What do you know about the real you?
Before careening head long into 2025, we needed a break, early, before anything weird happened. So Misti and I headed for Patagonia, AZ , after a truly superb holiday season of family, skiing and much festive fun.
We didn’t make it to Patagonia, barely made it to Moab the first day, got super side tracked as we headed south and, as I write this, are sitting in Tuba City, AZ contemplating whether we spend another day on the Hopi reservation, trying to make some deeper connections with the people there after chatting with a Navajo sheepherding grocery store manager two days ago who sent us on a fine adventure into a corkscrew canyon north of Monument Valley or head back into Mormon country and close the circle towards home.
What we have continued to learn about ourselves, my darling bride, her trusty sidekick and me, is that we love to start each trip with a plan (self-motivation!), believe we are going to make it (self-denial), are surprised when one of us sucks the other two totally off course (self-sabotage?) and it turns out to be way better than the original plan (self-abnegation).
The self-awareness that each one of us possess creates a selfless and selfish element to every trip we embark upon. None of us are brave enough to do alone what we do together. We each see our own version of the world walking down the exact same path, looking out upon myriad features of the terrain. I make us go, Misti makes us stop. Louies bounds so far ahead that we often lose sight of him until he appears from the direction we should have been heading all along.
Each of our selves is confident in its role within our little group and the balance is a natural extension of the parts that each of us is missing.
This current wander got me thinking about how to improve a self and a cyclist. How do we improve our self-control and self-confidence at the same time? Is self-discipline better than promoting self-effacing patterns? If you possess one aspect, should you work on balancing it out with the opposite or its complement? Self-gratification doesn’t seem to want to go with self-flagellation so maybe it pairs better with self-reflection? Find out why you like to do it and maybe you will be fulfilled by doing it more?
Cyclists- if you are a climber, should you build more muscle to go faster on the flats? Is an all-round cyclist more likely to have a longer span of injury free riding than one who specializes in one discipline? Is it better to identify your strengths and work those into your race routine, spending more time on course selection and less on warm destinations?
In the middle of this buzzsaw of questions rattling through my brain, Misti waved frantically, spit her tea out (which I know by now means stop the truck, there’s a photo we have to take) and just like that, my brain quieted down just enough to let some of these moments come to rest in each of our cups.
This year is going to test all of us. What we see as real now, may not be so before we turn the calendar page. Trust and faith are surely to be challenged, if not derailed. There will only be one thing that you can really count on, your self. I believe this is the third time I’ve said it here so, if you haven’t already, find that mirror and take a big long look, side eye if you want to sneak up on it a little bit. That person looking back at you is going to be with you for the rest of your days. Give that self a wink and smile, ask it the hard questions, be ok with it not knowing all the answers to the questions you pose. Right now, you might not need the answers, but you sure do need to be asking the questions.
Let’s go for a ride sometime this year and see if we can’t find some of them.
Cheers
