I walk past a pond every time I walk to work, but this blog is not really about that pond.
When I do walk past the pond it always makes me think about the pond that I am in and the discussion Malcolm Gladwell had in the book David and Goliath; he talks about big fish and small ponds, and small fish and big ponds.
The funny thing is we get to choose the pond we are in but it is hard to fight the instinct to always go for bigger.
On the Sunday just gone I had one of the best days I have had on a bike for a very long time. Regular users of the blog will know who Louis is. Louis and I set off for the Nottingham Cycle Live 75 miler at 8am Sunday morning, an event we planned to do since last September.
This is not a race. It is clearly stated everywhere that is it not a race, but it was for us. Invented by us, for us, to chase a time that we had worked at for the whole year.
The Nottingham 75 miler is full of cyclists of all abilities, age ranges and all sorts of different equipment. People on £50 bikes up to £5,000 bikes and people riding in flips flops. In the end though, 3 hours 58 minutes later Louis and I crossed that line after the 75 miles, and in the first 30 of about 4,500 finishers that day.
It felt good and we had a great day!
Inadvertently I had removed myself from a larger pond to a smaller pond, a place that maybe was appropriate for me at that time. Isn’t it funny how we get to choose the pond we are in and how that pond defines how we feel?
Blog Post Number - 1327
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