Hello My Name is Craig

In just less then two months I move to Vancouver and I have been having some trepidations about the whole deal. I don't have a place to live yet only a couple places I have seen on the internet but nothing concrete. Also I have no job lined up yet. When I say trepidations I really mean that I was stressing big time about this especially because every time I look at the calendar another week has gone by without me noticing. I have been thinking about this lately and have realized that moving right now will be the best thing for me. It is going to force me out of the my comfort zone and push myself to well be better. Currently I feel unchallenged and unmotivated by job but I frequently make excuses to not leave and get a better job. It is kind of a hard realization, made even worse when factoring in that I am working on mastery with my kung fu,  but am just floating along and maintaining being average in my career. I had become complacent and content, knowing I had security and freedom to do just as much as a I needed to get by. Like I said I am being forced out of my comfort zone and am grateful for the opportunities that it is going to present.

I have been feeling pretty off lately. Mornings I really don't want to get out of bed I just feel really drained. I am pretty sure that it is a combination of weather my diet and my sleeping habits. Now that the weather is nicer I have been getting out so that should work it self on its own. My diet is the thing that I have to fix. I went from getting up and making fruit smoothies every morning to not eating until almost 2-3 pm. Also I have been eating very unbalanced lately. Lots of noodles but not a lot of fruits and vegetables. As a result my energy level has been taking a plummet.

This week has been the week of news that will definitely create some challenges with my training. First bit of news was that Chelsey got into her master's program. Super awesome for her but that means I am moving to Vancouver. I am not sure on the logistics of this %100 but I will most likely have to leave by August.

Then this morning I went to the doctors to get my knee checked out and he believes that I have torn part of my cartilage in my right knee. I have an MRI scheduled for the soonest they can get me in, which is who knows when. This is hard because I am not good at resting, I am not good at taking things easy and I like doing things. I am not careful and I don't take care of myself that well so this is a major shock to my lifestyle and I don;t really know what to do. I am also frustrated with myself for getting hurt in the first place.

A bit late on this post but it has been a really long week. Starting on Tuesday Night I waited in the hospital with Chelsey as her grandma passed away. The Funeral was on Saturday so there was lots of stuff that needed to be done, Me and Chels spent the week scanning hundreds of photos and putting together a slideshow which was really cool seeing how appreciated it was by the family. It's inspiring to see how much a family pulls together in times of need and how many little acts of kindness they do for each other without thinking about it. Even being aware of what I was doing for people I still probably missed a whole bunch of that I could count. Anyways now that it is Sunday the cold I had been fighting off all week has hit me like a ton of bricks so it is time to rest.

Not much to report this week. It's been a not so good week for my numbers with Chelsey being down and me not going to the extra classes. I've really come to depend on the Monday/Wednesday classes for that burst of extra training and as a place to do my forms. I finally got a starting point with my stick form that I am working on in Friday's class, so now I have something to build off of.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Silent River Kung Fu

This past month has been the hardest I have worked on Kung Fu probably ever. Aside from being sick or the odd commitment I have been at the kwoon 4-5 times a week as well as training at home. Last sihing class I learned that I am going to not only have to train harder but also destroy the limits that I arbitrarily set up for what I am able to push my body into doing. Also on friday I really started playing with the weapon I plan on working with this year, the stick. I know have a bruise the size of my palm on my right arm.  So far for the first month I am into a pretty good routine where I am doing alright with my numbers and logging some serious training hours.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Silent River Kung Fu

Had a great day today snowboarding. It was good weather, I was with good people, and I achieved a personal goal while riding today. It took all day and my legs are burning still but I successfully landed a 360 off a kicker and it was a clean landing too. All day I practiced getting the mechanics of the spin down by popping 3's off of the banked walls, which for me is a whole lot easier to do because of the momentum. As well I ran through the trick in my mind picturing exactly how to set up and spin. After several failed attempts and many trips sliding down the mountain in a cloud of powder I finally just did it.

