Health and fitness lessons I learned from crabbing
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Today’s episode is a solo episode. When I was a kid going crabbing, I learned a lot of things that I now apply to my health and wellness. There are lessons about patience and perseverance, and also how to deal with people that aren’t in your corner. I got a lot of health lessons out of crabbing and I want to share those with you today. With no further ado, here we go.
I know you might be asking yourself, what on earth can crabbing have to do with being healthy? And it’s a lot more than just the fact that it’s actually a very, very healthy meat to eat. Crab meat’s delicious, by the way. If you haven’t tried it, I highly, highly recommended it. In South Mississippi and Louisiana in particular, catching blue crabs is kind of a cool thing. I’ve done crabbing up in Maryland when we lived there. But we were in Manchac, Louisiana, which is a little bitty town, I guess about halfway between McComb, Mississippi, and New Orleans. I know that probably doesn’t help a lot of you; just realize it’s way, way down there. Anyway, we would go crabbing. Our parents would take the traps out with the boat; and the kids – I was 15 – we would hang out on the dock and we would go crabbing from the dock. Now, we didn’t have traps, so we had a different way of catching crabs that took a lot more patience and a lot more time. But it kept us entertained and we did our thing. What you do is you take a turkey neck, a string, a net, and a bucket, and that’s all you need. You tie one end of the string to the turkey neck and then you toss the turkey neck into the water and you wait anywhere from three to five minutes or so. Then you slowly, slowly, slowly bring that turkey neck up to the surface. Now, I’d practiced with all kinds of little different ways of how I would bring it up, but basically finger over finger, slowly inching the turkey neck off the bottom, up to the surface of the water. And many, many times you would find a crab on that turkey neck. You see the crab as you get it close to the surface, you try to get it as close to the surface as you can, and then with the net you just scoop them up. And if they’re big enough to keep, you drop them in the bucket and you get going again.
So, what on earth would a turkey neck and standing on a pier, fishing for crabs and catching them one at a time like that – what on Earth could that teach me? The first thing it taught me was patience. You had to be extremely patient pulling the turkey neck to the surface, because you basically had to have the crabs so enveloped in the turkey, eating the turkey, that he or she didn’t know that they were being moved. They didn’t realize that there was a movement upward. So this was a very, very slow, methodical process to get the crab to the surface. And then you couldn’t get them too far to the surface, or else they would recognize what was going on and you wouldn’t get a chance to scoop them. So, very, very heavy on the patience, to make sure that you have patience to get the things that you want, which was the crabs.
The second thing it taught me was perseverance, meaning there were times when you’re out there and you’re just not getting any crabs to bite onto your turkey neck. So you just keep trying. You might move to a different part of the pier, you might go into the deeper water, you might go into the more shallow water. You just tested around to figure out what was going to work for you for that day. Crabs were finicky and sometimes there was a whole bunch of them there, and sometimes there weren’t.
The third thing it taught me was that you’re going to be dealing with a lot of adversity in your life. Where you would see this adversity when you’re crabbing is, you’d put the crabs in the bucket, and obviously the crab now wants to get out of the bucket. We had a little wet towel in there to keep them moist, but other than that, they knew they weren’t where they were supposed to be. So these crabs are trying to climb out of this bucket. The problem came in that the other crabs that were in the bucket also wanted to get out, and rather than perhaps working together, each of the crabs was trying to climb on the back of another crab to get where they wanted to go, to get out. So you could pretty much fill this bucket almost all the way to the top and the crabs very seldom were able to get out of the bucket, because by the time they got to the lip, another crab would pull them down to climb up on top of them. Because these crabs were fighting each other, these crabs in a bucket – almost none of the crabs ever got out of the bucket. You were safe to let the crabs stay in the bucket, and most of the time not have to worry about anything other than getting the next crab.
Those are three basic lessons, and I want to relate those to health and wellness and where those come to play in your health and wellness. We all are being brought up in this environment of, “I want it now”, instant gratification. And I can tell you that health and wellness are not instant gratification kind of things. I mean, seriously not. The reality is, it took us many, many decades in some cases to get out of good health, we lost our fitness over a series of years; and to get back to a state of fitness, to get back to a state of health is going to take some time. We have to be patient and keep at it, or we’re not going to get what we want. We may make a mistake and that sets us back. So, I’ve been sitting there for five minutes, I’m trying to bring this crab up and I make a mistake. In making that mistake, that crab gets away. Now I have to toss the net back down and wait a little while again. The process of getting healthy and well is going to take you time and you need to put in that time to make that happen. That means staying consistent as well.
