If you have ever taken one of my Spinning classes, or listened to my walking CDs, or seen my workout DVDs, you’ll know that I use the road, our basic training ground, as a metaphor for life. I often talk about training for the long haul, and life being an endurance event, my book is even called Training for Life, because I do believe that we are all athletes, and our event is life.

It is my firm belief, and has been my personal experience, as well, that in order to get the most out of our lives, and to do the very best we can in this event we call life, we must train for it.

Today, my life is in transition. And though the truth is, we are, for the most part, all changing, pretty much all of the time, there are still those really big transitions like: losing a job, going away to school, leaving (or being left by) a mate, losing a mate, having a baby, buying/selling a home, and changing careers, that send most of us reeling. These, and other momentous transitions, can be extremely stressful. But if we have been training for them - and we can train for them - we can go through them rather gracefully. Major transitions happen to us all at some point – they are simply a fact of life.

Think about it; you are riding along, everything seems to be going well, no big glitches as you travel along in your day to day and then, all of a sudden, you hit a ditch in the road, or you encounter a mountainous hill, or the wind changes unexpectedly and is suddenly against you rather than with you. That, my friends, is life.

If we train for the unexpected, life, with all of its ups and downs, becomes more enjoyable. The difficulties become more matter of fact and we find that we can comfortably endure them rather than resist, struggle with, or try to change the things that we simply cannot. 

Our training starts by recognizing, and reminding ourselves, that so much of life is out of our control. In training though, we purposely create resistance – we walk up steep hills, swim against the tide, and even add weight to our walks so that we can watch ourselves endure, and get through to the other side, even with the resistance. We become stronger, too, mentally and physically, by doing it. While engaged in this type of training, try accepting the difficulty, for there is one thing that you can be sure of; difficult times will pass.

I am sure that you, like I, have felt blindsided by some transitions. We judge them as bad because they seem so hard, such an inconvenience or heartbreak. But you don’t know what benefits lie beyond the hardship, and, just as riding against a headwind feels like an unnecessarily difficult struggle, on the other side, there is always ease, relief, and peace.

We must learn to let go of the way we think things should be, accept life as it is, and trust that the hills and the winds of life will ultimately make us stronger. And because of that, our lives become easier to manage, and more joyful, more of the time.

Peace and Happy Trails -
Debbie Rocker

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