Some Easy and Some Hard

Training this week is going well. I took my new wetsuit out for its first test in open water the other day and was thrilled. I was buoyant and glided along the water with an ease I’ve only rarely experienced as a swimmer. That, combined with weather that was simply exquisite for swimming, left me feeling like the 1.2 miles I did across a nearby lake was effortless. I seriously considered doing another half a mile, but decided to measure out a run around that lake so I can start practicing dual discipline workouts. I especially need to be pushing the run training. It’s my weakest discipline, and the one that is destined to cause me problems in the Olympic distance event I’m doing in just two weeks.

One of the things about training for distance events is that you spend rather a lot of time thinking about things that are not related to training (it’s part of what allows us to do things for far longer than we might otherwise). I’ve been thinking a lot about Wayfarer Community School stuff, and what I need to do to move things along with this project. I’m wrestling a bit with this, and I’ve decided I should take some time to write about the conflicts I’m having. I won’t get it all into this one post--I need to go to bed sometime--but if you’ll bear with me, I hope to connect all the disparate pieces into a cohesive thought over the next couple of days.

Laurie B asked where the project was in a comment a couple of posts ago. The answer is “not much farther than in the spring”, and I’m annoyed on several levels because I’m not happy with that answer. It’s not for reasons that are insurmountable or unavoidable that the project isn’t moving very fast. A lot of it simply has to do with me, and that’s a lot of why I’m annoyed. If it were something outside my control, I could roll with it (I probably wouldn’t, but that’s neither here nor there). That I am ultimately responsible for where we are means I have to get up off my ass and fix stuff, and that’s not as simple as I would like it to be.

I’m struggling at the moment with two separate issues in my way of doing things--not just WCS things, but all things. The first is that I have a tendency to focus on minutiae because it often seems like it’s the more immediate problem, when really I should be looking at the big ideas, which are my specialty and what other people expect me to be doing. The second is that, in a sometimes instinctive desire to keep stimulated, I often allow myself to take on projects that distract from more than they contribute to the grand plan. I’ll explain more about these over the next couple of days, but they really sit right at the heart of a lot in the deep end of my pool right now and I need to work through them.

I should probably have this conversation on the WCS blog. I am ashamed at how long it’s been since I posted to it. I’ll find a way to send this over there, and post the links to it on this blog. You need another blog to read, right?