An Embarrassing Visit to the Gym

I shared this story on Sunday during my sermon but thought you might enjoy hearing about a major embarrassing moment that happened to me last week. On Thursday I went to my boxing class, as I do each week. This class was at a different location and the instructor was a guy I’ve only had once before. I remembered that he liked to have team competition races with the winning team spared the exercise punishment given to everyone else at the end of the race. The races could include sprints, frog hops, bear crawls, suicides, or any other exercise that the instructor loved torturing us with.

We were placed into teams and then assigned a lane that our team would use during the races. Our team was on the far outside lane, and we also had one less person than all the other teams. I was standing first in line and would be the person to get our team off to a fast start in every race. The instructor asked if I would go twice so that we would have the same amount of racers as all the other teams. I accepted with great pride and was ready to help bring victory.

The first race was easy—simply sprint from one end of the room to the other and then back to the starting line. We lined up and took our starting positions. With the word “go” I was off, and I felt good. About 10 steps into my sprint, my right toe caught the rubber flooring and I was totally thrown off balance with all of my forward momentum. For a brief moment I was in the air, flying like Superman, but then gravity caught up and I went stomach first onto the rubber matting. One discovery I made is that you don’t slide on rubber matting. I came to a sudden stop, sprawled out and my whole body saying, “ouch.” I was embarrassed and felt like just getting my gym bag and going home. I heard gasps from those behind me and a few asked if I was all right. I felt like asking, “Do I look all right?” but instead said yes because I remembered I was in a race. I quickly looked up and saw everybody else reaching the end of the room and turning for the sprint back to the start line. I knew I had to make up time and pushed myself up and ran as fast as I could to complete the race. I’m thankful that the second time through I made sure to pick up my feet and had no more incidents, but unfortunately, because of my fall, our team came in second place, less than half a second behind the team that won the race.

In our lives we are all going to have those moments when we are giving our all and then suddenly something will happen that will bring us to a grinding halt. Every one of us will have those moments, but the question is not whether you will stumble but how you will react to the fall. Will you lay and moan and feel bad because it may look embarrassing, or will you assess the situation and realize it’s not about the fall but it’s about getting up and moving again? I want to be known for getting up and back into the race. While I’m writing this today my ribs are really sore and my knees have mat burns, but I didn’t quit and won’t quit. There are times in life that I’ll fall and will fail people, my job, my family, and even Christ, but I refuse to allow those failures to cause me to quit. I will get up and make things right and keep on racing.