My best friend and I are training for our next triathlon in Sept. We each decided at the start of our training what our goals for this next race would be, and our reason for competing. I think if you don't have a clear goal, when training gets hard(and it will) or when it gets tough(and it does) you lose your focus on why you are doing it in the first place and may give up. So for this race, her goal is to be able to run(no stopping) the 5k, and mine is to shave off two minutes of my swim. They may seem simple, but it takes time and dedication to accomplish these goals.
We are on a strict running schedule with her,because she has never run before,(the last race, she walked the run), and so we can not afford to miss one of our running sessions.
Sunday night, we left a little earlier than usual, trying to get finished before the rain, and well, that didn't work. Half way through our run, a huge thunderstorm came on us. It was not a light sprinkle, the wind was blowing, the thunder booming, and the rain was coming down so hard you could barley see. At one point we were going to just stop, quit and pick it up another time. However, we realized what if this happens in our race,we would have to make a decsion, there are no take backs,so would we just give up, not finish, stop 2/3Rd's of the way through the triathlon? No, we wouldn't.We would press forward. So that is what we did. We ran through that thunderstorm, we were soaked, our clothes weighed an extra two pounds, but still we ran. We laughed,and thought how crazy we must have looked! At one turn the rain would let up a few seconds and then.. bam.., it would pour over us again. It was fun, and thrilling, we ran faster than we had before. We finished our task at hand.
Training is so unpredictable, it has so many variables, such as the weather, what you ate, what you drank, your soreness, rest, clothes, shoes etc. But if you let those things stop you,or hinder your training you may never finish your task. When it rained on us, I thought, this is life, sometimes everything is sunshine and at those times its easy to stay focused and train,that's the easy days.Its the times when it rains and pours that build your character. It's in those times, that you have a choice to make. You can stay the course, push through and finish it, or you can give up and quit. It is at these times that help define who we are, and what we are made of. It is in these times, that we must complete our race, we can not afford to give up on our goal or ourselves. Finishing the race is the goal,finishing it well is the prize.
I hope it rains again tomorrow.
