Tuesday, August 28, 2012

eating cake

last saturday biking buddy bob and I rode our bikes to sundance and back.
as we passed through a neighborhood on the southeastern foothills, bob said this is the 'let them eat cake' part of town.  communities set apart with guardhouses, four-story mansions on the hillside, private gated homes . . . this is an area of "haves".  or at the least, "hads."  homes built during the years of bigger is better, of if one is good three is what I'll have.
it's difficult to imagine what I'd do if I had oodles of money.
it's even more difficult to imagine being so out of touch with reality that I didn't know people in my own community were poverty-stricken and starving.

and this all began, today, because I decided to have cake for breakfast.  well, not really for breakfast, because I considered my wheat-toast-with-peanut-butter breakfast.  cake was more like a, um, post-breakfast snack.  then a pre-mid-morning snack.  and now it's my mid-morning snack.  soon it will be a before-lunch-snack.
perhaps it's time to stop eating cake.
I'm not quite sure what's going on for me today, but it's possibly connected to the fact that I'm in taper mode.
last saturday's ride to sundance and back (114 miles, 8 hours of saddle time, 10,300' of elevation gain) was my Big Final Ride of the training season leading up to lotoja.  once that peak is reached, I move into taper mode, where my miles-per-week are lessened, I try to rest more, I do more yoga.  the theory is that after one trains all summer, increasing the challenges to a peak, it's then time to cut back and rest up before the big event.
if I haven't trained hard enough yet, it's not going to happen in the last 10 days.
time to ease off.
relax a bit more.
rest.
and eat cake.
oops..... not sure about that last one, but I can't seem to convince myself that cake isn't part of the plan.
I hit taper time and think it's indulging time.
the right thing to do would be to eat more vegetables, dark leafy green things, protein, some fruit, drink lots of water.....
but I seem to want cake.

I'll never live in a ten-thousand-square-foot home on the hillside;  I'll never be an over-consumer.  I'll never forget that there are people who can't afford bread, let alone cake.

but I fear I'll always love cake just a little bit more than I should.


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