Work? Or Play!

That's me at the top of Marshall Mountain, or at least as high as the road goes. It's a local ski resort just a few miles out of town. The climb itself is a decent one - 665 feet in 2.5 miles for a max elevation of just over 3900 feet. We're still working on exploring more routes to ride around here. Today I climbed Marshall and then went east out Hwy 200 for almost 15 miles, but the road turned a little choppy so I decided I'd had enough. I only went for 2 hrs and 30 miles instead of the planned 3 hrs. But considering I also ran for almost an hour and swam (poorly) for another 3o minutes, it wasn't a half-bad training day. Come to think of it, the last 3 days add up to the 3rd largest training week of my year so far! (Not sure if that says more about the quality of this week or the awfulness of my training in the previous 25 weeks...) Also, it was a beautiful day, with sunny skies and temperatures in the 80s. Genuinely HOT! Too bad the air is so dry that I don't even feel like I'm sweating. The downside is that I'm actually going through water faster than usual due to the dryness, so I'm having to be extra conscientious about hydrating.

Went to the Good Food Store again today. Awesome place. It's somewhat like a Whole Foods, only nicer, more down to earth, less self-righteous, and (slightly) cheaper. Really it's just chock-full of good, fresh food, lots of organic, lots of local-grown. I picked up zucchini, yellow squash, vidalia onion, crimini mushrooms, tomatoes, and ground pork to go with my leftover ground beef and a random box of Zatarain's New Orleans Rice Mix that I packed with me from DC (don't ask why). I diced it all up, threw it in a pot, and voila! Don't really know what to call it, but it's good. Did I mention that I'm eating the same amount as a family of four?

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"The most valuable thing of all is will, a deeply-rooted will; to will to be somebody, to achieve something; to be even now in desire that somebody, recognizable by his ideal."

-A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

I bought a few motivational posters to decorate the bedroom walls today. Lance Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, and Steve Prefontaine. I was greatly amused by the pricing - three posters for $8... plus $17 S&H. Oh well. Still cheaper than buying them full price.

But this brings me to my other endeavor for the summer: reading. Looking back on things, I am realizing that, to misquote Samuel Clemens, I have in some ways allowed my schooling to get in the way of my education. I am starting with Sertillanges' 1920 tome (first published in French, translated to English thank goodness) The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. It is a primmer and preparatory book for cognizant, intellectual reading, to help me process, understand, and digest the LONG list of written works which I have long desired to read but have not yet made the time for. I will follow this book up with another of a similar bent, this one with the rather condescending title of How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. From there, I will descend on the box of books I brought with me. I doubt I will get to start even half of them this summer, but they're all there waiting for me. I want to re-read authors that we touched on in my political philosophy classes but who I read from the perspective of academic expediency rather than patient, critical understanding. I want to delve deeper into classical ethics, renowned Christian writers such as Aquinas, Augustine, and Lewis. I want to learn about sport psychology, leadership, rhetoric and speech development (collected speeches of Winston Churchill, anyone?), and so much more. Sure, it's a lifetime endeavor, but now seems like a good time to start.

The idea of will has been bouncing around my head frequently of late. Battling with will, finding the willpower to start, to finish. It is certainly a struggle. I am having so much fun out here, yet at the same time, it takes a great deal of willpower to get up and do the very things that I am enjoying. It took a while for me to crawl out of bed this morning and actually pull on the running shoes, grab Dixie, and make it outside. The first mile of the run was just miserable. But ten or fifteen minutes later, I find myself alone, running through a small valley, grassy hills on all sides with wildflowers popping up here and there. The highway is just one hill over, but from down there I couldn't hear a thing. Magnificent. Yet I wonder, knowing that trail was out there, knowing that the run would turn out well, why I had such a hard time getting out the door. Finding the will to start. Or this afternoon, I did not feel good about my swimming, so I stopped the workout short. I wasn't hurt, I didn't feel sick - I just didn't want to swim any more. There are reasons (or are they excuses?). I'm out of shape; I haven't swum much lately so I've lost my touch for the water; I'm still adjusting to the altitude; the pool is 50 meters long rather than the usual 25 yards, so all of my times are demoralizingly slow; the list goes on and on. Ultimately, I did not have the willpower to finish the workout this afternoon. Perhaps that was for the best and was the right decision to make this early in the game. I'm trying not to be critical of myself here, just observant. Given the training load I am undertaking this summer, my mental health is just as important as my physical health. Perhaps more so. (Thus the sports psychology books.)

On the other side of the coin, I've had equal amounts of trouble sitting down and actually starting all this reading with focus. Interesting how I am having difficulty both moving and remaining still! I'll enjoy watching how the tension between the two plays out over the next few months. Newton's first law, I guess. Perhaps this is not unlike the concepts of momentum and inertia. Each term describes the resistance of an object to a change in velocity, yet we colloquially understand momentum to imply motion and inertia to imply lack of motion. The principles nevertheless remain the same, regardless of the actual state of motion. The same seems to apply to my recent experience as well. Stopped, it is difficult to begin moving. Once active, it is difficult to stop moving.

As some guy with a skull once put it, "There's the rub..."