Did you notice that it’s March already!!

And the winner is…

for Best suggested movie in a Motivational or Inspirational Category… Man on Wire, suggested by Jenn Heil. Not only is this movie, a documentary about a guy who illegally strung a wire from one of the World Trade Towers to the other and then walked it, an inspiration it went and won the Oscar for Best Doc. Thanks Jenn!

Honorable mention for movie suggestion goes to Helen Upperton for suggesting Coach Carter and tagging this line:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Continue reading →

Salut! Hi everyone…

Hope January was a great month for everyone… so much happened!

Three thoughts for this note… TIME being the central topic.

1)     The Super Bowl was this past weekend.  I’m sure many of you were not able to watch what turned out to be a great game. The Arizona Cardinals were in the process of making the largest comeback in the game’s history.  They came from 17 points back to be leading the game 23-20 with only 2.5 minutes to go. The quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger of the Pittsburgh Steelers then orchestrated a very purposeful drive that resulted with a phenomenal toes-just-barely-touching-catch to win the game. When asked immediately after the game what he said to the guys to begin the drive the quarterback simply said, “It’s now or Never”.

This ties in with a speaker I heard the other day,  Eckhart Tolle.  He spoke about how the mind likes to clutter ‘Now’ with thoughts of the past and the future.  That we can so easily miss the opportunity to be present because of our wandering mind. (I am SO guilty of this!)  Continue reading →

Bonne Année! Happy New Year to you! 2009!     Over the next 13 months, from time to time I will be sending out some simple thoughts that I’d like to share with you and I’d love to hear back from you.

I like to watch/read interviews of people from random ‘careers’ to see how they deal  with performance, pressure, success, team dynamics… all the answers to the big questions are out there! Sometimes they are disguised in a medium we might dismiss as being different than our own, but once you start seeing the framework of success, you see it everywhere.

It’s easy to get so into the work of sport; the singular focus on technique, the demands on improving physiology, the pressure of competition that you forget the play and the passion that got you where you are.  In the skateboard documentary ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’, narrated by Sean Penn, they show how a group of California kids “destroyed the status quo and challenged the idea of what was possible” .

If you’re interested,  I’d suggest watching it.  Are these guys (and girl) so different from you and your quest? Work ethic, passion, drive to be the best… it resonates from their lives then and their interviews now. It strikes me that the person(people) on the cutting edge of a sport always seems to look like they have a secret, a glow…  perhaps it comes from the fact that somewhere in them, they are the ones that can remember that they really love what they are doing.

The movie can be rented or downloaded (available at itunes).

I look forward to your comments.  Please feel free to share this note with others as my list of athletes is not complete.

Good training, great competitions,  Happy New Year

Marnie