Time For A Change
Sometimes in life things happen for a reason and I am a true believer of this. As humans we can’t learn to grow into the person we are meant to be without certain adversities. When I was first injured in my car accident back in 2010 I was not the man I am today. It took that devastating accident to make me step back and look at the path I was on just to realize it wasn’t taking me somewhere I wanted to be. Through that experience I gained maturity as well as the ability to realize I can make it through anything no matter how hard it may seem. Fast forward to today and I’m a stronger man and more focused on my goals. Goals of being a good husband, a good father, a good Christian, as well as a good athlete.
I’ve also had the goal for any years now of making it to the paralympics and add being a paralympian to my achievements. Accomplishing this goal does have it fair shares of ups and downs. One day you can be on top of the world feeling great and the next day can be the complete opposite. That’s just the life of an elite athlete. Everyone just sees the social media posts of me traveling the world and earning medals. What they don’t see are the injuries, the tough workouts, or the daily struggle of balancing training full time, having a job, and having a family. Recently an injury has set me back quite a bit. For the last 2 months I haven’t rode much and have focused solely on getting back to 100 percent. After countless visits to different doctors and specialist I’m finally starting to get back to normal. Structured training has resumed along with a very risky bit important change. I’ve decided after 8 years of working with the same coach that id make a coaching change. Im 42 and not getting any younger and just don’t know how much longer I can continue to race at a high level. This is where I go back to everything happens for a reason. My injury forced me to take some time off and really think about the direction I wanted to go in my future. Which led me to the decision that a coaching change could be good. It was one of the hardest things to move on from a coach that isn’t only my coach but a good friend. I prayed for weeks about this and ultimately chose to try something new. The hope is with a different style of coaching I can take another step up in my fitness. This new coach will take a more scientific approach to coaching where lactate test will be performed regularly to see where I need to improve. Im very intrigued and motivated to see where I can go from here. Maybe it works maybe it doesn’t, but it was something I have to try or I may regret it later. So now it’s back to work with structured training again. World championships are in America for the first time in 10 years so I’m going to give it my best shot to have my best race ever there.
