Before and after

I'm writing this under the influence of muscle relaxants and god knows what else thanks to a mega-migraine this morning. My spell check might explode with the corrective effort this post requires. I can honestly not blame computer error this time around. I apologize ahead of time.

This concerns the New Year's resolution to lose weight. I assume this is a popular one. (A good writer would have some sort of statistic credited to some researcher or another but I don't.)

As triathletes, weight loss might not be precisely our resolution but dollars to doughnuts it's a close relative. Trying for Kona? Faster bike time? Finish a sprint tri? You don't have to be a high-strung overacheiving triathlete to know that weight is a factor to accomplish any of these.

But before putting those Peter Reid (old school) or Chrissie Wellington pictures on your refridgerator, consider the before/after photos of people who've lost an amazing amount of weight.

I love these pictures. Here are people who've lived their entire lives being the kid/adult who instantly garners doubt from their peers and they turn it around and passive-aggressively rub it in their peers smug faces. I can't even give up caffeine without whining.

I can't fathom how hard this must be. They change their psychology, their determination and I-don't-know-what-all else.

An added bonus is when these people embrace exercise, including triathlon. How pure is their joy upon finishing. There's no snobbery about bikes, no excrutiating analyses about carb percentages vs. endurance. Their finishes are in their most basic form - a victory so innocent that I and most of the athletes I know will never know again. They are persistent, train for a goal loftier than my own and operate on a reward system far greater than mine.

I wish I could tap into their resolve and use it for my own (evil) plan to get to Kona.

So here's to resolutions that are way more likely to happen than my promise to get organized, become the first female president or an airline pilot. I'm still going after Kona.

Have a psuedo pop-psychology New Year

As I was sitting at a light during yesterday's ride, I thought it would be the neighborly thing to say, "Happy New Year" to the guy sitting two feet away from me on his bike.

He thought the neighborly thing to do was outright ignore me and push on with his ride.

I thought about two things:

1. Why can't we just be nice?

2. Why am I so disaffected about this?

Here's my insightful yet thought-provoking answer to number 1: We can't just be nice.

Here's my equally profound answer to number 2: Because we can't just be nice.

Number 2 was the more disturbing thought, in my opinion. At what point did I start to not care about human rudeness? This kind of thing used to really bother me. On and on I'd rant about this d-bag that ruined my ride/my day/my week. Yesterday I simply continued my ride - a stick with ends too blunted to neither hate nor love. Have I turned into "them"?

Sort of.

We can't "just be nice" and we can't care about other people's niceness
because we're humans. I know this sounds rudimentary and it is. We think that our life is the perfect way to live it and that gives us the right to attempt conversion of our fellow earthlings by bossing them into it.

At least mentally. As my story illustrates, no communication is needed because the less-enlightened should already know. I believe that was the source of the wanna-be world leader at the stoplight.

To move from the dead horse of the stoplight dis, I had probably the worst New Year's eve of my life last night. It was a combination pity party with a side of blame and resentment. Balloon drop at midnight. Champagne toast.

Here's where the philosophical part (and also the cunning intermingling of subjects) comes in. Well, it would if I had one. It's me. It's the rest of the planet. I'm right. I'm wrong. If I ignore everyone at stoplights, everyone will see that they want to be exactly like me. Only they don't because (Here's where the pity party started. It's censored to retain a modicum of self-respect.) *pop*

Was there ever a conclusion? No. Much like this blog entry, it's still hanging around, I'm still wallowing in self-pity/resentment and I'm going to go back to bed. There will be no epiphany, no future bumper sticker. Just me going back to bed and smugly acknowledge that I would never ignore anyone.

Happy New Year and be nice.