Good morning! I want to talk about equating Self Mastery to a muscle. Think about the muscles in your body and how you go about exercising them. Have you have ever gone to a gym and lifted weights on a bench press before? Suppose you’ve never done this and you decide you’re going to get in shape by lifting weights at the gym. You start your training by putting 300 pounds of weights on the barbell. When you go to lift the barbell with 300 pounds on it, guess what? You’re going to fail! There’s no doubt about it, you’re going to fail. It’s just too much weight for you to lift. You can’t start off lifting 300 pounds! You have to start off with any easy weight, a weight you can manage, something that you’re able and capable of lifting.

When you work on muscles, you have to start off with a weight you can lift and then gradually work your way up. So maybe you have to start off at 110 pounds. Let’s say you do the 110 pounds for a while and you do it long enough to where it now becomes easier. So the next thing you do is you add 10 pounds to that. Now you’re lifting 120 pounds. You work on that for a while until it becomes easier. When 120 pounds becomes easier then you add 10 more pounds. You continue on up like this, gradually adding more and more weight to strengthen the muscles in your arms. Read the rest of this entry »

Several weeks ago I made a commitment to myself that I would exercise every day with my primary exercise being hiking. My goal was to get out there and go hiking every morning. I’ve been doing it very faithfully.

My hiking morning goes something like this: I get on my hiking gear, jump in my car and drive up to the trailhead parking lot. This is about a mile from my home. The hike I usually take, especially in the winter, is up in the foothills of the mountain. It’s consists of a trail that goes in a loop where the trail runs along the lower portion of the foothills and then it heads up a very steep part of the mountain and loops back on another trail across a higher portion of the foothills and then back down to the trailhead parking lot. Got that?

I’ve been doing this every morning except Sundays and I have quite enjoyed it. I’ve hiked this trail quite a bit over the last three years but my consistency has been spotty at best. There would be months go by at a time that I wouldn’t do any hiking and then other months where I would be consistent. The goal is to do it every day. So I’ve been doing it very consistently for the last several weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Good morning! I’m standing in the foothills above my home. Just last night it was pouring rain. We had a big storm come through. This morning as I stand in the foothills it’s not raining on me, but as I look across the valley I see heavy rain and lightning flashes from one end of the valley to the other. What I’m witnessing is an amazing and wonderful light show. It makes me feel like God is putting a show on for me. It’s a delightful thing to watch. Wow, there went another one! It lights up the whole sky and valley. It’s a beautiful thing.

What does this have to do with self-mastery? Probably nothing except for the fact that if I wasn’t up here on my hike I wouldn’t get to see this. There are a lot of things I wouldn’t get to see if I didn’t get out every morning and go hiking. I get to see a number of amazing things that I think a lot of people don’t see. I feel blessed for it and I feel that’s one of the reasons that it makes it worth it for me to get up early and to get outside and exercise my mind and body. It allows me to be among nature and not miss the unexpected and wonderful things in life like this wonderful light show this morning.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Thank you.

Copyright © 2008 Garold N. Larson

As part of my quest to achieve self-mastery, I have made the goal to exercise every day except Sundays. I have done a lot of running in the past with my wife and she definitely was a motivational force for me. She and I have completed nine marathons together. They each were amazing experiences. Talk about Self-Mastery! Running a marathon takes an enormous amount of self-mastery.

However, I have found it very difficult at times to get myself out in the mornings to do a daily run. So a couple of years ago I began hiking and trail running and have since fallen in love with it. I am blessed to have a mountain with several different hiking trails within a mile or two from my home. So now my daily exercise consists mainly of hiking.

I find hiking to be so much more interesting than running on the streets. Running consists mainly of watching asphalt go by, mile after mile. Boring! Hiking and trail running, on the other hand, have so much more to offer as far as keeping it interesting. Yes, you do have to keep your eye on the trail, but you are also surrounded by nature. And nature never stays the same. It’s always changing. The transitions from each season to the next are wonderful to witness. The change from hiking in the morning daylight of summer to hiking in the dark, like I do now in the fall, is stimulating and challenging.

