Quotes and thoughts

"What we have is based upon moment-to-moment choices of what we do.In each of those moments, we choose.We either take a risk and move toward what we want, or we play it safe and choose comfort. Most of the people, most of the time, choose comfort. In the end, people either have excuses or experiences; reasons or results; buts or brilliance.They either have what they wanted or they have a detailed list of all the rational reasons why not."~ Anonymous

"A man is not old until regrets take the place of his dreams" John Barrymore "I am not only still dreaming, I am living my dreams." -Emilio De Soto II

"Fear is probably the thing that limits performance more than anything - the fear of not doing well, of what people will say. You've got to acknowledge those fears, then release them." --Mark Allen

There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain" -- Aeschylus "

In my failures, I saw the darkest part of myself, where I was weak, where expectations did not meet reality. Until you face your fears, you don't move to the other side, where you find the power." -- Mark Allen

Life, to me, is a series of false limits and my challenge as an athlete is to explore those limits."—Lance Armstrong

I was told once that the best people to judge a persons status is yourself. You are your own baromoter and any defined limits are nothing more than a form of someone elses nostalgia.

The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn't matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark.
- Barbara Hall

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." -T.S. Eliot

Better to aspire to Greatness and fail, than to not challenge one's self at all, and succeed.

“The arrow that hits the bulls-eye is the result of the one hundred previous misses.”

A person fails to reach their potential when they fail to pay the price.

"Do not dedicate your life to your sport, but rather, dedicate your sport to your life. Dan Millman


"When a man says 'I cannot', he has made a suggestion to himself. He has weakened his power of accomplishing that which otherwise would have been accomplished." ~ Muhammad Ali

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake"-H.D.Thoreau

"Concentrate on the process and the outcome will look after itself." Trust and execute the plan to the best you can

If you think you can, or you think you cant - Your right.

"Wasting that opportunity because 'it doesn't matter' makes me wonder if when you're old and tired and winding down will you wonder what if? What if I had let it matter? What was I afraid of? Was I afraid that if I let it matter I'd risk failing?" – Q

Apply the potential to believe to believe in your potential – SC

"All the miles of a hard road are worth a moment of true happiness" - Arnold Lobel
Apply the potential to believe to believe in your potential

"Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily disenchanted. Truth cannot be brought down. Rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend it. " -Krishnamurti


"Most people would rather be right, than effective. We should think about that as we surf the internet searching for threads to reconfirm our biases."

"I'm pretty shocked, but at the same time, I trained so hard," she said. "Some days the training was harder than the race was today." Desiree Ficker after her 2nd place at Kona 2006


The people that do "well" consistantly in really long triathlons like an IM do several things that puts them in a better position to do well: 1. They go in with some loosely defined place/time goals, but with an open mind. 2. They know when to shift from pace/time/nutrition plan A, to plan B and in some cases plan C as conditions change or fate deals them some unfortunate news. This is absolutly key! 3. They remain optimistic throughout the day. 4. They know that more often then not it's a race of attrition. It's not about hammering here or making a big move there. 5. They keep plugging away and letting the "race" come back top them. Read the tortise and hare fable, over and over and over. This is what it's about. Fleck

And digest their food really well.

"If you are good, be better. If you are better, be the best. If you are the best, find something else to be good at.""Excellence is caring more than others think wise; risking more than others think safe. Dreaming more than others think is practical and expecting more than others think is possible."

If you can't back-it-up daily then you are going too hard. - Gordo


“Technique sets the upper limit to where your fitness will take you.” – Unknown

“A life spent defensively, worried, is to me a life wasted…life, to me, is a series of false limits and my challenge as an athlete is to explore those limits.” ---Lance

“Obsessive is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated.” ---Unknown

Never follow the program of a champion because you never know if they are a champion because or in spite of their training program.

In order to get things you never had, you must do things you never did.

If you are good, be better. If you are better, be the best. If you are the best, find something else to be good at. Excellence is trying more than others think is smart, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than what others think is possible.

Be your own hero.

Some of the greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible. –doug larsenAbove all, train hard, eat right, and avoid television and people with bad attitudes. –scott tinley

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again>and expecting different results."

Endurance training is exactly like turning a Styrofoam cup inside out. So long as you take it slowly you'll be able to do it. Try to rush things and - rip - you'll tear the cup. You are the cup. -Gordo

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit" Aristotle

It's simple, but it isn't easy.

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess and worth doing well.

Success is maintaining your enthusiasm between failures." -Winston Churchill

"they told me it was impossible, I told them it was inevitable"

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal."

