I’ve wanted to update my blog for a couple of months now. It seems that every time I think I have something intriguing to write about, someone else had already written about it. The obvious themes include cold weather, off-season, winter training, and making fun of cyclists.
One of my favorite things about living in the mountains is watching the weather roll in and roll out. While I continue to reflect and muster up more creativity, here are some recent weather photos:
When I was in grad school, I talked to a friend who told me that work-life balance is a myth. I thought she just had poor time management skills. Little did I know that life would start stacking things on my plate and that soon I would learn.
When you are trying to run your own business, the hours don’t neatly divide themselves into categorized little blocks. The ratio of work to cycling to sleeping to just having fun becomes amorphous. Some days, the workday unofficially ends at 2 or 3pm. Other days, it starts at 7am and goes until 10pm.
Balance is a myth. Out of everything being juggled, one aspect of life sprints to the forefront until a line- real or imaginary is crossed. Then, that thing falls back into the shadows while something else emerges. It’s like a constant criterium with rotating leaders.
For the past couple of weeks, my scales have been tipped in a direction that I’m not too comfortable or familiar with. I put my head down and keep trudging forward because I know that soon enough, the pendulum will reach the end of its range and start to turn back in the opposite direction.
The title pretty much says it all. Snelling (late Feb) was set to be my first race. At some point in January, I finally decided to check into the pain in my butt-literally, a pain in my butt – and it turns out that I have some weird muscular-skeletal imbalance. In the grand scheme of things, it’s fixable, not a big deal, and in a couple of years, I probably won’t even remember I that I ever had this issue.
One of my goals this year was to start racing earlier than last year (mid-April). I might still be able to pull that off, but it’s not certain. The upside of this imbalance issue has been that since my training has been more limited, I’ve been able to focus on my business as well as take a couple of mini-climbing trips without driving myself crazy with an intense training schedule. The thing I love about rock climbing is how it strengthens the mind as the climber is constantly dancing across the blurred lines of success and failure.
This week, I was all set to sign up for the Strava hill climb challenge (100K+ vertical in 45 days), but the largest snow storm we’ve had all season decided to roll in. So here I sit, slightly impatient yet determined, waiting for the storm to move out and for my racing season to start. And riding the trainer, of course.
I want to Ride my bike 