A Whole Person

Well here it is, the Jerseyman. It's tomorrow. I want to go out and race my hardest, have fun and see what I can do. It is my friend Genine's first triathlon and I am excited for her. And there will be lots of familiar faces there which will be fun.

Today was a little upsetting finding out that my old swim coach and friend Joe had a seizure and is in the hospital. He has been having serious back issues and has gone to the hospital for that and struggled with that the past couple months and it is troubling to hear that he is having further medical issues.

I had the day today to study. Not a vacation day like some might think, but better than the 45 min commute each way to work. I actually woke up earlier than I have been in awhile. Thanks to the return of the sun. So nice to have it back. I think we all missed it quite a bit. I did get a chance to finally take my bike up to Sports People for a badly needed tune up after a scolding from Jonathon for always doing this to him at the last minute (its true, I always intend to schedule in advance but I only have one bike and I never know what days I am going to end up staying late at work and blah blah blah). Anyway, I apologized for being an ass, planned on tipping him when I picked it up, but he wasn't there. Next time I will do better. I was very nice of him to accommodate me.

My workout for the day was short, I did a short bike to run ended up 25 mins total with some strides. Then to the pool for 800m of swimming practicing sighting and some race pace 50's with long rests. And then stretching and foam rolling and that was it.

Yesterday was a day off training. Not that it would have fit in. I didn't home from work until after 10pm. I was burnt and tired, my legs and arms ached and my brain hurt. It was an exhausting day. I had to miss therapy. I called and rescheduled and he could hear in my voice just how stressed I was. It was a hard day.

As I have been busy and have been on facebook a bit, I have not been blogging as much, but I like it. I like writing down my thoughts and my training and sharing it with people and writing it for myself. It has helped me a lot through a difficult time to learn that I can be okay expressing what I think or feel about something and not really worry about who is going to read it or what people will think about it. I used to worry about what people thought about me all the time. I can't say that I never do. But I care about it much less. And I am trying to only care about what I think. If people don't like what I write, they don't have to read my blog. In the end it is for me. And if people enjoy reading it and it happens to help someone, great. But in the end it is for me, to get my thoughts out, to know that I can express things for anyone to see that I never thought I would be able to. And to be able to go back and read sometimes and see where I was and where I am now. It started as a way to mostly track my races and training. But I am more than that. I am not just a triathlete. I am Maija. I am a whole person. I work hard, I get tired, I get anxious, I get happy, I love my dogs, I get excited about little simple things, I love the outdoors, I love cupcakes and ice cream and fruit and anything sweet, I am far from perfect and I have made more mistakes than you can count, I am loyal and caring, I love the way that I look everything about it, I am awesome and complicated in so many ways. And when I wrote just about training it was empty because I was hiding all the stuff that was really there.