Fortitudine Vincimus (By Endurance We Conquer) -- Ernest Shackleton

Cycling is a blue-collar sport. You gotta do the miles. ~Jonas Twenty miles of hope and six miles of reality. ~Cam Brown

There is no failure, only feedback." - Mark Allen

"I once mentioned to my wife that I wish I could play the saxophone as she does. She turned to me laughing and said, "apparently not bad enough to learn how." She was absolutely correct. ~Kevin Purcell aka CoachKP.com

"Triathlon, from the outside looking in you can't understand it, and from the inside looking out you can't explain it."

I got two 1) Always Be Closing ." A.B.C" 2) Hustle and Flow

"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" "If the best time to have done something was yesterday, the next best time is right now!"

Going numb is Ironman foreplay"

"You have to wonder at times what you're doing out there......but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement." - Steve Prefontaine.

"Some dream of great accomplishments, others stay awake and do them."

"Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.-Og Mandino

Gordo-----
How many people in the world, know what it's like to truly achieve their potential in anything? How many people in the world have even tried? Truly dedicated themselves to it -- shed all distractions, moved into a plastic bubble, spent all day thinking about it, answering questions on it, trying to learn about it, baring their whole lives to the world so that there is no question/no doubt about what it takes. We can debate about the GI of wheat germ, on drafting, on whether 85kb of code is showing off, on whether to use 10K or 5K race pace for intervals -- or we can buckle down and train all day, every day.
So, our "potential" is a moving target. What I do is try to train myself (and my crew) to the best of our ability. Then we work on mental skills and race execution so that we are able to race to the maximum potential of our fitness. True satisfaction comes from working towards a goal and then performing to our potential given the circumstances.
In training, build race mojo.Don't spend it. -----Gordo

"Nothing in life ever just happens. Calculated progression insures your strength."


"If you are always allowed to stop training whenever you feel discomfort, you will find it too easy to give yourself permission to quit." - Attributed to Jet Li


“Dignity is when your mind doesn’t allow your body to be as soft as it would like to be.”


If it’s hurting me , it’s killing them


If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. --Marcus Aurelius

"Don't argue with a fool. The spectators can't tell the difference." - Charles Nalin


To push the limits, and then some more...crash or crash through. One of my greatest fears is not meeting my own expectations. It's a high risk approach but as the Dalai Lama says, "Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk..."
But the intrigue and appeal of IM is that it's so hard to get right...to have a perfect race. Or to even have 90% of a 90% perfect race. There's just so many potential uncontrollables. However, it's been the quest to conquer and control these so called uncontrollables that has inspired me to do my utmost best to prepare for what race day might serve up. In doing so, it's exposed some of my soul and tested just how strong my inner will and desire actually is. IM race day does the same, except on that day it's multiplied and magnified many times for everyone to see.
Anyway, I was in Port Macquarie with some self expectations...which in itself should have been a warning sign. For me I find that expectations come when I take my eye off the ball and lose focus of what I'm actually doing. And in an IM particularly that spells danger, and I should have known it. But ignorance is bliss. My very learned swim coach always says "Concentrate on the process and the outcome will look after itself." I should have tattooed this to the inside of my eyelids.
These expectations were born out of a combination of exhaustive preparation; experience from 4 previous IM’s; and a bit of a purple patch in terms of recent race results. So despite some earlier running injury problems, I was there to race...and therein lies the key to my epiphany; treating an IM as a race is the biggest mistake of the day. And I hate not racing.For me, a race is where you can eyeball your competitors during a race and then bust your ass trying to drop them before the finish line. It's the adrenalin, power, competitiveness, testosterone and so much more that makes lactic acid like an addictive drug. I thrive on the feeling of battling on the edge of control...holding on by a thin thread. It's a sign of a successful race...to just maintain a grip on reality. But IM doesn't let you do that. It requires you to let go, with a leap of faith, and hope the cards fall the right way...or else your day will end up as a grovel.

Campbell maffett 9:38 IM aus 2007


The Huichols are a very simple people who live high in the Sierra Madre mountains in central Mexico. They have a rich spiritual tradition that has been developed over thousands of years. They never had a warrior class, so all of their efforts went into peaceful spiritual endeavors. The Huichols value a lot of things that are so synchronistic in helping a person achieve excellence in our sport. They value the ability to quiet their minds so that the big answers to life’s questions can come through, the answers we cannot come up with through a logical thinking process. This was absolutely essential to coming up with the answer of how to beat Dave Scott when he was surging well below a six minute pace halfway through the marathon in Kona. They have a saying that says “it’s not over until it’s over,” which again for anyone who has raced Ironman knows is a perspective that can give hope in even the most impossible looking moments. This one saying is a phrase that says stick with it no matter what, because even if a goal seems unattainable in this moment, in the next it just might turn around, and that was absolutely key for me to keep going in my final Ironman when Hellreigel was over 13 minutes ahead of me off the bike.