By: Michael Beiter

Dam to Dam routinely closes the roads around my office every year for half a Saturday.

We used to have to battle to let the race marshalls let us out of our parking lot.

This year we just skipped it and I moved all my work to a coffee shop.

I plugged in at 7:30 am and met people on rotation for three hours.

One gal has been working with me for a few years. But she has been in the fitness industry as an instructor for thirty. The diet she and I put together is the longest sustained nutrition plan she has ever done.

She talks to her college-aged daughter about fitness and food stuff now and she said something awesome I think is important:

"Being my leanest, fittest, strongest, or fastest never made me happy. I would always just raise the bar and go back to work to get better without really enjoying what I worked for. Now, I don't do that as much. I'm happy that my husband and I road bike together and that we just got back from Hawaii and I worked out every day while averaging almost 20k steps daily. We've been there many times and this is the most active our trip has ever been.

What makes me happy has shifted over the years. I define it differently than I did earlier in my life. I definitely don't look for it with fitness outcomes. I find happiness in health, ability, and activity with my husband.

It's important for people to define happiness for themselves and to stop thinking it will come with the next pay raise, bench PR, or body fat best."

At a certain point, you won't get leaner, fitter, or stronger. You will have reached your genetic ceiling or the level at which the costs are no longer worth the benefits.

We call this stage maintenance.

Sticking with the status quo is much harder than it sounds. It takes discipline, constant self-evaluation, and a completely different mindset than the growth expectations our society instills.

Not everything is meant to grow or continue improving forever. The law of diminishing return says so, and it applies to fitness, finance, relationships, etc.