Happy 1st Birthday Blog!

Yes, yes it's true. The first post on imabadtriathlete was one year ago today!!! I know it seems impossible that an entire year (and what a year it was) has flown by.

First, I want to thank all my followers and readers. I never thought this blog would be as popular and read as it has been and I think it is just awesome! You all are the best :)

Secondly, I would like to annouce a very special badtriathlete surprise....

SO many of you have asked for this and I needed to get my blog something of its bday so....

Welcome to twitter imabadtriathlete!

https://twitter.com/Imbadtriathlete

Yes, I'm very aware I am missing an "a" in the name...but I ran out of characters. Oops!

I also found a pretty perfect profile pic for it:

Excellent! And (unlike my other twitter page) this one will be public and more of a forum for my training updates and blog entries. Especially now that I'm training for the half Ironman-Timberman, and picked up a coach...tweets should get pretty interesting-EEP!

Now onto a very special post I've been meaning to write. The whole reason behind the "bad" triathlete name on the blog :)

If you look at my finishing stats (or even just the pic above) you can see I'm not so great at athletic endeavors. I'm pretty decent, I have gotten faster, stronger, more endurance and have taken on longer distance events but you won't see me on that winner podium. And that's ok.

In our adult lives I feel like it is very important to keep challenging yourself to try new things. In other words, I feel like it is good to be bad at things. After college we are no longer required to take any "general-ed classes" or be forced to take that music class even though we are tone deaf. We are able to select (for the most part) careers and activities we excel in and choose to only participate in those endeavors. Unfortunately, I believe only choosing those activities will causes us to feel flat.

In my opinion, the best feeling of achievement is when you work so hard at something, struggle and then finally achieve what you set out to do. Everyday we perform tasks that we know how to do in our sleep. When we submit the final results for these tasks, even if they are perfectly done, it doesn't feel as good as the time when you were running a race, barely able to breathe thinking the end will never come, and then some how you were able to push yourself so hard to finish.  Let's be honest, when you struggle that much in a race, you probably aren't "good', you probably didn't win and hundreds (maybe even thousands) of people finished ahead of you. That's not the point though. The point is that you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and tried something you weren't so sure you could do. You pushed yourself so hard to do something you are bad at.

So yes, this blog is meant to be lighthearted. I write about my partying endeavors, overall triathlon/running failures, pond monster nightmares that keep me up all night, but at the end of the day, I'm doing triathlons. I'm pushing myself to achieve in an area that I didn't just wake up and succeed at. I suck at swimming but I still throw myself in Walden Pond knowing that I'm getting better little by little. (I'm even having less swimming nightmares!) You can too. Don't be afraid to be bad at things. You will find the greatest feeling of accomplishment when you do what you are bad at.

In fact, the activity you should probably be doing right now is the one that you think you can't. 

xoxo
Bad one year old tweeting triathlete