Today, I’m starting a new thing for this blog. I’m calling it Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom. The focus of my Wednesday blogs is to learn through the wisdom of others. Last night, I had a second consecutive weeknight run with a GPS failure on my phone running apps. I don’t know what’s going on with that. However, right from the first run interval, I knew something was not right with my Nike Plus app. I knew that I hadn’t just run a quarter of a mile in 1 minute. Trust me…I’m not that fast. Each walk break, I’d look at the phone and notice that I was gaining 1/100th of a mile each second in my walk breaks. Something was wrong. So, after the point where I know I’ve hit a mile (or close to it), I switched apps to Map My Run. Well, the first mile of that went okay. I got to the 1 mile mark about where I would normally cross 2 miles on this loop. However, after that, everything went crazy again. I walked for a minute after crossing that mark and advanced 0.30 miles in one minute of walking. I was completely frustrated. The unfortunate thing for me is that I didn’t know exactly where the 3rd mile ended (or the 6 mile for the planned end of my run). During the third mile, I tried to convince myself that I would just continue on and finish where I thought I would finish. However, the thought that I didn’t know exactly where I needed to be in order to make all 6 miles made increasingly hard to focus. By where I thought was the end of the third mile, I quit. It felt like a failure.

In my training efforts, failure is not a new concept. I’ve failed before and I will do it again. If there is anything I can take away from the above video it’s that failure is a key part of success. You can’t have one without the other. I hope these Wednesday Words of Wisdom blogs can be a place where we call all learn and be inspired. They will not always be videos. However, for today, I hope this video will encourage you to not be discouraged by failure in your life. It’s all part of being successful. Here’s to many more failures and the success that will come as a result.