Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Back in the game again...

Been struggling a bit with motivation as of late. At this point of the year (as well as this point in my development as a triathlete), I believe it's hard to always keep your eyes on the big picture. Sometimes you get bogged down with numbers, performance, training, and recovery so much that you forget about the whole reason you started this crazy sport in the first place. You start to doubt your capabilities, your motivation wanes, and the confidence that used to be sky high is now rock bottom. I assume this happens to all athletes in all sports, and I've reached the point where it's happened to me.

I started making excuses about what I should be doing. I started to think about different paths to take, and different things that maybe I was "more correctly suited to". In other words, my confidence hit a low and instead of digging myself out of the hole, I thought of ways to quit. The problem with that is that I'm way to much of a stubborn bastard to quit. The last thing I quit was football in the fourth grade (only to pick it up again in highschool and college!), and I wouldn't dream of repeating that incidence all these years later.

So what have I written in the past two paragraphs? Basically I hit a hole and now I'm out of it. I realized that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that what I'm going through is normal. Everyone that made anything of themselves, either in sport or in life has been hit with some obstacles. Winners don't think of ways to quit. Winners overcome obstacles and failures. Winners get hit, and hit, and hit, yet still stick around and show up each and every day ready to battle in order to progress.

Ok, so enough with the mushy, "Gatorade commercial" talking crap. The proof is in what you do, not what you say. I've been able to turn things around the past couple of days and I'm happy to be a triathlete again. Success will come with consistency, and that's really one of the only things you have control over anyway. Show up, come to play, and eventually, you'll get what you want. It may not happen every day, but in the end, the reward will be worth the journey.

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