After Hurricane Katrina (2005) devastated my town and my home, Hurricane Rita (2005) hit my parents town and their home. My parents evacuated to my devasted town and I suspected somthing was wrong with my mother. She is a very proud woman and never burdened the kids with her problems. Dad called me the day after they were able to go back home and told us they were on their way to Houston, TX. Why? MD Anderson – Cancer Center -I knew something was wrong, and my nightmare came true when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4B breast cancer and was told it would be difficult to recover from and a long long journey to recovery. I began to reevaluate certain material objects I though important, now life and time with loved ones was really happiness. After many many long weeks and months of chemo,surgery, good days and bad days, my mother is surviving breast cancer! She is tough, but I must also give credit to my father who held her hand along the way!! This is for you mom and dad!!!!

On December 31st, we’ll be introducing an 8-week program to lose 10 pounds of fat by the day Spinning Nation arrives. The program was designed by a three person team consisting of industry leaders in Nutrition, Spinning and Fitness. The elements of the program have worked for athletes, actors and people from all walks for over 10 years, but this is the first time it’s been built around Spinning.

Look forward to more announcements in the nex few days.

This year we lost 27,000 men to prostate cancer, with 186,000 more men diagnosed in 2008. That’s more diagnoses than all other (non-skin cancers) combined! The prevailing (and fatally incorrect) wisdom is that this is an “old man’s disease.

This year Athletes for a Cure was represented at more than 200 events across the US and everywhere we went we were greeted by men and their  families who for the most part were under 55-years old who had a prostate cancer diagnosis in the family. Here are just a few stories as told in a short video: http://www.vimeo.com/1881463

There would be no more appropriate time to ask you for your prayers and thoughts than Christmas Eve for the 186,000 men who, on a day they least expected it had their doctor walk into a room and say, “I’m sorry, but you have prostate cancer.” Please add a special thought for those 27,000 families that lost a man in their lives.

Please take a moment tonight to remember them all. Thank you.

Scott

Word spread across the countryside about the wise Holy Man who lived in a small house atop the mountain. A man from the village decided to make the long and difficult journey to visit him. When he arrived at the house, he saw an old servant inside who greeted him at the door. “I would like to see the wise Holy Man,” he said to the servant. The servant smiled and led him inside. As they walked through the house, the man from the village looked eagerly around the house, anticipating his encounter with the Holy Man. Before he knew it, he had been led to the back door and escorted outside. He stopped and turned to the servant, “But I want to see the Holy Man!”

“You already have,” said the old man. “Everyone you may meet in life, even if they appear plain and insignificant… see each of them as a wise Holy Man. If you do this, then whatever problem you brought here today will be solved.”

Excellence is never an accident. It is achieved in a person or company only as a result of an unrelenting and vigorous insistence on the highest standards of performance. It requires an unswerving expectancy of quality from the person or staff.

Excellence is contagious. It affects everyone. It charts the direction of the business. It establishes the criteria for planning. It provides zest and vitality to the company. Once achieved, excellence has a talent for permeating every aspect of the organization.

Excellence creates commitment and dedication from everyone in the organization. Once it is accepted and expected, it must be nourished and continually reviewed and renewed. It is a never-ending process of learning and growing. It generates a spirit of motivation and is always the result of a creatively conceived and precisely planned effort.

Excellence inspires every phase of people’s lives. It unleashes an impact which influences every activity, every staff person. To instill it in an organization takes commitment. It demands adaptability, imagination and vigor, but most of all, it requires from everyone a constant state of self-discovery and discipline.

Excellence is an organization’s lifeline. It is the most compelling answer to apathy and inertia. It energizes a stimulating and pulsating force. Once it becomes the expected standard of performance, it develops a fiercely driving and motivation philosophy of operation. Excellence is a state of mind put into action. It is a roadmap to success. When a climate of excellence exists in people, staff, management, and projects, business becomes easier.

Excellence in a person and an organization is important… because it is everything.

If you read even snippets of all of the incoming technology information there’s a consistent theme recently. The idea is that email has become so ubiquitous and is overflowing so many inboxes that it is no longer an effective way to communicate on micro issues, and is certainly not a place for personal communication. So what’s next?

The idea is that small communities of like-minded people will gather together in places like Facebook and share their lives there, slowly weaning email down to the basic business communications uses. The downfall of MySpace and others that came before were the invasion of corporate interlopers into these communities. Companies and individuals who saw a target audience ripe for the picking and cheap to get at.

What’s rising up to fill the void are real communities that expect everyone to contribute as a member, much like the community we’re trying to form around Spinning Nation with Facebook, Twitter, the website and our blog. We feel that we need to offer valuable information, prompt service and most of all, an ownership in the Spinning community if we want to host it.

We hope you’ll join us in creating an international Spinning community with your comments, questions, contributions and communication. You can use Twitter to connect with people all over the country in seconds, or take your time and contribute to the blogs. Most of all, we want to create a vital and lively community who see Spinning Nation as a place to do some good, meet others and spread the positive message we enjoy in health and fitness. Welcome home.

This whole tip should be titled, “It’s December stupid.” I’ve been going through this cycle for 25 years and I’m still fighting the urge to “train” hard in the short, dark days for the dumbest reasons. So I thought I’d list the three most obvious reasons to rest and recover during the winter months.

1. Tired is cumulative. You’re not beat from the last session, you’re beat from the month of training sessions that made you tired today. If you’re beat in December, it’s what you did all summer and fall that got you there, and it isn’t going to heal in a day.

2. Everything heals better at the break. Tree branches, bones and almost everything else in nature heals stronger after it’s broken. Just like your body. Stress and rest. It’s the rest that makes you better. It’s the stress that makes you go to class. Which is harder for you?

3. EVERYTHING sleeps in the winter. So often we view ourselves apart from nature. The days are short, nights long and everything about the rhythm of the world we live in says to slow down. Everything sleeps in the winter.

This holiday season the whole mission of Spinning Nation hits a little closer to home for me. I have a very good friend who is battling cancer from the lowest point this morning. He’s 40-years old, has a beautiful wife and 4 kids all facing a very uncertain future. When I sit down to work on Spinning Nation, this family reminds me how much we can do for people who need our support, they need to know that people care and we can give them that hope by just giving one class this year to all of them.

Please invite your friends on Facebook by clicking the “Share” button.

Woke up this morning and looked at all my Twitter tweets and saw people getting ready to go to class, ride outside, Christmas shop, basically everyone’s “plan for the day.” Today millions of people I don’t know and don’t know Twitter from Tweety Bird are waking up wondering how long they’re going to live, how much more time cancer is going to give them.

In my job I get to meet a lot of those families and it’s amazing how un-mundane life is to them. My goal for the day today is to appreciate everything that happens in my life and to remember what I forget. It’s an awful, beautiful life.

I am a double cancer survivor -Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma 6/04 and aggressive Prostate Cancer 6/05. I will ride for my many cancer survivor brothers and sisters and for the many friends who are no longer with us.

- Van Van Arsdale