Fitness Freedom and The TransAlp Challenge

By CEO Robert Forster, PT

The desire to improve your fitness can come from a variety of motivations. You might want to lead a more active lifestyle, overcome chronic joint pain or simply look and feel better. Often times health issues can be the most urgent motivator following bad news from a recent visit to the doctors office, or when you start to see a parent’s health decline and realize your genetic predisposition to disease. Whatever the reason, we all need a goal to change our behavior and the bigger the cost of failure the more likely we are to stay on track. When the doctor tells you will likely develop diabetes or heart disease if you don’t change your diet and exercise habits or your spouse says your getting a little flabby we tend to stay the course of our fitness endeavors. For athletes and those who have been actively training fitness for years and already know how good it feels to be fit we need to continually set new goals to keep motivation high and stay the course. For some friends and I, it’s longer and harder athletic events that, as we say, “keeps us out of the bars at night and gets us out of bed in the mornings to train”. Whether it be competing at the Masters National Wrestling Championships, or the Leadville 100 mile mountain bike race, if you don’t train hard and smart, you can be sure when the whistle blows or the starters gun goes off, it’s gonna hurt! Even if you do complete all your training one friend astutely noted waiting for the event to begin is like waiting for daddy to come home and give you a beating. As good as you feel there in peak condition you know over the next few hours or days you will suffer. These events make you dig deep and find the inner strength needed to push yourself beyond what you thought capable. This year it was The TransAlp Challenge bicycle race that served to get us put of bed on cold dark mornings all winter and be sure we were up for the task come June in Austria. The TransAlp Challenge is a Whatever the reason we first have to get passed the mental resistance to get moving and to keep at it we must adopt a long term mindset that this time it’s for life.

Getting Started: Overcome Inertia

The tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in straight line motion to stay in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.