After returning from my trip to Norway, I dove (more like belly-flopped, really) right into a full-time summer job at a bike shop in Barrie. I like cycling as a sport and activity, so being involved in a bike-centric atmosphere and learning about bikes has been awesome – albeit a slow, deliberate process (there’s a lot going on).

Another thing I’ve learned and am adapting to is the perpetual exhaustion associated with working 8-9hour days, five or six days a week. Welcome to the real working world. Trying to top that off with 2 or 3 hours of training a day doesn’t leave much extra time outside of when I’m eating or sleeping… but its probably good for me. Spending most of my day occupied with work means I don’t have the time (or energy) to dwell or worry about insignificant or far off things that used to cause me undue and unnecessary stress during my full-time athlete days.

A healthy portion of the thinking I have done lately has been about whether I should continue blogging and what I would blog about. It’s strange – over the past three years, I did more or less the exact same things every day, hung out with the same people, focussed on the same things, had the same goals, etc… and I almost always had things I could blog about. And now – I’ve made a big shift in my lifestyle, my social environment is different, and have different expectations for myself as a skier… and I don’t really have much to say or share. I think it’s because my life is becoming more my own life rather than just a life of skiing.

I haven’t taken many pictures, so here’s a random one from the May long weekend.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein

It’s difficult to succinctly and accurately explain how and why I ended up on the fritz with my commitment to skiing… but coming off last season I think it was pretty clear that I needed change in order to prevent a complete breakdown and burnout. Time for change.

The first step to doing making changes was letting go of my external commitments to skiing – namely, being on the National Development Centre program. The second step was finding something else that had little or nothing to do with skiing to be my new primary commitment – working a normal 9-5 job like your average university student. The third step has been choosing how (and how much) to integrate skiing into my life.

Right now, I’m training mostly on my own, joining Team Hardwood to help coach and participate in practices a couple times a week, and receiving guidance from Ron Howden on my own program. So far, it’s been a healthy balance and low-stress situation.

Start of a rainy 15k MEC trail race

Even though I’m on track with training, things are still in a very early adaptation stage. For now, my plans for 2016/17 only extend as far as my training through to the next given Sunday. For now, my only goal for 2016/17 is to be physically and mentally ready to start focussed training on September 1st. In the past, I think I’ve wasted too much mental energy being focussed on getting ready for my winter racing goals early in the year. So this time, the summer is about preparing myself physically and mentally so I can be ready to deliberately train through the fall for the winter.

Thanks for reading. I realize this post was awkwardly structured and rather ambiguous, but sometimes life is awkward and the path ahead unclear. Let’s leave it at that, yah?

awkward