See your goals, forget the sharks

CAN YOU SEE YOUR GOALS? The first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions was Florence Chadwick. On July 4th, 1952, she was in the midst of trying to be the first to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast. The sea was ice water and the fog was so dense she could barely see the support boat. But what she could see were the sharks that kept moving towards her and barely being driven away by rifle shots. Alongside Florence in a support boat, her mother encouraged her, but all Florence could see was fog. With only a half mile to go she quit and asked to be pulled out of the water. She later told reporters, “Look, I am not making an excuse, but if I had seen land, I might have made it.” It wasn't sharks, temperature, or exhaustion that made her quit, it was fog. She didn't make it because she couldn't see her goal. Two months later, with the same challenges and in the same dense fog, she stayed the course and completed the race knowing that behind that wall of fog, there was land.