Learning what it means to hurt....

It has been the topic with me and my clients for a couple months now. Hurt has a very different meaning to everyone. For some hurt may be a 9 hour IM or a 15 hour IM. It doesn't really matter the pace. It is about getting the most out of your body on any given day.

Some aren't in these races to push the limit. They are there to finish and enjoy the day. There is nothing wrong with that. I do it for some different reasons, I am not going into them here, but I do race to push myself as hard as I can. When you are able to hurt in a race and give it everything you got, you will never have a bad race. I decided to talk about this before giving a brief race report because some may think for me AZ was a sub par performance. Maybe because I didnt qualify for Kona, or I didn't break 10 hours, whatever the case racing IM is way bigger than that for me. All I know is that I "hurt" from the time the gun went off till I crossed the line. I gave it all I had on that day. For me that is a good day. It wasn't good enough to accomplish some goals I set for myself, but none the less, I can sleep at night because the effort was there.

The picture above is after the finish. It is just a reminder to myself that I did give it my all. That is definately my "Shelled face". It is easy to say after you recover a bit, that you could have got harder or faster. I just look at this picture and it reminds me that I did what my body could on that day.

Cheers,
Ron