Throw Back

Alrighty folks It's Friday so you know what that means!? Just a little something to put a smile on your face, make you laugh a little and JUMP start your weekend.

The year is 1992... I was ten years old and wanted nothing more than to be like these two kids. I was guilty of attempting to wear my overalls backwards. That lasted about ten minutes. Not because I actually came to my senses and realized that this was a bad thing but because my mom wouldn't let me out of the house dressed like that. THANKS Ma!!!!

Have a good weekend. See you guys & gals at the free workouts this Saturday.

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel doesn't believe in the periodical table, because he only believes in the element of surprise.

It's Raining, It's Pouring...

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while. ~Kin Hubbard

And of course there's always music to go along with what I post. So, for me when it rains I like to listen to a little Jack Johnson. Rain doesn't put me in a grumpy mood like it does some peeps, just a relaxing let me slow down and enjoy the day kind of mood. Cheers to all today and safe travels.

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel is against human cloning. Simply because two of him would unravel the fabric of the universe.

GoldFish

Normally when I check out youtube and see the videos that it tells you people are watching, or the videos that have been viewed the most, I just ignore them and search whatever it is that I'm looking for. It's been awhile since I've seen any of her videos but I came across this one earlier. One of my favs. * I edited this post early Thursday morning. Only because I forgot how BA I thought she did covering this song. If you got to see the previous song "The Goldfish Song" sweet deal, if not youtube that one. It's one of her originals.

Right around the time that Michael Jackson passed away (R.I.P) there was a cover song by this girl Kina Grannis on the front page of youtube. She covered "Remember the Time". I remember thinking there's no way you can cover that song and not butcher it. To my surprise... she did an amazing job! I was instantly trying to find other songs by this girl. Now maybe I was being biased because along with what I thought was a pretty BA voice, I also thought she was a cutie. Now I'm sure if you check out any of her other videos or even after listening to this song you might think differently. You're entitled to that... and that's your opinion. I don't claim to be a music expert and I definitely have my share of bad but hilarious music in my itunes. obviously from the New Kids on the Block post I made last week.

The way I see it, music is my outlet. Doesn't matter if its motivational workout music, hip-hop makes me wanna dance music or I just wanna be a goof music. Either way you look at it, I'm a fan of music.

JT Fact: The following is a short list of things Jeremy Thiel cannot do: .

Great Expectaions

WOD

5 Rounds for time:
400m Run
12 HSPU
21 In and Outs

First off I want to apologize for the late post. On Tuesday's and Thursday's my days start a little later than I'm use to, I know poor me. So, I haven't quite got the timing right on the blog posts for those two day's.

Above is the surprising shoulder brutality that took place in class today. It was a very good/humbling WOD as they usually are. I found the hardest part for me was the HSPU. I chisled away at them four, three and even one at a time. End result.. not as good as I would have liked but not as bad as I expected it to be. Which reminded me of this saying.

You Can If You Think You Can!

If you think you are beaten, you are,
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you like to win, but you think you can't,
It is almost certain you won't.

If you think you'll lose, you're lost,
For out in the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow's will.
It's all in the state of mind.

If you think you are outclassed, you are,
You've got to think high to rise,
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man.
But soon or late the man who wins,
Is the man who thinks he can.

~ C. W. Longenecker ~

JT Fact: If you want to be flamboyant like Jeremy Thiel. There's an app for that.

The Hook

We have all defined success by the jobs we hold, the money we make, most importantly the things we own have defined us at some point in our lives. I am still chasing the dream but in a different way. -unknown




A few years back I was channel surfing and came across this new show that Russell Simmons was putting on. The show was Called "Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam" and it aired on Sunday nights. The video above was my introduction into Def Poetry and I've been hooked ever since.

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel is currently suing MySpace for taking the name of what he calls everything around you.

Everybody...

It's starting to become an early morning thing where the lobby area here at CrossFit Central turns into an 80's flashback. This can include anything from Michael Jackson, to the Bee Gees and shh.. New Kids on the Block. I know, I know but you should see people's reactions. Smiles and reminiscing of the good ol' days about concerts and dances that were attended. It's all in good fun though. So this post is for the early morning crew who get's to enjoy the random music that gets played and to the people who now wish to become apart of the early morning crew. The good thing is this class has no cap to it, so you don't have to worry about it selling out!

