In the Facebook group for the New Zealand Ironman, Matt Oliver (a fellow IM NZ athlete) shared these thoughts this morning:

“I could never do that” The #1 most common reply I get when talking about Ironman. 
I’ve been thinking about starting to say “That’s good because we don’t let just anyone into the Ironman family” 
The fact is it is true, true for all of us. On day 1 none of us can do an Ironman. It’s not easy, it’s a challenge. It’s a desire to prove ‘can’t’ wrong. It’s you time to prove ‘Anything is Possible.’
And that’s my ‘needing coffee’ thoughts for the day. 
🙂 
Go prove to yourself you CAN do it!

~ Matt Oliver

So true! Most anyone can do an Ironman. Which doesn’t mean that everyone should. There are a million challenges out there that I do not take on. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t accomplish other feats; just that I only have so much time to devote and I have to choose my challenges. And we are all uniquely suited to different challenges in terms of both innate ability (genetically some are fast, others good at long and slow, etc), learning ability (maybe we are not a natural but can still excel with the right work), and desire to achieve (we all like different things; some are drawn to the challenge of rock climbing, but I would be happy never doing that again in my life; whereas even though it isn’t a current focus I would happily consider other challenges such as climbing Denali or riding the Iditarod trail on a fat bike).

But I do think it is important that we all find challenges, and even that we fail and get used to failing and continually pushing ourselves.

For some great additional words on failure, I do not think you will regret spending 21 minutes watching this commencement speech by JK Rowling.