Running, Cycling, Fitness Tips – The Inadvertent Athlete

Feeling Lazy? I know I do.

Feeling lazy these days? Join the club, of which I am president.

It seems that the time change / shorter days / work stress / soccer games / karate / life in general / you name it, are ganging up on me the last couple of weeks. I know what it is, I’ve experienced it many times. I’ve researched it and here’s what I’ve found: Nothing. It’s the thing athletes aren’t supposed to talk about or acknowledge, so they don’t. You won’t find many, if any, articles about it on Runner’s World or Active. Sometimes we just get: Lazy.

It always happens to me right after a significant race or event. I get the “post event letdown”. It happens the week after vacation, the week after Christmas, you know the drill. It is particularly dangerous for those of us that have training schedules for events in the not-so-immediate future. It’s really easy to take a few days off to rest. The problem is that rest feels nice and often, those couple of days off grows into a week off, then two, then your training plan is shot. Not good.

The cure for a good case of the lazies is simple for me. I always have to have an event coming up in the next 30-45 days or I will just let my crazy life take over. Even if it’s a 5K somewhere, I try to put something on the calendar every month. It can be an event, a Saturday shop-ride or long ride with the local bike club. Just something. It’s the same with cross-training. If I don’t make it a priority and literally block off time, my daily run or strength training just won’t get done. Sometimes, even that doesn’t work. What do you do then? Well, as I see it, you then have a choice to make. You can choose to let your circumstances have control over your health and well-being or you can take control of it.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that procrastination is the enemy. It has been said that procrastination is a sub-conscious attempt at gaining control. If that is true, it is ironic that procrastinating about exercise actually gives you less control of your life, not more. We are truly messed up beings.

So, in order to break this cycle, which I am as prone to as anyone, I have to make myself get up and go. I have to make myself eat right. When that one area goes to pot, others are right behind it. From there, it’s a fast track back to where I came from. No thanks.

So, now that I’ve preached a little to you, this guy needs to get his lazy butt up and go for a run, then eat a salad for dinner…

Tags: Marathon Training

Silver & Gold

I like shiny things. I like they way they flash in the sunlight. I need the spark, the little something something. I need the distraction from the routine of middle-aged domestication, I guess. At least that’s the excuse I’m throwing around tonight. It was a set of 3 shiny little things that got me into my current predicament.

Back in the Spring of this year, my wife and I decided to run the Bridge Run in Charleston, SC. It’s my wife’s hometown, and it’s where we met and married. The Holy City boasts a 10K event where you and 35,000 of your closest friends, can be herded like cattle over a bridge, through the sketchy parts of downtown that you normally wouldn’t brave outside of a locked car, and straight into the heart Charleston. I don’t think I had run more than about 5 or six miles at the time so, compared to most of my other events, I was well-prepared. That race is not the story.

Wandering through the pre-race expo, I caught the familiar site of mouse ears on a giant sign. “Disney? Why are they here?” Knowing that they leave no marketing stone unturned, I soon discovered that they ran an endurance race series throughout the year at the resorts in Florida and California. “Dang! Like they don’t get enough of my money!” I spat, secretly rejoicing » Read the full post

Let’s go back to where it all began…

The genesis of my new blog. So much pressure. What the heck do I say? Let’s take it from the top.

Since I graduated college in the last century, I have basically been a lazy sack of crap. No, really. I didn’t do anything but work, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. One day my daughter, who was 3 at the time, asked if I had a baby in my tummy. I looked down and AH CRAP! She was right. I wasn’t pregnant but I did have a big pot belly from indiscriminate eating choices over the past 10 years. I was fat and happy. In my prior life, before kids, wife and responsibility, I was painfully skinny, worked outdoors, and rode 30-50 miles a day after work. Metabolism of a hummingbird. 4.5 years of college, chicken wings and late night questionable behavior kicked that metabolism in the pants. Pile on a few more years of stress, kids, and life, and all manner of nastiness had broken loose on my once ripped abs. So, there I sat, demoralized by a little girl. » Read the full post