Good Friday to all and Enjoy the weekend!

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel knows what rhymes with orange.

Glass Slipper

No such thing as a Cinderella, just people who work hard. We're often told that something can't be done. That a team can't be beat or that an idea is just a dream. WE decide what we're capable of doing.

"I like when people doubt me, it makes me work that much harder" -Derek Jeter

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel has counted to infinity. Twice!

Do you smell what the Rock is Cooking?

"Your attitude is like the aroma of your heart, if your attitude stinks, it means your hearts not right"

"If you just make a choice... just decide what its gonna be, who you're gonna be, how you're gonna do it. Just Decide." -Will Smith

I'm on a quote kick this week. Sometimes they just pop in my head and then will not go away! Lucky for you one of the quotes stuck in my head has a movie clip to go along with it. Very Powerful. So, Just make a choice...

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel CAN believe its not butter

Road Less Traveled...

" Sometimes a man finds his destiny on the very road he took to avoid it" -unkown

I Know very Mr. Miyagi but when I saw this pic I was listening to one of my favs and just started thinking and writing thoughts down. I find for me, its easier to put my thoughts on paper then it is to tell people what I'm thinking. Give it a shot... put the song on, give the pic a glance and whatever comes to mind write down. At the very least give the song a listen to close your eyes and let your mind drift away.

JT Fact: If you have five dollars and Jeremy Thiel has five dollars, Jeremy Thiel has more money than you.

Remembering a Man

Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything
but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself,
to ideas which are larger than his individual life,
the idea of his country,
of humanity,
of God.

- Tagore

JT Fact:Jeremy Thiel always knows the EXACT location of Carmen SanDiego.

3..2..1

OK Go - Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

Good Song, Classic Vid and a good weekend starter! Enjoy... have a good weekend!


JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel got his drivers license at the age of 16. Seconds.

Limits or Illusions?

*I, like many people, am and always will be a huge fan of MJ. I found this article on ESPN right after his acceptance speech. Don't remember the writer but my hats off to that person. Thank you.




The night Michael Jordan was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he ended his induction speech with these words:

"One day you might look up and see me playing the game at 50. Don't laugh. Never say never, because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion."

He said not to, but everyone pretty much did laugh. Didn't Michael Jordan try to sell us this same hokum a few years ago? The last time he came back (in a Wizards uniform that was nowhere to be found on induction night) the limits -- most prominently tendinitis -- were very real indeed.

Mock common sense at your peril, Mr. Jordan. A 50-year-old man? In the NBA? Wilt Chamberlain said he could do it. But he didn't. Surely we can all agree that this is athletically unreasonable.

Riding home on the train from Springfield, I didn't even worry that it might really happen. I closed my mind, and opened the book I happened to have with me: the Best American Sports Writing 2007.

It features tremendous articles like Robert Huber on John Chaney, Eric Neel on the Saturday Game and Chris Ballard on the Game of the Year.

But the article that really stuck with me is Daniel Coyle's "That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger." It's about Jure Robic, who is surely one of the few people who frequently wins races in which he has repeatedly hallucinated.

Reading that article didn't do wonders for my conviction that athletes should honor common sense. Maybe limits really were illusions.

Not Funny at All
Robic is a Slovenian cyclist who, as Coyle writes in The New York Times, wins races by spitting in the eye of moderation. His technique is essentially, not to stop. One of the races he has won is more or less the course of the Tour de France, only without the nights to rest, eat and recover. He races all the way across America -- some 3,000 miles -- without ever really getting meaningful sleep.

There is a price, though: In the process, Robic goes wholly (if, mercifully, temporarily) insane.

Robic's wife saw him race for the first time and nearly instigated a divorce. His support team has found Robic boxing mailboxes he imagined to be attackers. They have found him in the fetal position on the street. They have heard him complain of being chased by mujaheddin. They have found him so mad that he get off the bike and storms the van. (They lock the doors, they say, when that happens.)

But they have also found him crossing the finish line ahead of the competition, thanks in large part to his unwillingness to listen to those who say there are limits.

People have assumed that muscles could only perform so much, for so long. If you bike for five days straight, surely your muscles would be so overwhelmed with lactic acid that they would stop functioning. But some newer research suggests that's not so. Some researchers argue that the body may be able to perform far more than we ever imagined -- if you can trick your brain into letting the muscles do the work. The limits that were once thought to reside in the muscles are now, some researchers say, really in the mind.

