In a big country dreams stay with you.

I haven't felt inspired to write the last few days. Not that inspiration wasn't surrounding me but simply that the words weren't coming, flow blocked like ice in a stream.

Maybe my biggest lesson as of late is the strength of a person's will and the power that it carries. Lucky enough I put myself in a situation where I learned this the fun way, not the hard way. This weekend I ran my first 10km road race. Let's be honest. The first 10km I would ever have run continuously. I had been training but not to the extent which would have left me feeling confident going in. To add insult to injury my parents had planned a dinner party the night before, this meant a reasonable flow of wine and potentially late night. Now an intelligent runner would probably skip the vino and head to bed early. I on the other hand, in my overconfident and less than rational state, saw this as a challenge to be accepted. The dinner party later turned into a few drinks with friends. No big deal.

Well I wasn't 100% to run the next day but when it came time to keep going the thought that ran circles through my mind was 'If you are dumb enough to go out the night before a run you sure better run the whole thing and fast. No excuses'. Luckily I finished, ran the whole way and faster than I had expected. It wasn't that I didn't want to stop, go back to bed, it was just that it wasn't an option.

Now clearly this is a humorous example of the idea of mental will power but what I have really found so inspiring as of late are the huge goals that people surrounding me have taken up and no matter how difficult they seem to be to achieve. These people are passionately committed to achieving their big, hairy, audacious, goals often simply through the sheer willpower to do so. Dreams stay with you.