The other one is perseverance that I talked about. Now, just because something isn’t working for you, you have to understand whether it’s your method or whether it’s just situational. When I talked about crabbing, we’re looking at maybe the place on the dock where I’m at – they’re not schooling down below there and I need to move to another place on the dock. I changed my tactics; I moved from one location to another. I didn’t change my approach. I’m still using the string, still using the turkey neck and the net, but I’ve moved to a new location. So sometimes when you’re training for something or you’re working on a diet and you’ve plateaued, you just need to have the perseverance to keep going. You may change your tactics to mix things up a little bit, but in a general sense, you just keep going. When you marry those two things together – patience and persistence, you have an excellent formula for getting whatever you want in your health and fitness. But you have to have both. Having both and applying both allows you to be successful. It allows you to get more crabs when you’re crabbing as well.
The final thing is the crabs in the bucket. If you’ve listened to the podcast before when I was doing a lot more solo shows, you’ve probably heard the episode when I talk about saboteurs. The saboteurs are just like those crabs. As you’re trying to climb out of that bucket, you’re trying to get healthy, they’re the ones that are doing things to pull you back down. And they’re doing it for the same exact reason that the crabs are – they want to be on top. They don’t want you to change, because it belittles them, it makes them feel bad about themselves. But I want you to listen to that statement – it makes them feel bad about themselves. That’s nothing that you’ve done. That’s all on them. That’s how they feel, how they are. Rather than cooperating with you and both of you working towards your health and wellness – them being a part of your accountability team, and you for them – they’ve decided to be the crab in the bucket that’s trying to pull you down to make themselves feel better.
So, don’t be like the crabs in a bucket. You can get out of the bucket. You know how to get out of the bucket – you get out of the bucket with patience and persistence. If you’re using patience and persistence in your health and wellness, you’re going to be outside the bucket and then you don’t have to worry about the other crabs in the bucket. They can just be crabs in a bucket.
I know this was a short episode, but I did want to take the time to share that lesson with you. Parts of this lesson are actually in The Wellness Roadmap book, so I’d encourage you to go out. It’s on presale at a discounted price right now, so I hope you will go out there and get the book. And again, please do leave me a review on Amazon. It’s really, really important to get the book noticed to have those reviews. Thank you very much, and I’ll talk to you next time.
I really need you on the launch team. If you could go to WellnessRoadmapBook.com, there you’ll find a signup form to be on the launch team. The launch team is going to get a lot more information about the book. They’re going to get some bonus material that I’m not going to be showing or giving out anywhere else. You’ve got to be on the launch team if you want these extras and these bonuses and some special things I’m going to be doing for them. All I’m asking are very small things from them to help me promote the book. So, I really do need you on the launch team. Go to WellnessRoadmapBook.com and you can sign up there.
Now, I am going to do something special for that week of the launch. I’m going to have a bonus episode on December 6th. That date actually happens to be the anniversary date of when I launched the podcast three years ago. So, that date holds some significance for the podcast and I want to make that a very special show. It’s going to celebrate the launch of the book and it’s going to celebrate you. And the way it’s going to celebrate you is I want you to submit your questions to me that I can then answer on the podcast. There’s going to be two ways that you can do this. You can go to the Contact page at 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com and record your question directly there, and then I can play that. That’ll be you asking your question, and then I’ll answer it. Or if you feel more comfortable, you can email me at allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com. There I’ll have your written out question and I’ll organize those in a way that makes sense for the show. I’ll read your question or I’ll play your question, depending on how you choose to respond. We’ll make it a really cool Q&A session, celebrating you – the podcast listener, and the podcast, and the book. So it’s going to be a special celebration week for us, having a special episode on that Thursday, December 6th. Please do get your questions in because this is going to be a lot harder podcast for me to get organized and recorded, so I’m going to need plenty of time and at some point I’ll just have to cut off the questions. So the sooner you get your question in to me, the more likely you are to be featured on the show. I do want to hear from you, so please do send in your questions either via the SpeakPipe, which you can get at the Contact page on 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com. Or you can go ahead and email me – allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com. I look forward to getting your questions, I look forward to helping you out on your journey, and I really look forward to sending off this book in the best way possible. So, please do join me on December 6th for the launch party, effectively the online launch party for the book. I’m really excited for you to be a part of this. I’m looking forward to your questions, I’m looking forward to having you on the launch team. Thank you.
