Mid - Season Reflection

The hardest part about the snowboard season is the middle. After two months of go, go, go, you just want to stop. Athletes get beat up, worn out, and over it. When this happens it is more important than ever to believe in yourself and look at the bigger picture. It is really hard to keep the constant beat down of competition scores out of your head. When there is no external gratification, you have to search inside of yourself. We need to understand what being the "best" means, and how we can balance that with our fast-paced, ever-exhausting lives. It takes on a different meaning for everybody, and the key to endurance is finding out how being the best plays in your life. 

We spend our lives living in relativity, who is “better,” “more suited,” “stronger,” “fitter,” etc. Better is a term we use to compare ourselves to a societal optimum. And therefore we like to translate the societal optimum as being the “best.” But is best really a relative term? I don’t think so. I think best is something that comes from inside. It is a term that honors the value of the individual. When you are the best, you are not the best because of quantitative factors. It’s not because you are necessarily stronger or more suited than the people around you. It is because you have found a way to take who you are and what you have to offer and utilize each of these qualities to the maximum effort. We can best use terms like “better” to set goal marks, because we have no other way to measure our progress. But it’s not about how we are in comparison. When you get caught up in the idea of better and worse, you begin to bog yourself down in defeat. Being the best is an individual effort that comes independent of everybody else. You take in what you see and you take your personality, and the opportunities offered to you and you make it your own. No one will ever reach the point of being “the best.” Realistically, there is no right way to get there. We live in a world of billions of people where everybody is living their own individual life and has their own ways of looking at the world.

             Consistency, looking for quality, and positive mental attitude. It doesn’t require any special talent, or special genes… It requires you to believe in yourself and to know yourself better than you know anyone else. There is no endpoint because no matter where you are in life, you will not be perfect and you will still be looking for quality. The “best” take these three things, and apply it to everyday life. Notice, each of these three things has NOTHING to do with anyone else. Then we reach the problem, what about ourselves? Aren’t we our own worst enemy anyways? But like I said, the term “better” is not something to use to quantitatively measure things. Every day we are at a different point in our lives. It is important to understand, know, and accept the past so we can progress, but we can’t lose ourselves in it. We see the progression, we understand where we’ve been, but we deal with life in the present. Sometimes life will throw us a curve ball, and we “fall backwards” in what presume to be our progression. But we adjust, it’s a blank slate and we move forwards. Perhaps the level at where we were changes, but consistency, quality, and positive mental attitude don’t. It is when we understand this adaptability, the variables rather than the sum, that we can continue to strive to become the best. We probably will never be able to quantify what our best is. But quantity does not even hold a candle to quality, and we will never stop looking for quality.


Once we are able to inspire ourselves, we can inspire others to no end.