Burning the Candle at Both Ends

After nationals I took some time to relax and come back down to earth after a long time up in the clouds pretending I was a bike racer. I had a chance to add up my races that I’ve done and I have done 54 races since late February. I don’t really have a good handle on how many is a lot but I feel like this is close. Plus to add on to that I’m still looking forward to CX this winter. But then there is a problem.

Last week I tried to get back into training, it didn’t happen. I’d like to say that I don’t know why, but that’s a lie. I know exactly why. I think I’m tired, I think I need more than a week off. Stack on top of that the fact that school is seriously getting harder and harder each day, The time to ride is just drifting away. The next step for me is to wonder if that is a problem. I still love to ride my bike, don’t get me wrong. That’s the funny thing. All I want to do is ride my bike until I get the chance to, then I find something else to do. I feel strange not training. But it’s not a bad strange, it’s sort of content. But like I said, school is getting harder and harder, or I’m getting dumber. Both are possible.

During the early part of the semester I didn’t study all that much. I spent most of my time just doing the bare minimum on homework and showing up to class. So it made sense when things didn’t always make sense and there were little parts of the material I didn’t fully understand. But in the past 2 weeks I have been studying. I have been doing most of the assigned reading. Not only am I doing the homework, but I’m doing extra problems. So you would think that my grades would improve and the test would be easier; but nope. So I guess I’m saying I’m a little frustrated with it right now. I feel like I was moving through school at a gentle walking pace before, but now that I’m trying to run there is a brick wall in front of me; I’m spinning my wheels if you will. I guess I’ll keep on keeping on and hope that it just takes time for me to catch up and feel like I’m on top of things. Because I still feel like I’m behind.

On top of that, my phone died. Not the end of the world I know, but it’s kind of sucky when you’re social life slows to a crawl when everything else in life gets tougher.

But now I will take some time to reflect. First of all, to reflect on what I’ve written so far. This post wasn’t supposed to be about how tough things are and just me complaining about it all. But rereading it, I think that’s what it is, at least so far.

So what is the lesson in all this? That is after all, what I started this blog to do. I wanted to learn about myself and training by writing things down. I think the lesson is that It is important to remember that we are all human. That there is only so much we can do. And when we put our heart and soul into something we can accomplish some pretty awesome things. But it all cost something. We have to take that into account to make sure that we still enjoy the hard work. And that sometimes we need to take breaks from our focus and spice things up.

About now is the is the time where I would look around the internet for sweet racing pictures, but I didn’t race. So here is a sweet picture of me not racing.

Thanks for reading!