Rowing Life Lessons: #2 Losing Doesn't Mean You Failed

I'm a fairly competitive and bossy person by nature. When I was little, most of the games I staged with my little sister were really contests - dance contests, cartwheel contests, hula hoop contests, diving contests, - you get the picture. And I was always very dead set on winning all of these contests. I even would alter the rules of the board game Pretty, Pretty Princess to ensure that I always won. (Thank god I have a fairly low key sister who just went along with my antics because otherwise I'm sure a lot of hair pulling would've been involved.)

I like winning.


Ok, yes, everyone likes winning but I really like winning. I sometimes have races inside my own head with other pedestrians on the sidewalk and silently applaud myself when I pass them and make it to a street corner before them. (I'm also pretty sure that I would be a very competitive Olympic power walker despite my stubby legs, but that's beside the point.) It once dawned on me that most people in college were playing drinking games to get drunk, I was playing because I actually wanted to win.

So, yeah, I really like winning.

The issue with really liking to win and being on a small, mediocre (sorry, boys) college rowing team is that you don't often win. You're often right in the unglorified middle of the pack, the "screaming medium" as one of my coaches once put it. And this is kind of a hard fact to accept for someone like me.

I think what has always been so hard for me to accept about losing is that I associate it with failing. And failing is the absolute worst possible thing in the world, in my mind. But the two words are not completely interchangeable.

We lost a lot of races. But that doesn't mean we failed as a team, as a boat, or, personally, as a coxswain. It just means we weren't the fastest. And this concept took a while for me to accept.

But more often than not, we were succeeding in our own right even if that success didn't mean a gold medal around our necks. It's important to take a step back from the situation and remember all of the successes and accomplishments you've had along the way. We worked hard as a team and individually to get where we were and that shouldn't be overlooked or forgotten just because we didn't cross the finish line first.

This is something I try to remember and apply whenever things don't seem be going how I'd like. It's not always easy. The work, effort, and dedication you put into something is just as important as the end result. And that work counts. That hard work is what makes it worthwhile and valuable, not the color medal.

(But let's be honest, actually winning is really cool too.)