Six months ago, after a little over a week where I was pegged to my office desk longer than I was home, filled with what I’d like to believe was a more than usual amount of ‘asap’ projects, impossible-to-satisfy requests, and an unusually high amount of the same corporate stress that many of us experience in our daily grind – the seed became planted to do something else. Over the last decade, I’ve been racing my bike. On the road. On the track. In the dirt. Wherever. I’ve come to be not half-bad at it and in recent years I’ve really refound my love for the sport. Last year, I experienced my largest performance-jump ever giving way to hope that I could have success at a slightly larger stage, especially given that I’m entering the prime years of my cycling lifespan. Which leads me to...
…today...which is the last day at my job.
I’d never thought about the difficulty of simply deciding to quit. There’s a laundry list of reasons why I shouldn’t, many of which likely may have already come to your mind – I’m aware – and I’m absolutely not 100% certain this is the right thing I should be doing, but I am. Whether its struggling to decide if I’m being fair to my wife (who’s more than encouraged me to do this), coming to feel okay with the certain derailment of my career path, or the obvious loss of income that we’ll feel (not that it was a lot). These things made it difficult to have a clarity of vision right up until the final day of this decision.
Right around the time the seed had been planted in my head about doing this, I learned that an acquaintance I had briefly known passed away in a car accident near the holidays. This shouldn’t have impacted me much given that we’d only had a dozen or so brief conversations in passing just under a decade ago, but it somehow, combined with the state I was in, timed up to awaken me to my existence a bit – likely akin to some level of mid-life crisis I’m sure. It brought to the surface those questions that seem to most strongly occur in times of tragedy or extreme emotion and helped reinforce that the true downside of doing something like this, really isn’t all that bad. I’d like to think that kind of thinking is more pure than insane.
Anyways, I’m going to rewrite my life path right here just a bit. My life as written progresses on a smooth corporate path towards a seemingly forever away retirement age at which point I'll sit in my rocking chair and rock as I do now, satisfied that my work was done, that’d I’d paid my dues and provided for my family. I’ll tell my grandkids that I used to race my bike just like them and I was halfway decent. I’ll tell them I maybe even could have accomplished something worthwhile had I not been prudent and stayed the proper course of a working career. But alas, today I pivot to answer that question. I move towards a future slightly unwritten, towards an answer I don’t quite have. In my mind - certain failure of accomplishing anything sustainable awaits, but with a tremendous amount of hard work, I’ll have complete success in creating an adventure that sees to it that I gave my absolute all in seeing how far I could take a life passion. For that I see little downside.
A lot of things here are working in my favor as well that it’d be unfair not to mention. Financially my wife and I have put ourselves in a fine position to be able to pull this off relatively unscathed for which I am extremely grateful. And from a responsibility standpoint, I have very few true things relative to many others in my position that would hold me back - making now a very good time to try something like this. I’m very aware of these things and realize this opportunity has been easier to take on for me than it would be for many others in my shoes. I am nothing but grateful for the position I’m in. In addition to going all-in on the cycling front, I’ve failed to mention that I’ll be pursuing many other things over the coming months non-cycling related, but given that this is my cycling specific news/thought outlet spot, I’m going to contain my scope to only things bike-related. But in any event, I’m looking forward to attacking the coming months as hard as I can. My focus is completely forward on what I need to do to be where I want to be. Looking forward to the adventure that awaits.
Until then, I’ll leave on a lighter note. A turkey attacking our team ride. Enjoy.
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