It’s that time of year, the time of year that I give up triathlons. Yes, I know that everyone who knows me laughs about this. I’ve done over a hundred triathlons since I started in 2004. And every year around this time, I say I’m done. Often, this is triggered by an Ironman competitions. My first Ironman, I was disappointed in my performance and as I drove away from it, swore I would never do another one. I looked at the four toenails that had gone black and which I eventually lost, and I thought — nothing can possibly be worth feeling like this the day after. I gave up — and then the next year, I signed up for another one and did it all over again.
You might be thinking right now that this sounds a lot like the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. I’d also argue that it’s the definition of success. It’s the definition of heroic doggedness. If you read through biographies of our country’s heroes, you will find a lot of stories of people who had a vision of something that seemed impossible. And they kept at it, year after year, failure after failure. I’m sure they changed some details. I’m also sure that the people around them thought they were insane, working so hard at that impossible thing that never worked, no matter how hard they tried. And I suspect, even though the biographies I read in the children’s library back in the 1980s didn’t tell me this…
