Baby You’re A Rich Man

Goals. Life would be so much easier without them. Just cruise through and take what comes as it does. No planning ahead, no working towards an end purpose. No last minute scrambling to meet a particularly lofty goal set at a particularly lofty point in life.

However, life would be pretty boring without goals. Never pushing yourself past your current potential, never realizing just what really is possible, all the while settling for the mediocre, the mundane, the humdrum, the routine.

99% of what we do day to day is just that. Survival. Wading through the bog that is life alongside everyone else. But that extra 1%, that little bit that gives you that excitement, that thrill, that hyper-sensitive feeling of accomplishment. That is what really matters. That is what defines us.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do something every day that scares you.” That phrase was used again in the “Wear Sunscreen” speech, written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune, remixed by Baz Luhrmann, and often mistaken for Kurt Vonnegut. Pretty much everything that piece inspires and encourages me, but that one phrase sticks out a little more then the rest.

So here I sit, 9:09 PM, The Beatles’ “Baby You’re A Rich Man” playing on the iTunes, thinking about what I can do tomorrow that scares me. 80 miles isn’t an extremely long ride for me any more, even in January with the colder weather, the wind in the valley, the shorter days, and the winter legs. Last year there is no way I could ride 80 miles on January 10th.

“Do something every day that scares you.”

My goals this year are as lofty as they have ever been. Last year was the first year I topped 5,000 total miles, and reached triple metric (near) miles logged in a single ride with 180.6 around Lake Tahoe in late July.

This year? 6,213.71 miles. Or, 10,000 kilometers. Seems a bit lofty, yes, as it took three years with 5K as a goal to finally hit it. But, that’s not the part that scares me. That would be the California Triple Crown. I barely passed 180 in a ride last year and my new goal is to pass 200 three times. Three times. Not once, not twice, but thrice. Three. 3.

This should be interesting.

Let’s see how this 1% turns out.