Keep Chasing The Chain

300 watts, 400 watts, more watts! 130 beats, 150 beats, heart exploding.

What’s the limit here?  How long can I sustain this?

Questions like these rattled around in my head as the road went up and I chased a friend up a mountain in France.

And then in a split second the words “keep chasing the chain” popped into my mind as I became transfixed on the chain on my friends bike in front of me, in that very moment and for a number of moments after, nothing else mattered except my “chase” for that chain.

It was a commitment to myself to my greater cause, to remain focused on that chain and maintain the same distance from it all the way to the top of the mountain. It was focus. The watts no longer mattered, heart rate neither, I just knew that if I chased that chain and stayed focused on it everything would be just fine.

From that day, numerous times I have “chased chains” on my bike and whilst doing so thought about the incredible pass over to life.

In life the challenges we face often seem enormous, there are so many variables, distractions, often reasons to quit or excuses that somehow justify a near from perfect approach. And that’s what happens too frequently, we stop, we quit and therefore we fail. But we don’t fail because of our inability to complete the task. We fail because of our inability to single mindedly focus on what will take us to our success, we can’t find the “chain to chase” and we freak out.

The lesson is simple, you can achieve great things, you will be successful. However there are so many variables, you have to pick one and pour all of your focus and effort into it as that one is going to get you what you want in life.

It will still be hard, you will still have to work for it but please, never ever stop “chasing the chain”.