So I have a few days until my next race and I feel fairly calm leading up to it, I’m actually a little excited for Sunday to come. I feel I got humbled a little in San Francisco and started to doubt if I could finish an Ironman, Sunday will be a real test of where I am in training and what I have to focus on in the last 6 weeks of training. Alcatraz was a hard race and it killed me, mentally and physically, to say the least it knocked me down. I don’t know if most people knew how discouraged I was after the  race and I wasn’t happy with where I was. I had only one option in my mind, GET BACK UP!!! I went to the pool the next morning, sore from the race and promised myself to stop making excuses, to train my ass off, focus on my diet and make every day count, I believe I have. The last 2 months I’ve got my weight down to 201 lbs (the last time I weighed that was in high school), killed my workouts and made sure to try to stay as positive as possible. I had a couple of small running races thrown in and I performed above expectation so I feel good about where I am now. I think the old Michael Brown may have packed up camp and headed for the hills with another excuse of why I didn’t follow through on what I started.

The greatest athletes of all time have got knocked down (Muhammed Ali lost and regained his heavyweight belt 3 times) and come back stronger than ever, maybe that’s why we look at them as the greatest..??  GET BACK UP!!! There are many athletes we’ve forgotten about because at the first sign of adversity they’ve called it quits. What’s knocked you down recently? Is it something you can get back up from? OF COURSE IT IS!!!! There are people with no legs who run marathons, I saw a video of a guy swimming with no arms and legs last week, just a fin on his stump..crazy. GET BACK UP!!! Lance was told he had a 20% chance of surviving his cancer, he only won 7 Tours. GET BACK UP!!!! You can stay down if you want but that’s not what champions do and don’t we all want to be champions to our families, friends and most importantly to ourselves. Get back up because eventually we all get knocked down, but I know one thing for sure, you aren’t keeping me down for long.

See you at the finish line,

MB