The Hard Routine

My fellow warriors,

A few words to wrap up the “Holiday Challenge” that we finished 2011 with and then, more than a few words in a call to arms for the first challenge of 2012!

We just finished the “Holiday Challenge” and had excellent results. My stated purpose for the challenge was to get everyone to set a goal in order to stay focused during one of the most challenging times of the year. The result would be continued progress rather than taking a step backward from all the hard work you had put in during the previous months.

Overall, the challenge was a great success. No one really went backward and those who did not meet their goals only failed to do so because they did not improve as much as they had planned.

Congratulations to Peg Smith who was our overall winner of the “Holiday Challenge 2011”. She improved her baseline workout time by 2 minutes and lost 3 pounds. Great job!

Now that you’ve once again seen the power of setting goals and it is a beginning of a new year, 2012, I want to propose a new challenge called the “Hard Routine’. If you are interested in starting this year off right and making it the best year ever, then this challenge is a great way to go.

My inspiration for the “Hard Routine” challenge comes from an article from the CrossFit Journal. You can find the article here on our blog: http://www.crossfitalliance.com/

Read it for ideas to begin designing your own “Hard Routine” after finishing this email.

To sum up the article, the term, “Hard Routine” comes from the bestseller, Bravo Two Zero, a book about a famous British SAS mission in Iraq. To quote from the article, “the commandos use the term ‘Hard Routine’ to describe their mindset, focus, and seriousness when at work. When they step into an actual mission, crossing the line of departure, they say that they go on the ‘Hard Routine’. From that moment on, the rules are strict, the focus is singular, and all available resources are brought to bear with an intensity that is necessary for success.”

So, the “Hard Routine” is a mindset that when everything is on the line, that all resources must be summoned into action in to triumph. However, while it is easy to see how and why this is true and important in life and death situations, like the ones these British commandos faced, it is more difficult to apply it in the less dire circumstances of everyday life.

But, why not apply the “Hard Routine” to your everyday life? Why is your life any less important? Why do we not put it all together, Mind, Body and Spirit to transform ourselves into the people we want to be? We do have the desire, don’t we? Well, you know we do, frankly, from all of the New Year’s resolutions that everyone makes.

A large part of it has to do with the sense of urgency, or lack of it…you simply fool yourself into thinking that “someday I will” or “I’ll get there”. But, if you are not careful, you will never get to it, you will never put yourself into “Hard Routine” mode, never realize your potential, your bliss.

If your life is worth living, then it is worth living well and I challenge you for the next five weeks to live the “Hard Routine!” Total commitment to stepping up your game, to deny self-indulgence (this could be food, alcohol, television, partying, wasteful habits…different for each individual).

Obviously, you can’t live like this in “red alert mission” mode all the time. You need time to periodically rest, recharge your batteries, etc.  But, I truly believe that if you marshal all of your resources, to go on the “Hard Routine” toward your own “mission” for short, strategic time periods, in our case, five weeks for this challenge, that you can make major strides, even game changing improvements!

Part of the stimulus for presenting this challenge at this time comes from my own need to follow the “Hard Routine”. As most of you know, I have been considering attending the SealFit Kokoro camp for some time. Well, I have burned my “boats” (see example from article of Alexander the Great burning his boats when he sailed into Asia) so to speak by signing up for the SealFit “Kokoro” camp (50 straight hours of no sleep all out physical effort) at the end of February.

As a result, there are a lot of things I will be working on between now and the camp to improve myself and I will be sharing those with you. I am not suggesting that you have to do what I am doing, but, hopefully you will get some ideas for things which you can work on to help you reach your own specific goals.

I will be sending out another email in the next week to discuss in more detail how we will initiate the ‘Hard Routine’ but for now, read the article on our blog: http://www.crossfitalliance.com/ and start thinking about where you want to be and how you are going to get there.

To your success in 2012,

Billy Fletcher

“A patent psychological shift occurs when the possibility of giving up disintegrates into ashes. The Hard Routine grants the willing participant entry into a hard sanctum located in a lucid place of the mind, free of the ‘soft’ psychological distractions and habits that can hinder sustained changes in action.”  It is total commitment!