Carragee Consulting

DFL>DNF>DNS

Last weekend I won a 5K rowing race in Sacramento.

I would be more proud of this achievement if ANY other rower had been in my event. Instead, my competitors all entered the Masters event, in which finish times are age adjusted.

Unfortunately, even though much of the field in the Masters women’s 1x event were older than me, including 3 of my teammates at BIAC, they all beat me even in raw finish times.

One of my teammates is a 2-time Olympian and about 5 inches taller than me. Another is 6 years older and probably only 120lbs soaking wet. The last one is 60-something years old and I’m disappointed she passed me.

I subjected myself to the frustration of being beat because I wanted a new baseline to measure my current fitness low point and improve from.

As a data analyst I’m happy running the numbers and try to figure out how much each factor like height, # of training hours/week, years of experience, gender and age influence predicted finish time.

It’s easy to see that considering my utter lack of training, simply finishing and then getting back in a boat later for my doubles race was a personal win.

Often with fitness, or coding, or parenting I feel under-prepared and incompetent.

The best I can do is keep showing up and hope to improve overtime. When I fail at consistency and I have to reboot it’s extra hard to get motivated when I compare to my former self.

One matra which helps me is that Dead F Last is better than Did Not Finish and that’s better than Did Not Start. DFL>DNF>DNS

So today I embrace my Red Lantern Award, for taking so long they had to leave the porch light on to guide me home.

I hope you can find the motivation to do something hard but fulfilling for yourself too and if you’ve got ideas on how to build consistency — I’m all ears.