The last couple of months have been
stressful at work! Fortunately, most of
this stress has been the good kind of stress in that has resulted from me
receiving more recognition, but it has also meant more responsibility and
wanting to live up to my own expectations. Without this sort of stress I find
that I easily become bored and feel unchallenged and my level of motivation
drops. However, during the first three
days of last week I experienced the kind of stress that is 100% unproductive,
the sort where you are all wound up about something that you have very little,
if any control over.
While riding my bike home from work on
Wednesday, I realised that one source of stress was simply arising from
communication difficulties with a colleague and Thursday morning’s bike ride
was filled with planning on how to at least change this one thing that I had
some control over. Interestingly, in the
midst of resolving this stress we ended up having a bit of a conversation
regarding our views on life, the universe, and everything, and while the book
“hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” states the answer to this is 42, our answer
was not so simple.
During our conversation I was asked “how do
you deal with stress? How do you deal with big problems? How do you deal with catastrophes?
How do you deal with the thought of death?” Without thinking or hesitation, I
replied to each of these in turn – I ride my bike. At first, my colleague found
this difficult to comprehend, and I’m not sure if I had him convinced by the
end, that for me, being out on the bike, or really just being outside exercising
is an incredibly effective reliever of stress.
After the conversation was over, I reflected a little on how easily
those answers had come to me, and I decided that, having resolved the one bad
stressor that I had some control over, the weather forecast for Friday was
looking great, I would take the day off and ride my bike all day. And that is exactly what I did! For good measure, and because I have a bike
race of 1280km coming up, I followed that up with a long run on Saturday and a
bike ride of almost 9 hours on Sunday.
By Sunday evening I was very sleepy, but happy that my body felt great
and more importantly I had refound my inner peace - the world looked a better
place again. After a goodnights sleep, Monday morning came about and I had let
go of all those unproductive stresses and was raring to tackle the things that
I had control over. AHHHHH.
Week tally of exercise:
Bike ~580km
Run ~5 hours
Feeling strong, not crazy fast, but my body
handled the 3 bigger days of training well, I didn’t feel tired at the start of
the days, I didn’t get progressively more tired, no major pains on Sunday while
riding, felt solid all day. 8 laps of
Taupo makes me scared, but I’m pleased with my current fitness level.
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