move the bar higher so I can try to make it right, to do extra to prove myself…I just fell hard early this week and I put the Bar back up yesterday…It looks even higher.
