Stay Present in the Toughest Mile

Stay Present in the Toughest Mile

QIC

Deliverance

AO

The Conspiracy

PAX

• Al Bundy
• Deliverance
• Friar Tuck
• Munger
• Padawan
• Styrofoam

Workout

Warm-o-rama
SSH / Rossy / greatest stretch / old mans 
Thang
400m burpee broad jump

400 meter lunge walk

400m bear crawl 

400m run 
Mary
Some stretching 
COT

Yesterday was my oldest daughter Parker’s 14th birthday, and it reminded me of something.

This workout isn’t really about grit. It’s about the tools we develop to face life without turning away from it.

Fourteen years ago, Parker was born, and things went sideways almost immediately. The nurses were working frantically to get her breathing. I remember standing there taking pictures, and one of the nurses turned to me and said, “You should stop taking pictures.”

I told her, “This is how I deal with situations like this.”

For years, my camera was the thing between me and chaos. As a photojournalist, I learned to stay calm, stay present, and keep working even when what was happening around me was emotional or heartbreaking. I photographed funerals, fires, celebrations, and tragedies. Some of the best and worst days of people’s lives. The camera never made those moments less real. It gave me a way to stay present without turning away.

One of my professors once told me the job of a photojournalist was to be a neutral, loving presence. I’ve thought about that sentence for years because I think that’s really what the camera taught me.

Somewhere along the way, F3 became that same tool.

Every morning we choose to do something difficult, not because suffering is the goal, but because we’re practicing staying present when life gets hard. We’re teaching ourselves that we can keep moving when everything in us wants to quit.

Back in May, I came up about 200 meters short of finishing the World’s Toughest Mile. Today I finished it.

The workout wasn’t the victory. The victory was becoming the kind of person who came back and tried again.

Those are the tools we’re building. Not just for ourselves, but for our families. Our kids are always watching how we respond to life’s hardest moments. If we can teach them anything, I hope it’s this:

Don’t turn away. Stay present. Do the hard thing anyway.