I'm doing a mostly non triathlon related update.. I did say to start that I'd do this from time to time, after all, if you're not training you're working and living, there is alot in life to experience outside of training.
It's not as I don't have anything to say these days, as matter of fact, just the opposite.
Plenty of things swirling around though that may not allow me to get a real cogent set of ideas down..
In no particular order:
Training:
What I've learned this past fall/winter/spring is that a person can simply train at a high level with no real plan around performance metrics, have fun and see improvements simply through consistency.
Ok, that person is me and your mileage may vary as they say.
My feel for things though is that folks that have been working aerobically for a long period of time can simply plug in hours without too much thought around structure and do just fine.
Nothing revolutionary here, train hard for alot of years *with* structure and then train w/out structure, you'll probably be ok.
Personal relationships:
I think a few folks read the Ryan Bingham quote I had up a couple of days ago and let's be real, the movie presented a character, not a real person but I think the quote is food for thought.
My relationship with training and racing is easy and fun even on the toughest of days, for the most part I know what I can expect, there is consistency.
Personal relationships on the other hand are, well, littered with inconsistency. Here I don't refer to myself specifically, I mean all of us.
My mantra as it applies to relationships outside of work and at work is have little to almost no expectations of those you do not know well; the aggravation, etc. saved is priceless.
Unfortunately having expectations of those we place some amount of trust in or know fairly well tend to be areas associated with the most risk.
How we do mitigate this risk?
You can't force a person to behave consistently so what we need to assess is their track record of consistency (and so on) before entrusting them with, oh say, an important project at work.
Where individuals and personal relationships are concerned: actually easier to metric, though unfortunately littered with many more opportunities for allowances mired by the personal relationship.
Once we have visibility of these short-comings it's up to us to assess how much more important work or some important aspect of our existence we entrust to folks; and we should do this based on Risk-Reward analysis.
That may sound bad but hopefully you trust that I mean it in the most academic way.
What I'm reading now, will read, have just read:
Kerouac- His writing can be moving, think Steinbeck or Fitzgerald but another generation. The characters are so sad and down-trodden that it is a bit depressing.
Dune, Frank Herbert- Yeah, there a gazillion books here. It's one long treatise on the behavior of humans in their manufactured constructs. The basics of the stories are entertaining by themselves if you want to skip the deep-thinking. :)
Ayn Rand- I simply cannot believe I've missed all this and I'm going to the bookstore immediately, will start with The Fountain Head
The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas- How you can not read this and root for the protagonist?
Work-related Projects
The pipeline looks better then last winter/spring but nothing firm on the horizon. I'm looking in town, would do Seattle on contract and I would consider moving under the right circumstances to a select few west coast cities.
That said, this is my home. I have family here and without being melodramatic that's the number one concern for me, how to maintain my connections to those things here while being successful, I've done it in the past so no reason currently to think it cannot be done in the future.
Happy Training !
