Pinball of anxiety

It’s not often I encounter a morning like this…a morning where I leap out of bed, turn off my alarm before it even sounds, and run down the stairs like I’m finally alive.

That just doesn’t happen.

I’m usually a slow-waking sloth, being pulled from my resting hole by the soundtrack of a cheesy carnival you secretly wish your parents had never taken you to. And if you own an iPhone, this eviscerating tune manifests itself as “By the Seaside.” Which is absolutely nothing like being by the seaside. I would know. Grew up right next to it.

This AM was just like any other (sans jarring alarm). I awake to another dark day. And yes, one can say the darkness is both physical and dispositional. The state of our Earth is quite alarming. And maybe it’s just because I work in the news sphere, but I can’t say with confidence that I feel very safe anywhere anymore.

...but that’s not where I was going with this post. Although it makes quite the point with where I’m going with this post…(read: my splintered mind has so many tangents it's almost impossible to stick to one thought path these days)

Normal mornings, all I’m thinking about is training… and then I go downstairs, bleary eyed, no contacts…and I can just feel all the chores I didn’t do…because I was training the morning (and night) before. Or I was simply just too tired.

This is defeating for my type A, perfectionist, clean-freak self. How can I have the energy to do two-a-days, but not unload the dang dishwasher? Or take out the trash? Or put items back in their places? Oy.

As I start making my secondary source of blood (coffee, duh), I usually ponder what my workout is going to be like. And where…am I going to the pool? Crap, where did I put my goggles? And ugh, I didn’t set up my bike on the trainer for the 2-hour workout I was supposed to start 10 minutes ago…

This pinball of anxiety starts cascading through my body, hitting all of the hotspots, lighting off all of the bells and whistles. But I’m not racking up any points. There are no tickets or prizes for this. Quite the opposite.

It’s a feeling of being on fire, constantly, and not knowing where the hydrant is.

Why can’t I be more organized, do the chores, put my workout gear together the night before…why does it feel like I’m in a never-ending game of Funhouse and I can’t find my way out?

But my mind this morning, this massive collection of neurons, firing like an Atari dot in Pong through the grey matter in my brain, is buzzing with all of the sentences I just have to put onto paper…or, the computer’s rendition of it (somehow "word document" doesn't sound as pleasing as "paper").

Today, this morning, all I want to do is write.

I haven’t had many days like this lately. And that saddens me because I love writing. It’s my number two (if not one, in competition with triathlon) passion in life.

But just like triathlon, my good days (and sometimes weeks) come and go with writing. And I’m trying to be okay with the days when I’m not “on,” when I can’t push out a PR, when I’m just barely making it up that hill. When I can't string out a sentence at work. When I have to turn in a script that I think is quite dreadful.

I often tell myself that not every race is an “A” race. And not every script/article/show is going to be my best work. And that is OKAY. In my head I accept this general idea. It’s my heart that can’t get over the feeling of imperfection in everything I do. It’s crushing. And it’s really all on me to turn that mentality around.

I was recently diagnosed with, SURPRISE, anxiety. Like I didn't already know that. Like I don't feel it every day of my life. And I'm not just talking about your run-of-the-mill anxiety that everyone gets every once in a while. I'm talking about the kind that makes you want to leap outside of your own skin.

Just talking about it makes me anxious. But I think it's healthy that I'm finally admitting I've got a problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people in my cohort have it as well. We are learning differently than generations past. It's process overload in this tech-savvy age. I'm just lucky I learned cursive (apparently, that's no longer taught) and I read actual, physical books, with pages and all.

Updates are instantaneous. We can not concentrate on one thing anymore because there are ten other new things popping up at the same time. It's hard sometimes to discern what's most important when everything is presented to us as "breaking news."

You read everywhere that exercise can help reduce stress and anxiety...take you out of the milieu of the daily grind. And it does, I can attest to that. Perhaps that's why I always want to be outside, running, cycling, or swimming. It helps to take the proverbial 'load' off.

When I'm out there - it's just me and the asphalt. It's my might against the world's force. It's here that I realize my problems aren't the center of the world. Nothing is the core. We're just tiny dots of humanity, merely moving across it. Swimming through it. Running around it. Cycling over it.

And this three-pronged sport, much like the verticals in my mind, challenge me to think differently, and see everything with a broader comb, a more open mind. It centers me, despite all of the noise happening inside of me and around me.

Triathlon has helped me see the signal through all of the noise. Yeah my anxiety is still there, waiting for me at the finish line, but in the moments I'm out there -- I'm truly living, I'm free. I can focus. I can breathe (although sometimes not very well!).

Point is, and the point of this long-winded and long-winding post, is that as much as my mind is an octopus with ten million tentacles of ideas bursting at once, I'm insanely lucky I've found a sport that dials me back to a more neutral state of clarity.

To most, that wouldn't make sense...how can mastering three different disciplines, and then doing them back to back to back make a person more sane?

My answer: try it. It's all about the focus factor.

#triathlon #ironman #ironmanblog #swim #bike #run