Here, There, and Everywhere

Hello hello, I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday, I know I did. I am still recovering from taking in about 10,000 calories and I feel like somebody needs to roll me around everywhere like Violet from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory…. I apologize for not having any content on the blog recently, I’ve noticed that people have been visiting but no putting out on my part. The past week has been crazy as usual but it’s been tougher to get writing done for some reason. Anyway, I’m back.

The team just finished up with our Cross Country season so we have been on an eight day break. Breaks from running always feel weird to me, espeicially in college since we rarely have a single day off, much less an entire week. It always takes me a few days to get my sleeping pattern back to normal because when we go from running twelve or more miles every day and then just stop, it shocks the body. Don’t get me wrong though, I desperately needed some time off to let my mind and body recover but I’m definitely ready to get back to business. Fortunately for me we resume practice tomorrow.

As I know all of you are wondering, “so, what has been on your mind lately Rob?”. Why, that is a most excellent question reader inside my head. A question I will address with enthusiasm. For the majority of my life I have always had the desire to travel the world. When I was younger I never had the luxury of leaving the country like some of my friends, mainly due to the fact that both my parents have always been entrepreneurs and were never able to leave their businesses for more than a week at a time, if that. However, they both traveled fairly extensively in their youths. I believe that the greatest education one can receive is gotten through travel. The most interesting and intelligent people I have met during the course of my life are always well traveled.

Lately I have been doing a lot of research on traveling and have been trying to work out a good month’s trip through Europe or Central/South America. The major thing that has been holding me back is of course being a collegiate athlete since not only am I in season practically the entire school year but there is also the factor of money. While several of my team mates currently hold jobs, I know personally that if I had a job I would have to sacrifice one of two things 1)School or 2)Running, neither of which am I very interested in sacrificing in the least bit. Plus my parents have always really tried to discourage me from getting a job while being a student athlete(despite how much I may need one). In the past I have been able to make enough money in the summer by working 60+ hour weeks to float me through the year as long as I am relatively smart with my money and if I’m in need of some cash I can usually come up with a way to make a little on the side that doesn’t require set work hours(sounds sketchy, but it’s not lol).

The good news is the type of traveling I plan on doing is going to be relatively inexpensive. I have little interest in going to strictly tourist destinations, staying in resort hotels, or having a designated tour guide. My desire is to really get out there, camping most of the way and staying in hostels when necessary. More than likely I will be traveling alone and unlike many people I have no fear of this nor do I feel that it will make the trip any less fun(probably more fun if anything). I have read some different websites where veteran backpackers say they can travel through Europe on $25-$50 a day if they are smart, which is something I certainly can afford, it would just take a lot of planning.

Studying abroad is something I have been considering as well but I see two major issues with this. The first is that if I decided to do it during the normal school year I’d be forced to use a red shirt for cross country or track, which I’d rather not do. The second issue would be if I took summer classes I would graduate earlier than planned which would prevent me from using all my NCAA eligibility and more than likely I would want to use all of it. Also, I would be tied down to the area where I would be studying and limited to travel basically on the weekends. However, these are just some issues and me studying abroad is still a fairly high probability.

I feel like I should start traveling as soon as possible before I have REAL obligations like a family and a career. I’m sure I’ll be able to travel then but it just becomes increasingly more difficult as your obligations grow and others become dependent on you. As of right now I’m going to try very hard to plan a trip for at least a month this coming summer and begin in Western Europe. Gradually I will work my way as far through Europe as I’d like, stopping at what I’d like to see and staying as long as I’d like. Sounds like fun huh?

RGM

Fate

I found this in one of my notebooks. I wrote it last year, probably around this time so I decided to let it hang out on the blog.

