Sadly this trip will take a sudden turn.  Throughout the last few months of training and speaking with people regarding this triathlon several issues have come up.  My goal of getting people to focus on the good we will be doing for the Water Street Mission and the Wounded Warrior Project never materialized.  Instead there has been an idea permeated that this triathlon is all about “Sean” and that is the last thing I wanted.  That coupled with two sicknesses that hampered my training and a recent back injury that forced me out of the gym for an extended period has pushed me to prayerfully cancel my plans to do this triathlon in September.

I want to thank you all for your prayers and for those of you that donated.  For those that did donate I want you to know that you have the option of getting a refund or having your money donated between the two charities.  If I do not hear back within the next two weeks I will split the money evenly between the two charities.

I am sad to have this be the outcome but am thankful to God and look forward to the future.  As our Scripture header says:

Acts 20:24 “However I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me- the task of testifying to the gospel of God’s Grace”

My prayer is that this website has been a small comfort and maybe an encouragement to you to step out in faith and try something great. Roadblocks are a normal part of life and should be used to strengthen our resolve, not crush it. God Bless!

-Sean

If nothing else spending a large amount of my time around dozens of young people has taught me one thing; we are in trouble.  Kids today are sadly wasting away their time and energy playing far too many video games, hobbies, and other assorted entertainment venues and it is showing in the ever expanding waist lines of our kids.  Now don’t get me wrong I love all of those things listed above but too often we see people being reactive in their thoughts and attitudes instead of being proactive.  Sadly it doesn’t stop with the physical but creeps into the emotional and mental as well.  This leads to a rise of what today we call “kidults” or people in their twenties or thirties still living at home, playing video games, not going to school or trying to better themselves.

I can already hear the reactive arguments.  The economy sucks, gyms are expensive, I am too old, my kids don’t listen to me, I hurt my left pinky toe 6 years ago and it hasn’t healed etc.  What a cop out.  As people reading this we should not have the luxury of blaming other things for our misfortunes.  Does the economy suck?  Yes.  Were you born with less athletic ability than your neighbor? Maybe.  At the end of the day your bank account, your family, and your waist line does not care what you were born with they care what you do with what you have been given and how you respond.  Are you being proactive in changing your life or reactive in responding?  As the old saying goes “it is cheaper to build a fence at the top of a hill then a hospital at the bottom”

Being proactive in our thoughts, actions, and attitudes enables us to better effectively live our lives and be better more fit people.  It is the first habit of highly successful people from Stephen Covey’s bestselling book by the same name and it has helped me succeed in areas of my life as well.  Being proactive with our finances and having a monthly budget plan will help us better manage our money instead of just spending whatever we want and then praying we can make it till next month.  Being proactive in our fitness will keep us healthy, strong, and ready to respond to whatever life throws at us and will set us up for success in the future.

Finally and probably most importantly it will set an example for our sons and daughters to be proactive in every area of their life and run against the current culture.  Important ideas such as sacrifice, duty, honor, delayed gratification, and hard work are what made our country great and what makes us successful people.  My favorite example of this comes from a man named Ben Carson.

Ben Carson is the current head of Johns Hopkins Pediatric surgery and is one of the world’s greatest physician’s.  But he was born into poverty and abandoned by his father.  His mother seeing what was happening to the rest of the neighborhood boys forced her two sons to go to the public library and bring home several books a month to read.  Then she required they write her book reports on what they had read.  Interestingly she herself couldn’t read!  She would simply highlight random parts and scribble certain things to keep her boys guessing.  Because of this proactive idea her son Ben Carson credits her for helping him succeed and starting a lifelong habit that enabled him to succeed at the highest level.

We can do the same.  We can get out their with our families and find something physically challenging that will help us lose weight, get stronger, be faster and leave a better legacy for our children.  We can ignore the reactive quick fix easy solutions our society tells us and do the work, make it happen, and be better off for it!

-Sean

I apologize for the lack of posts in the last 2 weeks life has been quite hectic with work and also my daughters first birthday this weekend.  So that means more stress and busyness to an already busy life.  How does this affect training?  Volume has decreased but intensity needs to increase!  One of the greatest lies that people buy into when they start training for weight loss or endurance sports is that they need to do long slow distance training.  LSD requires hours and hours of exercise at a moderate intensity to achieve certain goals.  While this technique can be affect and I have used it in the past I have found that a separate training program works better.

HIIT or High Intensity Interval Training has proven by far the bane of my existence.  Instead of spending hours exercising a person will increase their intensity level for shorter periods of time.  This includes wonderful items such as sprinting, interval runs at designated paces, doing as many pushups/situp/etc in a given time you can then recovering and repeating the gruesome process.  Doing this will more then likely introduce you to pukey the clown.

Just this past Friday we had some people from our church over to the “Glass House of Pain” for a fun workout where halfway through the high school student went outside and met pukey face to face.  But he was tough and after a small break came back and finished the workout.  Most people look at this and think “that’s horrible or unsafe or wrong”  but I would argue the opposite.

