Cheryl Knowlton: Hi, everybody. Cheryl Knowlton, Dynamite Productions, coming at you with Clay Johnson.
Clay Johnson: Hello.
Cheryl Knowlton: From Castle and Cooke Mortgage. Okay, so this is the last in our series of endurance events and what they teach us about ourselves.
Clay Johnson: Yeah.
Cheryl Knowlton: Clay, I love the story of you talking about the hardest endurance event you ever did in Hawaii.
Clay Johnson: Yeah, so it’s going up Mount Haleakala, it’s a volcano. You go from sea level to over 10,000 feet.
Cheryl Knowlton: Straight up. Straight up.
Clay Johnson: There’s one 200-yard kind of downhill section and then there’s a false flat. Other than that, you’re just up. It’s a crazy incline because you’re doing that about 36 miles. Now I’ve done-
Cheryl Knowlton: That makes my quads hurt just hearing about that.
Clay Johnson: Oh my word. Well, I’m a big cyclist, right? I’m in the upper-class of cycling as far as just size. I’m what you’d call a Clydesdale because I’m a big guy. But I love cycling. For me, even though I can hammer it on the flats when it comes to uphill, I have a big disadvantage because of just my sheer size.
Cheryl Knowlton: Yeah.
Clay Johnson: As we’re getting ready-
Cheryl Knowlton: You’ve got to pump it out.
Clay Johnson: Oh you do. You do. As we’re getting ready for this event, one of the guys asked, they said, “Hey, do you think Clay’s going to finish?” This is a guy who I’ve got-
Cheryl Knowlton: Oh!
Clay Johnson: You’ve got to realize these are good cyclists, these are good athletes, right? That I’m riding with. The one guy, who actually we have always been very close in production also in the loan business, we’re always pushing each other. He said, let me tell you something. He goes, “Clay will crawl up that hill the rest of the way if he has to, he will not quit.”
Cheryl Knowlton: I love that.
Clay Johnson: It made me feel good because the other person told me that he said that, and I thought, “That made my day.”
Cheryl Knowlton: That’s tremendous validation.
Clay Johnson: It is.
Cheryl Knowlton: That is awesome.
Clay Johnson: I was so grateful. But I think that’s the thing is, and we’ve talked about this a lot, it’s just not quitting, not giving up. We have goals, and hopefully, we all have goals, that we’re setting. It’s like, “Okay, we’re going to have setbacks, we’re going to have time to work really hard and really challenging,” and it was.
Cheryl Knowlton: It pushes us to the brink.
Clay Johnson: Yes, and you learn.
Cheryl Knowlton: But you didn’t quit.
Clay Johnson: Didn’t quit. You learn so much about who you are, what you have inside, and that there is that mind over matter capacity …
Cheryl Knowlton: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Clay Johnson: … that no matter how physically drained or what the matter is, your mind can overcome.
Cheryl Knowlton: That is exactly right. That leads to all kinds of fun things that we can talk about at another time, like mindsets and goal-setting and all of these things. Whether or not you’re an athlete or whether you are an Olympic couch potato, we would encourage you to set goals and to be known as someone who finishes. Those other people will say about you, as they said about Clay, “Clay will finish this if he has to drag himself.”
Is that what people say about you? Have that reputation that you are a strong finisher. With that, we’ll see you next week.
Clay Johnson: Bye-bye.