What's in YOUR Grit Bucket?

Mental toughness: is a collection of attributes that allow a person to persevere through difficult circumstances (such as difficult training or difficult competitive situations in games) and emerge without losing confidence.

This is explains what you need when you're out there on that last 1/3 of the course. Your lungs are burning, legs are shredded, you just want to quit but, you keep going. That is Mental Toughness. That's a lot of what the readings that coach sends are about. I can definitely use more of it. But, as part of my reflection, I've come to realize, as an age group triathlete, there is more needed than just mental toughness. 

You need Grit. Grit is the essence that gets you up at 4:45 am to be in the pool at 5:45 am. Then, it helps you drive through morning stop-and-go traffic to your day job where you deal with 8+ hours of problems/issues/personalities. Then, it keeps you going to drive through the evening commute to get home to the kids, husbands, or pets. Get the evening workout in. Grit helps you get dinner cooked and the kitchen cleaned up. Grit also helps you pack what is needed to do it all over again tomorrow. Day in. Day out. That's a lot of grit.

When I look back on last year, I realized that I didn't have enough grit to keep up with all the commitments I had made for the year. I phoned in workouts instead of using up my precocious grit. I took shortcuts and made excuses. And then, I wondered where the joy had gone. You see, if you don't go all in, there can be no joy.

"If you don't invest very much, then defeat doesn't hurt so much and winning isn't very exciting" - DickVermeil 

I took stock of the things that drew and replenished my Grit Bucket. I'd always known that training the run really took a lot of grit. Although I like long course, it took a lot of grit. As for replenishing grit, I think the only thing that replenishes it is time and fun. So, 2015 would need to be a year of replenishing grit.

For 2015, I'm doing 5 sprint aquabike races. So far, I'm ABSOLUTELY loving the training. I NEVER phone in a workout. I'm all in.

What's in YOUR Grit Bucket?