Leaving it all on the field
I used to have a doctor friend in Oregon who'd come home after a particularly long, hard day and say I left it all on the field today. It wasn't necessarily a bad or a good thing - just a comment on what the day demanded. Everything.
Today was that sort of day for me.
I've always been the kind of person to save a little juice for the home stretch - to always keep a little in reserve, just in case. When I ran cross country in high school, I'd carefully mete out my energy with each mile so that I'd have enough for a final intense burst at the finish. Plenty of other runners would start off giving it their all and sprint to the front for the first 10 minutes only to taper off in the second half of the race. Others would miscalculate, spend it all somewhere along the way, and find themselves literally collapsing, convulsing, vomiting just before the finish line, having overspent their reserves.
It's a risk, right? You've got to know yourself well enough to make a smart judgement - and hope that whatever plays out along the way doesn't upend your strategy. But I've been around long enough to know that the universe just loves upending our strategies.
How do you, then, make a practice of giving it - whatever it is - your all without collapsing just before the finish line? Where's the balance? I sure haven't figured that out yet.