Success

It's Sunday morning, and the rain is coming down outside (again). I am scheduled for a long run this morning and according to the local news there are small bands of rain moving in and out of the area and I should be able to catch a break in precipitation before it returns in the afternoon.

Yesterday's rainy weather set me up for another indoor workout at an LA Fitness and while I was there, I ran into an acquaintance who was walking in as I was reloading on dry clothes (indoor workouts make me sweat a little bit) and stuffing down some calories. This athlete has qualified for Kona a couple of times. He's a young guy in the 30-34 age group and was able to grab another spot at Ironman Wisconsin , the same race I imploded at in September of 2005 under brutal heat and windy conditions.

After saying hello and chit-chatting a bit, I head back upstairs and grab a treadmill. The treadmills are basically on a balcony of sorts overlooking the general workout floor below. There are multiple treadmills that are unused but I purposely select one next to a women who appears to be in her early 30's (a nice demographic.) and to the best of my subtle observations, I've noticed that she has been on that treadmill 'a very long time.'

In a not-so-unusual fashion, while running up a storm on my left, Ms. Thirty Something has an MP3 player going on and is focused dead ahead. Another ten minutes goes by and after repeated glances to my left, she stays focused straight ahead, looking into the abyss of LA Fitness. Making matters worse, she has a large towel that she has draped over the entire front of the treadmill, blocking my ability to gather any data on speed, pace, incline, miles completed, etc. You see, I have this amazing ability whereby if an attractive woman is running 7.0 miles per hour, I seem to be able to run at 7.1 miles per hour. If she's running 7.2, I can run 7.3. It's really something. Although once there was a woman who figured out my little routine and adjusted on the fly. She was running at about 7.2 when I got on (not a bad little clip). After a very brief warm-up (because my body language was trying to say, "Who needs a long warm-up to run this slow lady?") I crank it to 7.3. As I try to get my lungs to catch up to my legs, I see her adjust to 7.4. No sweat, I call her pathetic bluff and bump to 7.5 mph (8 minute mile pace). The next thing I know, the woman (I was thinking 'bitch') is at 7.7. I say to myself, "Oh, you want to play tough with Mr. Ironman and bump by .2 do ya?" I go straight to 8.0mph and I could hear the treadmill below me starting to make that squeal sound from the increased speed. As I was starting to enjoy my apparent victory, the smile on my face was quickly removed with an 8.3 move on her behalf. I can't really recall at what speed I eventually accepted defeat, but I can remember quite vividly, stepping off the treadmill, looking at my watch with the best look of 'purpose' that I could muster as if saying, "Look lady, I could play these games all day long but I have more important things to do." Enraged I move downstairs to the weight room and select a bench in perfect view of the treadmills above and started doing some bench presses, all the while looking up at, "Ms. I'm soooo great at running (oh give me a break.)" with a look of "You wanna piece of this!?!?" I'm glad she didn't come downstairs to out-bench me because I really wasn't prepared to change gym memberships.

Anyway, the towel covering the treadmill of the woman beside me was a 'Flying Pig' marathon from yesteryear. She's obviously doing a long run indoors on the treadmill to avoid the bad weather outside. That's when I started thinking, "There's no secret to success here. Here's a woman cranking out a long run indoors on a treadmill and over there is a guy doing the work required to make it to Kona while the gym is pretty much empty on an early Saturday afternoon."

For the remainder of my run (when I wasn't thinking about Ms. Thirty Something to my left), I was thinking of athletic success and what that meant. Here are two people (three including me) trying to achieve success with their athletic careers. But what is success and how would one define it. Does being a successful athlete mean you are successful in life? I wasn't sure about this. What if that was your goal in life, to be successful in athletics (a pro athlete?)

