Mary Eggers

On Saturday October 14th Heather Frazer Boyum would have turned 41 years old. The Rochester Moms in Motion would like to invite you to celebrate her life as they take to the streets in the 1st Annual Heather Boyum Memorial Iron Angel 5K. You can walk it, you can run it. Either way you can come together with this amazing community that is still so heavily grieving the loss of one of our sisters.

Please click here for all of the info, or click the logo in the right column. I will be in Hawaii during this event….. but I expect to see many pictures and lots of pink and with that being said….. lots of green in terms of money. This race will raise money for the Heather Boyum Memorial Children’s Education Fund which has been established to send her kids to college.

The burden on those children has been heavy. Nothing will replace their mom. Nothing will make it better and nothing will ever erase it. So lace up your shoes, come out and run or walk and honor the life that was…… let’s be honest it was stolen.

It’s the least we can do.

I read this quote by Bill Cosby the other day…..

“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”

I loved it. These kinds of words speak to me. It’s funny because a few years ago the kind of quote that would have spoken to me would have been “You have to hate losing more than you love winning” or something like that. It used to be about winning or losing. But that’s such a fickle things these days. Winning and losing isn’t what it is about anymore, at last for me. Depending on the players on game day a win or a lose may come. I have won big races, I have set course records…… winning is awesome don’t get me wrong….. but when you get so focused on winning and nothing else…… it shows in who you are. And trust me it’s not a good place to be. That doesn’t mean you should not take aim. There is a difference.

Winning is different from success versus failure.

Failure to me is not showing up to the starting line…… ready. Failure to me is not executing the plan one once the gun goes off….. when you have the choice to. How many athletes just throw a year’s worth of work out the window because their ego gets in the way, they need to have that fastest bike split and only end up walking a marathon?

Been there!

To me that’s failure. Not trusting and following the plan you have spent a year building. To me failure is not losing a race. Failure is also not having things go wrong and doing your best to troubleshoot them. Ironman is a long day.There are flats, dropped nutrition bottle, things out of your control. TO me failure is allowing those small things to rule your day. Failure is not them happening.

See the difference?

Failure to me is having a year to prepare and simply not doing it. Or not taking the time to. Or not asking for the right help.

Success to me is having the best race experience that I am prepared to have.

I am in a great place right now. I have come through the fog that held me back this past spring. I am healthy, I am much much stronger. I am making measurable progress. I have surrounded myself with an amazing team to help me get to the starting line of Ironman Mont Tremblant in 2013. More specifically I have the right team that’s helped me come back to my health and will help me achieve the four outcomes I am reaching for in 2013.

I have been in this sport a long time and what I have learned is that you never stop learning. You never stop growing. You never stop. As long as you don’t prevent yourself from stopping. And as long as you can keep your head about you. You go through the valleys to hit the peaks.

And you have to appreciate each and every one of those. Because they mean something going forward. They are part of the bigger picture. We can’t wish those experiences didn’t happen, we need to be glad they did. They make us who we are. On and off the field.

While I was enduring what I did I didn’t see that. But as Steve Jobs said…. you can connect the dots going backwards…. never forwards. I look back and say…  ah ha. That’s why I went through what I did this spring. RIght now it makes perfect sense while at the time it was horrible.

Take those times in your life and allow them to help you become who you are.

It’s not that I am afraid to fall flat on my face. I have. It’s that I desire more this time. And that will be my success.

So lace up your shoes. The Heather Boyum Memorial Iron Angel run is on October 14th. You can’t fail by coming out and moving for 3.1 miles for something really really important. The success is not who wins that race. The success is at the end of the day…… having a sizable amount of money to deposit into the future of her children.