I’m a jock. I have been most of my life, just didn’t realize it until I was about 40. For many years I raced bicycles. I was never really good but I did the best I could. In order to do my best at every race, I trained. I trained like bicycle racing was my job. I learned lots. One thing that I try to pass on to everyone I know that starts an athletic activity (and the point of the title) is that you cannot train at infinitum. There will be breaks in the continuum and they will happen for any 1 of 10,000 reasons. For the most part these breaks are good, they give both your mind and your body a rest. The thing about a break is: it is very, very, VERY hard to get back into the routine. Be it swimming, running, or riding a bicycle, for weight loss, conditioning or training for competition. Once you have broken the string it is almost impossible to find the new end and start to reel it off the ball.
At one point you will have rested enough and you will want to resume your workouts. You will have good intentions but there will be a myriad of reasons why you cannot start again. Each day you have to start in the morning and say to yourself ‘I’m going for a run today’. Ten, twenty times a day you have to repeat that mantra. As the day progresses you add to the phrase, things like ‘I’m going to run today right after work and I will run to the park, through the park and along the river then home. That should be about 5 km.’ If you do not run that day after work you have to get up the next morning and go through the same routine. Sooner or later you will run again. If you do this day after day your routine will return.
This is what has happened to our blogging. We were blogging quite regularly and then we started to renovate the house. Those of you who have been involved with such activity will understand that renovation is all consuming. We cut our athletic activity in half. We cut down on dining out almost completely. Entertainment became removing another section of old flooring. Blogging hit the skids. We did manage a few entries but they were sparse and written quickly.
I’m at the point where I want to resume entering a semi regular entry into the blog. So, every day I’m saying to myself ‘I have to come up with a captivating concept, and write a blog post.’ As I said above it does not happen instantly but I’m working at it. Tomorrow I try again. Stay tuned.