My wife and I recently completed another Muddy Race this past weekend. In the race teams of two traverse an off-road course and 5 obstacles. At the start of the race one person rides a mountain bike and the other runs, when you get to an obstacle the biker drops the bike and becomes the runner and the runner picks up the bike and becomes the biker. This happens at every obstacle until you reach the end where you find “the mud pit”. You and your partner then have to crawl through “the mud pit” to the finish line. Oh yeah fun times….
Due to some storms that passed by the night before, this year’s race really lived up to its “Muddy” name. At the beginning things were going great, running was easy and biking was a breeze. As the race went on the course got a bit harder and extremely muddy, the kind of mud that’ll win you the blue ribbon in a mud pie contest. It was so bad that during my bike leg I could no longer ride the bike and had to push it while running along side. The mud was caked on the tires and packed into the brakes, chain and gears. All this mud the jammed up the wheels so they wouldn’t even turn, I understood why the tires wouldn’t roll but this didn’t stop me from struggling to keep moving forward. Other racers stopped and grabbed a stick to clean the mud off their bikes but there was no way I was going to stop, I was in a race and time counts. So there I am pushing, dragging and at times carrying a bike because it was so jammed up with mud the tires would not roll. It seemed like the more I pushed the more exhausted I became and the harder things got. To add to my pain I noticed that the racers that had stopped to clean off their bikes were now passing me by and doing it easily because their tires were rolling again. At last I could not take it any more and decided to stop, grab a stick and start clearing the mud that was holding me back. This didn’t take long and I got going again with rolling tires and more energy. I was even able to catch and pass some of the racers that had passed me when I was struggling and finish ahead of them.
Later as we were driving back home I began to think about how my muddy situation relates to business and life. Are there times when things are harder than they should be but instead of stopping, understanding why and then clearing the obstacle we continue to push, pull and drag ourselves forward. We think going forward at all costs and through all pain will get us to our finish line faster. How wrong we are! The next time you find yourself in a situation that’s harder than it should be take the time to stop, understand what’s causing the issue and clear the obstacle(s). You’ll get to your finish line much easier and a lot faster.
