1. i haven't blogged since november. This doesn't mean i don't have thoughts. It means I haven't planned a day to blog since then: getting married, moving, Christmas, birthdays, new years. It's been awesomely busy.
2. My first day at 2|42 my mentor/coach/boss told me about the value of a team. The value of going being able to go further with a team versus going faster by yourself.
This makes me think of my junior year in high school. I decided to fill in on the 4x800 relay on our track team. I hated running anything more than 200 meters. I really loved getting out of school for a track meet to run for only 22 seconds-pretty sweet deal. But when one of my friends hurt his neck doing flips on a trampoline I figured it would be funny to run half of a mile competitively with people who had been doing this since probably 6th grade.
Turns out I didn't suck at it. But what I realized is in a 4x800 relay you actually run 3200m. No one is attributed to winning their split, it's a team effort. And the crazy thing, and painfully obvious...is your able to go a lot further as a team...and even faster.
Before funning the 4x800 I would do sprints. 100m or 200m. In these races I would run as fast as I could go and that was it, but by the end I was spent running only 1/32 of what I ran with my team.
What I really see as valuable to a relay team is not just the speed of every runner, or even the individual. what I remember practicing more than putting my feet in front of each other faster and further. Was practicing handing off a baton. The reason why we practiced this so much was that it was something that could make or break a win. If you dropped it, disqualified. If you ran to fast and didn't plan your steps to theirs...you can just add 10 more seconds.
Passing a baton is based on three key things.
Trust.
Trust.
and Trust.
You need to trust in your ability to hand off. You need to trust in their ability to run with the task your working at. And trust that you communicated long before about how this process is going down.
If you can't boldly place a task, goal, objective to someone else...you won't get the benefit of being on a team. If you can't trust them with it..you will hesitate and screw everything up. And if you never talked about this process...you will suck at handing off goals and objectives.
And in my entire time of being in track and competitively running no one person can beat a 4x800 relay team running on their own.
So if you've been running life's race on your own. stop. If you have a team and you aren't utilizing it...you probably realize that you suck at running the race the best way possible.
Take some steps back, have some hard conversations, and start passing the baton with trust.
it helps. seriously.
peace.
