Good Grief…. a Week with Me

Before we get under way….

For those of you (in Australia) who will be near a television at 10:10 (ish) this morning, I will be on Channel Ten (the 9AM show) doing my regular gig. Today I am taking off my fitness hat and talking about Renovating Lives; my first Personal Development segment on national TV. Go me. Take a peek. I’ll wave to you.

G’day Groovers.

Over the years I have trained thousands of people, from weekend warriors to Olympians. From fat blokes and chicks to bodybuilders and bodyshapers. And from kids and oldies to professional sporting teams. For the last five years I have been winding down my P.T. duties on the gym floor and at the end of 2007 I officially hung up my whistle and dumbbells. Yes I still own a couple of gyms, but I don’t actually train anybody these days (perhaps the odd friend). It’s been weird not training people after personally completing more than 40,000 sessions (no, not a mistake) over the last two decades.

While I still enjoy working with clients, these days the majority of my energy and time is invested into other areas. This site for instance. Interestingly, Johnny still gets at least one enquiry each day about my availability to train people.

Anyway, we have been toying with the idea of having a little fun and running some kind of competition via the site for a while, but we weren’t really sure about what we might offer as a prize. That was until Johnny suggested that we give away a week of personal training with me; five, sixty minute, one-on-one sessions with Mr. I’ve Retired. Now I know that some of you would rather hit yourself in the head with a spanner than spend five hours of face to face time with me over the course of a week, but feedback suggests that some of you might be up for it. Weirdos.

How it Works

All of the sessions will be conducted back to back in the one week (Monday to Friday), so it will be a big week for someone. While the sessions will essentially be PT sessions (in the gym), there will also be an element of mentoring and education over the course of the five days. If you can’t make it five days straight then you won’t be chosen, so availability is a requirement. Which week it happens and the time of the daily appointments, will be co-ordinated to suit the winner and myself. The sessions will be conducted from my Brighton centre in Melbourne and at the end of the five sessions, I will design an on-going program for the winner. I realise this prize will be difficult, if not impossible to ‘collect’ for some of you (for geographical reasons)… sorry about that but at this stage of my development I can’t teleport. Yet. I am working on it though. We are also in the process of creating a competition which will be for our interstate and international readers only. Info about that will be up within the next month. Having said that, anyone from anywhere can enter if you can make it to Melbourne for the five days.

How to Enter

Tell us in one hundred and fifty words or less why you want (need) to hang out with me for a week. Your submission can be serious and heart-felt or it can be hilarious, amusing and entertaining… whatever you feel compelled to share. Once you’ve finished your submission, you can send it via the comment thingy at the bottom of this post (or any post until the end of next week), or you can send it via email by clicking on the email thingy next to my photo. Or maybe you could send a hand-written message on parchment via your own carrier pigeon. Your choice. The cut off for entries will be Friday, August 1. Anyone can enter. Current fitness level, exercise history and age is not an issue.

Choosing a Winner

Because I’m essentially a chicken, I’m going to hand that responsibility over to my boy Johnny and our newest craigharper.com team member, Miss Bossy Boots; Vive from Lloyd Events in Perth. Then you can be mad at them, not me. Yep, completely gutless. Obviously we can have only one winner, but if we have some fun with the whole concept (and there’s any further interest), then we’ll probably do it again before the year’s end.

Covering the Event

I will cover the week of training here on the site, complete with daily updates, photos, a report from the winner (at the end of the week) and possibly a video interview in the form of a video-post. It should be plenty of fun and hopefully a great experience for our winner.

Tomorrow

See you tomorrow when we take a look at the topic of focus. Some of us are very busy achieving nothing in particular and many of us simply have too many balls in the air to be effective and productive (sound familiar?).

Ciao.. x

Feel free to ask a question, share a thought or idea or just say hi by clicking on the comment thingy.