New Groove

Every time I think about starting up this blog again with more regular posting, I feel I have to start by talking about what’s happened in my life since I last dropped off.  Generally, it feels overwhelming to hash out months, or maybe years, of my life so I inevitably end up not writing at all. After two years of no posts, I finally wrote a much larger summary of one area of my life, including aspects going back to childhood, that lead to a big life change. It felt appropriate to revisit the past, in order to close that door and embrace stepping into the unknown. Today’s post will not be some life tale, but rather getting back to the roots of this blog, talking about the ins and outs of my current life. 

After leaving GE in January, it took me a few weeks to find my footing in my new “work week”. The thing about owning your own business is you don’t work conventional hours. Sometimes I’m answering emails and reviewing my athletes’ workouts at 5am on Sunday when my dog won’t let me sleep in. However, I still look at Monday-Friday as the work week where I try to accomplish as much as possible, from both a business and household perspective.

I have a spreadsheet (if you know an engineer, you know we love spreadsheets for everything) with a tab that includes my to-do list. I have a list of tasks I do regularly each week, varying based on which days I go grocery shopping, run errands, what training is planned, when I do coaching social media prep, what laundry needs to be done, when I write athletes schedules. It also includes the daily tasks like walking the dog, work tasks and cooking dinner. Every Monday I copy that standard to-do list for the week then add additional tasks like appointments, continued education courses, house projects, yard work, coaching clinics. Most days, I don’t complete the list and I’m either deleting less important tasks (who cares if there’s some dog fur tumbleweeds on the floor?) or moving important tasks to the next day, then the next day. While there is a sense of satisfaction of a paper to-do list where you can physically cross off a completed item, I like the ability to easily change and rearrange tasks and watch the list get shorter as I delete completed tasks. 

At this point, I’d say I’ve finally settled in nicely to my new life. I still have lots of work to do to grow my business and I’m constantly throwing around ideas and brainstorming options. I’m going through the same process for updating my bonus room to become a home gym. It’s an awkward shaped room above the garage with mostly angled ceiling. It’s been utilized as half gym and half living room since we installed hardwood many years ago. The only time we used the living room section was when we were renovating our main family room and needed a place to veg out. Since then, the sofa hasn’t been used and the TV only on a rare occasion of a boring recovery spin or when I was training for Ironman New Zealand. That was when I was doing 4+ hour trainer rides during winter, rewatching the Lord of the Rings movies to prepare myself to see Hobbiton. 

Normally when I begin a house project, I have majority of the design figured out. This was the first time I started a project with no final image in my mind. Not even a rough image. I just started taking stuff out of the room and trying to sell it and spackling holes on the walls. After asking for ideas from several people, we are starting to implement one idea. We are dropping down a wall on part of an angled section to create a flat area for mirrors. Although that doesn’t help me in terms of overall image and color scheme decisions. Hopefully I’ll have a sparkle of creativity by the time we get to that stage of this relatively quick project. 

I’m currently back into the swing of normal swim, bike, run, lift training. I had to take some time off for reasons unrelated to the sport and then I got covid which prolonged my time off and made for a slower come back. Volume of training is getting back to a good level but with almost no intensity. I know my body loves lots of aerobic training so I can be patient focusing on that for the time being. Although I’m looking at some April sprint races and thinking how ugly that will turn out. Any sprint I sign up for will be for fun and not any attempt at actually racing. My primary focus for training is for Chattanooga 70.3 in May. Given my time completely off from training and a reduced focus on riding the last two year, it was earlier than I’d ideally like to do a 70.3. However, it worked best with my schedule and an ideal location now that I have family living there. So, like the sprint races, I most likely won’t be going in with a true racing mindset. And for once, I feel ok with that situation which shows how much I’ve grown as an athlete. I can preach certain mindsets to my athletes all day long but it’s different to reach a new level of athletic maturity on my own. We are all on our own journeys after all.

Hopefully I’ll continue to share more of my journey and that the four of you that read this, will continue to follow along.