Much of my fitness focus this past week has been shaped by one event . . . Rory McIlroy won the Masters! Congrats, Rory!  It’s been a long time coming, and of course, it couldn’t come any other way than the most stressful golf I’ve ever watched.  An appropriate ending for your dream of winning the career Grand Slam and achieving golf immortality.  Reaching your dream – especially in the way you did it over these years, and over the Masters weekend – taught me, and so many of us to dare to dream!

One of the themes I wrote about last week was trying to get better today – every day.  But let’s be real – that’s easier said than done.  In fact, it’s virtually impossible mostly because we’re human.  We fail, we have setbacks, and we just have some bad days.  But even when we are killing it, there’s another natural response that has real impact on our potential— complacency.

I love competing.  I always have.  Both personally and professionally.  I especially love to win, but recently I’ve come to think differently about what winning means.  Many of the sports I play – which are largely individual competitions – are designed for losing.  There’s only one winner among the many who participate.  I’d sometimes look at the format of a competition and wonder if I should bother joining it when I have little to no chance of coming in first – and in fact, have a much greater chance of finishing last.  But what I’ve come to realize lately is that, in all these endeavors, the real competition is with myself.  That doesn’t mean I always win, but it does mean that, at times, it may appear that I was nowhere near the top of a leaderboard, yet I still crushed it!

My past weekend was quite full balancing work (Sunday) and fun (Saturday), both of which took priority over the blog.  Still, it won’t take long to share all that I need to this week.  My outdoor climbing season began on Saturday, and I am as inspired as ever!  I can tell this story here through the social media diary I’ve put together . . .

“You never know what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes until you are standing in them.”  This saying, which I first learned when I was a young boy, speaks to empathy, compassion, and acceptance and is generally a good lesson to live by.  But something misleading about the phrase that we must also know is that we can never walk in someone else’s shoes.  Shoes are a metaphor for life, and even those closest to us cannot know what it’s like to be us.  Yet we live in a world where, too often, we judge others based on their appearance whether we know them or not.  Shaming, bullying, and discrimination based on looks are as pervasive as ever.  Social media may be the epicenter of it, but don’t be fooled in thinking it isn’t everywhere else too.