The way past fatigue, then, is to return the favor: to fool the brain by lying to it, distracting it or even provoking it. ...

Some people ''have the ability to reprocess the pain signal,'' says Daniel Galper, a senior researcher in the psychiatry department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. ''It's not that they don't feel the pain; they just shift their brain dynamics and alter their perception of reality so the pain matters less. It's basically a purposeful hallucination.''

Coyle also points out that just a decade or two ago it was considered nearly miraculous that anybody could finish an Ironman triathlon. These days thousands of Americans complete races that are more than twice as long.

A 61-year-old farmer won one of the world's toughest ultramarathons by similarly ignoring sleep. Everyone else was faster in the early going, but they made the mistake of stopping to sleep from time to time. Cliff Young said he imagined a storm was coming and he had to round up his sheep, and walked for nearly six days straight, shattering the course record.

A "purposeful hallucination," just as the researcher suggested.

Michael Jordan knows purposeful hallucinations. His Hall of Fame induction speech tells us as much. Jordan might be alone among humans in having essentially zero claim to being an underdog. He had, it seemed, purposefully hallucinated a world in which he had not won everything on the earth, a world in which he actually had meaningful rivals and a world in which he still had a ton to prove. That night he skewered, teased, showed up or taunted just about anyone who ever doubted him.

Reading on, we find Robic is not so different. Successful, in his way, but so unbelievably far from satisfied.

''I find motivation everywhere,'' Robic says. ''If right now you look at me and wonder if I cannot go up the mountain, even if you are joking, I will do it. Then I will do it again, and maybe again.'' He gestures to Mount Stol, a snowy Goliath crouched 7,300 feet above him, as remote as the moon. ''Three years ago, I got angry at the mountain. I climbed it 38 times in two months.'' ...

''All my life I was pushed away,'' he says. ''I get the feeling that I'm not good enough to be the good one. And so now I am good at something, and I want revenge to prove to all the people who thought I was some kind of loser. These feelings are all the time present in me. They are where my power is coming from.''

If the key to achieving athletic feats seemingly beyond human capability is tricking your mind, and if we already know Jordan has mastered that trick ... I figured we should at least do our homework.

Calling Chicago
I called Attack Athletics, the multi-faceted gym owned by the man who trained Jordan, Tim Grover. Mike Procopio is the director of basketball operations there. I asked him if it was conceivable that a 50-year-old could play in the NBA.

"The person would have to be an exceptional athlete," he says. "You'd have to be someone with a lot of size, real skills and toughness. I think it would probably have to be somebody who had stayed in good shape after their playing days -- it would be really hard after doing nothing. If you had the right person, they might need three or four months of boot camp, and then I think it wouldn't be too hard to get them into good enough shape."

The player you'd be left with, he says, would likely be able to look really good for a few games. One worry, he says, would be on defense, where the need to stick to quicker player might often seem like the teams were playing "six on four."

The flaw in the plan, Procopio says, would come not from a trip or two up and down the court, or even a game. "We could get you in shape," he says. It would come from the long schedule, the banging, and the inevitable wear and tear. "You can get fit, and I bet that for 10 or 15 games you could do it. But any player that age would have a lot of miles on those joints, knees, tendons, soft tissue ... and with all the banging and changing direction, those little injuries could be hard to recover from. If a 25-year-old pulls a hamstring, it could be a few weeks of recovery. For a 50-year-old, it could be a lot longer than that."

He's skeptical that anyone as old as 50 could keep their body healthy and functioning through an 82-game season. A shorter season -- for instance returning for a month or two before the playoffs may reduce the likelihood of trouble.

In general, Procopio didn't sound at all sure such an achievement was possible. But that was talking about athletes generally. Would Jordan -- a man of unquestioned will -- be subjected to the same limitations?

"Oh no no no no," Procopio says. "I'm talking about everybody else."

So, I suppose, we can take that as a suggestion that such a feat could be possible.

Robic, meanwhile, is trying to fulfill his own dream, of trying to become the first person to ever win the Race Across America four times. He led this year's race with about 40 easy miles to go, but served a one-hour time penalty, fell into second place, and quit the race.

