Last week I was on vacation with my wife’s family. We had the good fortune of going to Lake Norman, NC and renting a house for everyone to stay in. While vacation was on a lake and we all had a boat load of fun (mainly because we had a pontoon boat for a week). Work still needed to get done. This wasn’t work from the Application Engineering position here at EXAIR. This work was physically more difficult.
This was training for an event I will be doing hopefully within the next year. I’ve been attending a Tuesday morning workout for the past six months or so with two other men, who are both Marine veterans and I thank them for their service. This work we put in on Tuesday morning and a few other random times throughout the week is all for the same events. The events are put on by a company called GORUCK. (Yes, just like EXAIR, it is all CAPS all the time, one word.) These events are classified as endurance events and are lead by either an active or retired Special Forces cadre. There are different versions but they are all heald to the same standard for participants. Put in the work, rely on your team, and everyone will get through it together.
At most of the events very few people know each other that well. This makes forming a team within the few hours you are together very difficult. That is until you are under a time hack when everyone has their weighted ruck on their back, you have a few hundred extra pounds of sand bags to carry and because it is fun to watch the Cadre gives you a casualty that now has to be buddy carried. The main focus is to get people of all walks of life, all abilities, all physical aptitudes to come together, build into one another, and make sure everyone is at the end getting a patch to wear on their ruck.
This is why, on every Tuesday I try to put in some hard work mixed in with a lot of stairs. While I was on vacation and could have easily let that weekly training go, I didn’t. Instead I got out a deck of cards for the number of reps to each exercise, grabbed a 60 lbs and 40 lb sandbag and went to the tallest section of stairs we had close by, the dock stairs.
While going through the exercises, panting and glistening (for those that don’t know that’s the fancy word for seriously sweating), my youngest daughter came down to “help” me workout. The look on her face was at first confusion, then after a brief talk and explaining I am trying to better myself by doing this, she switched to full on support.
Burpees have never felt so good until you have a 4 year old cheering you on. Once I was done with all of my reps and had made over 6 trips up and down the steps with the 60 lb. sandbag I carried my sandbags and followed her in to the house for some well deserved breakfast.
This work could have been easily pushed to the side and not completed. Instead, I embraced it and did it. I was going to do the work even if anyone wasn’t watching because I want to better myself so that I may better any team that I am part of.
This same level of dedication is put in to everything we do here at EXAIR. Customer service, production, assembly, product design, order entry, accounting, and marketing all dedicate to ensure that we fill the needs of our customers because we want to become a strong part of their team. Whether it means digging deeper on testing a product in order to get some data at different operating pressure, or creating a 100% custom product that we have never manufactured before, we dedicate to the customer and ensure that all possibilities are exhausted so that the customer and EXAIR can both succeed.
If you have any questions about how EXAIR can help your team to reduce compressed air consumption, increase plant efficiency, and save energy through compressed air usage, please contact us.
Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF