As days grow shorter and temperatures surprisingly, and inconveniently, fluctuate week to week, the Davenport plush stands resolute and our Cavaliers reassemble on Grounds filled with expectations. After a long awaited, hard earned, and much deserved post-finals frenzy respite on the home front, the academic slate is wiped clean whereas training regimen results accumulate. The 2011 fall semester and year has come to a close and the New Year resolutions are waiting to be tackled.

Through my tenure as a Cavalier, never have I witnessed more emphasis on the inner struggle between greatness and contentment. As a coaching staff, and ultimately a program as a whole, passion and dedication to greatness is law; an acquired characteristic every fortunate alumnus departs with embedded in his soul. As I stressed in a previous article, our greatest fears can resonate mentally as voices persuading us that contentment and blending in is the ‘easy road.’ Maybe. Contentment is a safety net of comfort held up by the ambiguity of the unknown and staked down by fear of failure. With an unreserved, ardent, and inspirational spirit between the lines, the coaching staff obliterates any shadow of self-doubt within our band of brothers. Amidst reassuring and motivating methods, the one particular event in the culmination of our fall workouts that coaxes out courage and cuts said ‘safety net’ is the Iron Cavalier.

Throughout my career as an athlete, amateur, collegiate, and now professionally, I have never experienced anything as mentally exhausting, physically breaking, and competitively driven as this month-long, intra-team challenge. Riddled with a balance between maximum physical exertion and the mental importance of pushing yourself further than you thought you could, the Iron Cav is a miniature version of the excruciatingly beautiful self-mutilation known as Iron Man.

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