I want to but I don’t want to today.
Get up and wash your face, brush your teeth, plait your hair. You don’t need to shower, you’ll only get sweaty anyway. It doesn’t matter that all your usual kit is dirty, wear the fancy stuff, embrace your inner roadie. At least your bike’s still filthy from the weekend and your overshoes are plastered, that’ll balance it out.
Your bike is right there, you literally have to walk past it to get out of the door, so put your helmet on, your shoes, the mucky overshoes, gloves, keys, purse, stuff them in your stupid frame bag, snacks down the back of your jersey, it doesn’t matter that your thick gloves are still wet because you didn’t put them on the radiator, you have other gloves, just put those on.
You don’t need a jacket. It’s not that cold, you’re not going to be out forever. Just get out the door.
Put your headphones in, don’t worry that everybody hates cyclists in headphones, everybody hates cyclists whether they wear headphones or not. Put that song on repeat, it’s all you’ll want to listen to anyway.
It doesn’t matter that you took a wrong turn, you need the miles, you know where you’re going, you know all these roads like the back of your hand, you know umpteen different ways to get there, just take a different route.
Stop fretting that you should have brought the cross bike instead to make it harder, just ride singlespeed for the training, bonus points because removing gears means one less thing to bother with. Just pedal, keep your legs spinning, keep moving forwards.
Don’t worry if you push too hard and blow out, you know you recover fast, all that BMX, your legs can take it, you won’t lose them.
That phonecall you need to make, the conversations you need to have that you don’t even know how to start yet, the work you need to pull in, the questions you need to answer, the plans that need to come into being, the hands you have to hold while you do it, the skills you need that you still don’t have, the things you want that might not come to you, the books you still haven’t written, it’s all going to be fine, if you just keep going.
Watch everything begin to turn.
Things are going to change whether you want them to or not.
