One of the things which seems to be missing, everywhere I look, and in so many of the people that I get to meet, is the inability to create a positive narrative. This would be the age-old ‘glass half full versus glass half empty’.
But it seems to persist and pervade in so many places where people seem to be dissatisfied, upset, annoyed or distressed.
Apart from the most terrible circumstances (and there are plenty of those to see and to suffer), many, many negative situations come with a potential positive outcome or change of direction or spin.
For whatever reason, and based on whatever has happened to me previously, I do, at least most of the time, seem to have the ability to do this.
Last week I returned from a holiday in Scotland; I've been eating too much and drank too much and decided that now was the time to get back to proper training and to set some targets and goals and challenges, which is what I do to stop myself becoming the fattest person in the world.
I spent a long train journey from the north of Scotland writing the next ‘plan’, and got up on Thursday morning, ready to start and ready to go.
On Thursday night, part of the preparation was to clean my good bike extensively and get it into pristine condition, because the following day consisted of a session at the gym, followed by a minimum 4-hour bike ride, so that I could start to get ready for my cycle trip to Majorca which would not be the end point of the training, but the start point of the winter training and where I would be back into a routine of eating and sleeping and training and working, which fills me with great joy and contentment.
The first thing to do was to go to the gym the next morning with my friend and colleague Stuart Reekie (he's a gym expert), and I have been in the process of refocusing on the gym to be stronger for later life and stronger for challenges to come. As I arrived in the gym a couple of minutes late (my usual situation), I went downstairs to meet Stuart, who was setting up on the inclined leg press (he can lift about 3 tonnes on that machine). I instinctively knew that I had to start to ship 25 kilogramme discs onto the left side of that machine to let Stuart begin his session, and then we would alternate removing weights from my own skinny legs.
I was chatting to Stuart and slightly distracted, and so slipped a 25 kilogramme weight off the holder, only to drop it and immediately straight onto the bridge of my left foot.
Immediately afterwards, I wasn't quite sure what happened. I didn't think the damage was too bad, and so I continued with the gym session, continued with the leg press and even went for a coffee with Stuart.
During Friday, the damage started to emerge, and I ended up at the walk-in centre on Saturday, followed by a fracture clinic on Tuesday to identify 2 crush fractures of my right metatarsal joint and 1 crush fracture of my left metatarsal.
This is a pretty sh**ty injury for someone who had the plans that I had written the previous day, and it could completely derail me psychologically.
There are 2 ways to go in this situation for me; it is a fork in the road. On the right side is to go and feel sorry for myself, consider that the world is against me, decide to retire from exercise and accept that I'm heading towards 55 years old, and to sit down, watch Netflix and eat chocolate; that was certainly the urge on the part of the way on Friday.
The other way for me, though, is to refocus my attention and understand that I will have much more time when I'm not on a bike to do other things or to get up to date with other projects, to refocus into strength training for the upper body as soon as I can move properly and to really concentrate heavily on what I'm eating and the calories I'm consuming, and start to swim.
And so the narrative here is that I've been pushed in another direction, but in essence, probably a direction that's very good for me and very healthy, because I sometimes overtrain on cycling at the expense of other things, but it's all about the narrative, isn't it?
The narrative is either that the world is against me, and that is such bad luck, and I'll never be able to do this, or a door has opened over here; is that one closed, and I can step (not literally) through that door, and chase some other project or something else that's interesting, because I can't have the opportunity to chase the other thing.
This happens time and time again, when we hit the fork in the road. Left for negative, right for positive; there is only one fork to take, regardless of how difficult it seems, because taking the other road always sets you back further and further, and makes it harder and harder to return to the fork, to take the positive way.
Blog Post Number - 4649
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