Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Show. “Don’t worry about showing other people, show yourself.” – Miguel Cabrara.

I like that.

2) End. “In the end everything will be all right; if it’s not all right, it’s not the end.”

3) BMI. Some so-called “enlightened” (no pun intended) companies have begun to use the BMI to determine an employee’s contribution to his/her health insurance premiums. While the public at large (pun intended) will be enlightened (not sure) to learn that size in their case matters, CrossFitters and other strong people will find themselves on the wrong end of a new type of discrimination. (Our Warfighters have faced something similar for a long time)

Here’s my bid: do the same thing with a much more telling metric. Use % Body Weight Fat instead. If you must have some sort of body habitus number use the waist/hip ratio as well. The BMI is a lazy man’s measure which fails to take into account real fitness or health success stories. %BW Fat is just too easy and too inexpensive any more to not use instead.

Heck, you don’t even need to do any math.

4) Retirement. Knowing when to hang it up is hard. I am a retired football player who works with his hands for a living. I will have to retire again, at least from the technical part of my job, sooner than I am prepared either mentally or spiritually to do so. It is the nature of the beast when one has a physical vocation or pursues a physical avocation.

Knowing when, and why, to hang it up is hard though. It’s especially hard when you must choose to retire from one thing in order that you may better pursue another. It’s brutally, bitterly difficult when you decide to hang up your spurs even though you know that you are better than almost anyone else in that arena, but you’ve either slipped below your own acceptable level of performance, or know that you will slip if you devote even a little bit less time and effort to that pursuit. (As an aside, the inflection point when you realize that you have peaked and will never get better, that you must exert as much effort to just stay at your level as you did to get there, is a bitter crossroad in itself).

There are lessons for each of us to learn by observing those who choose to retire rather than be retired. These lessons are all the more poignant if they are accompanied by a narrative provided by the retiree explaining “why” and “why now”. So it is today with my young friend Jul!e F0ucher who has announced her retirement as a Games athlete (www.juliefoucher.com). Embarrassingly blessed with multiple gifts and aware that she has reached a crossroad where she must choose which of those gifts she will emphasize, she has chosen to place her academics first. Moreso, she has graciously told us why.

It is there, in the “why” of which she writes, that the lesson lies. The pursuit of excellence, of a personal peak, bespeaks a certain maturity as well as an understanding of the burden bourn by the gifted, born of their gifts. Jul!e must first “show herself” that she has made a full commitment, met her own standard, so that one day she will be able to retire, again, in the full knowledge that she cheated no one, least of all herself, in the full pursuit of her peak.

“Without heroes we are all plain people, and do not know how far we can go.”

Having already gone farther than almost anyone in one domain, inspiring countless people along the way, Jul!e has retired as a Games competitor and will now fully pursue her career in medicine. Who knows how far she will go; how cool if she takes us all along on this ride, too.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at October 28, 2012 7:25 AM