Surprising yourself, and having patience

Today's post is going to be a bit shorter as we have an early start time tomorrow and I am going to need some sleep tonight.  Today was a long day.  I showed up at the boat park at 9 this morning, we waited until 2:20 for wind, didn't start a race until almost four, and finally left at 6 this evening.  For anyone, waiting around for 5 plus hours seems brutal, but I have never been good at it.  In fact, for as long as I can remember, waiting around with nothing to do has been very bad for my sailing.  I have an incredibly hard time getting myself back in the right frame of mind after waiting has lulled me into a near sleep state.  In all honesty, it saps my motivation to go out when waiting stretches that long.  That being said, today I did it right.  I stayed out of the sun, drank gallons of water, ate properly, and when the time came I got my heart rate up and excelled.  Now, I don't pretend to have the formula exactly down, but I have learned a few things about myself in the process.  The first is that I am capable of surprising myself, and learning new things about myself.  The second is that I absolutely have to be excited about sailing to do well.  Prior to today, I thought that I could grin and bear it (yesterday was clearly an example of why that isn't true); but today I realized that I could get excited about something even in my state of low stimulation.  I jumped around a bit, got my blood flowing, and suddenly my mind was working and I was excited to get on the water and use my energy.  I love sailing, and all I needed was to get my body to match that love with a little excitement of it's own.

This leads to a lesson from sailing today.  There were two points on the race course today where I forced myself to be patient and let things develop when normally I might have been quick to act differently.  Now, I won't say that I'm a genius and I saw something brilliant that no one else saw; what did happen was I forced myself to make a decision and stick with it.  We have all heard someone say something along the lines of "trust your gut".  It's a horrible cliche because we all know our guts can be wrong.  That being said, when you spend your life developing a skill or putting yourself wholly into something, you start to notice things without even noticing them.  It's when that happens, you get that little voice in your head telling you what to do, that you should listen.  Have patience and believe in yourself.  That little voice in your head is you, your brain just has to filter out the noise around it.