The unconventional warriors of this earth
We have always been but never birthed
Inside the soul of the mighty oak tree
We are the winds of change and your final decree

You often sleep with our grip on your throat
Our location in labyrinths far off and remote
In the deepest, darkest parts of your cortex
Our energy runs white in a frenzied vortex

Though we are not the warriors of death
We are not here to stop your rhythmic breath
We end time and begin seasons
We give answers and provide all reasons

Decisions are made. What a misconception
A decision is simply a matter of perception
Perceiving what has always been
We have long ago decided your life from within

The unconventional warriors of this earth
We have always been but never birthed
Inside the soul of the mighty oak tree
We are the winds of change and your final decree

Bill Lumbergh

Hey everyone,

I’ve been looking at my stats and I have noticed that even though this blog is very new I have a pretty good amount of consistent readership on a daily basis(which is awesome). Therefore I am adding the option for readers to subscribe to the blog and will be notified via email when I post a new entry. Wait! I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that it’s going to be one of those annoying emails, almost like spam. Fear not young ones, the email will be a nice notification like “Hi there, would you like some refreshments? By the way there is a new post on 49 South. If you aren’t too busy check it out. Where is the restroom? Straight down that hall, it’s the first door on your left.”

So if you want to make me happy, click this link and subscribe to the blog. Everybody who is anybody is doing it. Subscribe to 49 South by Email

I’m Out!

RGM

Potential

In my last post I mentioned watching “What the Bleep Do We Know? Down the Rabbit Hole” and it has got me thinking a lot more about the world around me. One thing that I have always tried to explain to people is how much control we truly have over every aspect of our lives. In fact, a good bit of my second post is about this concept and much of what I have said is reinforced by Down the Rabbit Hole.

To keep this post so everyone can relate and also keep the majority of you from questioning my sanity, I will show you a brief and very basic example of how every single thing we do is in some way life changing. We all know that every decision we make is simply raw potential that turns into a direct outcome. Consider this scenario: I set my alarm for tomorrow morning at 8am but I hit the snooze button and go back to sleep for 15 minutes. This decision I just made has completely changed the way my day will unfold in one way or another. Everything will be different than if I awoke at 8am; different traffic patterns if I drive, I will see different people when I arrive at my destination, almost everything is different. Let’s say I wake up at 8am and get to school at 9am. When I arrive at school I run into one of my friends who is going to the movies that night and wants me to come and I go. But what if I get to school 15 minutes later and rather than seeing my friend that invited me to the movies, I instead run into another friend who I haven’t seen in along time. He is having a get together tonight and tells me to stop by. I choose to go to the get together where I meet a girl who will later become my wife. Big jump, but that’s how a lot of these things happen. Do you see what I’m getting at here?

Please understand that I am not talking about fate, rather I am addressing how simple decisions influence your entire life. Just think about how many variables the outcomes of your daily activities have and how many different routes you can take in your life. Consider something that has happened to you in recent future that made you really happy. Would this same thing have happened to you if you changed a particular decision you made such as where you had lunch or how quickly you walked at one point during the day? The same thing goes for bad things that have happened to you. By me writing this post I have influenced what you are thinking about at this particular point in time. If you would not have chose to read this you would be thinking of something else that could ultimately send your life in another direction.

I am not insinuating that every little choice you make will be the difference between you being a professional basketball player, a circus performer, or homeless. I’m just trying to get everyone to think about how many different possibilities there are for how our day goes. What if you would have sparked up a conversation in the elevator? What if you would have stopped for a second to tie your shoes. Would you have been where a significant situation happened if you had done so? In a later post I will address more on how we get the outcomes we want, but until then, just give this some thought when you are doing your normal daily activities.

.

RGM

In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

It’s true.. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the post. I just thought it would be a good title if I were going to write some type of cliche sci-fi article. However, I am not, so on to the post.

I had a very busy and interesting weekend but for the sake of time I’m only going to write about one part. Sunday I went to the Renaissance Festival which was very cool. I’ve been wanting to go for the past six years or so but just never got around to it, and almost missed it this year since Sunday was the last day. One of the shows was one where a man would bring up people from the audience and hypnotize them, making them do very bizarre things. We watched the show the first time and it was absolutely hillarious so we decided to come back when there were new people since it would be almost entirely different. Well, it just so happens that second time, I got asked to come on stage and got hypnotized myself.

