Indomitable spirit defined – by the will of Dan O’Brien
“Through everything I’ve gone through
and I’ve been everywhere, at the top of the world, in jail, hung-over drunk
I never gave up my dream of winning a gold medal in the Olympics.”
— Dan O’Brien, Olympic decathlon champion, 1996
and three-time decathlon world champion
Dan O’Brien’s coach, Mike Keller, once said, “Decathletes are always injured. When they line up for a race, 100 percent of them have injuries.” So how did they deal with these injuries? Every day, Dan and Mike assessed what body parts of Dan were working. Then … they trained the healthy parts and rehabilitated the injured parts. For example, if Dan’s knee was injured, he would do strength training for his upper body and noninjured leg, and do knee rehab on the injured leg. Dan always progressed in his training, no matter what, no excuses.
This is the indomitable spirit of an athlete who had the honor of being deemed the greatest athlete in the world four times with his Olympic and world championships. It’s also the value of a great coach, because Dan said on many occasions that he was too injured to train, but Mike always found a way for Dan to progress in some area of his training.
“You have to be able to be a good loser.
You have to be OK knowing you’re going to fail
every day in something without getting mad and upset.”
— Dan O’Brien
The next time you’re feeling
down, tired, sick or a little afraid,
what will you do
to have indomitable spirit and
progress toward what’s important to you? Or, will you wimp out?
