Over the past couple of months, I’ve been grappling with several aspects of my life that have shifted. In triathlon, I dropped out of Full Vineman a couple of months before the race due to injury, and also due to my determination that I was simply done with the long version (Ironman distance) of triathlons. At work, various forces have caused me to move into a different assignment than I’ve had before, and at home, Brian and I have gotten ourselves in over our heads with a remodeling job on the house.
My vacation last week (which was awesome) began with several
days of kicking back, relaxing, and decompressing while laying by the pool and
hitting a winery or two a day while we were in Sonoma county. The days away from work allowed me to
get some perspective on my life that I don’t think I could have while in the
midst of all the daily hustle and bustle. To put it simply, I could not see the forest through the
trees.
I had reached a point where I simply was not enjoying the
majority of what I was doing during the day. Workouts became obligations. Work was about clocking time. Home chores were about achieving the bare minimum. Taking care of our dogs was a “whose
turn is it?” scenario between Brian and I. And the remodel was the overbearing weight on our shoulders
that was the last thing we wanted to deal with at the end of the day.
This conglomeration of symptoms is often a sign that
therapists look at as evidence of depression and anxiety. I think that in this case though, I had
simply overwhelmed myself with too many things at one time.
In triathlon, I don’t have a race on the schedule. I blew off a 5k right before my
vacation because I was stressed out of my mind. I have made the explicit determination not to put a
race on the schedule for the near future so that I can work through this and
come out of it with a healthier outlook. I have always been a goal-oriented person, so this is
a change of direction for me, but one that I think is necessary. While training for the last Ironman I
did in 2011, I had a very different mentality about the sport than I do now—it
was to complete all the training and pull out all the stops at all costs. I grew to resent a lot of the time I
spent on the bike and what was then significant discomfort while running—this
likely led to the injuries that I sustained in the season that followed.
I’m spending time figuring out how to get back to enjoying
the building blocks of the process.
This morning, before my 15 hour flight to Manila, I got a bike ride in,
and it was rather enjoyable. I
went in the morning in the Los Angeles area on a weekday—which made a lot of
the difference. Bike paths and
roads are overcrowded with people in my area on the weekday evenings and on the
weekends. While it’s fine to deal
with that, I had set myself up such that the majority of my bike workouts would
be in the evening. Getting home
from work, when you’re already tired, and facing what will be a mentally
exhausting game of human dodgeball on the bike path led me to choose to skip a
lot of these workouts. From a
swimming perspective, I had set myself up to swim at night because of the lure
of the Belmont pool—it was the same schedule problem. Getting from work to the pool for a 7pm workout meant
leaving work an hour and a half before the workout, and either sitting in
traffic for most of that time, or riding mass transit and then a 20 minute
drive from the train station to the pool. Coupled with a relatively low attendance of people at
workout, I had little motivation to keep doing this. It wasn’t enjoyable and it was stressing me out. Running-wise however, things have
started to turn around for me--I am starting to have days with no foot pain at
all. It makes a huge difference to
approach a workout and not have a predetermination that you’re simply fighting
a war of attrition with your ability to tolerate pain.
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| Whoever took this picture deserves a medal |
I’ve been a lifelong athlete—and I will always be an
athlete. Sometimes a tweak or two
is in order to keep things fresh, to keep yourself interested, and to keep the
balance of your life in swing.
That’s all that’s really going on here, and it’s all that should be
going on. So I’m figuring
out what works for me without the context of a major goal in place, and then
I’ll see how that meshes with a goal in the future.
For work, I’ve landed in a job that is interesting, and more
importantly has less daily doomsday water cooler talk. My first thought when I got to work
before was “What time can I leave?” and now I’m back to focusing on the job
that needs to be done and not watching minutes go by on the clock.
Brian and I are taking a more sane approach to the remodel
as well, and it’s going to take longer, but it’ll be on a schedule that does
not overly dominate our lives.
We’ve all only got one life to live, and age-wise, I’m
sitting somewhere near the middle of mine. I think I’m on my way to figuring out what I want the second
half of my life to be.
