It's Working

Does anyone else find this commercial equally creepy and hilarious?

After finally unloading my Billy Brubaker metaphor from my brain and semi-successfully avoiding the need to drag through yet another bummer race report, I've decided to try and unload a few more things that have been floating in my brain during the past few weeks. I make no promises as to how coherent this will be.

Speaking of bummer race reports, I get the feeling that people don't like reading them and I don't blame them. I don't like writing them, but I guess I'm committed to truth in journalism or something.

It's funny, because the other day Adam told me that his friend who I don't even really know mentioned that I sounded discouraged in my blog. That's not really the reaction I want my writing to produce, but I guess there is some truth to it. For whatever reason, my race times are still slower than were two years ago, despite much better training. If pressed, I would call it a combination of bad luck weather-wise, race-day mental distress, and possibly the fact that all of the extra watts are being sucked up by the 15 extra pounds that I didn't have to contend with in 2007.

However, after the initial post-race cooling off period, I'm doing okay. What I'm doing is working.

After the Lumberjack, I said that I would focus on on the trail in front of me and I for the most part I've done pretty well at that. Despite some extra stress at work and dip in what I will call "surface motivation", I've still not missed a workout and really nailed several of them. No matter what's going on or how I'm feeling, when it's time to go to work on the bike, I'm getting the job done day after day. Even if I'm not seeing the immediate rewards that I'd hoped for, my numbers say that my day is coming.

As for my post-race negativity, everything I said back in June is still 100% true:

"Here's the thing. I'm not going to quit racing just because I'm not good at it. I'm also not going to resign myself to being a happy, smiley, back-of-the-packer with a "healthy attitude". I'm going to keep working and take this thing as far as I can take it, even if it doesn't go as far as I'd hoped. I'm going to stop caring what other people think, especially when they think I don't deserve to care about racing because I'm slower than them. I'm going to do what I want and I'm going to care as much as I want, because that's what I want to do. I'm not going let anyone tell me how I should feel, either."

Unfortunately, part of caring about something is being disappointed when it doesn't work out the way you wanted. I assert full rights for feeling disappointed after a bad race. I also feel like I'm dealing with it pretty well this year, as I'm not letting these setbacks throw me off course. However, I'll admit nobody likes a whiner, so whatever happens at Town Run, I'll try and think of something nice to say.