Pulling

"Tant va la cruche à l'eau qu'à la fin elle se casse"

-French proverb

Well, I made the decision to make this a total rest day today. No gym workout, even though it was to be upper-body. The goal this week is one-hundred-and-eighty miles on the bike; sixty yesterday and one-hundred-and-twenty miles more riding the bicycle three days in a row to work. The afternoon heat, along with eleven or twelve hours of physical work will challenge every part of me...which is the point.

I am going to totally recover from yesterday's sixty miles, thirty of which cooked me in the unexpected brutality of very early heat coming on. I still feel it now at 2:55 a.m., so, I'm giving the body some down-time. The mind, however, keeps pushing, keeps pulling.

You know, I keep forgetting that my work commutes are done with a ten-pound backpack and that, in-and-of-itself adds to the challenge and in the end makes me even stronger.

I don't know how much of it is mental...and God knows cycling is a mentally-driven athletic challenge...but the three-weeks I didn't ride, even though I was constantly in the gym doing strength training and even some cardio, set me back HUGE.

It's so hard to gauge where I really am right now in terms of my goal to ride and hang onto the back of Naples Velo come autumn, but looking back on last week's rides and now yesterday's pedestrian ride that almost destroyed me has me so deep in a forest of doubt of my athletic pursuits, it borders on ridiculousness.

In my head I'm kind of hearing those "naysayer" assholes...you know...people that "mean well" because they tell me the "truth" and are being "honest", in saying, "Robert, you don't have the 'body-type' of a hardcore cyclist"...or..."you're fifty-eight...be realistic", or "you are putting in only seven-to-nine hours a week on the bike at best, nowhere near where you need to be...", or any other "helpful" assessment of my "pipe-dreams".

A word to the actual naysayers,

"Hey, assholes, I have made 'self-doubt' a lifelong passion...guess what? I don't need your fucking help!!!"

I know it sounds like a bad thing, "self-doubt", and so many people love to pump themselves up with affirmations and enjoy the journey...but it isn't a bad thing and I have discovered the irony of ironies:

"self-doubt" leads to struggling to find the "silver-lining"...the reason to press on...the motivation to fight through the jungle of negativity and actually EARN TRUE "positivity"...not  "pumped-up" meaningless "smiley faces" of cartoon-like happiness and snowflake safe-zones!

I've discovered through fifty-eight years of doing this, that bullshit "feel-goods" actually make one MORE depressed, not less!!! Eventually they discover how empty and vapid all the "smiley-face-get-me-through-this" medicinal concoctions really are.

There are well-meaning friends who think so many of my motivational rants and videos are just that; "pump-up", phony drivel that ignores reality! What they utterly fail to comprehend in their "know-it-all" "help for Robert", is the epic fight I go through internally fighting off the "reality demons" that would have me being some moderate-exercising, "old-fart" preparing myself for a long slow walk to mortality at best...or at worst, just giving up...grabbing a beer, laying on the sofa and succumbing to old age and a body falling apart as the inevitable, "correct" course for all of us. They miss how, I fully re-create a perfect mental picture in my mind of every-single "would-be" athlete who is just on a sorry and sad slow walk toward failure as they pursue pipe-dreams of fantasies, left-over remnants of childhood imaginations. They miss how I actually see myself, as a desperate old soul clinging on to the last vestiges of what could-have-been; long lost abilities that exist only as shadows now, and how foolish it appears to see a man past his athletic prime chasing them as if they're real.

Those images are real, and tangible...they are in the front of my mind as I fight through the intense heat, sweat pouring from my head, drenching my handlebars until no more sweat can be produced and is replaced with spine-numbing pain that makes me want to just fall off the bicycle RIGHT NOW.

So, besides my ten-pound backpack, I also carry tons of baggage. All of that, along with Florida Mid-August heat, humidity and headwinds (no matter which direction I'm headed),  is making me stronger. 

-It is why I can do a fifty-mile pull, pulling an entire group of cyclists at twenty-miles-per-hour, sustained and still manage a twenty-five-mile-per-hour five mile sprint at the end of a hundred-plus mile ride with cracked ribs and road rash. 

-It is why I can pursue a physically challenging job close to sixty-years-old, a choice made so that I can have the time to ride my bicycle and pursue athletics rather than make much more money getting fat and old doing what I was on a path to do, for my entire work career.

-It is why I sit here, truly alone, at 3:30, ranting on Facebook to no one but myself wondering how Beth and I are going to make it until payday yet again, and knowing, somehow, we will.

There isn't one damn thing any "well-meaning" "honest" friend can say that somehow "snaps me out of" the "pipe-dream" I have in staying in a fast ride with cyclists my daughters age and well-off (God bless them) contemporaries my age who have all day to pursue their cycling passions up and down the world's greats cycling venues.

I have lived a life of pipe-dreams and wouldn't trade them for every piece of gold on Earth. I mean that on the souls of my children...and I realize it with every fiber of wisdom in this old man's mind. The adventures I carry within me make me strong, make me resilient and make me laugh at those who take the "smart road", take the proper turn at the intersections of life, live lives they expected to live and then on their deathbeds wonder, "was there something I missed", a though they would never admit to until they meet the true end.

I am arriving at my deathbed having pursued insane ideas and having rejected the "proper turns", KNOWING, not just pretending to know truths that others like to pretend they know.

I live in the jungle every day, insanely, by choice.

So when a "well-meaning" friend who has acquired all the stuff we are "supposed to" acquire, passes on his or her "wisdom", they have no idea how hard I laugh, feeling true pity along with my own brand of ignorant arrogance, just like their own...yet admitting to it all the same.

And still, I climb on my bicycle and push myself to points beyond where I should.

I love this journey more than life itself.

Today I rest.