The Drop

By 4.15 Skrillex is raging throughout my secluded home in Pittsfield, VT.

The juxtaposition of pastoral landscapes cast in mountains against  the dubstep heavy thumpings from a cabin is never lost on me but I find it rather uninteresting.  (I think that's why I fail to blog much.) 

I bought www.confusedhipster.com.  I think it might describe this post emo-boy musician syndrome of being an urban dropout.  I never managed well as a cool kid.

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I'm shy and passive.  Confrontation with people scares the crap out of me.  No man, I'm not going to 'throw down' with you. 

But a mountain?  An event designed to break me?  I've been throwing myself into brutality week in and week out for 6 years now.  I'm confrontational every fucking day - it's just on my own time where I can't bother anyone else.

And every time I say, "Damn, I must look fucking insane to the world" I think instead:  "I have arrived.  This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing at exactly this time."

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I don't know why the hell you are reading this.  In the back of my mind I write assuming that obligatory readings are probably the norm so I want to make the experience as painless as possible, and therefore brief.

There is a story I think I've felt that I've needed to be telling and have, just not been ready. Start exhaling.  I think my training really suffered because of this reality. What is training but an expression of our internal honesty?

I don't know what that narrative is but I'm grateful I realize it doesn't have to fit neatly into a category or pre-fab module.  Thank you for having it unfold by reading my posts.  Please share them if you'd like.  I'd like that.

And somehow we all will get from introverted musician to alter ego rock n'roll singer to Barn Beast of Vermont to a man just laughing at it all and hoping for a modicum of wisdom.

Governing Principles: Quality Time

It is interesting for me to think that 'mileage' was once the title of this blog in light of the circumstances that I am planning on banishing that concept from my mind space.

I'm guilty of mileage obsession: an unhealthy fascination with the distance I move my body in the semi-forward direction.

To be clear:  my goal in 2012 is to race better, NOT log  extreme miles.

To be clear:  I'll probably log extreme miles, but this is only a consequence of a paradigm shift from distance to time.  Mileage happens as a product of concentrated will.

Quality time:  this is my sole concern.

The most successful hours logged in a week can be spent on bike performance, sometimes on lactate threshold work, and sometimes on long slow, miles.  Notice, only two out of the three deal with logging actual miles.

So the first step in banishing this mis-step in my self evaluation is to fess up and acknowledge that I am a mileage junky.

I develop a sense of self worth from bragging about high numbers of miles.

There I said it.  And it sounds f@cking even more crazy out loud.  Try it.  Are you a mileage junky?

Did you forget what training is about in your perspective, too?

It's about spending quality time with your body and self as you ready yourself for a specific event.  Or not even for an event.  It's about the workout, start to finish -- one workout at a time. 

Miles are a subset...the event the super set of your 'being' while training.  Period.

Of course I will go on 18 or 42 mile runs, but I will not log every single mile on it as if that guaranteed my success.

Concentrated Efforts of Will. CEW.  That is the unit I'll be measuring 2012.

CEW = are periods of time where my body and mind are fully focused on co-development.