I took a further step back and looked at the different components of my life. How do I define success? How will I know if I am successful? Is success determined by others or is success determined by ourself? I jumped on the internet this morning and I did a little surfing on 'success' on Amazon.com. There were no shortages of books on the subject of success. Some were about the 'science of success,' while others were about how you could be successful by obtaining prosperity at work. Prosperity at work? Is that success in life? Based on a lot of my clients that have good jobs and make big dollars, I wouldn't necessarily call them successful in life. They have broken families. They aren't in good health. They aren't happy. They are quite stressed. But they do have a big house and nice cars. That has to count for something (so they try to lead me to believe).

I started to look at my own life and situation. How did I define success? After further thought, I came to the conclusion that I define success in different ways depending on what I am judging. For instance with work, I don't judge my success based on how much money I make relative to other people. Quite frankly, we have some very wealthy clients. They have wealth that I am not sure I will ever achieve. I have plenty of clients that earn more money than I in any given year. Does that mean I am unsuccessful at work? Am I to judge my success quantitatively based on my relative performance benchmarked to others?

I quickly determined that I don't judge my success based on others in this regard. But I would say that I am successful regarding my career. I believe I am successful because I enjoy what I do, I control the amount of time that I spend at work, I really like the few people that I work with on a daily basis (we have a small office). I can control who I work with and who I don't. And finally, I get to use my brain in a way that by challenging myself, I feel fulfilled doing my number crunching. Further analysis leads me to the conclusion that a lot of my self-described success has nothing to do with quantitative data relative to others. Rather, it's the qualitative factors that I would deem successful.

But I find that when I judge my athletic performance, I would deem myself 'not as successful.' "Why is that?" I asked myself. It's because when I judge myself from an Ironman racing perspective, I tend to judge my success relative to others. It boils down to, "How did I do against my peer group?" Did I make Kona? Will I make Kona? Will I podium one day in my age-group? Wow, this was a total shocker to me because I normally pride myself based on my ability to "do my own thing in life and not worry about other people." I always thought of myself as the ultimate contrarian in thoughts and actions. I guess I have been wrong about myself.

Based on this scary self-realization, I think it's in my best interest to alter my definition of success in Ironman racing for my own self-preservation. Others might be horrified to admit defeat before even trying, but deep down I really don't ever believe that I will win Kona one day (I mean the whole sha-bang) and I guess I don't care about that. Will that mean that I wasn't successful? What if I never top five at Kona? What if I never top five in my age group? What if I never finish in the top ten percent, the top twenty percent, the top fifty percent of my age group in Kona? Heck, what if I never make it to Kona? What if I end up a twenty time Ironman without any hardware? Will I be unsuccessful?

When I go back and think about work and my career and think about how I define success, I think about success from the standpoint of what makes me happy. When I think about what really makes me happy and excited about Ironman is my commitment to excellence. It is knowing that I tried my hardest. I worked as hard as I could work toward the process of achievement in the sport that I am passionate about. I was going to state that, "I believe that the harder I work, the more successful I will be at Ironman." That may be true. But I also believe that if I have defined what makes me happy (which is doing Ironman), and I am most fulfilled when I try my hardest (I like doing the work), and I enjoy the process of achievement, then I am successful regardless of how I do relative to other peoples performances.

I try to look at issues in life based on what I can control and what I cannot control. In the end, I cannot control other people's performances in Ironman racing. I cannot control their genetics, their speed, their work ethic, their previous athletic background, or anything else for that matter. But I can control myself, my own actions, my own choices, my own diet, and my own work ethic. It's important that we don't let others determine our own sense of success. It very well might limit us. There are plenty of people out there that believe that anybody that can run a 10k race is successful in athletics. Running a marathon blows peoples minds. Being an Ironman is beyond comprehension for the average person. They created their own barriers and limits and told themselves before even trying what is possible and what is not.

Success comes from within. And usually success can be obtained from the internal pride generated from knowing that you worked hard, paid the price and got the job done.

Ahhh yessss! The rain has stopped (or at least slowed tremendously). Time for a long run.

Just remember, everybody loves a great success story, unless it's not their own.