To overcome challenges, stop comparing yourself to others (A story about an Athlete)

 

To overcome challenges, stop comparing yourself to others

(A story about an Athlete)

His name is Dean Furness and he is a wheelchair athlete.

We see ourselves being measured throughout our lives. Along with our height and weight as children, it becomes our speed and strength as we grow. People almost always use test scores, even in school, and even our salaries today to measure our position. It's the personal average when we look at it in a different way. It's a very personal thing and it's for you, and I think if you focus on that and work on building it, you can start to accomplish some really amazing things.

He got this idea in the evening of December 2011. He was out feeding his horses and doing evening chores. Minutes after he jumped into his tractor, a 700-pound bale of hay fell and landed in the tractor seat, fracturing his vertebrae. But he didn't lose consciousness. He couldn't recognize his legs even if he touched them. he couldn't feel anything from the center of my chest down. 

He was waiting for help from his house about 100 meters away. As shown in the movies, he tried to get help from his dogs at home, but they just stared at him. About 45 minutes later, his wife arrived home and with her help his first helicopter ride took him to the hospital.

He was told he would never be able to walk again. It became normal for him to use a rope to sit up in bed, or else to use a board to slide from bed to wheelchair. He watched people reach for him. All his personal averages were reset.

His later story ,

A few weeks later he was transferred to a specialized spinal cord rehabilitation hospital. There he had something called a fit class on the first day where his group did the most reps on the weight machine and went all out and won.

He then took on impossible challenges in the future, such as completing a wheelchair marathon.

He met his first physical therapist in 2016, and she pushed him aside and said, "You know you should do a half marathon in your wheelchair. Yes, in 10 weeks." He thought in his mind that you were crazy. He had no exercise plan, no way to know how fast to go.

He wanted to go fast, so he did what he had to do. He started researching wheelchair racing. 

He used the internet to learn about the technology and equipment. He also got a coach to get started.

The coach said he should start the 2017 Chicago Marathon

 with that guidance, he went back home, and he got to work, much like in the prior way. And he continued researching, but he had learned my lesson. he was really careful not to compare with how accomplished those people on the internet were and how fast they were, because if he had, he probably never would have continued going through with it.

The weekend of the race arrived, and it was just like going to college for the first time. You're dumped off, there's a whole bunch of people around you, you don't really know very many of them, somebody's got the cool stereo and the cool TV and they're smart and they're pretty and they're cute and they're handsome and you don't know if you really belong. But then somebody says, "Hey, let's go get food." And all of a sudden, that friend group happens and you start to settle in. Well, that weekend of the race, they had a meeting called the Wheelers Meeting, and there were 60 wheelchairs in that room the night before the race. And wouldn't you know it, all of the people that he had been researching were there, the best in the world. There must have been over 50 Paralympic medals in the room that day. And he felt pretty small and I fell back into that trap of comparing himself. he knew that my averages that he had been tracking during his workouts were over 90 seconds slower per mile than theirs. And the coach was the only one there that he knew, and he reached out and noticed something, and he think he sensed my anxiety, and he invited me to get food with his team. And with that, everything settled down. he realized really quick that they didn't care about his average, surely, and he had forgotten about theirs.

Well that next day, he finished the race about 45 minutes after the person that won it. But as he was leaving, those new friends, who are very close today, challenged he to stay involved and to keep working through different races and competitions. And so he did what he knew how. he went home, and he got busy.

Now, as you can imagine, being in a wheelchair, let alone training for a marathon in a wheelchair, is a pretty lonely thing. he have an incredible group of friends that will ride bikes with him and keep track of pace and help him out. But in the end, it's still five to six days a week, it's 50 to 60 miles of effort, and it's a lot of alone time. And for the most part, you really have nothing to rely on but yourself in those times. It's his average, and he trying to get better little by little.

Well, this fall he was in Chicago for the third time. It was his seventh marathon, and he attended the same pre-race meeting and the same pre-race meal and caught up with those friends. And they lined up for the race, and right at the start, his average kicked in, and before long he caught up with some of those friends and was able to keep pace with them and push together. But it wasn't long before he faded. It just happened, and he found himself all alone again with really nothing to rely on other than what he had worked so hard to be at. But they turned into the wind at the halfway point, and his average became a strong advantage, and it wasn't long before he caught some of those friends and passed them all the way to the finish. And while he didn't set a personal record that day, he did finish 30 seconds per mile faster than his prior Chicago times and just left himself pretty excited.

And so this is he. This is his average. Seventy-five days from today, he'll be in Boston for his second time. he is super excited about that. But keep in mind, this isn't really just about racing. he working really hard every day to be better in so many other ways, a better parent, a better husband, a better coach, teammate, friend, person. And he promise you, even though what you see here is very visible in terms of the challenges that he face, everybody here has something that they're fighting, and it may be visible, it may not be, but please, take some time and focus on you instead of others, and  bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.

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