Early Start Boot Camp

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As you can see from the archives, I’ve had a two month or so break from posting. These have been tough times, with many lessons learnt and lots of challenges faced – some conquered, some failed and some ongoing. Life’s like that – well mine is, anyway!

After hitting the bottom – hard, I decided that I needed to work on my motivation, so I came up with a plan – the early start boot camp. I had been starting my days totally the wrong way and this new plan is much more like the right way.

Five years ago I ‘upped-sticks’ and moved away from my hometown to somewhere a lot nicer, by the sea (Torquay, in Devon – England.) I realised recently that I was still taking too much for granted and was failing to appreciate many of the gifts that the local area has to offer along with the benefits to my mindset from indulging in the best that nature has to offer.

In the past, on random occasions, I would get up early and walk down to the seafront when most of the town was still asleep and take photographs of the sunrise, the sea and anything else that caught my attention – for example, the abundance of wildlife that is highly active at that time in the morning, seeking out their breakfast, or trying to avoid becoming someone elses breakfast!

So I decided that I would make a plan that involved doing this on a daily basis as a way to start my day off on the right foot. I’m still adding to and tweaking the plan, for example when I return to my flat I do some exercise with my home gym equipment before starting work (mainly gym ball and simple abdominal exercises using a 10kg weight as if it were a medicine ball.)

The rationale behind this is that if I can’t drag myself out of bed at silly-O’clock and get some exercise while appreciating the stunning wildlife and beauty on my doorstep, then how can I possibly face the challenges that life and business are going to present to me? Answer – I can’t. So there’s no excuse.

Initially, I’m focused on regularly doing the walk down to the seafront, nice and early, in time to see the sunrise. This morning I took my camera along and went crazy, taking 128 photographs. After editing, I got this down to 66 decent ones. I’m probably going to do this every time because I enjoy it, it’s creative and hopefully it will inspire someone who bothers to look through them on this blog. This is why I chose the career I have (to live where I want and do what I want, when I want) and it was clear that I needed to remind myself of this on a daily basis – ideally first thing.

I hope that anyone who has a peek enjoys the photographs. They are a little bit random – I snap anything that appears in my field of vision that’s interesting. By the way, the boot camp is a fantastic idea and I feel totally different to how I usually feel at the start of my day, so the boot camp is a keeper. It will be interesting to see if I can keep it up and if I still enjoy it some time from now, but in all honesty I just have to change boot camp locations regularly because the local area is packed with stunning views and great things to see and experience.

You can click through the different pages of the gallery using the numbers underneath. If you click on a photo it opens in the lightbox view, enabling you to see larger images and click through them one by one. But for the best hands-free experience, just click the ‘click to switch to slideshow’ link and enjoy.

2 thoughts on “Early Start Boot Camp

  1. Those are some beautiful pics and I think the sea bird in pic 62 is some kind of heron, but I could be mistaken.

    We often forget how important it is to have true leisure time where we clear our minds of all the stuff everyday life tries to cram down our throats. I think taking a camera with you is a great idea because it forces you to notice beautiful things more so than if you were to simply walk around.

    Very nice photos Rog and it’s good to see you posting again 🙂

  2. Hi Paul, thanks for commenting. Yes I think it’s a heron too, although I’m not so good with ‘IDing’ birds. I did some Googling and found a few websites for doing so, because I wanted the name of the other birds I saw on the steps, but to no avail. I like that the ‘heron’ has one of those tassle things hanging from the back of it’s head – cool dude!

    I agree that clearing the mind and getting closer to nature is important and valuable. I’m just about to make another post about today’s early start boot camp, which was kind of different, as you may see.

    Thanks again for visiting and commenting Paul, it’s always nice to hear from you.

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