A bad dream

Fairly average ride this morning, started early thanks to a buzzsaw waking me up at 6:30am (when it’s actually still dark, surprisingly…). The person using that saw better have been cutting a mother and child loose from a burning car, instead of - say - constructing shelves, that’s all I can say.

Anyway, average enough ride, same morning route down the seafront, but this time I pushed out a little further just to ensure I made five miles total (I’ve been a little under recently). I was listening to Keane’s Under the Iron Sea at the time, specifically a track called ‘A Bad Dream’ which is a fairly melodic, soothing sort of tune - the kind of stuff I like, thangyew - but it has a nice soaring orchestral ending.

As I stopped to swig some water I turned back to look at Brighton centre, facing east, and on cue a fantastic sunrise stopped me cold. Various clouds were strewn across the sun, which was bursting through at the edges, leaving a multi-coloured orange sky below it. With Brighton’s seafront skyline below it, the sea to one side, and foreground details like wheeling gulls and of course, other bikers… plus my musical accompaniment… it was a sunrise to remember.

Of course,  I didn’t have the camera with me….

It doesn’t always feel great

After my near-existential pep talk to myself yesterday, naturally I don’t go out on the bike. I did get other stuff done, stuff I’ve been putting off (It’s remarkable how prevaricating over one thing you don’t want to do will get your priorities straight) but I didn’t go out.

I told myself it was because it was too windy, and I wasn’t entirely wrong - hearing the wind shriek around the flat, and then having difficulty remaining upright as we walked down Middle Street towards the front, with the wind threatening to flatten us, made me think I’d made a wise choice.

Regardless, last night I told myself I was going to have no excuse this morning. So when the alarm went off and I slapped it quiet, wondering if I’d really slept for eight hours, I quickly dismissed the naysaying part of me and went out before I persuaded myself otherwise.

The first inkling that this was going to be a tough ride happened when I hit the first street, and felt a gust that was much stronger than normal. By the time I got to the seafront though, that’s when I knew I was in trouble. Whitecaps were surging past each other in an effort to reach the shore, jostling for position as I sat at the lights waiting to cross, then seeing the green man and wondering if I should. I got across, turned right… and rode into a wall of wind.

Meta-exercise

I should be on the bike instead of writing this post. Should. Okay, so I choose not to be on the bike… and I choose to write this, instead.

I went on an internal training course a month or so ago that emphasised one very good point - that everything we do is a personal choice, and that everything we don’t do is a choice, too. The thinking is that you have to take responsibility for your actions, and ‘own’ them. This (in theory) breaks you out of a value-based cycle of “I should do this” and “I suck because I didn’t do that”. Which is how I feel right now.

Two reasons:

1. I haven’t been out on the bike since Tuesday.
2. I just looked at my log of cycling for September, and saw I’d ‘only’ done four hours total.

I can justify all this in my mind. But I choose, instead, to feel shit about it. This is my life, ladies and gents. A long slow process of internal criticism. It gets tiresome.

The one thing I will say - mostly to myself - is that I have to remember that the longer I leave it, the harder it is to get back on the bike. But when I get back on, you have always remembered immediately that it feels great. Always.

Go. Ride the bike.