On Triathlons and Training:
I had a great 4 mile run last night as the sun was setting. My training is picking up this week as I prepare for the Lonestar Half Ironman at the end of April. I’m about a month late in adding swimming and biking to the mix, but it’s now or never. I’ve struggled quite a bit with training over the past year and a half. At first it was understandable, since I was swamped with wedding planning and house buying. But now it’s more confusing. My motivation is…uneven. I find myself spending a lot of time comparing myself to others instead of concentrating on myself and what I want to accomplish.
I don’t have a good group to train with. Many of the people in my triathlon club have gotten more serious about the sport than I am interested in becoming, rising as early as 3:30 a.m. to participate in 4-hour long spin classes. I am not at a point in my life where I am interested in getting up that early or spinning that long. This means that I am back to training by myself. Sometimes I don’t mind training alone, but sometimes it gets lonely.
On Social Media:
The NASA tweetup last week was great, and I loved participating in it, but after tweeting for a solid 2 days and following dozens of new people on Twitter, I found myself feeling overwhelmed by the amount of social media I was trying to keep up with. When I’m feeling stressed out because I missed the last hour of tweets, something is seriously wrong. So I unplugged from Twitter and Facebook for the whole weekend. A couple times while we were watching the Olympics, working on the bonus room, or enjoying dinner with friends, I thought “oh, I should post this or that.” Then I shook my head and groaned at myself.
Yesterday, I unfollowed about 50 people on Twitter whose updates I realized I had begun skimming past anyway. Then I logged onto Facebook and hid a whole slew of people. If the answer to the question “have I communicated in any way with you since high school graduation” was “no” then bye-bye. You can be my Facebook friend, but I do not have to read your updates. Unfollowing and hiding people probably sounds like an insanely obvious thing to do to some of you, but it was long overdue in my life. I feel less overwhelmed already!
(And don’t worry — if you’re reading this blog at all, that pretty much guarantees that you are not on either of the lists above.)
On Major Life Decisions:
It’s three weeks later and I still don’t know anything about what NASA’s new direction means for me. Overall, people are worried, scared and unhappy, and listening to the din is stressing me out. For the moment, I’ve tried to tune out most of the commentary and opinion and just read what’s officially released by the people at headquarters. I’m planning to stick around through the end of the shuttle program this fall, since I’m the lead Rendezvous for the last shuttle flight, STS-133. After that? Who knows.
I have many ideas of what I could do. Jose has many ideas of what he could do. A lot of those ideas are compatible. The sticking point is that it will be nearly impossible for us to move into new careers without taking a very large pay cut. That isn’t the end of the world, and though it would change our lifestyle, if we must do it, we’ll do it. But I feel like we just got settled. The NASA uncertainty makes me feel unsettled. And I like settled better.
