Sunday, October 7, 2012

Bike Trip Motivational Thoughts

I told you guys I would post this... even though it's been a few weeks.

1. Biking 5 or 6 hours a day left a lot of room for thought. My dad would always say: it's more of a mental battle than a physical one.

2. I've mentioned it before but there's one motivational quote that I use to get me through every challenge in life. It's the last two lines from the poem Invictus: I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. To me this just means that I can do anything I set my mind to. I won't let anything stop me from achieving what I want to achieve. For a while I would just repeat this in my head over and over again, but then I started trying to remember the whole poem (which took a lot of thought and kept me distracted when I wanted to be).

3. The next motivational thing is the poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman. I sort of discovered and fell in love with this poem when it was on the Levi's commercial. I tried to remember and repeat the first few stanzas of this poem too. Eventually I had to look it up one night because I knew something was off and I couldn't seem to remember the end of the second/beginning of the third stanza. I had tried to memorize the poem in the past so I knew a little of it, but the poem is kind of long and I was never actually successful in memorizing the whole thing. The second stanza was really the part I kept repeating in my head as a sort of battle cry.
"For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!"

Of course everyone didn't depend on us to finish the bike ride but you get my drift... it was motivational.

4. Encouragements from the crowd. I was a little worried that I'd get really bored without any music to listen to, but for the most part we kept each other company. Since a lot of the roads we were on were pretty empty, we were able to ride side by side and talk. This made things seem to go by a bit faster.

5. When we rode on busy highways and had to ride behind one another my main motivation was to get off that road as quickly as possible. My dad always laughed when I would ride 15 mph all of the sudden instead of the steady 11 or 12 I was at for most of the trip (yeah I know I'm slow).

6. On the last day we started getting bored and tired and my dad began singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall." It went on for a bit too long so in my head (and eventually out loud) I started singing Stu's Song from the Hangover. Yup desperate times call for desperate measures and this was the first thing that popped up in my head (I have no idea why).

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