Yeah, I feel like I should have pushed that button.

The crushing iron is in the house.

Oh, man, yeah, that intro is just a nice, solid, like, adrenaline espresso shot.

I feel like it's good.

I passed on the extra cup of coffee.

But, yeah, it is amazing to be back.

It is February 18th, the year 2026. Welcome aboard,

everybody. You're listening to the Crushing Iron podcast, and this is episode 9606.

It didn't come through.

There it is.

It just shows us how rusty we are.

We couldn't even get the little fake intro in.

Yes, when we went live, I thought about being like, hey, it's podcast, you know, 9-0, like 9-10.

And referring to the podcast we did last week in the week before, just to play with everyone's mind.

Like, yeah, you know, last week talked about this, but wait a minute, I didn't, I missed it. But no, we're back. It's been a long hiatus. We were at run camp for a week out in the hills of Tennessee, one of our favorite weeks of the years. We were there for a week. and then yeah, I frankly just forgot to pack the old podcast equipment because I was traveling that whole next week and never even came back home.

So yeah, that was on me. So we took last week as a little bit of a break in, but we're back and excited to be here.

But yeah, thanks for your patience. And you know what? It is nice. I mean, I feel like sometimes we should just pretend like we're too busy. And, you know, we get a few little nudges like, hey, man, really missed the podcast or hey, when's a podcast coming back? It's nice to be missed. You know, when you're when you're consistent, when you show up pretty much twice a week, if not once a week and and you have every week, you know, for the most part, for the last, what, eight or something years, you know, sometimes you don't get the opportunity to miss us. So you know what? It, it feels nice to be missed. And it feels nice for people to be like, hey, man, when's the podcast coming back? And I can't tell if that's just like people are really bored and there's really not much material this time of year for your athletes, but whatever, nonetheless, it is. It's nice to be missed and it is really nice to be back. Yeah, it is. It's kind of like, you know, I've been thinking about that a little bit. It's sort of like, remember, well don't know. When I had a regular job in corporate America, I had this like non-miss streak going where no sick days. And it was one of these things. It was like a streak, you know, going. And then, you know, but like, it's like this lot of pressure because there's motivation. You don't, you know, want to get fired but then it becomes about the streak yep and then uh you know when you lose a streak

it's easy to go ah you know fuck it it's like it's like workout workout streaks you know

or like people that try and run for a hundred straight days or whatever the case when you stop when you like you miss a day you're kind of like well streaks over I guess I'll just screw around for a while but no the key is you get back at it so yeah we are man it's funny it's funny you went that direction because that's like two things not that I had like top of mind for today but I was actually thinking about that on my when I was driving post run camp I was like man remember the thinking about how long it'd be before we podcasted again

I was like man remember the days when I would you'd like I'd like podcast in a fucking car

or we'd be like side by side I think I remember we're doing a podcast in the stairwell

at Disney on like a family trip I was like like, yeah, you're showing some dedication,

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