Landing this is no different then what is needed to achieve any of my other goals. Determination, perseverance, and the drive to go further and be better then I was the day before. is an attitude that I have carried throughout my life.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Silent River Kung Fu

I've been spending a lot of time back in the white/yellow belt class as of late. I car pool with a friend of mine who recently started kung fu and I help out in class while I am there often teaching small groups of students. I've come to realize something from this and that is that I have forgotten a lot of stuff since that class. Not going to the beginner classes has been an opportunity to keep up on my basics that I had been missing out on for a long time. As well attending I had been missing out on opportunities to work on teaching and leadership skills.

Side note the Chinese New Years celebration is coming up with weekend and I have taken on filming it this year which I am pretty excited for.

Since the start of the new year I have put on a total of 2341.6 km on my car. Needless to say I feel like I have been living in my car lately. Aside from work everything I need to get to is a minimum round trip of about 100km. Fortunately even though I am car bound I still can achieve a lot while commuting by being creative. I can go over forms in my mind as well as work on learning mandarin. Though I wish I didn't have to spend so much of time in the car I have been forced to make it work for my life.

Last week I was presented a great opportunity to end my year in the UBBT with an act of kindness. My girlfriends aunt and uncle were helping friends of theirs renovate and move into a new house they had bought in a very short amount of time. One month to be precise, well 17 days if you include Christmas. Long story short Chelsey and I were called upon to help move the family over night when the wife spiral fractured her ankle. Even though it meant I missed out on going snowboarding and was moving boxed and furniture until about 2 am, the sense of gratitude from the family was worth it and it was really great way to end off my year.

After the passing of Steve Jobs a whole surge of videos and such a gone viral over the internet including his 2005 speech for Stanford University. This speech delivers some pretty powerful messages and over all has reminded me that we are the ones who shape our own destinies.  

This last week has been kinda helter skelter for routine I've been trying to make sure that I get a minimum of 100 push up done before I head to work and then another 50 or so when I get home just to kind of get out of work mode so I can get back into working at home mode. The only problem is that lately I have been sleeping in so it's been about 50 if any. I have to force myself to get of bed even if I am tired because doing my push ups in the morning wakes me up and makes me have a much better day. Also I have to get to sleep at an earlier so that it is easier to get up.

I have dropped the ball severely on my blogging this year. In doing so I feel I have really let my teammates down and I've let myself down. I basically skipped out on half a years worth opportunity to grow in my Kung Fu and in all aspects of my life really. I had lots of time to think without the daily distractions I usually have about my Kung fu and my life while I was at the ocean and decided that I have been coasting and taking the easy path this last couple months. Fortunately for me I still have time to change how I age been doing, well everything and pull something good out of this year.

So I've been feeling kinda down and out lately. Partly work, partly my girlfriend is working in Saskatchewan, mostly travel lust though I think. I'm feeling better now I decided that instead of wallowing in self pity i would do something to make someone else happy. Moral of the story making others happy makes me happy too.

With a little rest and proper care I managed to prevent an injury that probably would have taken me out for a couple weeks. Friday I felt a bit of pain in my knee so that night it was iced and wrapped, which is out of character for me usually it's just forget and go. Saturday I was having an awesome tai chi class where everything was flowing and I was getting my six harmonies. I was literally buzzing with chi until bam my knee buckled and I was done. Luckily went home iced and wrapped and took an anti-inflammatory and rested. Sunday was another day of relaxing this time at the beach and the water seemed to heal up everything. So now Monday no pain. Still taking it easy but for once I properly took care of an injury.

This weekend I was finally able to make it to the farmers market and it was awesome. Everything about the market feels so alive especially in contrast to the supermarkets. It's also nice to learn about your food from talking to the people who produce it as opposed to just reading labels,which is a habit we got into after our 100 mile diet last year. All in all good day with spent with family in the market even though I was recovering from a pretty bad cold.

Today we met up today as a UBBT team which was the first meeting I was able to attend for this year. It was a much needed kick in the butt. I've been making to many excuses and letting things slide to much, such as my blogging for about two months. Luckily there is still time to change my mind set to get more out of the UBBT and out of myself plus when people know where I am at and how I am doing they can give those little nudges that I sometimes need.

forgot to mention that I am psyched to start learning to wind surfing tomorrow!

