Part 17: Don't let a blink blind you.
Yesterday was my third and final track day of the year. I didn't die, and, I got a new personal best. You must be stoked with that, right? Don't let the thumbs up fool you. If you look carefully you can see that I was not feeling especially stoked: Why wasn't I stoked? To remind you, my target time for these track days has been to get round the Hampton Downs national track faster than 1:26.00. My best time of the day was 1:26. 01 I missed my target not by 1 second, not one tenth of a second, but ONE HUNDREDTH of a second. 10 milliseconds. That's literally ten times faster than the blink of an eye. I should have been delighted with my PB time, and with the track experience in general. But I was feeling a little disappointed, frustrated and annoyed with myself for not doing better, and with the other participants who frequently disrupted my hot laps. I've clearly become too fixated on achieving an arbitrary goal to the detriment of fun. In the grand scheme of thin...