Should you stop improving yourself for the test or keep going?

Last week was a frozen hell in San Antonio Texas. No power, water, or internet for most of the work week with temperatures well below freezing all week (-10 with windchill). For Texas it was cold.

None of the systems built in Texas are designed for cold. They are all designed for mild winters and 100 plus-degree summers. Our homes and road are designed to be cooled and not warmed. Most years I don’t need a heater in my home for more than a week all year. And that is only to keep the house above 65.

Last week we got almost a foot of snow in San Antonio. No one was prepared. So people do what they always do in an emergence, raid the Walmart. By Sunday everything in the local stores was gone.

The power grid was never designed for the cold. Rolling blackouts to conserve electricity and keep it going failed when the power couldn’t be turned back on once it was turned off. Without power, all the local stores were forced to close.

People were on their own.

It didn’t bother me that much. I’ve got water, food, heaters, cold weather gear, and wood to burn in the fireplace. Survival wasn’t the problem for me or my family. My worry was what are the people around me going to do as food becomes scarce?

So during the emergency I stopped training and worrying about my diet. I ate what we had and walked the neighborhood to check on things and my neighbors.

We do all this work to make the hard times easier. Doing 75 Hard is voluntary hardship that makes you harder for the hard times.

The hard times came for my family for a week. It wasn’t as hard as it could have been. And honestly, it was a week off for me without much work.

The only miserable time I had was stomping through the snow for hours looking for a water cut off in the ground. Our community pool had two different pipes break and since I’m on the board I ended up working on it. It was miserably cold but easily doable.

Other people talked about their ordeal and how miserable it was. It was slightly annoying and a little bit of old school work. We actually melted snow at one point to do dishes because we had no water.

It was just part of life and a small adventure for me because of done hard things in my life. Some voluntary (like 75 Hard, get your 75 Hard Starters Guide here) and some not so much when I was a Marine. But to an extent, that was still voluntary too. We had a joke when things got hard, “you signed on the dotted line.” Meaning, you volunteered to be a United States Marine and this is part of it.

How do you do when things get tough?

When life gets hard do you stop everything and only concern yourself with survival?

At what point do you put off getting better and just survive?

All questions I’m still asking myself. I was prepared mentally for the last week to be much tougher.

Ben Branam

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