I am unbalanced I have decided. Not mentally but in life, I have a hard time finding even a moderate balance between work, kung fu, freelance and well just plain old living. Time for myself is the first to go, a habit I picked up in college when my choices were homework, food showering or sleep and I could usually only pick two on a lucky week three. The last week or so  I have been working to fix this and have been making improvements. I managed to make a trip to b.c. where my phone was rendered useless, which was such a good feeling being so disconnected. An even better feeling was doing my forms on a mountain in the middle of nowhere with the sound of a river flowing nearby. Also I have started a new and proper routine for training so hopefully it goes well and I can keep up with it my inability to keep routines is one of my biggest short comings.
But now I am tired, a little hungry and ready to go home for the day

A couple years back I was doing something stupid and ended up tearing all the ligaments on the inside of my left wrist. It sucked as it pretty much made any flexibility in my wrist non existent. I went to the doctor and was told that all I could do is slowly strengthen it and I did and it was mostly perfect up until a couple weeks ago and BAM!!! Re-injured and the worst part is that I can't think of what I did to injure it? Suddenly my ability to push ups was cut to pretty much zero. I've been slowly working it up and stretching it out with progress but it's slow, and well I can tend to be impatient sometimes so I want it healed now. Unfortunately it's not going to happen and I don't want to put myself back at all in the recovery process so for now it's slow and steady wins the race.

Sounds like I'm being overly dramatic but sadly i am not. Everyday we lather, scrub, wash and spray potentially deadly chemicals onto our bodies. I say potentially since there are about 50,000 chemicals in use that have not been tested.

But don't take my word for it check out what GOOD magazine has written about it as well as natural replacements.

http://www.good.is/series/no-more-dirty-looks/

It's so warm out comparatively speaking. The snow is melting and the sun is shining and I can drive through puddles (one of my favorite past times in the spring). With the rising temperature, I have noticed a rise in my energy levels. Now it's time for less time inside in front of the computer and more time outside. 

Side note: push ups are getting better for numbers but I need to be working on my forms more, especially with tiger challenge coming up. I also got ahead on my kilometers due to getting a exercise bike for the apartment. Balancing all my goals is been pretty tricky and I to get back into the good routine I had at the beginning to be able to achieve them all. And I need to fix my diet it has been very inconsistent and no where near as good as when I was doing the 100 mile challenge last year.

I've been thinking a lot about my strengths and weakness lately. It started with just me as a martial artist but now is encompassing all aspects of my life. I have also been thinking a lot about being on the UBBT team and realized that I forgot that it is a probably the single biggest opportunity I have been given to take my weakness and improve on them. It's easy to get caught up in the numbers forget why we are doing this at all, well for me at least.

That being said I am making it so that by the end of march I will have not only caught up but gotten ahead on both my push ups and sit ups which have fallen behind.

I had an epiphany yesterday. It occurred when I was on top of a mountain sitting on a chairlift with the sun shinning down on me. I had been in the moment completely for pretty much the whole day. Nothing mattered but what I was doing at the exact moment. Maybe it's the fact that if my mind strays I could horribly injure myself or other people but every time I strap into my snowboard and start riding i just get completely into the zone.

This is awesome but I need to learn how to be this engaged in everything I do in life. My epiphany was that I needed to make a more conscious effort to be more in the moment especially when it comes to my training.

So last night I was out with a friend on a fun photo shoot and it was getting late. I had only eaten some rice that day and she had pretty much nothing to eat so needles to say we were hungry. I was alright to get home and make something (most likely more rice) but she wanted to stop and well being past 10 pm nothing was open except Mcdonalds. I usually make a point of not eating their food but I was hungry and feeling kinda lazy and the main reason she offered to buy me some and I have a hard time saying no to free food. Big Mistake. I ordered a double cheeseburger and large fries total calories was something like 820 the majority of it coming from this super tiny burger. Seriously make a panther fist and the burger was probably smaller. Also it tasted horrible.
It did reinforce why there is usually a weight issue associated with fast food. Most often these burgers are being offered for super low prices usually around $1.39 making it cheap and highly accessible. And In comparison to planning and making dinner, it's a whole lot easier to just run well I mean drive down to your local burger joint and voila instant supper no effort. I know there is no easy solution to the fast food dilemma but it's a huge problem here in North America.