When is good enough good enough?

The following is a lengthy quote from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

"Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport [triathlon]. If pain weren't involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such and investment of time and energy? It's precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive - or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself."

Pushing past the pain inherent in an endurance competition presents a clear opportunity to test ourselves against a barrier, to see if we have what it takes to overcome a challenge that pushes us out to the very edge of our physical limitations. Exceeding that barrier, including the hours required to prepare for the competition, is the closest we can get to metamorphosis.

But opportunities for transformation, improvement, reaching new levels of accomplishment are not limited to physical competition. Accepting that a task will be painful, be it the physical pain of an endurance competition or the uncomfortable awkwardness of approaching a stranger, and choosing to do it anyway induce countless subtle alterations in who we are and what we can achieve.

The opportunities to test our limits and discover what we can achieve are boundless.

Talent is a myth. Genetic limitations are a myth. We choose how far we go, how high we climb. We decide when good enough is good enough.