Being hynotized ended up being almost exactly as I thought it would be; a very relaxed and meditative state where I was completely aware of what I was doing, just much more open to suggestions. While I was on stage it was a group of about ten including myself being hypnotized. After going through the relaxation stages he first hypnotized everyone to think they were watching the funniest movie they had ever seen(which I truely felt like it was) and then was intrupted by an annoying commercial. He also hypnotized everyone to think they were drunk and another one where he convience the girl beside me that I smelled better than anything she had ever smelled and she basically tore my sweatshirt off trying to smell me. One of the participants was hypnotized to think he was pregnate and going into labor. Very entertaining stuff.

Last night I finally watched “What the Bleep Do We Know? Down The Rabbit Hole” on youtube and I must say it is extremely interesting. Some of the concepts are really close to the beliefs I have always had about the universe. It’s pretty long(16 parts of 10 minute segiments), but if you haven’t seen it check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSk51Lp-vHU

RGM

Fill ‘Er Up

Within the last few years I have noticed that people have a huge misconception with not only the way the global economy works but they also do not understand the powers of our government. More specifically people do not understand that the government really doesn’t have anything to do with the price of crude oil. It seems like almost everyday I hear someone say:

“they really need to do something about these gas prices,”

to which I reply “who is they?” “

The gov’ment! Bush doesn’t know what it’s like out here!”

Someone clearly doesn't understand inflation.....

Umm hmm…. Now after this happens I tell them that it’s not the government’s decision as to what the price of a gallon of gas is. This is the point where their mind shuts down and words fly out of their mouth like “oil in Iraq” and “open our reserves.” Ok. Sure.

First, let’s look at some basics. You see, here in the United States of America we have this thing called free trade and what this means is that the government is relatively uninvolved with the day to day operations of our businesses. The government does not own the majority of the corporations in this country unlike some places in the world. Exxon Mobile, BP, and Shell are our primary distributors of oil and are all corporations not owned by the United States Government. One thing that should be made very clear is that these are in fact just that; Corporations. Corporations are not out to make friends, they are out to make a profit. The higher the profit, the happier they are. Exxon Mobile is a very happy corporation. That’s rule #1.

As of November 14th, 2008 crude oil is worth roughly $50 USD per barrel. That means if you go to Germany you can sell a barrel of crude oil and they will hand you money that is worth around $50 USD. Let’s say you want to go to China and sell a barrel of crude oil, how much do you think it would be worth? If you said $50 USD then you are correct. So if you were running a corporation and your job was to maximize profits, why would you want to sell your product for less than the going rate? If you made stereos and every other company was selling their same model for $200 and people were paying the price would you be eager to sell yous for $150? Not me. I know some people would argue that you would sell more at $150. However, the fact of the matter is is that oil companies find an equilibrium where they can maximize profits, so reducing prices would not benefit them. This is a very simplified and condensed explanation but it is exactly the way it works.

Now on to another argument I hear which is saying that the government should open our oil reserves. There are two major problems with doing this. The first is simply the fact that the oil in our reserves is still worth $50 a barrel and opening it for a limited amount of time would cause our country to lose money. Not to mention a lot of that oil in the reserve doesn’t belong to us. The other problem with opening our reserve is the fact that the reserve is for a real crisis, not because prices are high. If we used up all our oil in our reserve, what do you think would happen if we went to war with Saudi Arabia or faced some type of real emergency? A good comparison of this concept is to think about a college fund. Let’s say your parents had been saving money for your college fund since you were born and now your 18 and have control over the money. Sure the money is there and you could spend it however you pleased, but what happens when you want to go to college?

The only real thing the government has direct control over as far as gas prices go is taxation. In North Carolina I think the current tax on fuel is $0.26/gallon. If they completely cut this tax then sure, you would save a few dollars each time you filled up but guess what has got to happen? They will have to find some other place to make up this money. The government has to have tax money to fund the country so they will simply increase your income tax, sales tax, or other taxes to compensate. The bottom line is simply, gas prices are the product of supply and demand. The consumer demands a high amount of gasoline and the supplier responds with the proper price to allow for sufficient supply. If prices are too low then everybody fills up and drives without a care in the world which leads to a shortage. We don’t need shortages. Just suck it up and pay a few extra bucks for gas or buy a bike.

