Many of you have asked how my competition season has gone. Here are the bottom line results: I finished 23rd after the Master’s qualifier, 15th in the Open. What this means is there is no automatic invitation coming my way to go to the CrossFit Games. This obviously is not the result I would have liked. There is still an outside chance I get an invite but that means that 3 people will have to decline their invitation so I am not counting those chickens!

On the other hand…I was very happy with my performance. At age 59 I am at the top of the age group and in the top 23 people there is only one other 59 year old and he is #17. Over the course of the 5 open workouts my performance improved. And on the qualifiers my workouts were, again, top notch. The goal is to finish with the knowledge that there was nothing left; that you did everything you could do today to finish as well as you did. There is nothing I can do about the performance of the rest of the field. The only thing I can control is my performance.

Life is like this. You can only control the things within your purview. The list of things you can’t control is very long. The road to un-happiness is paved with worrying about things you can do nothing about. You can’t fix the weather. You can fix your attitude about the weather. You can’t conjure up a huge deposit in your bank account but you can change your attitude about the state of your bank account. You can’t change someone’s opinion of you but you can decide to not let their opinion bother you…it isn’t any of your business anyway!

Going through life worrying about what other people are doing, saying, or thinking is not a recipe for success. Doing that will only result in frustration and unnecessary stress. Stress about you if you need to stress about something. Do something about you if you need something to do. Worrying about other people is like teaching a pig to sing…it doesn’t work, and is very irritating to both the pig and you.

If things are not going the way you want, you need to look to yourself not the rest of us. You and you alone are in charge of your attitude. It isn’t just in competition where Full Effort is Full Victory…it is in Life.

This is #23 out.

John Mariotti
www.crossfitodyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com
775-338-2412