I feel like I fail constantly. This failure comes in many different forms. I feel like I fail when I stare at my phone too much when I’m with my kids, not being in the moment and fully present. Then there’s the serious increase in screen time for my older son, the fact that I snack constantly and therefore can’t lose weight no matter how much I seem to run or work out, the fact that my house always seems to be dirty these days, and so on. The stay-at-home order due to coronavirus is challenging everyone in new ways, and in my experience, some of these challenges feel terrible. 

With the kids I coach, we talk about failure and learning more about yourself through failing. It’s an important message to get across, especially in sports like rowing and running, since winning is really difficult. The odds of winning a marathon, or even a local 5k or 10k race are pretty slim, at least for me. The goal is usually a personal best. So for me, if winning is the only goal, I fail 100% of the races I enter. 

So races in these sports are difficult to win. The day to day is tough, too, though. It’s really difficult to have a great workout everyday. Indoor training for rowing has the added element of looking at the rowing machine monitor, watching the splits change every stroke, giving a constant update on your effort and output. The watch gives somewhat similar feedback, but at least while running, you can put your arm at your side and enjoy the scenery. While erging (using the rowing machine, that is), one has little choice but to look at the monitor a couple of feet from your face. It takes a concerted effort to NOT look at the monitor, actually. All of this is to show that when a workout goes badly on the erg, it tends to go REALLY badly because you watch it happening via the stats as you feel worse and worse physically. Watching the scores and times go downhill adds another element of pain to the whole process. The screen is looking back at you saying, “Look! You’re failing! Oh wow! The split got worse again! What’s your deal today?”

The trick is to learn something from the struggle. If you can learn something about yourself through the bad workout, then it wasn’t a failure. It was just part of the growth process. If I can actually learn through the process of failing over and over and over again with the phone that’s constantly in my hand or the snacks I continually reach for when I’m not hungry, then I become someone new and better. I might make the same mistakes again, but maybe it’s a difficult lesson. Maybe calling these problems “failures” are just a tactic I use to make myself feel bad. Criticising my own failings has been a life-long hobby for some reason, and I doubt that I’m alone in this. 

I’ve launched into a series of posts about supporting other women and not judging one another, but I think at the root of it is judgement of oneself. If we lighten up on ourselves, if I lighten up on MYself, lightening up on judging other women won’t seem like such a tall task, especially since I think the judgement of others is rooted in self-doubt. If only we could all just be super self-confident and truly see ourselves as the imperfect but wonderful people we all are. Most of the time, these failings aren’t a big deal. They just feel bad when you have so much time to obsess over them, like, you know, in the middle of a global pandemic.

Stupid coronavirus.