I deal very poorly with failure.  I avoid it like crazy, and I like to tell myself it’s not in my nature to ever do so.  I work hard.  I’m a winner.  I failed today.

Today was a big day, pretty normal in many regards, but it was a personal make or break.  On this first day of my 28^th year, I broke.  You see, I’ve been planning on running the Chicago Marathon (on 10.10.10 no less).  I had a great training season, ran a really strong half marathon in August, and have been training well ahead of last season.  Then it hit.  I knew it was coming, but I acted like it wouldn’t matter – these two huge trips on my calendar that I’d been ignoring.

First, vacation.  And oh let me tell you, it was fantastic.  But its funny you see how the maintenance runs I was going to do quickly gave way to 4 hour dinners that went to 12 or 1 AM and mornings spent at the café sipping espresso – while my running shoes stayed in the suitcase.  A small set-back, surely I can bounce back right? And I did.  I spent the next 2 weeks getting back in the rhythm, doing my runs, feeling good.

Then the other shoe dropped.  A trip to Africa for business.  It was awesome, I am so privileged to work with this client and the world-changing stuff they do every day.  It was also 12 days.  A few short runs happened, but the fat lady was starting to sing.  The bus driver was warming up the bus in the parking lot.

All hope was not lost.  Surely, I, a winner, could rise above the fact that I had been traveling 27 of the last 34 days during peak marathon training?  So, I decided that this morning I would go out and do my final 20 miler, power through and be ready for the race.  Well, you’re smart enough to know where this is headed.  I got to mile 12 and realized, or maybe finally admitted, the jig was up, not this year.  I failed.

Let me talk about what I mean.  The decision to go away with my wife, work on our relationship, and our individual selves was brilliant.  I wouldn’t trade that for anything – that was a success.  The chance to do the work I get to do and meet the amazing people I met in Angola and South Africa was something I’m also very thankful for, and I consider that another success.  The moral of the story for me is this – you can’t win at everything.  Did the universe just split?

I think sometimes we lie to ourselves and to each other about failure.  First, we (or maybe I should say I) can act like it doesn’t happen, or if it does that we should hide it.  But the second way is more interesting to me.  I think sometimes we say, “you didn’t really fail, things came up, you made a choice, etc.”  But the truth is you [I] DID fail, it’s just that we don’t have a good handle about how to admit that in our culture.  I had a goal to run the Chicago marathon again this year, and when it comes to that goal I failed.  But in that failure is a whole list of other successes that would have suffered had I met this goal.

So, I’m hardly resolved.  This is still hard for me.  I’m going to have to grit my teeth just to get out there to cheer on my friends like Jeff and Jen among others, who did meet their goal.  It’s going to be brutal to watch them do what I had planned to do.  But I think in this moment I’d just like to say, I failed today, and I’m ok with that.