What Gives?

You know you haven't blogged in a while when you forget the password to your own site!  (But I did write a piece recently for my buddy Jim Gourley's blog.  You can check it out here!) First off, I expect nobody to read this.  I don't blame anyone for that but myself.  I took people on a journey -- one that I'm very proud of after re-reading my entries from more than a year ago -- and then I abandoned whatever audience I had accumulated. I needed a break, plain and simple.  I needed more free time.  Time with my now-wife.  Time with friends and family I had also abandoned at times in pursuit of my own Ironman quest.

What I gained in time over the past couple months, I had lost in fitness.  After my honeymoon, I got back to working out but with nearly 10 pounds extra on my frame.  Those close to me told me I needed the excess weight.  I had never looked better, they said.

How frustrating!  Physically, I had never felt worse.  What a conundrum.  I spend all this time training and racing and on some level, part of it is because I want to be proud of my physique.  Yet when I'm in peak condition all I hear about is how gaunt I look.  Then, I go travel for two weeks, drink a lot of wine and eat pounds of red meat and all I hear is how great I look.

I wonder why that is.  Is it because I genuinely look like a refugee, with the lines of my ribs showing and my face becoming sharply angular?  Or is it because people take comfort when you look closer to how they look -- and they're not in shape.  For example, when I hang out with my triathlete friends, they never say I look "bad."  In fact, what my friends and family think of as gaunt, my tri-friends would call "lean."

Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.

***

PS: I have a lot more to write about.  I wasn't even planning to write about this topic when I opened up my blog.  But it's a start. I'm rusty.  If you read this far and had been a fan in the past of my blog, please accept my apology for going AWOL.  I can't promise it won't happen again, but I can promise to offer what I hope is insightful commentary on life as a triathlete/career man/husband/family guy.  I won't be writing every day, but I'll try to be more consistent than this summer's massive drop-off.