"Hi, my name's Drew and I'm a recovering swimmer from the '90s"

I grew up in the age of "You will swim 17,000 meters a day, and if you don't get good from it, that's your problem."  This has left a lasting impression on my life that is flawed to its very core. On one hand, the work ethic that swimming taught me was unparalleled to anything I probably could have gotten as a child, and that's saying a lot, given that I grew up in a military household where sitting around and relaxing was viewed as a cardinal sin.  On the other hand, it mistakenly taught me that more is always better, and it has taken me decades to unlearn, and something that I still struggle with on a daily basis.

I was lucky going through school because it was easy for me--people used to get really pissed at me when I explained to them that the amount of time I spent studying for exams was on the order of minutes, as opposed to hours or days in some cases.  It was simply very straightforward for me to identify what I didn't know, review that, and be done with it. My test scores, grades, and acheivements all reflected that, and I carried this into my professional life.  The only difference was that time became measured in hours worked, rather than in tasks accomplished, and I set out at a very early time in my career to fill my days with the most productive time I could, rarely exceeding a 40 hour workweek and often outperforming my peers in the process of doing so.  I'm only saying this to point out that somehow I was lucky in not letting the lessons that were ingrained in me as a swimmer carry through to my career.

I am, however, extraordinarily hard on myself in my activities outside of work.  Joanna, my triathlon coach, has pointed this out to me, and she has been dead on.  If I am not exceeding the bounds of reality of what my body can handle, I am not happy with the results of my workouts.  If I am not constantly achieving new PRs, I am not satisfied with my race results.  If I'm not doing all of this while I'm holding down a job as an aerospace engineer, where I am routinely faced with the realities of a contracting industry laying off workers left and right, then I have failed.

I think that the lesson that I had to learn, and still have more to learn about, is that sometimes non-perfection is good enough.  Beating myself up for ending my workout yesterday after a wasp sting is not productive, and given the black-and-blue mark I have on it today, I probably didn't need to finish my hard intervals while riding home.

I'm not going to the Olympics, and given that I'm about 3 hours out of contention for a Kona slot, I'm not going there either.  The daily struggles that I have with performance have to be more about enjoying the process, rather than focusing on the result, and I think I've lost touch with a lot of that--so I was all too happy this morning when a brief bout of runner's high kicked in during my 10 miler, and I could remember what it's all about.

It's time to just enjoy the day.