Being a Role Model Part 2

Someone is always watching...


Before I moved back to California from Iowa, I played in a semi- professional baseball league in Dubuque County.

At one of the games at Dyersville, one of my teammate's wife came up to me and said, "Our son thinks you're so cool, especially with the hair you have. He said he wants to grow it just like yours." I never had someone come up to me to say anything close to that (See http://keepinthatswag.blogspot.com/2013/08/being-role-model.html).

In the past two weeks, I got to visit Deuce Athletics, the sister gym of Deuce Gym, located just in my backyard of Torrance, California.

The classes I attended were with young middle school that are pursing to play high school baseball, and then move onto the highest level they can afterwards.

On the second week I attended a class, the first half an hour involved a strength portion and then the rest was the Workout Of the Day.

Deuce Athletics athletes, Sebastian and Justin.

For the strength portion, we were doing 5 reps of heavy deadlifts.

As I got to my max weight for the deadlift, I remember when I was going through my pre-preperation to stay focused before the lift, the other five young athletes stopped what they were doing and watched me pull up a 345 pound bar 5 times.

One kid asked me, "Is that even heavy for you?

Hell yeah it was.

I talked to the two coaches the run the gym after the workout and one of them said, "It's good that you came to class. All the kids here looked at you today and probably thought to themselves, 'I need to get to that point someday.'"

It's a very humbling experience to hear someone say that he or she wants to be like you or looks up to you from doing what you like, whether if it's playing baseball, lifting weights or just going about your business.

A saying from one of my high school coaches stuck with me, which was, "Always run a hard 90 out of the box because you never know who's watching you."

I take pride in hard work that I put in at the gym, at work, on the field, in everything I do and I think it all started from that saying from my coach.

I hope, in the years to come, I can become a better person to be a role model and set an example to more people.


Jun