But before I digress too much, a little background information might help. If you haven’t heard of Crossfit, or functional fitness style workouts, you soon will.  In a nutshell, functional fitness gyms focus on variety and intensity without the use of any machine weights. Instead, you end up doing pull-ups, working with medicine balls, hitting a sledge hammer against a massive truck tire, flipping truck tires, pulling sleds with weight on them, lunges, squats, and a variety of other movements that are “functional” in style.

Over the last five years these types of gyms have exploded in popularity, with more than 2,000 popping up across the county.  Initially targeting professionals whose jobs require stamina and endurance (i.e. firefighters, SWAT teams, military, etc.), these gyms have also attracted everyday athletes who, like me, have become bored with the standard gym experience (sounds like another intersection of business and life – hence the popularity).

The Inner Circle Gym opened in Wenatchee in April 2009, and was the first functional fitness gym in the valley.  I have to be honest – it’s awesome. My workouts are shorter, more intense and most importantly, more fun! Yes, I said it. Fun. : )

For instance, here was yesterday’s workout that made me so sore today.  Adam Vognild, one of The Inner Circle Gym owners put this workout together. We did each of the items listed below for 3 minutes, with a one minute break in between. So in twenty minutes, we maxed out our reps at each “station.”

• Sit-ups
• Pull-ups
• Sandbag get-ups (take a 35lb sand bag on your shoulder, lay down, and get up, back down, up etc.)
• Air squats
• Burpee’s

That’s it. Nothing fancy, but boy am I sore. The cool part is, tomorrow I’ll go in and mix it up with a completely different workout. Efficient, effective and fun. You gotta love that.

If you are interested to learn more, check out these links:

The Inner Circle Gym Website – www.theinnercirclegym.com

Wenatchee World Article – At this gym, they don’t have no ellipticals, pal

WSJ Article – Fitness as a Full-Time Pursuit

I have no regrets. Life is too short. That’s why my only message and reason for this post is to look at your life, and make sure you are making memories and making a difference. Don’t waste time on distractions – focus on what is most important.  The question, “In ten years, will you regret X decision” is so true.

And how does the title of this post tie in? Because this title describes a memory maker for me that I want to share with you. Our son’s favorite word is ”buh.” Additionally, he has a whole series of favorite things that stem from “buh:” balloon, bee, ball, blue (for blueberry).  I love it.  I’ll never forget the joyful ”buh’s” he says daily right now as he points them around the house.  We all could use a little more “buh” in our life – they’re a good thing!

Over two years ago Brianne and I decided to end our cable subscription and sell our TV. And so it was that my sweet 19″ TV/VCR combo that I bought in college moved on to a better, more loving home.

I have to admit, I was a bit more skeptical than Brianne about how we’d fair without our 19” boob tube.  Thoughts like “what about major sporting events, what about staying current with news, or what about just staying current with trends in general?” all ran through my brain. 

Despite the hesitancy, the desire to create more time doing things won out over keeping our TV. We only had so much time in a day, and we realized it was way too easy to turn on the television set and let the evening go by.  Amazingly, the withdrawals didn’t last long once the TV was gone.  When you actually unplug your TV and it’s not an option, it’s easier than you might think to fill your time.

For more than a year we had no TV in the house. We instantly created more free time which allowed us to stay ahead on chores, get outside more, and in general communicate more. And when we got an itch to watch a show, we jumped online and watched it without commercials.  The beauty of this is we could watch it when the time was best for us (rather than us fitting our schedule around the show).

About a year ago we ended up buying another TV (a 42” flat screen), but its only purpose was for movies; we still have no cable. Even with this addition, our time in front of the TV is significantly less than what it used to be because we dictate what we watch and when we watch it.

If you are finding it hard to get everything done in your life – try disconnecting your cable. You’ll save some money and instantly create free time you can use for whatever else is most important to you.

And to bring this full circle and add a marketing perspective, this is one of those areas of life that is a true intersection for businesses. Digital online media is reshaping how we consume information. I have no doubt that in the future cable TV as we know it today will converge with broadband and the majority of consumers will view most if not all of their cable content online. It’s already beginning as TV’s are now being sold that can connect direct with Netflix, YouTube etc.

At the end of the day each of us will still be responsible for how much TV we consume, but for those of us who want to be specific about when and where we watch it, we’ll have even greater flexibility.

Over the last several months I’ve been researching, planning and coordinating how this blog will work. For instance, what blog platform should I use, should I have my own personal domain or just use a generic one, and what in the world should my blog look like?

The biggest decision once I decided to move forward was what blogging platform to use.  Obviously I’ve decided on WordPress.  If you are researching what blogging platform to use - I can sum up why I chose WordPress in three easy points:

1. It’s open source (you can grow with it and lots of people smarter than me have built lots of cool features)
2. It’s easy to use
3. You can optimize it to your heart’s content (what good is a blog if people can’t find you online?)

In addition to figuring out the structure of the blog, I’ve been jotting down notes and ideas for what to write about - lot’s of them (ironically this was one of the biggest excuses I used in the past for starting a blog – that I would not have anything to write about). As soon as I committed to doing this blog the ideas started flowing, which doesn’t surprise me.  The unknown is always a bit scary, but once you’ve pulled the veil back a bit you realize it’s not that bad.

Now that everything is up and running, the journey truly begins. Over the next year I’m going to blog about life experiences, business experiences and what happens in between.  It should be fun – life is full of surprises, and as a marketer it’s those surprises that help lead to new ideas in the business world.  This blog hopefully captures life at those points.  Feel free to join the journey with me – the more the merrier.