Note to the reader: At best, I’m a periodic blogger. Thank you for your patience and I hope you enjoy.

What you see here is a slice of the actual map from my first adventure race. I have had it now for more than 16 years. Although I would not necessarily call myself a ‘pack rat,’ there are times that I find meaning in things that others might discard. I find meaning in many of the things now tucked away in my basement. This wrinkled and stained map is one such artifact. This map represents monumental failure. Failure Realized.For the uninitiated, adventure racing is typically a multidisciplinary team sport over an unmarked wilderness course with races lasting anywhere from a couple of hours to two weeks in length. Multidisciplinary means running, hiking, biking, climbing, rappelling, orienteering, canoeing, kayaking, and so on, all in the same event.  At the time of this race, I had already run a couple of marathons and other road races, spent plenty of time navigating and moving through the woods as I was still in the military, and spent a fair amount of time with 2 of the 3 others on the team. In other words, we thought we were ready.

Take another look at that map; do you see the start point in the lower, left corner and subsequent checkpoints up and moving to the right? You are looking at the first one-third of the navigation portion of the race – and where it all fell apart. By the time were were pulled from the course near the end of the day – yes, pulled – we had completed one navigation point. So, what happened?

Blind exuberance. We were EXCITED! Oh, were we excited. We had trained, we had planned, we had all of the equipment, we had purchased matching shirts people! Our failure realized? In our case, we were so excited, so exuberant, that we ran headlong into failure. Excitement is great, but not if it causes you to loose sight of your goals or it pulls you completely off course.

We forgot our plan. Take a look at that map again. Those circles and numbers represent our plan to work through the course. They represent both our path and our checkpoints of progress. They represent small wins along the path to our ultimate goal of finishing the race, and hopefully finishing well. We forgot our plan and lost our way. After finding the first checkpoint, we charged off into the woods with little to no regard to where we were heading and how far we needed to go.

You and your team create plans for a reason: you understand where you are and where you hope to go. You should be flexible and can make adjustments to the plan as you progress, but don’t loose you way.

Overconfidence. If you have visited this space before, you might have read my brief suggestions to colleagues at my current institution about professional development. If you missed it, it included a direct and fairly simple observation, “You are not as good as you think you are.”

We were definitely not as good as we thought we were. Although we were physically ready and had the requisite skills necessary to complete the tasks along the way, our lack of humility was our true downfall. At no point during our wayward journey through the woods and swamps of the race course, did anyone admit that mistakes were made, consider that we needed to go back to the where we went off course, or just stop us long enough to consider other options. As the person who had put the team together and organizer of the trip, I was unable to take responsibility for how poorly the team was doing or pull us together to figure it out.

It certainly has been said many times, but I’m happy to add myself to the list of those who have shared the thought: failure is a great teacher. Failure realized is a lesson learned.