Gone Fishin!

Farm work is good for the body and soul! Longhorn cows arriving soon to Elmwood NC!

Heavy Aircraft Carrier Ropes! Ray, Chaplain Ken Lewis (a great training partner) and Jason Laurel took this picture of me suffering! The THOR Logo, its trademarked so don't get any ideas! When I first arrived at FT Bragg over a year ago one of the first people I met was Ray Bear. I caught Ray in the halls at our headquarters carrying a giant, I mean like Aircraft Carrier big rope around. I said to him, "Hey man that looks like a rope for undulations!" I thought I was being smart and cool that I knew the term undulation.  Ray said, "Thats exactly what that is for, you should come to my gym and try it out" I said, "You are on brother!" That was the beginning of a great friendship with our new strength and conditioning coach. Ray is a veteran and spent most of his career training professional baseball and hockey players, helping them get over injury, get stronger and faster.  Now Ray does the same for soldiers...

  I moved to the Pinehurst-Southern Pines area about a year ago to begin work at FT Bragg. I chose this area to live because its quiet and has a real small town atmosphere. I was looking for a place to workout and discovered a little place called Southern Pines Crossfit. I started doing Crossfit while in Iraq and if you are unfamiliar with this type of training, well its not your average system. There are no machines, just bumper plates, kettle bells, pull up bars, plyo boxes, big tires and lots of sweat. There's no whining, no compromise and no one left behind. While Crossft is a great training system what has really drawn me to this gym is the people. I've been away from my family for a long time and it gets old spending time by yourself. At the gym each day I worked out with folks who became good friends. I looked forward to the end of my day, so that I could swing by the little garage gym and suffer with my buds.  Today I did my last WOD or workout of...

The picture above is of our dog Levi in his normal fashion keeping watch on the yard from his guard post. We got Levi from an adoption program 13.5 years ago just after our other dog Austin got killed by a car. Levi, part beagle and something else turned out to be an amazing little dog. He was friends with everyone. Always minded, never ran off and was just a great dog. He loved us and our kids. He barked at people in the yard, but the minute he know we liked them he did too. Just hard to put a value on that. A week ago Levi started showing signs that something was wrong and sure enough after a trip to the vet, we found he had a bad infection. A couple days later he quit eating. He looked so sad. It was brutal. I took him back to the hospital on Friday and the doc said they'd do what they could with him...13.5 years old is getting up there for a dog. On Saturday we found out that Levi had an infection that was causing his white blood cells to attack his red cells...