Snow in Seattle – Training Update – Major Revelation
It’s snowing like crazy again here.
Here’s what that looked like over the Christmas holiday.
December snowfall at the McHichens home
The snow is making it very difficult to keep up our demanding cycling training schedule. [Editor's note: Mr. McLaren is given to both exaggeration and tongue-in-cheek remarks about his "demanding training schedule". More on that in a moment.] It’s not easy riding a road bike with smooth tires and wheels that are, like, 1/4″ wide on icy city streets. Fortunately, April got us an indoor stationary bike trainer so that I can put my (very nice, on loan from friend Steve U. – thanks, Steve!) bike on it and pedal like crazy in the living room for hours on end. I was riding the bike in the living room before without the stationary trainer and it was really a pain in the rear because I was having to get off and turn it around before I could even make one full rotation of the pedals. Going long distances was very time-consuming and it scared our cats. So things are much better now on the cycling training front.
In other news, I had a major revelation this week which I am pleased to share with you. It is the following: I am no longer 25 years old.
In fact, many people who know me were already aware of this, but somehow they failed to let me know about it. Sure, there were the birthday parties and cards and such, but who takes those seriously. That’s just so friends and parents can try to get you to go along with their own (very real) reality that’s telling them they are, indeed, getting older by the minute.
I, on the other hand, have – mentally, anyway – kept my twenty-five-year-old ability to punish my body with abandon and expect it to leap out of bed the next day ready for more. “Punish away!” my mind still says. And my body says, “Sure, go right ahead, goofball! Just don’t expect to be leaping out of bed – at all, ever again.” Hence [major revelation] it’s different than it used to be.
So I have revised my goals a bit for this fundraising effort.
The first goal is to raise the amount of money April and I have committed to raise. You all have helped and are helping us there. We can’t thank you enough! Believe me, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is doing great things with this money.
The second goal is to COMPLETE the New Balance Half Ironman Race in June ’09. I realized this week that it would be good to actually finish the race, rather than to train so hard that I would be incapacitated well before race time, or, even worse, that I would get injured during the race and have to stop because I had run myself ragged during training and never really gotten in the kind of shape it takes to finish a major endurance event.
Being a competitor can wait. First I want to be a “completer”, as April has mentioned before in this blog.
As I told April, I am going to be the best darn not-competing-too-hard guy ever! You will see. No one will be able to touch my not-competing-too-hard efforts. I will be crushing the competition when it comes to not competing too hard! Crushing! [See what I mean?]
