I crossed my third HYROX finish line last month.
It wasn’t my fastest race. No personal best. No dramatic finish that shaved minutes off the year before.
And I walked away as proud as I’ve been of any of them.
My first HYROX was about proving I could do it. Crossing the line was the whole victory, and showing my daughter that when I make her a promise, I show up for it.
The second was different. Taya and I trained together with one clear goal – beat our previous time. We did, shaving five minutes off it. Exhilarating to see what consistency actually delivers.
This year was another chapter entirely, and I knew that well before race day.
Taya’s currently overseas living her best life – remember travelling in your twenties? – so I partnered with a woman from my gym doing her second HYROX. We both went in carrying niggling injuries. Training looked different. Recovery mattered more. There were sessions where my knees reminded me I’m three years older than when I started this.
If I’m honest, there were moments in training where I caught myself comparing. Watching younger athletes move in a way I couldn’t. Wondering whether I’d lost my edge. Whether I was doing enough.
Sound familiar?
We do exactly the same thing in business. We measure our chapter twenty against someone else’s chapter five. Different resources, different circumstances, different responsibilities, and we still wonder why our journey looks different.
Comparison has a clever way of making remarkable progress feel ordinary.
Race day humbled me.
My partner got her personal best. Watching her celebrate was every bit as good as chasing one of my own. There was something in helping someone else have the moment I’d had the previous year. Her success didn’t make mine smaller. It became something we shared.
As for me?
I finished without pain. I laughed more than I have in any previous race. I enjoyed every station instead of obsessing over my watch. And I left knowing my body was stronger than I’d given it credit for.
We did it as a team too. F45 Dee Why showed up together, supported each other through it, and finished congratulating each other rather than comparing times. That mattered more than any of the numbers.
That’s progress.
As we get older I think we have to get more intentional about how we define achievement. Not every season is built for a new PB. Some are about resilience. Some about consistency. Some about rebuilding after a setback. Some are simply about staying in the game when life has got wonderfully full and beautifully complicated.
The problem is we judge ourselves on yesterday’s scoreboard. We decide success only counts if we’ve outperformed the person we used to be.
Better question, and one we explored at length at this year’s leadership retreat – who are you becoming?
Because there are victories that never show up on a stopwatch or a profit and loss.
Choosing to keep showing up. Being kinder to yourself. Celebrating someone else’s win without diminishing your own. Honouring the season you’re actually in instead of wishing you were in a different one.
Those wins matter. They’re usually the ones that shape us most.
Progress isn’t always a new personal best. Sometimes it’s the wisdom to change the goal, the courage to keep going anyway, and the perspective to realise that finishing with joy is a win worth having.
That’s a personal best of an entirely different kind.
Janine x