Untapped Wisdom
First a brief training update. Things are continuing to progress well. Last night was a 2 hour and change run in the rain. My longest run in about 7 months! It was awesome, it felt good, I enjoyed the rain, and I even had the opportunity for a brief swim when I came upon a bridge that was out due to construction and back tracking to detour wasn’t a viable option. I figured what the heck I’m already wet because of the rain – splash!
On Sunday I did the Bong 30k TT, I was very pleased with my effort, although I did receive a sound beating from true TT monsters masters – but things are continuing to progress well on the bike.
The only other thing worth mentioning is my attempt to do the Doc Ride on Saturday resulted in quite a story. I departed my house at 6am, rode to Pewaukee and then onto Dousman. The Doc Ride was going well, until about 20 miles into it, we had to ride over a rode which was under construction. Long story short – a rock damaged the side wall of my front tire and I flatted. I changed it, and inflated my spare and the sidewall did the spare in too. If I had used a 12g CO2 and settled for limp home tire pressure it might have made it. So I ended up hitchhiking back into Dousman and buying a new tube and tire prior to riding back home.
This weekend I am doing participating in the High Cliff Half Ironman on a relay as the biker. I decided to do a relay instead of the full race for two reasons: Doing the bike leg supports my current priority of biking hard to increase my fitness and FTP. And it reduces the pressure for me to rush the rebuild of my run fitness.
Onto the meaningful content for today, what is untapped wisdom. Well it’s a lot of things really. You can look at it from the perspective of “If I could take my current frame of mind 10 years into the past when I was swimming in college…” or “If only I had spent more time noticing the birds in the sky back then…”. I find that I have to be careful when thinking in those terms – it’s easy to fall in the trap of wishing to relive the past with the knowledge you have today.
But that’s not what untapped wisdom is about. It’s easy to say – man if I could go back and apply my appreciation for hard work, my motivation, and the understanding of training I have now, and swim in college again…, but that does nothing but hold you in the past and ultimately hold you back from moving foward onto your potentional. Untapped Wisdom is more about understanding that sometimes things are the way they are for reasons you don’t yet grasp, accepting that fact, and realizing that we can wait for time to bring us clarity – or we can take a look at the signs on the road and see if we can make sense of it now.
Albert Einstein says it best “Significant problems you face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
I’ve mentioned it a few times on my blog, but for me 2009 exemplifies this perfect. Poor race performances, a major bike crash, a major injury – in the moment I found myself doing nothing more then driving myself forward. I had two Ironmans to finish, I had Hawaii to qualify for, my bike power numbers were through the roof, I’m running my long runs like a rock star…all while I ignored little signs. Waking up for swims was hard, getting pumped up for long runs was difficult, I couldn’t run without 4 ibuprofens per hour, I struggled to hit 6:20 mpm on tempo runs, my weight was up. I even went so far to suggest taking a short cut on a Long Ride once.
Signs are there for a reason. Sometimes they are there to tell us we need to stop or take a detour. Other times they are there to tell “Bridge Out…Adventure ahead.” Find the wisdom to read the signs and get the message before you’ve passed them by.