So, most every day I go out in the early mornings for about a half-hour hike in the foothills and canyons near my home. On Saturday mornings I go on longer hikes for about two hours in length. Here are some photos from last Saturday’s hike. The fall colors were dazzling!

This morning’s hike was marvelous. It was dark yet there was enough light from the quarter-moon to light my trail to where I didn’t need my flashlight. There were thin clouds moving quickly past the moon in the dark that were simply beautiful.

I have to admit, I didn’t feel so great this morning when I got up at 5:30 a.m. In fact I felt lousy. I was so tired and had a headache. So it took a lot of self-discipline to get myself going. I was amazed that as I went on my hike I began feeling better and better and by the time I was done I actually felt great and still do. That just goes to show you that you have to stick it out and don’t let aches and pains or fatigue stop you from your daily workout.

Have a great day!

Copyright © 2008 Garold N. Larson

Good morning! As I mentioned recently, part of my quest to achieve self-mastery is to exercise every day, no matter what. As I looked outside this morning I saw that it was pouring rain – cold rain! I must admit that thoughts of climbing back into bed went through my mind. How was I supposed to go hiking up the mountain in this?

Then I thought of my amazing wife. I call her amazing because she is! She goes out running every morning with her running partner Ramona, no matter what. Rain, sleet, snow, wind, darkness or extreme cold doesn’t stop her. As I looked out the window this morning I knew that my wife was already out there in this miserable storm doing a 10-mile run.

So with that thought I forced myself to get on my hiking gear and drove up to the trailhead for my hike. I pulled on my rain poncho and headed up the trail. By this time it was beginning to get light. Read the rest of this entry »

Good morning! Well I’m learning already about obstacles to getting to bed on time. I came across an obstacle last night. As I analyze last night, in a nutshell I ended up getting to bed one hour later than I planned. My goal is to be in bed with lights out by 10:30 p.m. I should know ahead of time that that’s going to be a challenge with a family having three teenagers still living at home.

This is what I ran in to. I thought I had prepared well so I could get to bed on time. It was on my mind. I was conscious of it.

First of all Halloween is coming and our kids are actively working on their costumes. My son Preston and I had gone on what we call a daddy date. About once a month I take each of my children on a date. We call it a daddy date. We go out and do whatever it is they want to do. Typically we go eat at some fast food place and go to a movie. But these days it’s hard to find a decent movie that we haven’t already seen. So we couldn’t find a movie to go to, so I asked Preston what we should do. We decided to go to a couple of the local thrift stores and look for costumes. Preston was excited about that. He’s my thirteen year old son. Read the rest of this entry »

The goal of self-mastery is a noble one. Yet every day people’s efforts are thwarted because they fall victim to the enemies of self-mastery: Too Little and Too Much. As you work towards mastering your mind, mastering your body, mastering your money and mastering your relationships, nearly all failures can be traced back to the problem of too little and too much.

What do I mean by that? Let me explain by using some examples.

Mastering Your Body

First let’s talk about mastering your body. When you think about the struggles that people have with their health and with their physical body, most of them have to do with too little and too much.

Of course the obvious one is too much food. There is no arguing the fact that America is suffering from an obesity problem. We eat too much. We tend to overindulge and eat far too much than we need. When you go to a restaurant and order a dinner they generally bring out enough food for two people. The portions are huge and we feel that, in order to get our money’s worth, we need to eat the whole thing. A number of times my wife and I have ordered one meal and split it between the both of us and we have left the restaurant full. There have been a number of other times when we wish we would have done that because we ended up with far too much food and left the restaurant feeling stuffed and sick to our stomachs.

