Here Comes Gravity

Today, I start my first real job in over six months.

I’ve been enjoy­ing the rid­ing a bike full time, blog­ging, spend­ing ALL of my sav­ings and liv­ing like a bum for so long, I’ve for­got­ten what it’s like to ‘touch base’, ‘win, win’ and speak like a sales knob.

My mini/temporary retire­ment over the past few months has been a breath of fresh air and my insan­ity has cer­tainly been sand­bagged at least for another couple of years.

Sadly, there comes a day when bills, food and cloth­ing need to be paid for with some­thing other than sexual favours and begging.

The Pre­cious Resource — Time

Dur­ing my stint with an abund­ance of time, I quickly dis­covered that escap­ing the daily grind tem­por­ary or oth­er­wise doesn’t equate to more time on the bike.

I struggled to get out of bed for the early rides — admit­tedly mostly through winter but over­all I pro­cras­tin­ated more fre­quently in gen­eral. The thing is, if there’s no impend­ing eight hour grind bear­ing down, the tend­ency to stay in bed and ride later becomes more prevalent.

This men­tal­ity soon became a habit and one that I couldn’t shake. I found myself rid­ing late after­noon most days because I’d skipped the morn­ing bunch ride. I found I was cram­ming rides in — mainly through guilt so I didn’t skip a day.

That cycle is hard to break.

Now that I’m work­ing again, rid­ing with the 6am bunch is a must. If I miss it, I’m one day closer to get­ting dropped in my next race. Apart from the money — glor­i­ous money, I per­son­ally man­age my time more effect­ively when work­ing a nor­mal day job.

Time man­age­ment becomes a massive factor from here on in. But that’s a good thing. Any­one who has worked from home will know exactly what I’m talk­ing about.

More often than not, self employed peeps work­ing home busi­nesses get nowhere near the same pro­ductiv­ity they once had in the office. Dis­trac­tions are in abund­ance with chil­dren, TV, Inter­net, garden­ing– all bid­ding for a piece of the action.

In 2007, I raced the Buss­leton Iron­man, my first and only year of triath­lon. I worked a full time job and still found time to fit 180km bike rides and 30km runs in.

It was the fit­test I’d ever been — I had way less time than I do now.

Con­clu­sion

If you think retir­ing, not work­ing or doing noth­ing but rid­ing your bike is all beer and skittles — think again. You’re in lala land if you think you’re sud­denly gonna get massive kilo­met­ers in on the bike.

Work or other life com­mit­ments, force you to man­age your time more effectively.

You’ll be a bet­ter bike rider because of this reason alone.

I would recom­mend to any­one think­ing about doing noth­ing to think again. Work­ing, study­ing, writ­ing a blog, cre­at­ing art among mil­lions of other activ­it­ies are all going to keep you bal­anced and well roun­ded. They’ll keep you on track men­tally and spir­itu­ally whilst the cyc­ling will keep you phys­ic­ally in tune.

What are your exper­i­ences with being a full time cyclist?

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