My hands are still really fast, which is very cool. I enjoy surprising myself when G throws something and I snatch it out of the air, or i catch a slippery jar of hair product when it comes somersaulting out of the shower caddy. I think my hands got faster after I got over 30, and realized that my mark and point blocks were areas I could still improve in my Ultimate game. My hands didn’t actually get faster, but my skill at focusing immediately on the disc and making a point of putting my hands right on it got better. Its easy to say things like “Watch the disc into your hands” but actually zeroing in on the target and making a concerted effort to grab it, not just wave your mitts near it, takes a lot of discipline and practice.

Of course, this skill is mostly useless in biking. And all too much recently, my talents have been used catching cartons of ice cream tumbling out of the freezer. I’ve been hanging around 155 for about 2 years, and I’m kinda not happy about it. In ’03, my last year with Ironwood, I went into the season at 146. Since then I’ve put on 1-2 lbs of muscle in the chest, and 1-2 in the legs, so that still means I’m 3-5 heavier than I’d like to be, ought to be, or have been since about 1992. I’ve been carrying this weight like a guilty pleasure, and it needs to change.

Its caused by nothing specific, but a little too much indulgence in too many places. A few too many beers, a few too many snacks, a few too many kung pao chicken chunks, a few too many hits…and the weight hangs around. My drift toward excess has been multi-faceted, and includes faster driving, bricked workouts followed by binging, long nights working and late mornings into work, dominant and aggressive behavior, corners cut or too rigorously not cut at all, opinions provided too bluntly, tantrums thrown. Its a pattern of lacking restraint.   Is it biking not providing an outlet for my need for conflict, isolation from spending so much time on the computer and the internet, schedules with beckie so disparate that I am alone too much, a reaction to the responsibility of parenthood, the “dad principle” making me a solipsistic king of my narrow domain, an overdose of stress and agitation, or a simple obligation to drink for 3? I respond by over-responding, under-inhibiting.

I need to restore balance, but it is hard when the balance is tipped just a little but not fundamentally off in any one thing. And when most of what is out of balance are, by themselves, harmless and things I enjoy and want to do. Seemingly insignificant changes are the hardest. But also the easiest. They can be made simply, one at time, if i have the discipline to focus on grabbing the moments of choice when they spin towards me, and not just waving my hands up near them.