It was an interesting phenomenon when I took my family to visit China for a couple of weeks. We noticed there were no obese people. We just didn’t see any fat people in China. The people weren’t starving. There wasn’t poverty. These were regular people and they were healthy. They were thin because they ate mostly vegetables and rice and they walked or rode bikes wherever they went. So you just didn’t see overweight people. It was quite shocking to come back to America and see how many overweight people there were. When you are around it all the time you don’t notice it so much but when you’ve been gone for a while and then come back – wow! There are a lot of grossly overweight people in America. We eat too much! Read the rest of this entry »

I have run nine marathons so far in my life and each was an amazing experience in itself. However, none of the marathons I have run compares with the experience of running my first one. It was one of those events in life you never forget. I would like to share with you that experience and the life lessons I learned from it.

Many years ago I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish sometime in my life. On my list were things like traveling around the world, getting a pilot’s license, running a marathon, and visiting the pyramids of Egypt. I put the list away and promptly forgot about it.

A few years ago my wife found my list and was surprised to know that I had a desire to run a marathon. She stole my goal, trained for it and ran a marathon. I was totally amazed that she actually did it. In fact, I was so impressed I said to myself, if she can do it so can I. And I did.

Running a marathon is no small thing. A marathon is 26.2 miles long or about 44,500 steps. To get a grasp of how far that distance really is, I suggest the next time you take a drive in your car to set your trip meter. Watch the miles tick off and when you get to 26.2 miles think about running that distance. Again, it is no small task.

Running a marathon is a unique experience. It is the only sports competition that I am aware of where the greenest beginner can rub shoulders with and compete with the elite athletes of the world. You don’t find that in football, or basketball, or golf or any other sport. But in a marathon, I was running with the Kenyans!

To train properly for a marathon you must begin nearly a year in advance. When I began my training I couldn’t run two miles. But week after week, month after month, with the training and guidance from my sweet wife, we gradually built up our miles. This means running 2 or 3 miles a day for four days a week, resting on Fridays and then running a longer run on Saturday mornings. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided that from time to time I would put the spotlight on individuals who are great examples of self-mastery in some area of their lives. I feel we learn more and gain more confidence in ourselves when we see what other people are able to accomplish. I’ll call these people I spotlight “Self Mastery Heroes.”

The first person I would like to shine the spotlight on is someone I know extremely well – my wife Lisa!

My hero!

There are those people who call themselves runners and then there are the true runners. Lisa is a true runner. There is absolutely nothing that stops her from getting out in the morning and doing her daily run. Every morning, as faithful as the sun rising, but long before, Lisa is up and out there running. You could set your watch by her. She has been doing this for ten years and there is no sign she is stopping. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many people who have done amazing things. I don’t know about you, but I’m the type of person that gets pumped up and motivated when I learn about someone who has accomplished something remarkable. I want to write about one today.

I think someone who runs one marathon is an amazing person. I think someone who has run 50 marathons is a very amazing person. But there is one person who ran 50 marathons on 50 consecutive days in 50 American states. I think that person is an incredibly amazing person! Unbelievably, he ran his final marathon in three hours and 30 seconds. This was the New York City Marathon. To top that off he then ran back to the start of the first marathon, a distance of 1,300 miles.

This would be incredible for a person in their late twenties to accomplish, but this man is 44 years old and didn’t even begin running until he was 30 years old.

So who is this superman? He is the quiet and unassuming Dean Karnazes. He is the one that puts “Ultra” into “Ultramarathon.”

Some of his accomplishments:

• Completed a 362 mile run from the summit of Mount Kosciusko to Sydney, Australia.
• Ran a marathon at the South Pole where temperatures reached 40C below.
• Ran the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race across Death Valley, California where temperatures reached 120 degrees.
• Competed in the US relay race, consisting of seven 200-mile long legs. The race was run by teams of 12 members but Karnazes ran it solo!

The list literally goes on and on. Search his name on Google to find out more of his story. It is amazing. I feel Dean Karnazes is an example of what the human body and mind is capable of. He is a true example of self-mastery in its highest form. When I learn about people such as Karnazes it gives me hope and motivation in my own efforts to achieve self-mastery.

Are you aware of any other individuals who have achieved high levels of self-mastery? What do you think of people like Dean Karnazes? Please share your thoughts with us.

Thank you.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Copyright © 2008 Garold N. Larson