When it rains it pours. My mom used to say that when things got rough and there?s definitely some truth to the saying. The last 6 weeks it?s poured. First, I had the hard drive on my iMac fail, then 10 days later the 1 TB external hard drive that served as a partial backup to the iMac?s hard drive failed before I had a chance to back it up. This took with it 99% of my family pictures and the overwhelming majority of my presentations, writings, videos and research from the past decade. I also received 3 moving violations, had one car accident, my replacement rental car ran out of gas not once but twice (who knew the Dodge Charger they gave me while my car was getting repaired would get less than 18mpg!!!), I lost two of our most loyal clients due to a move, lost (or had stolen?I?m not sure which) one of my better digital cameras while at the USATF Combined Event Nationals, had my most highly visited website shut down without warning by our webhost, had all 4 toilets at Athletic Lab clogged simultaneously for several days, experienced dramatically increased business costs that all seemed to come at one time, and had a minor falling out with one of my better elite athletes. And my dad?s health was starting to fail on top of that. For a while it seemed things just kept piling on. All the while though I made a concerted effort to recognize all the good things that have happened in that same time frame?a very successful USA Weightlifting certification course held at Athletic Lab, teaching at 2 of the biggest USATF Level 1 schools in the past 10 years on back to back weekends, having the Carolina Railhawks plug Athletic Lab at the half time of their March games, Spring time?s warmer weather finally showing up, finally getting a formal agreement with a local school to use their track (I had been training my elite track and field group on facilities either with an informal agreement?.several of which fell through, or bandito style?.which was likely to get us kicked off), increasing our client number by 30% in one month, and having one of my athletes who tore his Achilles and didn?t have medical coverage finally get some help after 6 weeks of nothing.

Keeping focused on the good helped.

Lesson learned: Remember with the ups come the downs. Without Ying there is no Yang. If everything was great all the time we?d never be able to appreciate it.