Life - Pressure

Pressure, pressure...

Not tire pressure.

Today the weather was excellent, the sun beating down, the bright outside making me scurry back inside to retrieve my sunglasses. A great day for a ride, right?

Well, yes. And no.

Actually, I didn't go for a ride. My choice and mine alone, no pressure or anything, and the missus thought it'd be a great day to ride too. Let's put it this way. I didn't sit down to type out some thoughts thinking, "Man, I really wanted to ride today and I'm bummed that I didn't."

In fact, I'm sort of glad I didn't ride. With some non-cycling high stress events in the last week, my non-cycling life has been moving at a rapid pace. Which direction, I don't know, but it's moving rapidly.

Yet there are some things from the spring which I need to wrap up. To me, spring means Bethel and getting my fair weather car out of hibernation. Then, with the missus done with her work (they are busy until April 15th), there's a break which announces "You've made it through another spring!", namely our annual trip to Vegas (at least that's what it's been for two years).

This year though I still need to finish up "spring stuff". For example, with the Bethel Spring Series, the women's trophies need to be sent out. They should be ready but I have to pick them up, package them up, and mail them. I need to finalize the site for the 2008 year as well, with all the results and such posted locally on the carpediemracing.org site, not just here on the blog.

My fair weather car (it's blue) is still hibernating. Starving for action, I'm sure, but hidden away in a secret garage. With the warmer weather, I'd like to have the blue car here as my default car, and I'll be picking it up from its secret winter hibernation garage tomorrow. Normally I'd have made this switch in late April, but this year other things got in the way.

I keep talking about these unnamed other things. The non-cycling aspects of my life which are moving, namely job and home, are at least in some state of motion. For many months they were in a state of total rest. Tons of potential energy, no kinetic energy. Now the kinetic energy level is increasing, rapidly at some times.

Regarding "job and home". Since the latter ("home", i.e. buying a house) is somewhat dependent on the former ("job" - the missus and I think it to be imprudent to purchase a house without me having a job), it's really the former creating excitement, stress, and anxiety in my otherwise extremely calm life. Since I am uncertain what will happen, and I don't want to jinx anything by mentioning things prematurely, I'll have to leave it as "the situation is changing and that is much better than it simply stagnating".

A potential big thing, especially for the blog, is that if things do work out with the "job", I'll be extremely limited as far as blogging goes, even more so than the pitiful one post per week rate I'm writing at right now. Well, one post a week might be about what I'll be able to do, but not much more than that.

With all this extraneous excitement and stress, my cycling life has been struggling a bit. I find I'm very goal oriented, and without a definitive target in sight, my motivation to ride weakens considerably. Add to that the fact that a non-cycling thing is a big goal for me (and therefore absorbs a lot of my energy) and cycling loses out, even with an upcoming race.

Since I'm pretty sure I'll be racing at Hartford in two weeks (I haven't registered yet), you'd think that was motivation plenty, but it's no longer a target race for me, and the non-cycling bits of my life seem, for the moment, much more important. Even the lure of the Nutmeg State Games feels weak for now, unusual when you consider that New Britain is my absolute favorite course and always a target race for me.

So, if I seem a bit out of it at Hartford, you'll know why. In the meantime, in my non-cycling life, I feel like I'm carrying the leader's jersey in a seven day stage race.

Problem is that it's day four. And there are three hard stages ahead.

I don't know how those other guys do it.