excellence and mediocrity...

this picture was clicked by a photographer friend-cum-colleague.

today Hyderabad Bicycling club organized the third edition of it monthly bike race...though I am not the competitive riding kind, I still decided to go for it...it was a 40km race along wide open roads laced with ups and downs...the turnout was quite healthy with around 27 riders participating...going for 70km joyrides on weekend mornings is one thing but competing against the best riders of the city is totally different...I pushed and pushed hard and managed not to finish last...I completed the 40km in 1 hour and 49 minutes but that clearly was not enough at all...some of the riders though were class apart...though this was just a casual/practice race with no big trophy or award associated with it, the spirit with which some of the riders took it was really admirable...they had a strong urge to finish among the the first few...some spat blood (just a figure of speech...no rider was harmed in the race) just to save a few seconds or take that few meters of lead near the finish line...I, on the the other hand clearly had the zeal missing...everybody wants to win; nobody likes to lose but to badly want to win as if it were the most important thing in life is what separates the champions from the mediocre...at every slope and with every passing rider, I tried to push and get past the challenge...but the mind-body coordination was clearly missing...my efforts didn't have the killer spirit that was required to make the difference...at one point when the rider who overtook me was a little too ahead of me, I let him go and turned around to find the next one...and it is this very act of repeatedly accepting mediocrity that becomes a habit and then it is too late to turn things around...the human body always is repulsive of anything that's physically painful/challenging...it is the mind who plays the real game...