In My Head

Do I need a plan? I don't mean a vague idea, or even a carefully considered outline. I mean a blow-by-blow scheme. You know, workouts literally written in on the calendar every day for the final four-plus months to Coeur d'Alene. I'm thinking this might be a good idea—but not because I fear I need it in order to keep me on track. It's really more about giving my head a break. See, the way it is now, on Sunday night I sketch out what I'm going to do during a week in my head. Nothing gets written down. Then each day, I refer back to that, uh, plan, which of course is now, metaphorically speaking, a scrap of paper that's been left in a pocket and gone through the washer and the dryer. I mean, come on, we're talking about in my head. There is so much ridiculous stuff going on up there, there's no way a workout plan for the week is going to survive more than 10 minutes. There's the typical life stuff that comes with having a 9-year-old son 50 percent of the time, by myself. There's work, and I keep pretty much all of my plans and notes for work in my head, which is lunacy, but there you go. There's all those baseball statistics from the '70s. (Weirdly, there are far fewer from the '80s, barely any from the '90s, and none at all from this new century.)

Love life? Ha, that's entirely in my head. So you get the idea. It's too busy upstairs. Yet every day, I go to bed having to figure out what I'm going to do tomorrow. And every morning I wake up rethinking what I came up with the night before. It's so easy to rethink it, because the "plan" never had any solidity.

And yet I love triathlon, now more than ever, and every day I want to and need to keep making progress, moving forward, working hard. So, in my planless state, I worry and wonder if I'm doing the right things and enough of them or too much. I fear missing a workout, and yet I juggle workouts from today to tomorrow and tomorrow to today and sometime I drop one and it rolls under the couch and I don't see it for months. Oh, I can survive like this, I think—it's worked for work—but I'm starting to believe I might thrive if I had a solid plan. Yeah. Maybe, then, I could just follow the plan and in my head, there could be rest.

[Today: I was going to take the day off, but ended up riding 20 miles on the trainer, good solid miles, too. Then we went over to my sister's and ate way too much guacamole and fajitas while watching a lot of commercials and a very short Bruce Springsteen concert.]