Winning by design, not by chance

I love to read about winners. I love being around winners. Obviously I love to win. Winners are comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time.  They are always working to find an edge, something they can do to get better. Winners don’t always win, but they learn from their loses, so that  those loses can result in later success. A great example is Lindsey Vonn, she has every reason to be satisfied, yet she continues to strive for competitive excellence. Here are some quotes her that affirm what a winner must do:

In the meantime, Vonn has not followed the familiar course that led her to three previous Olympics and three successive World Cup overall titles. Last summer, she instead overhauled her training regimen and diet.

“We went back to the drawing board and asked how I could improve on last year,” Vonn said.

While she dominated the downhill, super-G and super-combined events last season, she ranked 14th worldwide in slalom and was 28th in the giant slalom. So Vonn adjusted her training to focus on getting better in the two events in which she failed to win a race. In 2009, she sequestered herself in an Austrian gym working out eight hours a day. Last summer, she was outside working on explosiveness, quickness and agility.

“I still lifted weights inside and rode a billion miles on a bike in the gym,” said Vonn, who has won an American-record 33 World Cup races. “But I added drills to improve my foot speed. I’d say half my time was outside working on my footwork and getting my feet quicker. It’s worked.”

As an example, Vonn cited last month’s first slalom race in Levi, Finland, where an off-balance turn nearly sent her to the snow. Instead, she made a spectacular recovery to finish sixth.

“Last year, there’s no way I finish that race — I’m off the course,” she said. “But I had the agility to save it. You can say that’s no big deal, but a sixth place is 40 points in the overall standings. Last year, I would have got zero points. So that’s a huge difference.”

Winners are winners because they choose a path less traveled. It is not a path of comfort and complacency. The challenge to all of us is make the choice to pursue the journey to excellence. It is a journey that never ends. Enjoy the journey, it is journey filled with adventure and surprises.