Putting A Little Perspective On Things!

The journey continues and what a journey it was this week!

This week I had the privilege of traveling with 3 of my athletes to Upstate New York for the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track & Field National Championships. In addition to watching my current athletes compete, I was afforded an opportunity to watch several of my former athletes coach their athletes at the highest level of Division III athletics! For three days I watched the very best athletes that Division III has to offer in 18 events and 2 relays! 

Over those 3 days, I watched close to 800 athletes compete for 320 All American spots! That means 60% of the field works hard and sacrifices all year to get to the top of their respective events to possibly come home with no hardware. And trust me, regardless of their seed, every athlete goes there with the hopes of standing on that podium as an All American.

You may be wondering how this all ties into my enjoying journey theme of the blog or putting a bit of perspective on things title to this post..... I will get to that now or at least attempt to as you can imagine how a 360 mile ride home can give one a lot of time to reflect on everything they witnessed.

Here goes:

1. Pick a destination race and travel (drive) with friends. Maybe your trip will not be 1600 miles over 4 days like ours, but that time is great for conversations, jokes, getting to know each other and pointing out things along the drive. Quite often we noticed more of the weird things,  like a cow tied to a tree in a yard in upstate NY...WTF???
2. Respect your fellow competitors - Guess what, we all compete in sports like track & field and triathlons for many of the sames reasons but probably the biggest reason of all - testing our own physical limits and trying to push beyond them. Your fellow competitor is not necessarily out to beat you as they are out to set a personal best and challenge themselves! And sometimes that will mean them beating you and at other times you beating them. It is not always personal! 
3. Get to know your fellow competitors - As mentioned in #2 we are in this for the same reason and in some ways we don't truly compete directly against them as we can only control one thing in a race..... and that is what we do during the race! It was very refreshing to watch many of these athletes interact and get to know each other despite all competing for the limited All American spots. After races, take time to listen more to others talk about their races than always want to talk of your own races. Don't worry, you will get your chance to talk about your race!
4. Don't take take things to seriously - Like the 60% at NCAA's, who walk away with no AA award, we need to understand races are not always going to go the way we want them to! Yeah, we might be disappointed but I assure you the world won't end! Good or bad, we can all learn from our races and put together plan for the next race. As me and a fellow triathlete, who I train with at times, joke about races....they are all "C" races!!!! Like almost all of these 800 athletes, outside of our professions, we won't be making money in the sport of triathlons!
5. Enjoy the journey - Take pictures, Blog, Tweet - who cares - do whatever you want to show others how much you enjoy what you are doing! Just don't over hashtag things!!  Don't just focus on the end results, quite often the greatest pleasure is not in the end result but how you got there! Quite often it is the journey that is the greater challenge! 

Well, my journey is leading up to my first triathlon of the 2015 race season. Next Sunday, I will be competing at the Black Bear Sprint Triathlon (750M swim, 18 mile bike, 5K run). My goal as of now is to see how hard I can push myself over the course and see where the results will fall.  Training has continued to go well and I feel a lot stronger now than I did last year at this time. Here are the latest training totals: (2015 training started on 11/03/2014)

29 Week Training Totals

Bike - 4009 miles/ 189.85 hours/ 21.10 mph

Run - 672 miles/ 89.38 hours/ 7:58 per mile

Swim - 57 miles/ 27.36 hours

Total - 4738 miles/ 306.59 hours

Per Week - 163.37 miles/ 10.57 hours

My ways of enjoying the journey:

1. Drinking my coffee
2. Drinking my beer
3. Eating my ice cream
4. Blogging - helping others keep things in perspective
5. Pictures -  triduath45  (Instagram)
6. Coaching others

"But if you’re all about the destination, then take a fucking flight.
  We’re going nowhere slowly, but we’re seeing all the sights."
"The Ballad Of Me And My Friends" - Frank Turner