165 Days (Motivation can be Hard)

Earlier this year I promised that I would write at least one blog entry per week, but sometimes life gets too busy even for this.  Every few days I would sit at my computer and think to myself, “I need to write today,” and yet each day some other task took priority over this one.  I had three exams and a paper the first week in December, and last week was the beginning of finals week (which, as most people are aware, can be fairly stressful.)  While final exams at the University of Texas don’t officially end until today, I was fortunate enough to have my last exam this past Saturday at 9AM.

Texas 4000 knows how busy students get, and understand the priority that our education takes in our lives.  To encourage us to spend more time studying and to not worry so much about our organizational commitments, they decided that our last required official team training ride would be on December 1, and our last meeting on the 6^th.  I was thinking about this fact yesterday, and I realized that I had not been on a training ride since that official one two weeks ago.  That’s two weeks that my bicycle has sat in my living room gathering dust, two weeks for my muscles to degenerate from lack of use, and two weeks to feel lost without a cause.  I brought my bicycle to Houston so that I could train on it here, but it’s incredibly difficult to find motivation to go on a 20 mile solo ride around the city.  I thrive on companionship and have been unable to wake up at a reasonable hour knowing that my ride will be alone.  It’s something that I need to work on, I know, but I don’t think that humans were designed to go on long bicycle rides alone!