Don’t be a little bitch.
Dutch runner Sifan Hassan set the women’s Olympic record in the marathon, winning gold. She also earned bronze medals in the 5000m and 10000m races. Her total running time in this year’s Olympics was just over 3 hours.
Imagine training your whole life, every second, to prepare for three hours of opportunity. You trip. You’re done. You get injured. You’re done. You’re sick. You’re done.
This is the level at which real excellence is achieved. And yet, so many of us who say we want to be excellent at something disqualify ourselves. We don’t even show up because of one very obvious illusion. My whole life I’ve been falling for that illusion:
Just because your moment isn’t likely to happen tomorrow means you don’t need to train for it today.
I’m having a tough time returning to climbing from a two month hiatus. Thinking back to the strongest I ever was, I got there by accident. I wasn’t thinking about consistency or working out or tracking stats. My friends will confirm my solitary thought on the matter:
Don’t be a little bitch.
It’s not like I was ever at any serious level and I’m now in danger of missing my moment of excellence in climbing. I just don’t want the strongest I ever was to be the strongest I’ll ever be.. because I did miss a moment recently.
I had an opportunity to work as a freelance travel blogger—an opportunity that could have opened up the whole world to me, my dream since I learned how to work YouTube. The only requirement was to submit a writing sample. I have plenty of schoolwork to prove I’m a solid writer, but I didn’t have any pieces appropriate for this. I froze. I didn’t respond.
The real knock to the nards is that I’ve been planning to start this blog for months. I kept putting it off until tomorrow because my opportunity didn’t look like it was coming any time soon. But one day it did, and I hadn’t trained—I wasn’t prepared.
It’s easier to stay in shape than it is to get in shape. It’s easier to maintain a blog than it is to scrape together an article at the last minute. It’s easier to act now than regret later.
Maybe you don’t see your opportunity for excellence coming, but when it does, it’ll come fast—and it might last a lot less than 3 hours. We all know the feeling of missing a moment, but there are so many moments for so many things. Prepare your whole life, every moment, for the moments that matter.
Stay epic 🤙🏼
Beck
