It is very rare to achieve success without failure first.

So I think it is important for me to show some of my failures along the way to achieving Project 183.

The first failure I will post about occurred back in March, and relates to goal 112, which is to complete a CityChase competition.

To give a short background, CityChase is an Amazing Race style competition, with races all around the world. You sign up as a team of two, and on the day of the race you have a set number of hours to complete a series of checkpoints and then get back to the starting point. The Australian CityChase is held every March in Sydney. You can read more at the CityChase website.

In March 2007, I flew up to Sydney with Nat to have a go, and despite our best efforts, we didn’t finish in time. But with an understanding of the competition, and a desire to knock the goal off my list, I flew up to Sydney in March 2008 with my great mate Andy, determined to cross the line in time.

We arrived the day before so that we could familiarise ourselves with Sydney streets, in the hope it might make it a little easier to navigate on the day of the race. And it did.

But what it also did was wear us out a little more than hoped, and combining that with a really tough course, and not enough endurance training on my part, meant we didn’t complete the race.

I flew back from Sydney so disappointed, because I thought that I would surely have improved enough from the first time that completing it would have been a breeze. It showed to me that being complacent and expecting results to happen for you are the acts of a fool.

So far, this has been my worst goal attempt failure, but I think after two failures, I know what it will take to achieve success next time. Training, training and more training. And a GPS device would be handy too.

Andy and I still managed to have some fun on the day. We found fake moustaches at a $2 shop and planned to run the whole six-hour race with the moustaches on; they fell off after five minutes!