This is just typical. I’m laying here on the couch. taking a day off. Gray clouds scud across the sky intermittently dropping rain. The TV chatters in the other room, and I have maps up, scrawling routes from here to there, backing up, rerouting, trying to find something new. Tomorrow is Sunday, and I want to do something big.

I’m not sure whether I’ll run or ride. Can I fit something in with the wife, piggyback on an adventure with her and the dog? Leave them back at the car and find my own way home, through woods and neighborhoods.

No. Days. Off.

Three letters, an acronym, a liminal pressure, a head fuck, stuck to the front of the refrigerator with a couple of whimsical magnets. No Days Off. Here we are two weeks into a New Year and already I’m doing it wrong.

The NDO idea isn’t really that you should turn yourself inside out every day. It’s not even that you should exert yourself every day. It’s that you should move every day. A rest day isn’t just for stiffening up, letting the lactic acid settle and accrue in all those inopportune places. I’ve been pushing myself too hard, just to make pen marks on a piece of paper.

So I’m off today, and my stupid brain has a hard time with that.

A rest I was dedicated to in the morning has given way to antsy-ness, this urge to plan for tomorrow. There is a practical reality that without a course of endorphins at some point in the day, my mood becomes irritatingly variable. I irritate myself. I irritate everyone else. I might be chemically dependent on exercise.

No Days Off.

Late in December I was only running/riding two or three days in a row. I couched quite a bit, and the net result was some amazing trail runs, long, fast and easy. Rest and recovery are real ingredients of peak fitness.

But the problem is me. It’s impatience. It’s an inability to follow directions. I’m the one I get no days off from.