Paradigm Shift

Things have been off kilter for me lately. When I sit down to write, my mood and my mind are like a roulette wheel in a rigged house... always landing on a losing square. I look back at my posts from the last week and wonder at the negativity in them. So unlike me, a happy-go-lucky, roll-with-punches kinda gal. I don't wonder that I wrote them - we all have bad days. But I marvel that I wrote them all together, a string of black thoughts. As annoying as my little equipment dramas have been, to read them you'd think I've been having one bad day after the next, and I really haven't. These things have been like flies buzzing my head at a picnic... a minor annoyance, nothing to pack up and go home over.

I will say that I've come to know in these last few equipment troubled weeks that ignorance is bliss. Had I fully understood my equipment problems during the race season it would have frozen me with fear. I was too new, too scared, too intimidated. Too unsure of my ability to conquer this crazy thing I'd committed to. I had to believe I had the right running shoes, because they would magically get me through the torturous run legs. I had to believe my fancy new bike would get me through the heat and the hills, because I certainly couldn't. I had to believe I was as prepared as I could be and that nothing could have been trained for different or better or harder. But it's all different now.

I can feel a change on the cold, snowy wind. A change in me, a change for the better. A change I know I have to go through, even if it means temporarily venting dark and angry thoughts into cyberspace. Because as I swat these flies, I've come to understand something that changes everything.

I got me through the run legs. It didn't matter that my shoes weren't right.

I climbed the hills and took the heat... and did it without benefit of all my gears.

I did that.

And even though not a single thing is actually different - I'm still the same person who panics at the site of a lake and struggles through every step of a run and still has to lose over a hundred pounds - it's all different inside me.

Now I can see my own strength - the races knew it was there and they showed it to me, but I was blind to it. Swatting at these flies knocked off my equipment blinders.

Now I understand why I suddenly vowed to stop swimming junk yards and started doing every drill I could read about. I used to be perfectly content to swim my 880 yds and be done. Now I understand why I, just yesterday, decided it would be a great idea to try running a hill interval workout. I used to do the bare minimum running required of a given day's plan and be done. Now I understand why I'm accepting invitations to go trail biking in the snow. I used to find that sort of thing just this side of insanity. And now I understand why I'm doing all these things, out of the blue, without premeditation. I just do them, and they're hard and new and while I'm there I sometimes think "how did I get here?!?!"... but at the same time it feels like the natural thing to do.

I get it now. It's my time to move up on move on. I had my rookie experience and with my physical limitations I thought I'd be happy to stay at that performance level forever, but now I know that's not even close to the case. Maybe the equipment problems were a rite of passage, I don't know. But I think they served a larger purpose. I needed the buzzing flies to wake me from my just-doing-enough contentedness, to force reevaluation of the possibilities of me. My body has been leading me in that direction for a while now, and it's time for me to follow.