RGM

4/7ths Background and 3/7ths Wisdom

From time to time I will give bits and pieces of background about myself and some of the things I have learned over the course of my life that will show how my mind operates. Begining at a very early age I have figured out key parts of success that are very simple, so simple that others often fail to acknowledge that we all have the tools to do whatever we please.

I will begin with what is going on in my life currently and briefly touch on how everything came together. If by chance whoever is reading my blog doesn’t know me personally, my name is Rob and I am a cross country and track and field athlete at UNC Charlotte. My story is quite a bit different than about 95% of our distance runners because I came to the university from a extremely small school, with almost no real coaching, extremely under developed, and not being lured by all the other division 1 colleges in the state for scholarship money.

In high school I was a decent runner but couldn’t touch the times most of our guys on the team ran. I basically trained in the months of August to November for cross then did a little bit of running over the winter before starting up for track in March and finished training in May. Most weeks I would run less than 25 miles a week, which, if you know anything about distance running then you know that is basically nothing, especially if you compare that to what most athletes that go on to run at a D1 school run. However, the low mileage I did run was quality every single day, too much quality to be honest and just never had the guidance of a proper coach or another good distance runner. But I did ok and I loved what I was doing.

I began competitive running in the spring of my freshman year in high school. Up until that point I played other sports, including football. My defensive football coach was also one of our track coaches and he encouraged all of the specialty players to run track to build speed and endurance for next football season so I decided to give track a run for the money (I slay me….). Early on I realized I had some natural ability in the endurance department but I was definitely not exceptionally fast starting out. However, what I did have was something I discovered long ago and was really brought out by our wide-outs coach and that was the ability to work very hard and excellent discipline. Our wide-out coach was only at our school for about a year but took such an interest in me and whoever else wanted to make something of themselves, and he reinforced my ideas of relatively limitless capabilities.

My junior year was my big year in high school where I became a serious contender in our region in both cross country as well as track and I was even getting some interest from a few smaller colleges. But shortly after footlocker south I upped my mileage way too fast and got a stress fracture in my left fibula. I spent most of the winter in physical therapy and was released for running about two days before track practice started. I bounced back pretty quickly and still managed to finish 2nd in the 1600 and 3rd in the 3200 in our region. The week of states I had been getting some intense pains in my stomach occasionally but didn’t think much of it. About two laps into the 1600 I started getting the absolute worst pain in my side and began getting tunnel vision, feeling as though I was going to go unconscious. I fell way back and knew something was wrong, having two absolutely terrible races. The next night I was with my girlfriend at the time and experiencing stomach pain 10x worse than before and finally had to take her home because I honestly thought I was going to die. Come to find out the next day, my appendix was about to rupture so an emergency appendectomy was in store for yours truely.

Now my senior year was far from spectacular. I didn’t have a particularly good cross season and I was a bit unnerved about the ability of my left leg to withstand the rigors of running and I sure as hell didn’t want to spend my senior year in a boot. I finished out my senior year in track with a relatively mediocre performance. No scholarship offers, no interest from really anyone I felt worth going to. At that point I thought my days of competitive running were over unless I decided to do a turkey trot or a charity road race here and there.. Far from glamorous you might say. So beginning in the summer I started hitting the weights pretty hard and doing other things that were more upper body oriented, mainly just to look good and was doing hardly any running.

I continued on with lifting for mass into the end of August, the beginning of my freshman year at UNC Charlotte. Then one day it hit me hard. I thought to my self, “this is stupid! you quit doing what you love just so you could look a certain way.” Immediately after this thought I laced up my trainers and went for a run. Man, was I out of running shape! But I felt that love again and thats what I was missing. This is when I started toying with the idea of walking on at Charlotte. About a week after this first run I knew what I was going to do and it was now just a matter of doing it. Somehow I ended up finding one of my current team mates on face book who would become my mentor and basically was the person who brought me into college running. He always told me like it was, never sugar coating anything but at the same time never belittling me for having a dream but not exactly having the running resume these guys had. I met a few of the other guys on the cross team who would later become my brothers and started getting advise from them. I knew I needed to be at a minimum of 60 miles per week before I could even think about stepping foot inside the gates of Belk Track.

