Balance

It is amazing how a few things can change everything very quickly. At the end of August I crashed and started the Fall semester. That plus a week of rain lead to a very low number of miles ridden in September. 257.2 miles low! There were weeks this summer that I put in more miles than what I did in all of September.

Cycling seems to be a great metaphor for life sometimes. Keeping the wheels rubber side down and not losing your balance. Keeping the pedals turning and moving you forward in the direction you choose. The basics of cycling are learned pretty quickly otherwise you stop riding. But if you keep it up and you keep trying you master how to not fall and to keep moving forward. As time goes on and the riding becomes more compitative you learn how to push through the pain and pedal harder. As life gets more complicated sometimes keeping our balance and pushing to get where you want gets harder. It is easy to let work or other things get in the way and make you loose your balance.

This semester is going to be a very important one for me if I can get everything done. This semester I have 3 more independent research projects to finish (and submit to journals), comps to study for and pass, a dissertation proposal to work on, and a post-doc to line up. All so I can still graduate in May or August.

So I have a lot to do but I have to keep the rest of my life in balance to make it all worth while.
I have a list of goals and plans to get those goals accomplished which I will share shortly but for now the first thing that I will commit to is posting more often and more consistently. So hopefully once a week or so.

Thats all for now but more to come soon.

Balance (or what I learned about life from cycling)

Balance- It is a pretty simple word that means so much. Staying up right on a bike, Not falling over, keeping the rubber on the pavement....It seems so simple but it is not. Think back to when you were a kid and you were learning how to ride for the first time and you did not want to remove the training wheels. Maybe think back to the first time that you rode with clipless pedals and did not want to fall and do something like break your arm.

Once you get past the training wheels and the clipless pedals the training comes. Pushing yourself on hard intervals and trainer workouts until you are ready to puke. Or riding so hard that you can taste the blood in your mouth and feel the searing in your lungs just trying to stay on the wheel of the guy in front of you so that you don't get dropped in the middle of nowhere in a 20 mph wind.

And we all do it so that we can get faster, stronger, more able to attack at just the right time. Then again if all we do is go hard then we just end up tired and not able to even hold a 10mph pace, so we have to balance the hard rides with the recovery rides.

And then there is life...............
Balance is just as important in life as it is on the bike. Balancing demands of work/school, family, training and everything else can sometimes not go as smoothly as we and other folks would like. Sometimes work can be all consuming and you end up not spending any time on the bike and just enough time with family so that they remember your name. But then all of those other things and people start to remind you that you need to spend sometime with them. The family (wife) starts to make sure to schedule time with you for dinner and a movie and every time that you walk by your bike your legs start to ache, reminding you of all of the hours that you have spent on the bike building the form that you are losing.

So sometimes you spend a few more hours on work one week as long as the next you make sure to spend a few more hours doing those things that you neglected the week before. But then again with just the right balance.............then maybe everything will continue to work out and everyone will stay happy.


So just like on the bike rather than wobbling to one side just to wobble to the other next, staying up right and keeping "the rubber side down" is not as easy as we make it look sometimes.

Obviously since my last post was back in August I have not done the best job with balance in the last month or so but life seems to be coming back into balance and keeping it that way seems a little more manageable.

Here's to keeping life a little more balanced.