Like with a lot of sports fans, August is an exciting time for me. Baseball is in the backstretch and the pretenders for the pennant races have been weeded out. In my sport: NASCAR is on the threshold of selecting it’s elite 12 for the Chase. Of course football is back. NFL Football is the number one fan sport in terms of popularity in the United States. 2nd place is way way back in the pack too.
My name is Russ Bohaty, and I am the fitness trainer for professional race drivers such as Joey Saldana, Sprint car champion and Kasey Kahne of NASCAR. But one of my true loves is football. Football players are a special breed of athlete. The game is really all about taking on obstacles over and over again and defeating them. Do that better than the other guy and you will be champion. So even though it grates some, I love following this Brett Favre retirement drama. I am Minnesota native, went to college in St. Paul, but now I live in Texas. As a man who loves being a southerner, I feel a brotherhood with Favre. He strikes me as a throwback, an every man. So when a story broke recently that he was finally retiring do to an ankle injury suffered against the Saints last year, I was dissappointed. Even at over 40, the man can still do it. Being an even more advanced age myself, I love that. One thing that grabbed me was the subject of retirement in general. I heard a commentator on ESPN radio say something that really stuck with me.
If you followed the story you know that after little more than a day, Favre came out and said the retirement stories were not true Basically, Brett was saying that he was still evaluating the condition with his doctors and hadn’t made any sort of definite decision. The commentator said the following (and I am paraphrasing). “Why would he want to retire? Retire to what? He is doing what he loves right now and he still does it better than most of the guys out there. Retirement is for people that hate their jobs and therefore hate their days and want to escape. What does he have to escape from? No longer playing a game he loves, hanging close to all his buddies acting like kids, getting paid millions of dollars, the cheers of adoring fans, 6 months of committment a year?”
To me the commentator touched on that all crucial attitude that I live by. I am over 60 years young and I am doing what I love. I do it full throttle. I tell my much younger clients: “I am not gonna retire, I am going to refire.” Basically I have to have more passion for what I do then they do for what they do, or I am not worth paying to do what I do. That is my earnest belief. If I am looking for the chance to bolt from it, then it is obvious that I don’t really have any passion for it. Why should anyone believe a word I have to say?
When I bring to you my labor of love: My “Racers’ Workout”, the passion had better come through bull horn in your ear loud. Yeah, the workout is configured to be a fitness training program for motorcycle racers, car racers, and for anyone who wants to have the durability, strength, focus of a professional racer like #9 Kasey Kahne. Retirement is for people who are controlled by others, who do things because they have to. Like beasts of burden on a farm. People of passion don’t believe in the concept and they want to live their lives at their peak both mentally and physically. Those folks are going to be looking for their own Racers’ Trainer to take on life at full bore . Soon we’ll be getting to work, the professional racer training way .