In that moment this student learned to persevere through hard circumstances to complete his task.  And because of that he was stronger both mentally and physically. Isn’t that the point of exercising to get better at something?  For a person with limited time but with goals to accomplish high intensity training serves my purposes and enables me to have a better level of fitness.  I can also attest to the overall fitness level I have achieved through both endurance and strength using crossfit and other biking/running methods combined with HIIT.  For example my stats are:

6ft1 180 lbs
Bench: 205
Back Squat: 265 (yes I have a really weak squat)
Deadlift: 360
Power Clean: 225
Max pullups: 22
5k: 21 minutes
10K: 44 minutes

And so far I have managed to remain injury free this training cycle due to the combined weight training and running program.  So if you want to improve your level of fitness and do so in a short period of time I would recommend checking out www.crossfit.com  and looking in their program.  WARNING!  Start slow do lots of stretching and warmup exercises before you jump right in or you will injure yourself.

Till next time….GO Hard or Go Home.

-Sean

PS:  If your interested in donating to an awesome cause check out our donation page and click on wsm.org  to learn about the mission we are supporting in Lancaster.  They serve thousands of people a year and could use our help

Today is my daughters 1 year and 9 month birthday!  Wait what?  Who celebrates that?  Well we believe strongly that life begins at conception which would make our beautiful baby girl 1 year and 9 months old today and man what a race it has been!  I want to stress a lot during the upcoming year is that my priorities will always be to family first.  While I may fail at this my goal will always be to honor and serve my wife then my daughter.

Too many people make the mistake of putting their career or goals ahead of their family or if they do put their family first they make the mistake of putting the kids first over their spouse.  Why is this a mistake you ask?  I could bore you with statistics on how the divorce rate in America hovers near 50% or the fact that the majority of our kids are growing up in single or mixed family homes but instead I will ask this; do you feel alive and fulfilled in your marriage life?  If not there needs to be some adjustments made.  Your spouse is the person you have committed your life to.  Not your job.  Not your kids even but your wife.  After the kids turn 18  and move out (hopefully!)  the suction noise from your wallet should cease a small amount and then you turn to the person you will spend (hopefully!) the rest of your life with.  How will that person feel if they have been neglected, shunned, and unloved for the past 20 years?

My challenge is this.  Not all of us are going to be competing in Ironman triathlons because not all of us are that brain dead.  But most of us have jobs (well maybe not in this economy ):  and most of us have families.  Leaving the legacy of a strong healthy family is the most important race we all run together.  So make sure you “keep the main thing the main thing” and focus first on your spouse and then your family.  How do I build a strong family and run the race well?

Joshua 24:15 But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

I firmly believe the best way to strengthen your family, build a legacy that lasts and to run the race of life well is to serve the Lord with everything you have and follow His example.  For those of you younger or unwed readers who are scared of this race I would encourage you to read this article and look forward to one of the greatest races you will ever run.  Enjoy!

 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/26/man-top-5-reasons-to-grow-up-and-get-married/

-Sean

This is part two regarding the planning needed for successfully completing my Ironman Triathlon or in my opinion being more successful in our everyday life.  As people we are all granted 24 hours a day (sound familiar) to accomplish whatever tasks life has placed before us.  The Bible talks about this very clearly about this;

Luke 14:28 For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?

Ephesians 5:15-17 Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

Now both of these passages in context are referring to counting the cost of being a disciple of Jesus(Luke 14) and living like wise men/women in an evil world.  I like these passages because it is a call to be prepared and be wise in the things we undertake and the way we live our lives.

So for me personally in order to fulfill my duties as a Husband, Father, Pastor, Service member, and then a Triathlete this required me to reevaluate my schedules.  First in order to be properly prepared for my triathlon I need to start sacrificing lunch times and early mornings in order to accomplish the dreaded TWO A DAYS!  For example my workout schedule for today is:

Lunch: 115# shoulder press.  3 reps on the minute for 10 minutes.  Followed by 75# Power Snatch 75 reps for time.  The # symbol denotes the amount of total weight being used

Before Dinner: 3 mile tempo hill run.

Tomorrow will be a morning workout of a 20 minute AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) of 10 115# push presses, 10 Kettle bell swings at 53# and 10 Box jumps followed by an afternoon/evening 10 mile Bike time trial.  A time trial consisting of a 10 minute warm up followed by finishing the 10 miles as quickly as possible.

Typically my facial expression during time trials falls somewhere between 5-6.

In order to facilitate proper time management skills I have weeded out unnecessary time wasters.  Things such as Facebook  playing games, watching TV etc will be dwindled down in order to facilitate my goals.  Now are these things necessarily bad?  No but when we as people spend more time watching TV or playing games instead of cooking delicious healthy meals, exercising or spending valuable face time with our families these areas of our life suffer.

So I would encourage anyone that reads these whether you are a triathlete, weight lifter, spouse or just someone looking to succeed in life do yourself a favor and sit down and evaluate how you spend your time.  Really sit down and calculate it out and then decide whether or not the things you spend the most time on are honoring God, making your family stronger, or actually making your life better.  Then figure out what to change and DO IT!  Because if nothing changes, well then nothing changes!

