My guilt muscles are pry the most active in my body, and when the holidays bled into January and I hadn't written, I got all blah blah; which made it easier for January to become February, etc.....silence.
The quiet on the writing front does not, however, correspond to a break in training, and I figured today was a good day to say:
I RODE MY BIKE SIXTY MILES TODAY, and boy are my legs tired.
My butt hurts. Like. HURTS.
I have a weird tan on my arms, where I pushed up but did not take off my long sleeved shirt.
My knees are looking at me like "WTF?"
I haven't been on a bike since around....February 17th or so. Travelling around Australia is not much conducive to cycling for 3 hours every few days. The point of which is that I was shitting bricks before this morning's ride, and I feel like I did okay. I kept an average speed of 15 mph, which isn't great, but takes into account the hills where I chugged along at 6-9 mph, and the headwinds I was dealing with for the last, oh, 2 and a half hours of the ride.
I know I need to get that average up...at that rate I'd take 8 hours on the bike on race day. Wait, that's not that bad actually. Hmmmm!
Someone the other day asked how I don't get bored on long runs / rides, and I thought about that a lot today. The closest thing I can figure out is this:
1. Generally my brain is way overactive, and being forced to have nothing to think about except, often, keeping going, is a really nice experience, and I feel much calmer mentally than usual. Which I guess is the opposite of what you might expect.
2. Any thoughts I do have, which tends to be me trying to plan things - work stuff, writing stuff, paying bills stuff - aren't really ever able to go on for longer than a minute, really, before they get interrupted by thoughts about continuing to keep the pedals going around / the feet in front of the other / the arms pulling & legs kicking, checking the timer, drinking water, adjusting in the saddle, etc. Which again I think is an improvement, as temporary thought un-pattern, over my usual circular routine.
I read Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running in about a day and a half while on vacation - I'd wanted to read it for awhile, and was stunned to find whatever he's talking about sounds, to me, just like me regarding distance events. He had this to say about what he thinks about while running:
I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.
On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on the hot days. When I'm sad I think a little about sadness. When I'm happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don't think much of anything worth mentioning.
I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People's minds can't be a complete blank. Human beings' emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.
The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn't exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn't. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.
Which reminds me: the ride today was on the Pacific Coast Highway, and shortly after I turned around, in a few nice minutes where there wasn't strong wind or a hill and I was able to chug along nicely, a seagull flew alongside me at head height - two minutes at 18 miles per hour with a bird gliding with me. That's all I really thought about just then.
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