Starting Over

When I was younger, I loved playing video games. And when I say younger, I mean, like, 5:00 this afternoon. Anyway, there are certain games that I play that I feel like I have to start over every time I mess something up. So, I hit the reset button. In a way, it allows me to perfect my game, but it’s still wasting time trying to perfect a level on a video game. How OCD is that?

Starting over. At times in all of our lives we have to start over at something. Whether it’s a software project or as simple as cutting a board, (always measure twice and cut once) there are times when scrapping what you got is the only option. A lot of times you can take the leftovers and build off that.

But there are times when starting over just plain sucks and you can’t salvage any of your previous work. Like running. That’s something you never want to start over doing. You see, the last time I really trained for a race was about a year ago. I haven’t done a lot of running the past year. Yeah, I did the Little Rock Half Marathon, but it was pretty ugly. Doesn’t take a lot of training to do a bad half marathon. So, I’ve gained some weight since the last big training session. About 15 pounds. I started wondering why my pace was getting worse and worse. Turns out, that’s a lot of extra weight when you’re running 5 to 6 miles. So, I started thinking about how much starting over sucked.

Which got me thinking about what I did at the beginning. When I started training back in the day for my first (and so far, only) triathlon, I was afraid to run because I had a lot of weight on my frame and had never run more than 3 miles. So I started riding a bike to lose weight. And it worked. I lost about 10 to 15 pounds doing that. That made running quite a bit easier. So just like good ol’ Michael Finnegan, I’ve decided to begin again.

Introducing my new obsession (hopefully), Felty:

It’s a Felt F80. So, if you’re in Searcy and on the bike trail and a fat guy on a bike whizzes by, that’s me. So, here’s to me having to start over. Hopefully, I will have learned my lesson this time and I won’t have to start over again. But you know me, I’ll probably mess this up screw this up. Dang it, gotta start over….