Get it right next time...

Out on the street I was talkin' to a man. He said 'there's so much of this life of mine that I don't understand'.

Of course if we understood everything, the world would be a really boring place. An audience always looks to see how the magician did the trick, rather than just take the illusion at face value. Having seen a 'Magician of the Year' return an empty crushed tin of Coke to being full and in need of a ring pull to open and poured out, was asked if I wanted to know how it was done. When I said 'no', he said he was confused as everyone asked. You see, I was happy with the illusion and didn't need to understand. You see, sometimes it's okay not to know...

You shouldn't worry, I said, that ain't no crime. Cause if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time.

But we do worry don't we, me included about getting things wrong. Failing our peers, failing in public and not looking the fool. Oh the embarrassment! And yet, this is exactly the thing that stops us exceeding our limits. Yet if we look at lots of people we would class as being super-successful in life - they have all been failures in one way or another along their way to success.

You need direction, yeah you need a name. When you're standing in the crossroads every highway looks the same.

It's very easy to give in when things go wrong isn’t it? Giving into not going down the same route again and using fuzzy logic rather than common sense to guide our next steps. Imagine using Pot luck as your Sat-Nav the next time you travel anywhere. I understand how annoying being Google-Driven it can be but even in the pre-digital age we weren't traveling blind - remember using 'A to Z Maps'?

After a while you get to recognise the signs. So if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time.

We travel down the same paths of failure and make the same mistakes time and time again. Why is that? Why do we live so much in hope that things will turn out ok? Why do we believe that things will change for the better when it's obvious they won't and don't. Is that what we call it 'Human Nature'? 

Life is a liar yeah life is a cheat. It'll lead you on and pull the ground from underneath your feet.

And when it goes wrong you become the victim. Get despondent and can't find a way back. We can feel cheated. Having been in this situation myself, it would have been far too easy to say 'Why me'. But then I would have been giving into the negativity that surrounds so many people I meet that live under the grey cloud of 'Regret'.

No use complainin', don't you worry, don't you whine. Cause if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time.

My advice is always to draw a line and move on. People make mistakes. I make loads of them. We all make mistakes. We don’t do it on purpose - things just don’t go the way we planned. The feeling of liberation when moving on can be overwhelming. There's always another chance. Another opportunity. Another way of making things happen. You just have to dust yourself off and have another go.

You gotta grow, you gotta learn by your mistakes. You gotta die a little everyday just to try to stay awake.

Sometimes it feels like you are paddling upstream. It does for everyone right now I can assure you. Covid-19 has changed our world - Finished off over 100,000 worlds in the UK alone and will finish off many more worlds in the months to come. So when you feel everything's a mountain that you can't climb, don’t worry because if you get it wrong, you'll might get it right next time.

1,079 Marathons, 255 Ultras, 9 Guinness World Records, 15 Marathon des Sables, 27 Years' Dry