If Matt Long Can Do It – Why can’t you?
Last night I watched Real Sports on HBO with Bryant Gumbel. It’s like 60 minutes but only for sports related stories.
They had two stories that made me tear like a little baby but that’s okay. We could all use a good cry every now and then right?
One story that really got me was on former NYC fireman Matt Long. After Matt lost a lot of friends in 9/11 he vowed to be in peak physical condition going forward. So he competed in marathons and even qualified for other ones based solely on his time. (Usually, it’s by lottery or fund-raising)
Long story short in 2005, he was run over by a bus while riding his bike in NYC. He wasn’t hit by it. He was legitimately run over by it. He had a 1% chance of surviving. He was losing so much blood that in the first 48 hours he went through all the blood in his body 5x over!
He was confined to a wheel chair for a while, endured countless surgeries and has a ton of metal in his body. He then went into a deep depression because he kept thinking about what was.
He bounced back after he declared he was going to run a marathon. He stopped thinking in terms of what he wanted to do. He started thinking in terms of what he would do!
Well, he did it. That wasn’t enough for him though. (You have to understand how painful it is for him. Or at least try to. One leg is an inch shorter than the other one now. And the metal that’s holding his body together isn’t meant to bounce around like that.)
He wanted to be an iron man.
That’s 2.4 miles of swimming followed by 112 miles on a bike only to be finished with a full marathon. It also has to be completed in under 18 hours.
He finished it with 3 minutes to spare. He was in excruciating pain the entire time.
Sadly, he had to stop running marathons and doing Iron Man’s because it was literally killing him from the inside out.
Matt is an Iron Man though. Literally and figuratively.
Matt believes that if he can do it (and that was his purpose for doing it) anyone can. Anyone can push themselves more than they think they can. We just have limits that we set for ourselves…or don’t.
Oddly, a friend told me about Matt a few weeks ago. She’s a friend of his and thought we should meet. I’m going to meet Matt. I can’t wait.
I think we can all be a little bit more like Matt. I think we can all push ourselves just a little more than we normally do.
If he can, why can’t you?
Thoughts? I'd love to hear them! Share them with me on Twitter or on our feedback page.
