Bike bit

A little tooling around in the nearby bit of the park, more clipping and unclipping, and then I rode down to the transition site at 72nd St. for mild pondering and the realization that really these cleats are fine.

I went to the mandatory pre-race briefing earlier and that also had a more or less calming effect on the nerves - many people who do these races are very athletic and confident, but it does not in fact take magical powers to complete a triathlon, it is just a question of doing the three things in order and sort of taking it all at a sensible pace! Also though I am certain that I am pretty much the single most nervous and fearful cyclist in the entire race, quite a lot of people have qualms about open-water swimming, so it cannot be that I am really the only person who is afraid of something...

It is very warm outside, the air feels almost body-temperature - I was not sorry that I was not running, though I am sorry that CU lane swim only goes till 8pm on Fridays during the summer so that I have missed my chance for half an hour in the pool. I should try to get in there tomorrow afternoon for a quick swim after I've dropped off my bike at the race site.

I have had a slightly comical realization in the last few days: comical because it has come from reading all these books about Niels Bohr and Wittgenstein as I do my research for the book I am supposed to write this summer! I am not a great genius of science or philosophy, or indeed of anything else, and it must also be said that Bohr was a more stable character than Wittgenstein, but both of them are much afflicted by these stretches of exhaustion and insomnia where they cannot do any work and yet work would be the only salve for their state of mind! It will not, I think, strike anyone who knows me who reads this as much of an insight at all, it will in fact seem blindingly obvious, but I am thinking that possibly I am not a permanently utterly neurotic person with a permanently disabling fear of bike-riding and a permanent inability to buckle down and write my novel - I am just still in a state of depletion from a very stressful year and a half or so, and it is taking me longer to bounce back than I expected...