Laziness and effort

This first year of triathlon training has taught me quite a few thing about myself, most of which are indefinable and the gains of which are difficult to ascertain but when I look back I find a black hole of effort, that magnificent vortex sucking calories into the three disciplines of triathlon. Everyone says there is a 4th discipline, the mental aspect, but I’d like to add another, the stress management discipline. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the stress levels I occasionally encounter on this long road destroy my morale, tackle my motivation and fuel the endless excuses not to take that first step down the path. Every day starts with that first step away from comfort, from mediocrity and subsistence. Perhaps because this triathlon represents my first true venture into the realm of competitive individual sporting, and because I have no anticipation of the reward, no inkling of what lies in store for me as the fruit of this enormous tree I’m watering. I’m lacking that extra motivation, and stress has filled its oddly sized vacuum.

Yesterday a battle raged at noon when I donned my war robes and tried to move my bicycle from stop to go. I begin my training best when I’ve already eliminated as many excuses as possible for not training before I have to make the critical choice of whether to exit the door or not. Over the course of the last two decades I developed and coaxed from my mental vocabulary the ability to procrastinate and discover in the slightest details a reason to abort a training mission. I deal with this by prepping my plan and waking up as early as near to 5am as possible (my active hour) in order to leave without fuss before I realize what the hell I’m doing and how crazy it would be not to fall back asleep next to my beautiful girlfriend in a wonderfully comfortable bed. Most of the time I’ve failed in the past, yet recently I find myself more and more successful, waking up, falling back asleep, then waking up again shortly later to berate myself and slowly, achingly, wearily drag myself from solace to torture. Urgency has become the mother of my determination, with my Ironman bearing down on me with the full force of its Herculian requirements stirring me to leave lazy behind.

And yet I still feel lazy, still feel as if I could do more everyday, and I probably could, I could get in that evening run, and skip that second helping, swim that extra lap and push myself to another interval. I can do it, but still, more often than not, I do not. For this reason I still feel lazy, when macroscopically, I shouldn’t, not when I’m on average; racking up 200+ miles on my bicycle, 10000 + yards swimming and 15-30 miles running, every week. A person shouldn’t feel lazy with those numbers breathing down their neck. Next year I’ll stop being lazy. Next year as in October, when we start it all up again.

Coming up: The winter training plan