Every morning I would set my alarm for 6am and get my run in before class. I would usually run into the team when they had morning practice on our 3k trail and they would always give me strange looks like “what in the world is this kid out here this early when he doesn’t have to be”. Looking back I think it is absolutely hilarious that I did almost all of my training exclusively on the 3k trail, if you by chance have any familiarity with UNCC’s campus trails you know what I mean. I did a run in early September with two of the guys on the team when they were on a recovery run and they showed me several of the team’s trails but the only one I remembered how to get to was 3k so I looped that trail like it was going out of style! I kept adding on the miles each week, 10% a week, working my way up to 60.

Each week I would get a little bit hungrier, wanting to be on the team even more and seeing myself in their workouts, visualizing myself in a Charlotte jersey. I remember sometimes seeing the team on campus, out running, or where ever and how bad I wanted to be them. Now that I am on the team, I have told several of my team mates about this but I don’t think they really understand how much I looked up to these guys(and still do). Eventually I was hitting 60 miles per week and feeling pretty good so I was debating on whether or not to wait until next cross season(which is what I originally planned to do) or come out for indoor track season. After talking to a few people on the team, I decided the sooner I could get my feet wet, the better, so I went and told the coach that I wanted to try to walk on. I think early on he saw I am a worker so he was pretty quick to put me on the roster. I remember when I first got a Charlotte track hoodie I felt like I was on top of the world. I had a long way to go but I was here baby and thus began my career as a student athlete at UNC Charlotte.

Sometimes I have to stop and think about how far I have come in just a little over a year. I remember walking into the track the morning of the A10 Championship here in Charlotte and thinking how just last year I was standing on the same course watching these guys race. I remembered how bad I wanted to be doing that and now, not only am I on the team but I was about to race the conference championship in uniform. But before I move away from this condensed version of my journey the past few years, I want to mention two people who deserve serious respect and always have my right hand. Since I have no idea if they want their last name publicly displayed on the internet I’m going to keep full names out, besides, this is just acknowledgment to them and they obviously know who they are. The first is the person who as I said earlier was my mentor and brought me in, TB. If anybody on the team believed in me from the start, it was this guy. He always told me how it was and gave me tons of advice which helped me more than he probably thinks. The other person I have to mention is a former team mate, CW. I was going through a really rough time the past two months and this kid not only knew exactly what was going on but he helped me pull myself out of a downward spiral. Much respect and love to both of these guys, and if you happen to know who I am talking about, buy them a beer or hook them up with some food if you work at cook out or where ever. They deserve it.

Now to the main point of a possibly overly drawn out post. All throughout life I have never naturally been the best at anything. However, there has never once been something that I committed myself to that I didn’t become very good at and I have been committed to a lot of things. I get very agitated when I hear others complain about not being able to do something but what are they doing about it? Usually nothing. Almost everyone can do whatever they want if they just commit and give it time. I am not running on a D1 team because it was handed to me. This is not the case by even the tiniest stretch of the imagination. I decided thats what I wanted to do, figured out what I needed to do in order to achieve my goals, and simple went after it. I didn’t question or doubt myself, I just simple went after it. So if you want to be a great musician then choose an instrument and make that your priority in life. If you want to be a great athlete then figure out what the people that are in the position you want to be are doing and make small steps to get to where they are (then do more). To wrap it up the keys of success are: believing in yourself, discipline, thinking positively, and vision. What do you want to be?

RGM

Mic Check

Hello, hello and welcome to my new blog. I’ll begin by saying that this blog isn’t going to be on a select topic(s) like my last few blogs I’ve written have been. This blog is going to be a collection of miscellaneous topics ranging from my everyday experiences, motivational pieces, art, poetry, my ramblings and opinions, humor, exaggerated events, as well as very strange(and possibly disturbing) writings. It’s pretty late and I have practice in the morning, so until tomorrow, stay classy internet. I’m out.

RGM

P.S. Where the heck is Waldo?