Many limits are illusions, it turns out, but not all of them.

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel does not use spell check. His spelling checks itself.

Committed or Crazy?

Committed or just plain crazy? from ENW with Deb Slater on Vimeo.

This morning Jeremy was training a client and the conversation that was going on involved him asking his client what his wife thought about him waking up at 6 a.m to train CrossFit. His Clients response "she thinks I'm crazy". To which JT replied "crazy or Committed... they both start with a C".

This brought laughter to the people waiting for class and sparked another comment, "there's a fine line".... touche. There are plenty of people who say that we CrossFitter's are crazy! I think one of my favorite quotes is "obsessed is what the lazy call dedicated".

Now, I would say that the gentleman from this video (Scott) is crazy. Water Skiing, up North in JANUARY! No thanks. I'm making faces having to walk to my car when its 20 degrees outside. I tip my hat to you Scott. So the next time that you see somebody doing somthing you think is crazy, stop and think about the things you do. I mean who in their right mind would be out on a Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m to do a workout in 17 degree weather?

JT Fact: Jeremy Thiel doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

Top Five

Today for you, just a look into one of my top five favorite movies.
1.) You can never go wrong with Marvin Gaye.
2.) Jack Black does a stellar job with his performance. Enjoy!

JT Fact: Some people idolize super heros. Super heros idolize Jeremy Thiel.

Half Empty or Half Full?

Saturday Night I joined the rest of America and watched Avatar. I had heard from a few (in my opinion) viable sources that it was the best movie they had ever seen. Being the movie buff that I am, that alone was enough to spark my curiosity.

I had no idea what the movie was about. I had kind of seen some previews but never really payed attention to it. All I knew was that there were blue alien looking people, flying dragon looking creatures and shooting arrows. Not really enough to spark my interest on first sight. I thought it was another Star Wars/ Star Trek kind of movie and those movies aren't really my cup of tea.


I WAS WRONG! This is monumental. I'm a guy, so naturally its hard for me to admit when I'm wrong. I posted a while back on how I didn't want to be "that guy" that tries to stuff books that I think are good down people's throats, or movies for that matter. This is an exception, a pass, a get out of jail free kind of thing. If you haven't seen this movie GO SEE IT! I highly recommend you watch it in 3D. Now I understand there are critics who will probably dispute my opinion and rightfully they can do so. I will say this, there were some parts in the movie that struck a chord with me. One in particular....

A piece of dialogue... I'm going from memory so if its not accurate please do forgive me.

Guy: Well then teach me
Girl: We have tried to teach the Sky People. It is hard to fill a cup that is already full.
Guy: Well my cup is empty

Hopefully this doesn't ruin anything for anyone. After hearing this part of the movie instantly the question of, Is it half empty or half full popped in my head. I like this dialogue because I think there is truth in it. So many times I know I have been quick to argue my point before actually hearing people out. What does it take for someone's cup to be empty? What does that mean? I have my thoughts on what it means and my preference is to have an empty cup rather than a cup that's half full or half empty.

JT Fact: When Jeremy Thiel does a push up, he isn't lifting himself up, he's pushing the earth down.

Urban Legend?

So while watching the game last night. Sorry UT fans (not really) I was browsing around on Facebook and noticed that someone had created a Facebook page dedicated to how Jeremy Thiel was the coolest CrossFitter in the world. I thought this was pretty hilarious but cool in its own right at the same time. I mean nobody's making facebook pages dedicated to me. So I decided to checkout this fan page. Sure enough it exits! JT's facebook fan Page.

To take it even one step further there's a discussion board set up. The topic Jeremy Thiel vs. Chuck Norris. I have to admit I'm a little upset that i didn't think of this first but kudos to the person who did. Let the battle begin!



Jeremy Thiel does not wear a watch, HE decides what time it is!

Gettin Jiggy With it!

"A better Me" i believe is how it was put. Well, step one is for me to take the first step.

New Year. New Post.

Six Days into the new year and like many people I've been doing some thinking. Before 09' rolled to an end there was a discussion. What are people's thoughts on beards and mustaches? I personally like them and my hats off to those who have the patience to rock them. I've always wanted to try both, I however, am not one of those patient facial hair kind of guys. So a collaboration of some well known men and their mustaches and beards:
"20 Manliest Mustaches and Beards From Facial Hair History"