Discover yourself

  I get asked the question a lot "What do I think about when your training for hours on end?" So I just wanted to write down a thought I had recently well doing a bit of said training for Ironman :-) As some of you know, the training for an Ironman is hard, long and wearing to say the least. You spend hours upon hours alone. Swimming, cycling, and running. Repeat... Sometimes you get lucky and you have a small group to train with. But even amongst others, you find yourself isolated and trapped within your own thoughts. And it's these thoughts that can either drive you to success, or ultimately cause you to stop and give up...

So here was my thought. I was out running is this great cold weather when this crept in...
 I started thinking about an article I had recently read where Lance Armstrong said that, “Endurance Athletes are running away from something inside of themselves, and that is one of the reasons why they do what they do”.

 So I began to think, "What am I running away from?" I thought back into my past and several things jumped out at me. But none of these things seemed like anything I had not already dealt with. So as I continued my run, I could not seem to find that something I was 'running away from.' The more and more I thought about it, the further and further from finding that something I seemed to end up...

 So my thought process changed a bit. Maybe it's not that I’m running away from something, but rather running towards a burning desire to discover something about myself that I never knew or dreamed imaginable... And when I thought about that for awhile; that statement was a better fit for 'Why I do, what I do.' :-)

 So I look forward to this process. The endless hours of training. The good days. The bad days. And even more important, the hard days. Because I know with each stroke I take, every kilometre I bike, and every new trail I run down. I am that much closer to discovering that something that drives me everyday.

Jesse James Brown

Please take a few moments and watch this video. After this, you have no more excuses. Never say "I can't."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdi0hMkinM&feature=related