Monday 30 March 2015

Malaria, getting down and feeling sorry

I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to name my week this week, "a toughie". Although it didn't consist of thousands of kilometers on a bicycle over harsh terrain amongst aggressive Ethiopians or spells of diarrhea while baking in the African sun every day, it was still a tough week.

The Cricket World Cup loss was felt by every single South African with half a heart. To watch AB and the boys break down on the field showed just how much they had put into this campaign. The pressure must have been tremendous and the tears rolling of their cheeks at the end, left me a miserable wreck as well.

I had to rush to the hospital after the cricket to get some emergency Malaria tests done after I showed all the symptoms of Africa's biggest killer. I didn't feel worried, I just felt like death. I have never experienced headaches like i have in this past week. 

So you can say I felt pretty sorry for myself this week. It was another week of no training which really depressed me even more. As some of you read this I am sure you can relate to having a bad week, but then weekend arrived and suddenly I realized I needed to catch a wake up.

I had two speaking arrangements organized yet wasn't feeling to inspired. It was easy to be inspired on a bicycle, away from the daily distractions that have invaded our lives, but to be inspired back home was a different story all together. I pulled away from people, stopped answering my phone and emails and just went back to my simple way of living. I finished the books I was reading and started to draw inspiration from the bible characters epic stories of war and triumph. I slowly started to drag myself out of my miserable rotten thinking. 

We all have these moments, and the fact that life gets so busy just forces us to put off things that are really important, like our lives and our happiness. We can't make a difference in a broken world if we don't love ourselves and spend some time each week working things out, reading or praying. You see on the bicycle this became easy for me, but back home, the fast pace of the world pushed my priorities aside.

I made a decision to be excited and proud of the life I have been called to live. I stepped on stage three times this week, alive and excited about the stories I had been blessed with to tell. I felt really inspired just to heard the feed back and the sort of comments that landed in my inbox this morning, things like, "Im moved, I want to be a better husband," "I want to make a difference," "I want to be the best I can be," "I want to live my life."

I don't know who was moved more this week, the people who listened to my stories or me, the bicycle adventurer, coach and friend. 

"Positive or negative, we are the captain of our thoughts. When you start to realize that, your daily thinking starts to change. We chose our thoughts, nobody else."
What do you chose?

Wednesday 18 March 2015

I guess its time

Home, safe, sound and letting it all sink in. Its been a crazy couple of weeks at home with family sickness, my own illness and just recently the death of a young man I had coached last year.



It was so difficult to blog while I was away, I hardly had a connection anywhere. In the epic race, get up, ride, eat sleep do it all again, sometimes I just didn't have the energy to pour out my heart to a phone screen. 

One thing that really got to me though was the fact that when I got home everybody wanted to hear the story about an aggressive arab holding a knife to my neck. This was the only really story that I shared on the road and to think...its definitely not the best one. So I'm so excited to sit down and finally get the story on paper. 

Its going to be a long process and a patient one, in which I will dive deep into my mind and heart and draw out the journey in the best way I know how. 
The journey has begun, again!

Your opinion matters less than the story...

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