There's a great quote from the movie, The Martian, with Matt Damon in it. You solve one problem, then you solve another, and if you solve enough problems, you get to go home. There's relevance in that to cycling. Today I'm going to talk about where. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness, and our longevity? That is the question. This podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh. and welcome to the roadman podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another roadman cycling podcast. I was watching the movie The Martian the other day and the quote I gave it the outset. I'll give it to you here again. He said, you solve one problem, then you solve another problem. And eventually when you solve enough problems, you get to go home. And the more I sat with that quote and the more I taught about it, It basically sums up our journey through fitness. It's never a straight line and that's what I want to talk about today. Before I jump in and talk about that, let me remind you about Patreon, folks. This is a time when we're seeing small businesses go under every single day of the week. The roadmap podcast, it's going strong. Look, we're still at a humble start. We're not even 12 months into this experiment. We are building. We're building ever so slowly. So I'm asking you guys to give us a little bit of gas. head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch and give us a little bit of view over this journey. Buy us the price of a beer once a month to say thanks for the podcast if you're learning anything even if you haven't subscribed to this before and I know to some people this idea of giving five euro a month when it's free content is completely foreign why would I give it to you why would I give you five euro when it's free and I don't have to pay. The idea is reciprocity. I'm giving something for you, putting it out to the world in the hope that you'll do the honest, decent roadman like thing and repay the favor and fund this podcast. It's a pretty out there business model, but I'm hoping we'll make it work. Roadman, I'm going to leave the link for that down below. But today I want to talk about that similarity between the quote from the Martian and our journey through fitness because getting fit, it's never going to be a straight line. You're You're gonna have periods where it seems so easy, then you're gonna hit an obstacle. And just like playing a video game, you get to choose how you respond to that obstacle. You can get to this point in the video game where you, you know, Sonic the Hedgehog meets the big body at the end of the level. Remember that on the Sega Mega Drive? That's a shout out to anyone who grew up in the 90s. You get to that point and you get to choose, okay, do I just abandon this video game and throw it away? Or do you figure out how to defeat it? He figured out how to go forward, persevere, to figure out a workaround just to keep going forward. I have a client at the moment and he's having difficult personal situations. His wife has had a couple of health scares and this guy never misses sessions. So I've planned out his week, his wife's health scares have popped up. He doesn't come back to me with excuses, he comes back to me with solutions. He's in one of the worst positions you can imagine as a husband and as a father. He's finding ways to move forward because he knows fitness, he knows his mental health and his physical health are so tightly toied together in union that he needs to keep moving forward, would bolt them for his family. And he finds a way every week to squeeze in a session early, to do it at lunchtime, to cut off early and get it in there. And he's a great, great example for how you move forward and just solve one problem after another until we get to that destination that we're looking for. and that destination that we're all looking for, it's the Smasher Cycling Goals. Our cycling goals might be humble to break 25 minutes for a 10-mile time trial to ride our forced 100-mile to lose some ways to win a one-hour pro race. We all have different goals, but we're all on this common journey together and we can all help each other on it. You know, you're gonna have obstacles and we have them here in Ireland at the moment. We have bullshit obstacles around exercise restrictions. You can't train outside your 5k. You need to work around this shit and keep going forward because ultimately you need to be responsible for your own health, your own physical health and your own mental health because no one's going to do that for you. You can't pass the book, you can't look to someone else, you can't look to a government to say, this is we're going to keep you fit, we're going to keep you healthy. There is going to be no magic vaccine for happiness and for health, exercise, laugh, sweat, socialise, eat well, sleep eight hours a night, hydrate. time with friends, spend time with family. Row men, you need to take ultimate responsibility for your happiness. And as soon as you hit an obstacle on this journey, which you will, you're going to hit obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. Go. Okay, pause for reflection. What's the best way around this obstacle? Tim Ferris, I was reading a blog from a couple of years ago, and he just has a great attitude on problem solving. He says, when you encounter a problem, step back, pause for reflection and think, if there was an easy way to solve this problem, what would that look like? Because we're conditioned all the time to think the easy way is the wrong way. You see it all the time if you got a calf and I see it with a bunch of friends only a couple of months ago, it was, you know, as always, calves were close and it's only takeaway. But there was two lines, one long line and one short line, and immediately like four of guy has joined the long line and I rolled right up the short line, right to the end, got my coffee, came back and they're all like amazed why'd you go up that line and I was like because I just paused for a second. There's no there's nothing saying you need to go on the long line in life. There's nothing saying that the easy way can't be the right way. So pause, figure out how to get around your obstacles but road men keep moving forward. Chatty it's Marl. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans, regardless of what your level is. There's a master's beginner advanced. There's meal plans, shopping list, and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio. That's roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day.