Day 8 of 75 Hard Challenge Round 2

Hello all,

I’ve been working hard, but today started out sucky. My wife has been awesome through both challenges and we’ve been spending more great time together this week then we have in a long time.

But today started out wonderfully until I got to the gym. My arms are still killing me from arm wrestling over a week ago. Yes I think I tore part of my tendon. At least it isn’t really bad, but was incredibly painful after trying to bench this morning.

I called my sister, the nurse, professional athlete, and trainer for help. Of course it’s an ice and Motrin problem that will heal on it’s own after time… lots more time then I want it to take. So I’ll be waiting another week or two before I can hit the weights at all. Yuck. To me that’s depressing, but now is my opportunity to do more cardio and work on that.

I need to spend more time outdoors to get more use to the heat so it really is a good thing (I’m looking at the positive side of this), and in a couple weeks I’ll be back good as new.

Other then that, I’m branching out and getting the kid involved. Today I started him on journalling every morning again. When I told him we would do it together he didn’t fight me on it at all. So I was happy to hear about that. We’ll see how it goes in the upcoming weeks.

But this is one of the tests. Can I do this and improve the world for the people around me as I go? Of course most of us don’t want to take the time to journal in the morning (and that’s why I use The 5-Minute Journal) but I can look back at my life and when I take the time it makes the day better. I’m trying to stack those happy good days back-to-back for the rest of my life. Now that I’m older it seems that I actually have to do a couple hours of work per day on myself to keep those good days coming.

Case in point for good days, is today. My arms hurt so badly when I gave up the work out I could barely move at all. Driving home was painful. You know you can’t cry in the gym, but I wanted to cry it was so painful. With ice and Motrin, I feel so much better but still hurt.

Even after all that horrible pain, not getting the workout done I wanted (weights where 30 minutes before I gave that up and did an elliptical machine for 15 minutes), and having my sister tell me the hard truth (no weights for the next couple weeks), today is still going to be a good day. I’m doing the work on myself so that I can get things done, be productive, happy, and dependable.

How about you? How is your day going? Do you want to have good days no matter what? They you need to work on yourself. The 75 Hard Challenge is a great place to start. You can win the war against yourself and develop the self discipline, internal fortitude, and grit to do anything by starting with this challenge.

Keeping the ball moving forward in my life is why I started doing the challenge a second time after completing it successfully the first time. And honestly, it looks like I will be doing a 75 Day Challenge four times a year to keep myself in top shape both mentally and physically.

So how about you? Can you finish the challenge? Have you already started? For those of you that think it’s easy, put your money where your mouth is and do the challenge.

75 Hard I will Conquer,

Ben Branam