Being Deliberate
Fiona & Joe at the Cairns Ironman finish line, June 2023.
I’m big on the idea of living life like everything you do is deliberate.
Not all the time - because there are often days when it goes in the Too Hard Basket.
There are lots of ways to describe living deliberately, and your definition of it will be different to mine, which will be different to everyone else’s.
It sounds simple in theory, but in reality it’s extremely difficult, at least in my experience. My definition of living deliberately is to have some idea of the direction you’re heading, your goals, and the experiences you want from life. Then using that information, it’s about making decisions that move you in the direction of those goals.
When a hard decision has to be made, or you can’t see a way in which making it moves you towards something you want, then it becomes about framing that new challenge as an opportunity to grow. It sounds hard because it is.
We haven’t always worked this way - like a lot of us, life just happened to me up until I was about 25, until I learned to take a bit more control and responsibility.
One of the things I love most about triathlon is that it’s an individual sport. You are (largely) the only one responsible for your successes and failures, only the least self-aware triathletes find someone else to blame when things go wrong.
Fiona is an athlete who, in the past, has had the opposite problem. She’d give the credit for her successes largely to others, and take the blame for her failures totally on herself.
Over the five or so years we’ve been together I’ve seen her mature and become more self-assured - and now she has the confidence to shoulder responsibility for both success and failure when they come up, and not do so without being able to share some of it around too.
It’s so great to see, and anybody who has spent time around her probably shares my feeling that she gives off an infectious energy that I just want to be around.
That brings me to where we are now.
Lately, together we’ve been working on living more deliberately to move her towards the goal of racing at the highest level she’s capable of. For us both that continues to mean making some big and scary sacrifices, and taking some plunges into unknowns together - this blog and this website and Patreon are just some small examples.
We try not to lose sight of how fortunate we are to live in such a beautiful place and be able to eat and train the way we do, as well as travel to the occasional race and have the kit we need to complete a race.
We don’t love talking about ourselves, so the way we provide insight and value to anybody who reads this might change or just be rubbish. But we’re excited to give it a try! And we hope that you’ll be willing to give us feedback and suggestions along the way.
