When life shits on you, stay the course

Life sometimes takes a shit on you.

There, let's get the knowledge bombs out of the way early.

The past week and a half was not made up of beautiful hotel rooms filled with hot women giving me long and superlative blowjobs.

Life is not always this pleasant 

This is by no means a pity party or cry fest.  Everyone has weeks like this.  Where life just decides that well, "I've been nice to you long enough at this juncture and I think it's about time I drop some tremendous shits on you."

It happens.  It's going to happen.  There is no periodization involved in life.  You wake up, and live it, and make decisions every day about how you're going to deal with whatever is thrown at you.  Sometimes you make a "good job" decision and sometimes you make a "well, that'll hurt later" decision.

Or sometimes you just wake up to things that are going to wreck your shit for a while, and you don't have a lot of control over that.  If your mom/dad/spouse/child/best friend gets killed you're going to be thrown into the emotional abyss and it's perfectly ok to take your time to mourn out of that.

For those of us that are lifers, we generally still want to train.  It gives us an outlet or a reprieve from the onslaught.  However I have found at times, that I couldn't concentrate on training when something was weighing very heavily on me.  The past week or so was very much like that.  I still had good training sessions, however my thoughts were generally someplace else.

Some times you can turn the shit storms off long enough for training, and some times you can't.  My suggestion when this happens is to do your best to NOT deviate from your diet and training.  Some folks will have no problem with this, and some will struggle with it mightily.

The main reason I suggest sticking to your plan is because after the shit storm clears, and the sunshine and BJ's come back out, if you totally derailed your shit you're going to feel pretty disgusted with yourself for allowing the train to come off the rails.  I have seen this time and time again.  If there is one thing you can do to help speed the transition back into "happy time" it's knowing you were able to stay the course when things were difficult.  Will it be hard?  Of course it will.  If it is something that is going to be life changing, then trying to maintain a semblance of consistency in some area in your life, will in fact help keep some satisfaction and balance in there.

A counterbalance to the shit storms

One of the best things about programming low like I've been talking about so much lately, is that even when you're feeling shitty you can still get the required work in, and know that you're still inching forward in that particular area of your life.  I'm not saying it will eliminate the problems of whatever you are going through, however just knowing you have something in your life that is moving in a positive direction can be helpful when you will like everything else is coming down around you.

Besides, emerging from one of life's resurrections jacked and tan is never a bad thing.

For those of you that are struggling to stay the course right now, put your chin down and go to work and know that eventually these struggles will pass.  Make sure you haven't done something you'll be disappointed in yourself over when they do.