Daily Gratitude: More on persistence. I learned this (again) during Vol State this year. There wasn’t any time that the race was easy this year. Sometimes they were a bit easier than others but never easy. This was my own doing since I made myself really push on day 1 and because of that i sacrificed a lot and was paying for it through the rest of the race. If you were following, you’ll remember my “gut incident” on the side of the road in the middle of the night just outside of Shelbyville. For about the next 24 hours I stopped any intake (food and liquids) so the incident didn’t repeat. That, of course, led to other problems. Fortunately by this point in the race I had refocused myself enough to simply think about getting some rest and then gradually starting my intake again. I knew I had to keep going. And since I was focused on the present moment, I was able to handle that without worrying about what was going to happen in another day or three. That’s how I handled each difficulty as it arose. I did my best to keep from getting bogged down.