Miracles and Attitudes

Yesterday was a bit of a miracle.  After being rained out of my normal Monday 30 mile ride, it looked like Tuesday would be the same.  It rained all day until about 3 in the afternoon.  At 5 o’clock when I left work I looked at the radar and figured it would be rain free for around an hour.  At this point it would have been so easy to say that isn’t enough to get my 30 miles in and write the whole day off as a wash out.  But that isn’t the type of person I want to be, and hopefully not the person I am.  I think of two quotes that resonated with me and shaped my personality…

“You’re supposed to be here to better yourself and get educated, so cheating in college is just stealing from yourself.”

And

“Training in bad weather pays double: you make gains and your rivals don’t.”

The first came from one of my friends when I remarked about someone in a class of mine cheating and how there was nothing really to stop what they were doing to cheat.  The second is from professional cyclist Alberto Contador.

The first quote I apply daily in my life.  It’s very foundational to me.  Not to say I cheat or am prone to cheating, but I have a strong opinion about useful work and busy work.  That is to say, I have infinite patience for useful tasks but zero patience for useless tasks.  Will I skip a step and cut a corner on meaningless make-work.  100%.  Will I skip a step and cut a corner on important work, or projects I am passionate about?  Never.  Because, as my friend said, I’d only be stealing from myself.  

The second quote is something that can be taken to crazy extremes.  If you’re a professional athlete from whom the difference between millions of dollars and poverty is 2% performance, it makes sense to apply a crazy extreme standard of dedication to yourself.  For even elite amateur athletes, however, you should probably stay indoors when the sky is dropping baseball sized hail.  For us normal joes, it’s OK to sleep in Saturday morning if it’s raining hard.  As much as I love cycling, and I love it dearly, I don’t derive any pleasure riding in the rain.  It’s uncomfortable in a way totally separate from the normal discomfort of cycling, like getting a dental exam but in an office without AC and it’s 90 degrees inside.  

All of that is to say that there is a push and pull between cheating yourself by not riding when you should, and sucking all the fun out of it by riding when you shouldn’t.  On days like Tuesday, it wasn’t entirely clear which sort of day it was.  

So I set out on the road south, the sky was black to the south and the wind was from the south.  My plan was to go as far south as I could until it looked like I was heading into the oncoming rain, and then turn around and use the tailwind to beat the rain home.  As it turned out, to keep a long story short, I was able to get 30 miles in.  It was a small victory to get a normal Tuesday ride in despite thunderstorms literally on all sides of my area without getting a drop of rain on me.  Had I not ridden, I would have felt extremely guilty for cheating myself.  

The guilt attached to failing to do something we have ritualized, or a hobby that we have transformed into an obligation is a double edged sword.  Beneficially, it can be a powerful motivator that gives you iron discipline.  Negatively, it can turn a love into a hate; a hobby into a labor.  

For many people they ask me, “how are you so motivated to ride 5 days a week?  I wish I could find the ability to work out so much.”  Frankly, my struggle isn’t to find the motivation to work out: working out is the best part of my day, when I am the happiest.  For me the struggle is to accept without guilt that some days it just isn’t going to happen, and being OK with missing a day.

Since solving other peoples’ problems is far easier than solving our own, I’ll do that first: if you dread exercise and you have to summon all your internal fortitude to get out the door and get on the bike or go to the gym or get in the pool or whatever, you’re doing the wrong thing.  If you are constantly looking up ways to get the same fitness results from a shorter workout, you’re doing the wrong thing; no one ever (hopefully) asked how to speed up sex and have it end faster.  If you hate cycling, stop doing it.  Swim laps, go to Crossfit etc.  Try everything until you find the thing that clicks with you and excites you.  Find the sport that you daydream about doing while sitting at your desk at work, and do that.  Something that fires your passions exists and you have to keep going until you find it.  Trial and error.

For myself, I’ve dealt with burnout before, and I’ve blogged about how I dealt with it.  Over-doing my hobbies until they become a chore I hate has been a recurring problem in my life.  There doesn’t seem to be a simple solution other than to listen to my instincts.  If it’s a sunny saturday morning and I could ride, but my body is crying for a break, I have to do a better job of listening.  I think I’ve done a bit of a better job of that in the last two years.  But being present in our own lives is a never ending challenge.