-Sean

PS:  Just a warning.  Even the best and most carefully laid plans sometimes fail.  Just look at our feline friend above.  Don’t let that discourage you.  Get back up, do the work, and make the changes necessary to succeed.

So I have been receiving a lot of questions regarding how a full time pastor, part time air national guard sergeant, full time husband, father of an infant and new home owner can possibly fit in enough training to be able to complete an Ironman triathlon.  The answer is actually quite simple folks and for this I do have to thank my church family at Grace Church at Willow Valley for the additional help.

Many people claim “I just don’t have enough time” which is basically the most common excuse.  Interestingly enough as human beings we are all granted the exact same amount of time: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  How we subdivide that time will determine what we do or do not accomplish.  As the old saying goes “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”  It is crucial that as a human being you properly plan out your days to make the most of every opportunity.

So along with proper planning comes a having a proper plan.  There are many different ideas when it comes to how to train for races such as these but for someone like me who does not have 30-40 hours a week to devote to training my favorite plan is based off of the website www.crossfitendurance.com

Crossfit Endurance is a training program that breaks the traditional mold of what runners and triathletes call LSD (no we really do these races without drugs) or Long Slow Distance training which basically emcompasses hundreds of hours of long slow runs and rides.  CRE on the other hand encorporates a completely different approch which has the trainee doing lots of interval, speed work with a large focus on HEAVY weight lifting and Stength/Conditioning.  This was the program I used to complete my half ironman and was quite pleased with how it fit into my schedule.  By doing shorter but extremely intense workouts coupled at various times with a focus on building a strength base of olympic weight lifting, gymnastics, etc athletes have shown to resist injury much better AND get amazing results in shorter time.  Sounds great right?

So that is the main training program I will be following in order to accomplish this task.  If your interested in what they do go on over and check their website out.  I am also blessed to have a church family that will allow me to take an hour here or there during the week to go workout.  That will prove to be a huge blessing.

Lastly the biggest help to my home life will be this guy:

This is an indoor cycling roller and it will keep me within talking distance of my family as I spend large amounts of time on it every week.  While not perfect it will allow me to accomplish my primary goal of being a great husband/father and finishing this race.  Hopefully though I won’t have too many of these issues while I train

-Sean

First week of training in the books and I managed to get in 3 miles of running and a few lifting sessions.  Why?  The Flu!  But spirits are high and im looking forward to getting back to my full training schedule.  In the meantime for those of you who are interested there are some things you can do while sick to maintain your fitness levels.

Training while sick:

1. DO workout!  Don’t think just because your sick that takes training off the books.  You must temper your training however so that your body has adequate time to recover.  Light cardio, strength sessions and lots of stretching/yoga can actually aid in your recovery.

2. DON’T use this as an excuse to pig out.  (Full disclosure im 100% guilty)  It is easy to start eating all the nasty food you can get your hands on to make yourself feel better but resist the urge at all costs.

3.  EASE back into your training schedule.  You hopefully took a few days off so be mindful of injuries as you jump back into training.

8 months and counting till the race.  I am going to be checking out the race course and making adjustments as needed.  We currently have 3 miles sponsored out of 280 so if you are interested in sponsoring a mile or two or hundred let me know.

-Sean
PS:  Thanks for all the wounded warriors out there.  You work through a lot more then just illness on a daily basis.

Greetings and welcome to my new website!  This is the first of many posts regarding my recently announced intention to do an Ironman triathlon in September of 2013 to raise money for two great charities: The Wounded Warrior Project & Water Street Mission in Lancaster County PA.

This site is brand new but will be filled up shortly with information regarding training, my personal thoughts, challenges, and other information regarding the race, the charities themselves and devotions on why someone would take on such a crazy task.  Take some time to look through it and maybe even join me in this monumental task of both completing this race and raising  money for these charities and making a difference in our community.

I recently preached at our church on two very significant passages from the Bible;

John 10:10 “The thief comes to steal kill and destroy but I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.”

Ephesians 5:14-17 “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead,and Christ will shine on you.”Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.  Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is”

In the first passage of Scripture we have Jesus reminding us why He came  that we have a full life in Him.  Not a partial life, not a good life, but a full life and this can only be found in Him.

The second passage is calling to those of us who don’t know Jesus to wake up and become alive because without Christ we are spiritually dead and physically we cannot experience everything this life has to offer.

So I decided this coming year to make the most of every opportunity in this evil world and bring some good to it.  Donations to charities are down, people are struggling under the weight of a weak economy and they need help.  Both in the spiritual form and in the physical.  So I decided to do something about it.  I will train my body, my mind, and my soul to complete this task and make an impact in my community and in the lives of those around me.

Want to join me in this task? Check out the links to see how you can. Want to experience the full life that Jesus promised?  Check out this link for more information on experiencing the abundant life Jesus promised http://www.gotquestions.org/become-a-Christian.html

Thank you for coming and please check back often,  This is going to be one crazy ride!

-Sean