By Paul Winter
It doesn’t matter if you’re coming to Iron Legion to train weightlifting or Jiu Jitsu.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, young or old, in peak health or broken down and scarred up.
We don’t care how you feel about what’s on the news today, or your boss, or your car.
“You’re not your fuckin’ khakis,” as Tyler Durden famously said in the film “Fight Club.”
What you are is a member of a community that requires you bring the heat each and every day to Iron Legion, and that you bring fire to the Forge.
Our bindrune logo is about that fire, and the people who work the bellows to hammer out the imperfections from the steel, as we talked about HERE.
All of us have something going on in our lives at all times that makes it inconvenient to train. We all have somewhere to be, or a schedule to keep, or obstacles large and small that could’ve kept us from being here.
The difference is: who makes the choice to be somewhere, to offer their heart’s blood and their sweat up as fuel to power the Forge, to make the fire burn as hot as hell, in order to build up the entire Legion.
This upward elevation we are looking to produce here at Iron Legion Strength and Combat has to be a product of the whole – each individual coming together to form something greater than themselves, driving toward an unattainable ideal, and yet striving toward it with every expectation of attaining it, every day, every minute spent here.
Energy and attitude are infectious, both the good kind and the bad – so when you come into the gym with a shit attitude, low energy, dragging your ass in here to put in a lackluster training session, that is no longer simply you having an off day.
It is you acting as some kind of Typhoid Mary, an energy vampire pulling the life force out of the training facility, pulling others down to your level, because “misery loves company.”
View this place instead as a temple of power, a place where, before you walk in the doors, you need to purify yourself of all the madness and mayhem of the day, in order to come in strong, positive, and ready to uplift those you will train with to be their best.
These kind of people are more valuable than gold in any kind of environment – in business, they keep the excitement up and the cash flowing. In friendships, they maintain good communication and act as the glue that keeps things together.
In war, they’re the kind of people that get you home.
I was just watching the classic, “Deer Hunter” again last night.
In it, during a high stress and horrific scenario inside a VC prisoner camp, Robert DeNiro’s character Michael talks down his friend Steve as the scene reaches a boiling point.
After their attempted rescue by helicopter, Stevie is unable to hang onto the landing gear and plummets back down to the river – Michael lets go, and falls back to enemy territory with him, rather than leave a man behind.
On returning home from the war and discovering his friend Nick, immortalized by a young Chris Walken, is still back in Saigon – he goes back to VietNam in order to try to bring his friend back home because of a promise he made while drunk.
We should all strive to be the “Michael” of our community.
And sure, training isn’t war, and shouldn’t be equated to it…but we can look at it as a proving ground where we can choose to bring strength to others, or make them weaker with our presence.
This place is a Forge – and we expect you, the Legion, to bring the heat.
