Gil Can Run!A blog on Running and all the crap that runs through my head while doing it

Jul 5th Took the No train to Noville…

With stops at Noway, Nope, Notgonnahappen, and AreYouCrazy? A little background, this morning I woke up and went to my house and split wood…
We started with 5 logs:

We got some work done, and the wedge popped out and landed on my big toe on the right foot:

Then the hammer slipped, hit the ground and then my left foot, I called it a day shortly after this picture:

After that I tried to run, I got a mile in and my back hadn’t loosened up at all, then I started feeling dizzy and disoriented. I decided to take it super easy, turn around and walk most of the way home. I used the time to practice breathing and good posture.
I realized that we are not defined by our successes, nor our failures. We are not the jobs we have, or the money in our bank, or the stuff in our homes, or our driveways. It is how we handle our successes and failures, that is what defines us. I failed today, and it’s OK to fail. I was 8 miles short of my goal, I only really ran 3 miles, walked the rest. But I did what I could, breathing and posture are just as important as anything else. I think we all need to fail every now and then. I think we need to start letting our kids fail too.
When I worked at BMW, the sales staff, managers, and service advisors would all have to have customers fill out surveys about them. If they scored less than 10 on the survey (It was scaled 1-10) they would have to meet with people about it. If they got too many 9s, it was grounds for termination. What good is a customer satisfaction survey if perfection is all that is acceptable? Newsflash world, NOBODY’S EVER PERFECT! Nothing we do is ever perfect, there are always flaws, there’s always something more we could have done. Some days, we will be really off. How did we get away from this being ok? Even when I was a teenager working at McDonald’s, I remember customers getting very upset over simple mistakes people made. No matter how quickly the error was corrected, some people would just stay angry, like they never made a mistake in their lives.
So we are not perfect, we fail sometimes, and failure is alright, just take it and do your best with it. That’s all. Don’t even have to learn anything, we just always have to do our best. today was a failure, but it was the best failure I could produce.
Secondary moral of the story, chopping wood hurts more than I remember from when I was a kid.

Posted in Uncategorized by Gil with no comments yet.