In threes

What do they say about things happening in threes? Our last couple of days have been a good reminder of that saying.

Saturday I didn't have the best day. After a very busy week at work I had a busy day running around and generally not being very productive. The day ended well, but on the whole it felt like the day was frustrating and wasted. Strike 1.

On the Sunday I lost a set of our keys and then spent the rest of the day trying unsuccessfully to find them. Why this day was frustrating and annoying sort of goes without saying. Losing keys is never very fun, but this set was a particularly annoying one to lose as it had some very hard to replace keys on it. Strike 2 - another very frustrating and fairly annoying day.

With the lost keys on Sunday the day was already not going well, but then my wife was feeling stressed because she had to go in for Jury Duty today and she wasn't sure just how the week was going to work out. Stressed wife meets stressed husband makes for not a very happy household. Strike 3.

I just hope that the saying holds true and things take a turn for the upwards from here.

In the end the last few days have been a good reminder of how important perspective can be. Waking up this morning we were still stressed, but having got a bit of distance on the happenings of the weekend, things didn't seem quite so bad. After a few phone calls to figure out replacing the keys, things started to look a bit more manageable. I can guarantee that as we get further into the week and the solutions start to work themselves out, we will get to wondering just what we were so upset about.

Such is the nature of so many of the little things that go wrong in life. Stay calm, get some perspective and work your way through and the problems suddenly don't seem to bad. Lose your head and freak out a little and things never get resolved.

The above holds very true for sport too, whether it be training or racing. When you are involved in sport, things can go wrong. In a long sport like an Ironman, they almost certainly will go wrong. Injuries in training, crashes, breakages in races, nutritional errors, pacing mistakes the list is a very long one. What can make the difference between a good race and a bad one is whether you are able to keep your head, keep your perspective, focus, regroup and get on with it, or whether your day simply falls apart.

During training I have lost count of the number of negative things that happened to me that ended up having a positive outcome in the long term. Injuries that led to rehab that led to better technique. Horrible sessions that led to mental strength. Breakages that led to better approaches to gear setup. It was all just a case of getting some perspective and keeping the mindset positive. Finding the good in the bad.

In racing, one of the best tools I found during racing was having a race plan that didn't just account for a good day, but took account of a bad day too. The plan was there to help me keep my perspective. Rather than lose my head, my race plan told me exactly what to do if the day wasn't going well. Hopefully I wouldn't need it, but if I did I never needed to panic, I just switched focus and got on with it. As well as helping me get perspective and staying focused it also helped me keep the mind positive and constructive.

And really that is what so much of this comes down too. Over the weekend my wife and I had a couple of bad days as we were a bit too tired and stressed to keep the mindset positive. We ran out of the energy needed to keep the discussion constructive and ended up grumpy and miserable instead. Sometimes all that is needed is a bit of distance from the events, something constructive to focus on and the will to look for the positives in the situation.

Still, I really hope bad things don't come in fours.