Liz Randall's Cycling Blog - a life behind bars

"With ordinary talents and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable"



Saturday 7 July 2007

Exposing my egocentric character

I've been involved in sport all of my adult life and naturally alot of my childhood too..tennis, hockey and lacrosse while at school and uni, athletics, squash, orienteering and rock climbing here in Australia before I "discovered the light" and got into cycling. In all sports I've reached a high level of competency and success and so along the way have discovered what works for me and what doesn't.

What works is a steady calm somewhat egotistical life style where I can concentrate on the things that matter to me..family, work and currently above all my training. What I don't do well is emotion. Emotional highs and lows equate to fatigue for me which cuts into training.

The last month or so have been charged with emotion at work as we have been going through a re-structuring process resulting in alot of redundancies at middle management level. I have no problem with the re-structuring...its badly needed, but the temporary fall-out of a hypercharged emotional atmosphere over the last week or two has had the side effect of exhausting me to the point of having to cut out training sessions. We've also had a surfeit of farewell parties which has blown my diet out of the water!!!...too much of the food I like but shouldn't eat on tempting display.

My immediate boss left on Thursday and I was one of the speakers at her farewell bash, cutting down at least a forest of trees while carefully editing my speech. A bit like a reference........what's not said is as important as what is said. I was well and truly out of my comfort zone..there were over 100 people there and I was more nervous than before any race (except perhaps the 500m time trial on the track, where its over so quickly you've got no margin for error). Adrenalin flowed big time and I guess displayed it by maxing out the "fidget factor meter" followed an hour or so later by the after effects...total exhaustion. The family's evening meal was "open the fridge and eat whatever's there" as all I could do was inhale a bottle of beer; I'd already eaten enough during the day both at the party and pick pick picking afterwards.

So, once again back to training...only 142 days to go.....can an elite athlete of any age be anything other than self centred?

I have a "Stat counter " on my blog...this lets me know how many people are reading my blog...so far >400. I'm also able to see how people have arrived there..some of you have a direct link from me, some via other blogs such as fixmawheel and jeff's blog . A few have arrived via the Google search engine; some searching for "one hour record" info but others searching for the following terms... "porn", "blue" and "speed", which if you look back at my posts are there as labels..although somewhat more innocently than those particular searchers were after!!!!! The title for this post has been wickedly chosen to see how many more hits I get via google!

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