Missing out

It has been really easy for me to get into a negative frame of mind recently. And it's been easy to add up events and turn them into patterns. And it has been hard to try to tease out the difference between real problems and invented problems, and how to respond in an appropriate manner. This has been true across different areas in my life.

In particular in the area of triathlon training, I feel like I miss out on the longest rides. I felt like this when training for Longhorn. There were three 55+ mile rides in the training, and I missed them all. Missed one for work I couldn't get out of, and the other two were rained out. I survived Longhorn, but I bet those long rides would have been helpful. And it's just not the same on a trainer. Even three hour trainer rides don't push you like riding outside.

So far this year in training for Lonestar, we've been rained out, frozen out, and the one weekend I was out of town on a long ride weekend, perfect weather for a 70 mile ride and everyone is gushing how great it was. So is it appropriate to feel like there's some force that doesn't want me to ride long? That there's something wrong here? Or am I just being a whiner? One T3er told me she did 112 miles on the South Mopac loop. That would be 14 laps, 8 miles each. Which sounds a little excruciating, but it got the job done. And that road is safe pretty much all day, except for the worst of rush hour traffic. So really, I could do that, except I already have a 1pm appointment on Tuesday I can't miss. So I will have to ride in rush hour if to get a 5 hour ride in. Maybe two shorter rides on Tuesday?

So then I just say, fine, there's no sense in forcing it, just ride long this coming Saturday. No problem. Except they're already predicting a big rainy front coming in for the weekend. Really.