How to Climb Hills better - Don't be a Hater - like it, love it, want some more of it!

I used to think that mental attitude, PMA was a very metaphysical thing and that when you pursued difficult endeavors it was like mind over matter.  In other words simply willing your body to go to that next level.

While there is something to be said for that idea, it is only one piece of the puzzle.

Mental Game Coach John Ellsworth says - train your mind to focus on productive thought

Up your mental game with Coach John

What I do know from my experience is that I can learn to love just about anything at this point in my life by no longer giving in to "being a hater"

I think most of us have probably been at a point in our life where, we hated work, no matter what it was.  House work, home work, doing the dishes, football practice, reading, just about anything that does not elicit instant reward with out going through a lot of effort.

Not like the the things that come easy  in life.  Such as Eating ice cream, sleeping, watching TV, playing most games, you get the idea

I was no different, growing up I wanted to play football, but hated the practices and the conditioning that was required as a prerequisite.  I loved to have money, but hated almost every minute of what ever I had to do to earn it,  whether it was delivering newspapers, working in my parents office, putting up hay at the horse barn, or my various food service jobs.  I was a prisoner of not knowing how to apply the principle of   love conquers all. 

Then when I was about 22 a funny thing happened.  One day I just woke up and realized, that I was going to have to work the rest of my life and there was simply no way around it. 

I made up my mind right then, that I was just going to make the best of my job work hard and try to make the days go by as fast as possible.  

I was working my way through my final year of college and had just been married, so I had a pretty full schedule.  I spent my days working for a tree service dragging and chipping brush, plus using a chain saw and at night was doing my final year at Purdue.

A funny thing happened on the way to graduation.  I not only started looking forward to going to work, through rain and sleet and dark of night, but I also started to love the work that I was putting into studying.   I thought for a long time that this conscious decision to love my job was a one trick pony that only applied to my employment and did not at the time realize what had actually happened.  All I knew until recently was that I loved to work no matter what kind of job I had, I could get up, not dread going and work all day almost without ever watching a clock. I loved to study loved to learn and was constantly teaching myself new things and didn’t put the 2 together

 A few years later, my wife picked up bodybuilding as a hobby.  I had lifted weights in High School because I had to if I wanted to be on the football team, but I had never ever enjoyed it.  It was a lot of work and it hurt.

But I wanted to spend time with my wife and do things that she enjoyed, so I joined the gym with her.  I started out slow, but went to the gym very consistently and before long, I was not only getting great results, I was actually looking forward to going to the gym.  In fact, this was the only thing that would actually make me watch the clock at work, because I could not wait to get to the gym and put my self into serious pain and muscle burn.  I even learned to enjoy the muscular soreness that would follow hard workouts.  I thought to myself,,, this is weird and I would not have believed it,  had it not actually happened to me.

 For a long time, I thought this must be like drinking black coffee or beer.  It was just something that you had to develop a taste for.

Then 4 years ago, I started bicycle riding.   I was only doing this for a Juvenile diabetes fundraising ride and I planned to only do it for a year.  I had never liked bicycle riding all that much in the past, but I bought a decent bike, had the fortunate accident of having my speedometer set to kilometers thought I was riding really far and fast and was having a ball.

Once again, I made a love connection.   I sort of realized what had happened but still was not quite understanding the process of what was causing me to love things that I had previously hated and all of the pain or discomfort that is associated with them

 That was when the skies opened up and I had my epiphany at Indiana Urology  but I was sitting in the waiting room and I saw this Runners World magazine and on the cover I noticed an article called “Learn to love Running”  I was intrigued. I had always passionately hated running.

So I read the article and the upshot was that the trick to learning to love running was to look forward to your runs, don’t work to hard at first and your body will start a hormonal surge of chemicals called endorphins.

Our bodies use these chemicals to help us to adapt to stressfull and painful situations for the purpose of survival, and as a side effect can cause you to look forward to and actually enjoy those situation. - WOW!!

A light bulb lit above my head and all of a sudden the mystery was revealed. It’s the endorphins and they are triggered by love. I thought what the heck, I’ve always hated running, but I really need to give this a try. If it was possible to trick myself into liking something that I had previously disliked, in order to improve my health, I might not only be on to something, but what a great thing to be able to share with others if I could teach them to do the same.

Guess what?  It worked and now I feel like I can’t live without running.  I have applied the same principle to swimming with the same result.  I believe that I can do this with anything.

My next step is to share this with others, who for one reason or another hate their job, want to get in shape. Want to learn how to play musical instrument, want an education

But hate the work involved to get what they want.   The list goes on.  It literally can work for anything that you currently hate.  Ask anyone who I coach or who rides with me.  Don't say I hate hills or you will get corrected!  You love hills and you need to tell your body that so that it can get with the program.

This principle can be applied to just about any process that is required to reach an objective. In fact the best way to reach any objective no matter how large is to learn to love the process that will get you there!
 

 This is not nano tech people the Beatles really got this one right , “ All you need is love”

 Learn to love and you can do the impossible, Through Love, I can now conquer all things, at least the mundane ones.
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I live to help you learn to  love all things cycling!

Michael