Exorcising

For reasons that may have once been in my control but are no longer, I have faced a trying and tribulating and demotivating week. What seemed like a simple, shortened four-day work week suddenly sprouted heads (one for opportunity, one for failure, one for promotion, one for the status-quo, one for potential and another for heightening the bar without my consent). The modern warrior that I'm not, I picked up the sword anyway. What else are we to do in the face of a Medusa than to brandish wit, wisdom and courage and face it head on? (Or in the Medusa-nal case, non-eye line on).

And I lost. Twice, if not three times in my mind. You know the feeling when you are falling, and you think it is going to stop, but then you continue and your stomach drops a little more. I went through the mental version of that nausea.

So in the face of defeat I fall back on the one thing that I can control, that I am successful at: fitness. This week I tallied 31.4 running miles and 57.8 cycling miles. That total was bolstered by an Extreme Makeover: Exercise Edition of 6m-run and 20m-bike Saturday and a 10m-run and 18m-bike Sunday.

Both yesterday and today I took a new bike route that ran me along the LA River (read: concrete convex in the Valley filled with gray water, dead plants and probably some bodies...or body parts)





But the nice part about the path was its solitude. I could bike without traffic lights, cars or distractions. Just a nice straight shot southeast. At the bend, I turn onto Los Feliz Bld. and head back home along a slightly more populated Griffith Park route.

Anyway, as I was biking, I got to focusing on my exercise habits. Turns out -and this isn't an earth-shaking realization, mind you- that I use exercise as a means of exorcising stress. A lot of people do, so I won't stamp any sort of uniqueness on that. But what was interesting to me was 1) the introduction of Max the bike to my routine, and 2) the increased amount of time I have spent exercising the past two weeks. I've really started paying attention to chasing the high. I've added in extra runs before practices (both Saturday and Sunday). I squeeze in time before I go to work - to which I now bike as often as possible.

There is a level of sanity bought by these routines, yet, when the sanity is found in the exercise and not in the everyday, what is going haywire? I suppose it's not much to worry about. I love to workout, and it fits into my life well. I can go a day without it (I did on Friday!) and I have no trouble getting back on track. But until the rest of my world gets sorted out (if that ever happens, and I don't believe it will because things that reach an equilibrium are boring, no fun, un-complex), fitness becomes not only a means of passing the time, but it becomes a source of achievement with more importance that I have contributed to it in the past.

Wow, morose and melancholy, I know. My apologies, I just haven't gotten the chance to wax philosophic (or do anything of an intellectual nature, in a while). Good thing it's almost 7am and time to bike to work