I'm writing this for me, but I'm also writing it for someone else.
Someone I love.
I hope when you read it, you'll see the point.
It's May 1986 in Perth, Scotland.
We're in a big leisure centre.
I want you to picture the scene.
There's a big stand on one side of the basketball court (in America, they call them the bleachers).
There are two teams of 14-year-old boys playing a very, very important basketball match (to them).
There are maybe 500 or 600 people there, and it's really noisy; one of the teams even has cheerleaders. That's the team on the left side as you look at it from the bleachers.
That team comes from the West of the central belt in Scotland, about 25 miles west of Glasgow.
The team on the right comes from the far northeast, about 50 miles northeast of Inverness.
The team from the north are the heavy, heavy favourites in this national cup final.
They beat the team from the west coast by a mile in the quarter-finals the year before.
There are about two minutes to go, but the grainy VHS video is the only memory left from that time apart from in the minds of the people that took part.
The team on the left, the teams from the West, my team are two points up with two minutes to go.
That was almost impossible in the lead-up to the match, but this is how these things go.
The superstar player from the team from the North heads into the key (the small zoned-off area underneath the basket). He's attacking and driving forwards, and the big skinny number four from the West Coast team steps in front of him to block his way, and the referee calls a foul.
The number four has his arms above his head to block the ball, but he realises what's happened.
That's his fifth foul, and he has to leave the game effectively being sent off, as is the way in basketball.
In the video, you can see he walks off the court still with his hands held up in disbelief as to what he's done and goes and sits behind the bleachers, unable to watch the rest of the game.
The teams from the North score and then score again, and they win by two points.
After the game, the coach of the team from the West (the losers) will come to number four, who is the captain of the team, with a bag of sweaty strips and say to him, "Why don't you carry these since you don't have the Scottish cup?"
Number four was me.
It still sticks in my throat to tell that story, even to dictate it to a computer.
I still have the grainy VHS video in my house.
What I didn't realise in my despair after losing the Scottish Cup and costing my team all the glory of that was that I was in the middle of a 12-month period which would be the greatest of my basketball time, my only time in an 'elite' sport.
I would get selected later on for the national team. The following year, I would play three internationals losing by three points to Ireland and missing the final shot of the game to tie, beating Wales by seven points (my best performance in a Scotland shirt) and then losing to England but with an extraordinary second half performance in front of thousands of people.
I would go on to play for two more years for Scotland and captain them in my third year, but it was never as good as that, it would never get as good as that again, and now I've lost it.
Since then, I've lost a lot of things and also people.
After the basketball glories of the first year of internationals and then the second year of internationals, I was earmarked to be the head boy of my school.
When the time came, four of us were pulled into the office, and it was clear that they were about to 'pin the badge on me'.
From where I came from in my background, that would have been one of the most outstanding achievements of my young life.
They gave it to someone else who was, at least on paper, cleverer than me.
Bizarrely I look back at that as one of the most significant losses of my young life.
It marked me deeply; I'm not quite sure why.
Fast forward to July 2015, and I'm running. It's at the end of the outlaw iron distance Triathlon.
I'm dressed in a bright orange skin-tight top, grey shorts, orange trim, and orange trainers.
As I enter the lake at Holme Pierrepont in Nottingham for the last time in the marathon, I've got five miles to go.
People can see me from literally miles away because of my orange top.
I'm running a considerably faster second half of my marathon than I did in the first half. They call it a negative split in running.
I ran a 3:40 marathon at the end of an Ironman in my first attempt for just over 11 hours.
It was, without a doubt, one of the greatest sporting achievements and days of my life.
Afterwards, my coach Simon came to me (a man of few words) and said, "You definitely have something".
I realised that was true, and I decided I was going to dedicate the next few years to seeing how far I could get.
I entered Barcelona Ironman in the following October.
By the time I got there, my running was finished forever (due to arthritis in my left knee), and I'd lost one of my best friends.
I never had time to grieve the running because I was too busy grieving something else.
But the loss of that spurred me to build a practice because I couldn't train for Ironman.
Throughout our lives, we all suffer terrible losses, defeats, and gut-wrenching disappointments.
What happens to some people is they flip the narrative and change it into a positive force for the better.
They use it to remember people that they've lost or to avenge things that have happened to them that seem unfair.
Others never managed to do that.
They wallow.
I'm fascinated by why that happens and really, really fascinated by why some people decide to flip this around and move forwards and some people don't.
And so, I'm writing this for you, and I'll tell you that it's for you when I see you and I'll make you read it because now it's time to choose.
Go left and never recover or go right and make a monument to the terrible things that have happened, to the sadness, to how you feel right now and take you to a better place so that years from now, you're saying, "actually when he ran into me in the Scottish Cup final, it became the making of me and catapulted me to a better place".
Blog Post Number - 3504
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