The THPL journey has some patches of time that push us harder than others and requires that we put in a really big effort to get to the next stage of development. And it struck me that one of my favorite cycling-isms is quite fitting for this “effort / endurance” notion and it is the metaphor of burning matches. In cycling when chasing a distant breakaway, the riders on the front of the peloton will have to “burn all their matches” to bring back the escapees. Burn them too soon and you will not win the race - too late and you never get there.

On our THPL journey, we each have a finite number of matches in our book. Matches are energy or an absolute measure of will. The individual units can be somewhat hard to measure, but you know when you’re all out. And so in the terms of our THPL journey and our life’s infinite stage race, I think that each of us should consider how many matches we have burned and how many we have left in our metaphorical matchbook. For example, have I travelled just one too many days and am a bit on edge? When I go really hard do I realize that I might be running out of matches? Just because we can go hard all the time might not be the best idea. And so it is important for us to consider and always have running in the back of our mind “is it really the right time to be burning so many matches, or might I want to save some for later when I really need them”. The balance between using our matches at the right time and not might be the difference maker between a successful THPL journey and one that just did not meet expectations.

Loving life, when I have a lot of matches left in my book…