They Call Me Seashell

I remember that first day back from Panama City Beach in 2012, standing in the elevator at work a person in my building noticed my IM Florida Finishers jacket. He asked me, "So, what was the hardest part?" while pointing to my jacket. I turned to him, smiled, and replied "Signing up." I never would have been wearing that jacket if I did not start.  And believe me when I say that it takes the most courage to sign that piece of paper and hand over your $700+ non-refundable entry fee. Do you know why there are so few Ironman finishers in the world?  At IM Florida in 2012, they celebrated the 500,000th individual finisher of the Ironman races. That is a lot of people in general, but that is over multiple races world-wide in all of the then 30 years of the branded event.  The reason why it took 30 years to hit half a million Ironman finishers is simple.   The fear of the unknown. If I look over what I personally overcame to find that courage, we must rewind even fur...

Every year around this time, I ask my teammates to come up with a power word (or small 1 to 2 word mantra) for the year ahead. I thought it would be fun to see what word you are pulled towards when you think of 2021... the word you can hold onto to dig deeper, or stay the course when things get difficult. My words in the past have been FEARLESS, RELENTLESS, BEASTMODE... and I realized that for me, those words ended up almost hurting me more than motivating or inspiring me when when things started to hit the fan and I had to do some soul searching. I was not feeling fearless, relentless, and certainly was not in beast mode... and the words just did no good for me. I almost felt like I was weak just because I could not rise up to the level of my power word. We already have so much stress in our lives... why add more to it? A power word is meant to inspire, to lift up and the words that I had chosen in the past certainly could do that for the right person in the right headspace... but for...

Am I finishing... or starting?