Today I learned that a reason I get tied up to an outcome is that I chose I way that I can’t afford.

Effort has a way of sizing itself so that it gets exhausted exactly the moment you get there.

You arrive home and you feel like you couldn’t take another step.

That’s why I get so fixated on a positive outcome. It’s because in the event of a negative outcome, there’s no energy to do more because I already gave it all. I shouldn’t give it all on any day other than race day.

The closer this race got, the more focused I’ve become on what comes next. In my defense, this is not purely because this is a deep personality trait of mine. I think it’s mostly because of my degrading social life. The last two months in Lisbon have been beyond anything I’ve experienced so far. I meet my coworkers on long zoom calls, I call my family and friends often, and I go out of the house every single day, multiple times. I also live in a nice neighborhood and I see people all the time.

But with the exception of my friend who spent a day with me, I met nobody in real life and I had almost no conversations at all. People don’t speak english and on top of that, I’ve started experiencing this nascent hostility towards foreigners in Portugal. Not knowing the language has never been an issue for me. But it has now become one.

Getting into my first ever bike crash on my first ride didn’t help. Breaking my bike didn’t help, getting sick for a week right after, closed pools, getting lost in a new country with a dead phone on 120km cycling trip, crashing and avoiding severe injury, not running properly for three weeks because of a bad knee, not having a drivers license, getting lost in Portuguese bureaucracy, etc… Non of this helps. It’s been a long long two months. Far from ideal training conditions.

I’m not enumerating excuses. I’m simply trying to reveal how the focus drifts away from the journey to the destination. It shifts from doing the work, showing up with heart and positivity, into a fixation on a calendar event that one just wants to “get it over with”. With the weight of people coming to cheer you on that day and nobody being here for the journey, of course I’m going to lose focus. Of course I’m going to get overwhelmed.

The lesson is that I always knew that the journey is more important. I intend to focus on it. But I have just experienced the erosion of those good intentions into that all familiar recipe of failure and disappointment.

Getting the IM done would be amazing. It would be a huge weight off my shoulders and it would allow me the time and energy to pursue some increasingly pressing matters. However, I think it would probably not be the optimal outcome. I think experiencing failure is probably the path of most learning. I don’t want it to happen because the more I stay in the IM project, the more I expose myself to professional failure and simply more shit coming up like accidents or injuries.

But in reality, there is part of me that I want to burn away. The part that’s afraid of failure, the part that longs for the undefeated, the first attempt success, the perfect plan perfectly executed. It’s not a particularly distasteful part of me. But it certainly is too powerful and I know it’s not helpful at all for the things that I want to accomplish in life. Perhaps a failed swim in front of my friends where I barely make it out of the water alive, is the right doze of humiliation to burn this part of me away. Call it an exorcism, a form of exposure therapy.

Part of me did invite my friends because of this. I don’t want to hide anymore, in success or in failure. The words of my mentor Seth Godin never leave my mind: Show the work. That’s the only way the work can matter to those to whom it should matter. But that aside, that’s the only way to learn to confront. Yes, this is all for me. I need no recognition. But perhaps I need a crowd to hold myself accountable to the standard that I set a long time ago. If success in the eyes of my peers don’t matter, than why should failure?

I’m not planning on throwing in the towel. No, I will not concede that I didn’t train my hardest. Perhaps it wasn’t enough, but it sure as hell was my best and I’m happy with it. The last piece of the puzzle is the follow through. That’s the theme of this year. 2023 was the year of discipline, and 2024 is the year of the follow-through. It’s funny how it came along. I think I did enough, and I have hope that I will get this done. But if it’s not, then we do more follow-through.

To reiterate the main lesson: I know that the journey matters more. I know that our energy should go into the daily task that lead me to where I need to go. The focus should be on the present. But I find myself focused on the outcome because the present is unbearable. This is a result of poor planning. Perhaps a good way of designing journeys is to make sure they are desirable even in the absence of the outcome. That’s how I get to play for long enough to do the things that I need to do.