At the Massey University Blues Awards, Olympian heptathlete turned high jumper Sarah Cowley spoke about how she lived and breathed the dream of being an Olympian.
After five years of hard slog, sweat, perseverance and coaching in the heptathlon arena, she had only made small improvements and, 10 months out from the London Games, was still well short of the Olympic standard of 6050 points.
In her words, she realised, as did Albert Einstein, that ''doing the same thing over and over and thinking you are going to get a different result'' was insane.
So she decided to change things up a bit. She surrounded herself with power experts, a sport psychologist and a change in mindset and explosiveness did the trick. She achieved a score of 6135 points at a meet in Austria to eclipse the Olympic standard and the rest is history.
She achieved her goal, lived the dream, and had a ball. Now she has decided to focus on high jumping in particular and is already ranked No2 on New Zealand's list with a jump of 1.91m. She needs just another 4cm to qualify for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016.
Cowley is the embodiment of determination and personifies the willingness to ''change it up'' in order to get those extra points or centimetres that drives elite athletes all over the world.
She has chosen an ethical path to do this but, unfortunately, many athletes choose an alternative path, one that potentially has high returns but also extreme costs.
They take this path because of strong ambition, sheer desperation or ignorance, and, regrettably, there are individuals along the way who choose the unethical path for them and encourage them to pursue unethical options, or turn a blind eye.
Sometimes the athlete isn't even the one being duped (or doped?). One such example is Jock Paget, New Zealand's Olympic bronze medallist and world No3 in equestrian who was suspended from eventing and may face a lengthy ban because the horse he rode at the Burghley International Horse Trials has tested positive for reserpine.
Paget seems genuinely shocked by the positive test, which suggests someone else was responsible for doping up Clifton Promise.
Who would take such a risk, knowing that all successful horses are drug-tested? Was it the horse trainer or owner? Was it someone in Paget's team? Was it Paget himself, desperately trying to hoodwink us all?
With athletes who use their bodies as tools for performance, where responsibility lies is less ambiguous. Athletes, whether they are aware of the nature of what they ingest/inject or not, are responsible for what goes into their bodies.
Canberra Raiders winger Sandor Earl found that out the hard way when he admitted to injecting a banned substance during his time at Penrith in 2011.
After watching a candid interview with Earl and his mother on The Footy Show, you couldn't help but wonder if he was just a gullible, desperate young man keen to get over his numerous shoulder injuries to achieve his dream, who chose to blindly follow the advice of a shady sport scientist he thought was employed by the club.
Whether he did it intentionally or not, he did it and must take some of the responsibility and thus punishment accordingly.
But in the case of Paget, was he meant to be with the horse 24/7 to ensure the horse was drug-free? Is this a realistic expectation in the world of horses?Paget rides the horse, but surely he isn't the one breeding, feeding, training and caring for the horse day in and day out.
Will that matter to the drug agencies, who are taking a tougher and more investigative line when it comes to the battle against doping in sport? This take-no-prisoners approach has seen the likes of cycling and Australian sport in general under intense scrutiny, and the Jamaican track and field programme is still under the microscope.
Being an elite athlete is such a minefield of ethical dilemmas and temptations.
Cowley has taken what appears to be the high road so far, while the likes of Paget, Earl and possibly Usain Bolt have wittingly or unwittingly been led down a much shadier path.
As the stakes get higher, athletes need to be less trusting and have their wits about them all the time. They need to keep in mind another quote from Albert Einstein: ''The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.''
