Dealing with disappointment

If you were to look at the dates of this post and the previous post, you’ll notice a large gap immediately preceding this post. To me, it’s more than just a bunch of days when I didn’t want to write. I think it can teach me something important about myself. After reflecting on this subject, I think things immediately took a turn for the worse after my last race. I had raced the week before, and performed better than expected. I briefly discussed that race in my last post. The following week I was expecting big things.

So I took my lofty goals and went racing. Six miles into the race I was dropped. I chased for seven miles, the remainder of the first lap, before I quit. Yes, I quit. I can barely tolerate myself. Somewhere deep down in the wrinkles of my gray matter I learned that quitting is something you just don’t do.

Then I stewed on my performance, the fact that I quit, my weight, etc. If it was negative and I was aware of it, then I thought about it. I started finding excuses not to make it to team rides, not to stick to a diet, not to give a shit, basically. I was aware that I still owned a bike, but I had convinced myself that I needed to start back at square one because I was just…that…bad. And I didn’t want to start back at square one. It was a convenient little catch-22 I had put myself in.

My saving grace was and is a very good friend in the cycling club I belong to. And by “very good” I do not mean close necessarily. I mean that this friend knows how to tell others what they need to hear without sounding like a Nike commercial. He talked me out of the box that I had put myself in, and got me going to team rides again. Most people reading this will know that this is exactly what I needed. I needed to know I wasn’t as bad as I had convinced myself I was.

In fact I’m better than I could have expected. This morning I trimmed 90 seconds off a personal best on a 17-mile course that I use to test myself. It appears that my major problem is getting too deep into my own head. I drew a few conclusions from my introspection.

1. I need to ride with others as much as possible. Or, stated more generally, I need to stay connected to the friends I have.

2. When I don’t have someone to talk to, I need to be able to stage my own personal intervention. There are several points over the last several weeks when I could have addressed this, and the sooner the better.

3. Expectations can be exceeded or not met, by a little or a lot. Typically, my expectations have no real basis in reality, so judging based on how my results compare is complete foolishness.