I'm not sure when it started for me however I have noticed that all cyclists like to count things; pounds, kilograms, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, miles, watts, heart rate, intervals, placings, laps, RPM's and on and on. I started writing some of it down in daily logs about 19 years ago and continue to this day. It might seem like a waste of time but in fact it keeps me from wasting time by organizing, planning, documenting, reviewing and being accountable for every day. I have also written down several years of how much time was spent with the guitar each day, but discontinued that about 8 years ago.
As the years have passed the 'big picture' has become a little clearer. I remember when 20 years sounded like a long time to me, that's about 7,304 days. If you had one dollar for every day you lived you might have enough to buy a decent used car.
You may think 50 years sounds like a lot but it is only about 18,262 days. If you sleep eight hours a day by the end of just one year that is equal to 121 days gone which leaves about 12,202 days in 50 years. Then if you subtract the 18 childhood years and just count the 'waking' days in a 50-year-old adult lifetime you are looking at about 5,628 days total.
If you look at it that way it sure seems like a short time we have on this planet. Probably ought to not wish away a moment of time and try to do something worthwhile every single day.
I am just the opposite for exactly same reason .
I used to run very detailed logs .
The problem was that I was too much about numbers , totally losing the big picture .
On the top of everything was mythical belief that being short of certain huge quota would hunt you at the races .
Since believing in big numbers turned against me and I was not quite ready to make a 180 degree turn , I simply stopped running the log .
Good idea !
I started to do things entirely for the the heck of doing them , without the guilt of running short of kilometers .
A typical case of having versus being .
Posted by: wojtek at January 1, 2009 07:40 PM