Christmas Consequences

I am feeling the consequences of Christmas in a number of ways.  As a musician and parent of several musicians, this is the busiest time of year for me and my family, with multiple concerts and gigs keeping us busy almost every night in December. 

When I get busy, I get lazy.  When I am actually at home, I don't want to do anything.  When I don't do anything, I get bored.  When I get bored, I eat.

To punish myself for all of this Christmas sloth, I finally got back on the bike this weekend.  To begin the weekend, I loaded up the car with the bike and trainer and headed to Cathedral to participate in the indoor group trainer ride.  I never thought that I would do this, as it seemed silly to me to get up early on a Saturday, load all of my stuff, and drive to do a workout I could just as easily do at home in my own time.

However, I'm glad I went.  It is definitely more fun to ride the trainer when there are other people to talk to, and different videos to watch, and the higher ceiling of the gym keeps the temperature cooler than it is in my basement when I ride the trainer there.  I can usually only tolerate the trainer for 45-50 minutes at home, but was able to do a good 100 minutes here without getting bored.

After seeing David R. at the training session, I asked him to go out for a ride Sunday afternoon.  Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, I'm pretty sure this was my sub-conscience brain punishing me again for all of the good food I've eaten in the last two weeks (see Chicago post).  Having ridden with David numerous times, I knew that he would want to go farther and faster than I was capable of, and that I would punish myself trying to keep up with him.

That turned out to be the case.  We ended up riding out almost to Cortland before I had to turn around so I could get home in time to greet some family who were visiting.  David is incapable of riding as slowly as I was going, so I had the rewarding experience of watching him pull away, and then coast until I caught up, and then he'd pull away, realize he'd dropped me, coast, etc....

It is amazing how difficult a 40 mile bike ride can be when you haven't really ridden in six weeks.  It seemed so easy back then.  At least this weekend was a good kick in the butt to get going again.