Commitment

I can't believe it's been 9 months since I've been here. My, my, my, time flies. OK, this year, from here on out, I promise to faithfully discharge my duty to chronicle all that is sports related. If there's time, I might even get off topic and talk a little life; who knows, maybe some theater or film. We will definitely be talking some hoops this year. Nate Robinson of the Knicks is this year's big surprise. I have never been so wrong about a player. I'm not a fan of Stephon Marbury, but he's getting a raw deal. More on that in future posts.

So after such a long hiatus, where do I begin? Ah, maybe I should share the reasons for my sudden disappearance from the blog scene. Well, one minute I'm doing 48mph down the side of hill at Harriman State Park (on my bike that is), hanging on for dear life, and the next minute, the stork drops this little guy off at my LBS (my son) and I'm knee deep in pampers and cloaked in the aura of fatherhood. So much for blogging for awhile.

Which brings me to the topic "du jour," Commitment. Yes, the big "C" word, often bandied about on the http://www.nyvelocity.com/ website. Every year, it seems as though one of the discussion topics on the site is whether one can be committed, in this case to the sport of cycling, if one doesn't spend all of his or her waking hours perfecting his or her pedal stroke. In other words, can a person with a family and a demanding career every truly be committed to being a winning bike racer?

Now after having been a father for eight months, having a fairly demanding job and trying to maintain that ever elusive thing called "balance," I think I am now qualified to answer. And I would say the answer is "maybe, but probably not." I mean, look, I think one can make a pretty compelling argument that there are degrees of commitment and that you must take a person's personal circumstances into the consideration when deciding whether he or she is committed. But for bike racers, local bike racers in particular, where only one thing matters, the result, no one really cares that you had to work late, take your spouse to dinner or the kids to a soccer game. With every one of those decisions, you give up valuable hours of training! That's not to say that one can't be good or even win races without training, but we're talking about commitment here.

An athlete that is truly committed to his or her sport will do everything to be better, including sacrifice time with friends and family. I've been on the scene now for a couple of seasons and I come from a basketball background, and I have seen some folks really give of themselves to be better athletes, and I am truly impressed by that. I mean, all I could think about after downing my third slice of pizza on Saturday night was damn, in a few weeks, I'll be racing against some guy who hasn't had a slice of pizza in 5 years... and then I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine. LOL

The moral to the story is that there is no moral. There's no right or wrong answer, you should do what suits you. Ride 9W seven days a week, 5 hours a day until you drop, or ride once a week at 11pm on a Wednesday night after you've cooked a 3 course meal for your spouse and read your kids their favorite bedtime story. But whatever you do, just keep riding.