On a morning with rain on the forecast, 15 PAX were sufficiently inspired and motivated by Shuggah Shack's co-Q VQ and his stirring preblast to show up ready to work.
Shuggah Shack flawlessly handled the warmup. Marky Mark led a main event of Merkin-Jump Squat-LBC pyramids, followed by tennis court relays, during which no one uttered a single complaint about the weather conditions. And then Shuggah Shack returned to lead Mary. At least that's how YHC remembers it.
But this backblast isn't about the exercises. Rather, it's about documenting and sharing the wise pre-blast words of Shuggah Shack …
"Since I will be the Vanna White to Marky Mark's Pat Sajak tomorrow I thought I'd give you a pre-Q message: When I was a freshman in high school back when Olivia Newton-John honestly loved me, I had an English teacher named Mr. Secord. Mr. Secord wore tweed sports coats, smoked a pipe, was Harvard-educated and everyone wondered what screw was loose in his brain that possessed him to work at my god-forsaken school in East Hartford, Connecticut. Mr. Secord brought great writing alive for us with dramatic readings and interpretation of the classics. While reading text of some epic struggle of man vs nature he put down the book and uttered a phrase I have never forgotten 'Comfort is a little death.'
"Being a kid whose heat and electricity was more off than on, missed more meals than I made (what they euphemistically call food-insecure these days but I called just damn hungry back then) I guessed from his proclamation I was the most ‘alive’ person on the planet. But as the years passed and I celebrated the ballooning of my waistline and the great fortune I’ve had as an adult with an amazing wife, great kids, and a rewarding career, I began to appreciate that quote more and more.
"If the gritty struggle against nature is when a man is most alive, then axiomatically, there are actions we take out of ‘comfort’ that remove us from that ideal. If we are too timid to face the issues that inevitably confront us with our significant others our relationship dies a little death. If we don’t address things at work that we know we should out of fear or intimidation our career suffers a little death. And when we don’t remember to treat ourselves as important moral and physical leaders of family and community we as humans suffer a little death.
"To this end, I would like to extend from the deepest reaches of my soul my warmest thanks to you crazy guys who get up way too early with embarrassing nicknames and incomprehensible names and acronyms for virtually everything. ITG I am certainly a lot less comfortable than any sane person ought to be and for that I am eternally grateful. I am more alive now than I have been in years. SYITG."