A Little Inspiration

So, I've been wallowing in self-pity for the past couple of days, reviewing the debacle that's been my nutritional and training life for the last two weeks. I was feeling good after Yankee for a day or two and then things started going downhill. Not only have I not been updating my blog, I haven't been training. I've ridden once since the race at Yankee and have also used every opportunity to shove any and all food in my face. I purposefully skipped my WW meeting last week because I couldn't deal with the repercussions of my behavior.

Last weekend, we took a short trip to Staten Island for the wedding of one of my friends from high school and although we had a great time, there was so much eating and drinking involved I think I might have actually slipped into a food coma.

The more training I skipped and the more I ate, the worse I felt and the more I wanted to skip training and continue to eat. It's happened before. In fact, it's pretty much my M.O. Last year, what started out as a somewhat promising racing season quickly deteriorated as I found more and more excuses not to train.

Needless to say, I was feeling pretty disgusted with myself this morning and was ready to chuck the whole thing and resign myself to a life of sloth and obesity. Motivation was clearly lacking. Then I had some time to kill and I decided to catch up on a few blogs. (I haven't been able to read any blogs since our Internet was down for three days and only came back on last night. Please don't let me start a rant about the worthlessness of Comcast.)

At any rate, I was reading a race report from Cohutta 100 written by endurance racer extraordinaire Danielle, and suddenly I felt inspired. Here was the missing motivation, finally.

Now if you ask me what made Danielle's posts so inspiring, I'm not sure I could pinpoint it. I think part of it is her enthusiasm for the sport and her commitment to keep improving, even after all the success she's had and the races she's won. I also thought about how much encouragement she gives to other racers she meets, even those like me, who are not very good.

This is starting to be a bit sappy and philosophical, but the truth is, this is such a great sport with so many encouraging people. I forget that sometimes. But this morning, I thought about everyone who has been so supportive of this struggle of mine. There's not just Danielle, but another hardcore friend; my teammates, including Jake and Laurie; blog readers and fellow racers, Ali and Di; and of course, my husband, who's spent so much time building my training plan, working on my bikes and teaching me things. There's also my mom, but I could go on and on.

The point is, I've done too much work and enlisted the help and support of far too many people to let this racing season go to hell. So as hard as it's been to keep motivated lately as other things creep into my life, I'm making a commitment to myself and those who have encouraged me to continue to put effort into this.

We leave for Key West on Sunday, but I'm going to take any opportunity I can to ride between now and then. Once I get there, I'll have my usual exercise repertoire of walking all over the island. I'm also going to clean up my eating and try to keep my drinking to a minimum while I'm there. Next stop on the race schedule is 6 Hours of Addison Oaks on May 9, which will be here all too soon.