I was watching the Olympics this weekend and while watching the men’s marathon, I saw a runner that was in the lead pack, stop running and collapse for a few moments. After a few minutes, he got back up, gave his head a few knocks and kept running. After catching up with the lead pack, it wasn’t too long before he stopped running again. One of the announcers said that it looked like the runner literally hit a wall.
Before watching the marathon, I also watched a dressage event where a horse decided he didn’t want to jump anymore after hitting two bars on his first jump. Before his turn to jump, you could tell that he wasn’t up to doing it so it wasn’t a surprise when he refused to do any more jumps and the rider had to pull out of the competition.
After watching both these incidents, it made me think that sometimes we have to admit that we can’t push through, no matter how much we want to do something. Sometimes we have to listen to the signs, whether that’s physical, where the body lets you know that it can’t go any further or our intuition telling us that continuing will cause us harm of some sort.
It made me think about the fact that Simone Biles pulled out of some gymnastics events during the Olympics because she didn’t believe she could do the routines that she had planned without potentially causing herself serious injury.
I can imagine that not being able to realize your goals can be challenging. After training and competing for years, it can be difficult to come to a point where you feel like the best decision is to stop before realizing the goal.
I also know that there are times where achieving the goal you set out to do isn’t possible. It can be heartbreaking, and you can be left feeling that you have wasted your time and energy. You can also be left feeling like you were fooling yourself to ever think the goal was a possibility.
If you’ve been reading my blog for some time, you may have heard me say that I believe that everything happens for a reason. So let’s continue that train of thought here.
Instead of looking like the unplanned end of the pursuit of your goal as a failure, think about what you can take away from the experience. Maybe you hit a wall and it means that you need to do more training, or do some work on your mindset so that you can push through even when the body makes you doubt if you can.
Have you ever felt as if you’ve hit the wall? How did you handle it? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments. ♥