The Formidable Four Hundred

A good friend of mine, Jason Smith, just completed a self-prescribed challenge: to ride 400 miles in one week. To set such a difficult challenge and then complete it is quite the feat and I join with many in congratulating him on it. In my own life I enjoy greatly setting goals and seeking to attain them -- not for money, or a prize, or even a pat on the back -- but for the satisfaction of knowing that I was able to fulfill a task that I set out to complete. Even when the challenge is not met I see it as an opportunity to try again, to simply change the due date. Without goals in life we become stagnant, complacent, stuck, discouraged -- we become less than what we were created to be.

Congratulations Jason, I say you deserve a digital finisher's badge, even though it isn't provided by Strava. Wear it proudly and good luck on your next challenge -- I'll join you soon.

From Jason:

The work week 400 is done! I really don’t know how I did it. It was all encompassing to say the least. I was on the bike every day at about 4:30, which meant I was waking up at 3:30. This is no big deal once or twice a week if you give yourself some sleep-in days, and I really like them on week days because of what you can accomplish. It becomes a real big problem after 3 days :-). The hardest part of this challenge is the mental one by far. None of the rides where intense and that was the plan going into it so it wasn’t like the dread of intervals. It became taxing every night when I was dead to the world at 7:30 and still had to be a dad for the next hour. It became hard on day 3 when I thought about how many miles I had left, and it really became tough on Saturday when I almost gave in and slept  until the 6:30 JKG ride time. I just kept telling myself that I had to get on the bike……..just get on the bike and start to pedal. It’s a simple idea but in times like that the warm pillow is screaming at you very loudly. I hate to use the JKG saying in some dramatic inspirational sound-the-music story because to me it works in kind of an opposite way…..I guess…….to me it works in a rather simple way, a close your eyes on the trainer and zone out type of way…….a don’t think about anything and just go type of way……………a less thinking is best kind of thing! That’s what this challenge boiled down to, can I just keep going? It really wasn’t about the pace, It was in fact about the place.

I just kept asking myself “what story will you tell?” Am I going to tell the story of quitting or the one where I made it?

The single best thing I did was to tell people I was doing it. I didn’t do it to impress people, I did it for accountability. I knew if someone was paying attention I wouldn’t want to quit. If this would’ve been some idea that no one knew about, Saturday would have been the end of it!

Thanks for your support my JKG friends, tell you more later, the pillow is calling my name!