“The price of anything is the amount of life you give for it.” - Henry David Thoreau (the Alchemist?)
Friday night is when everyone is supposed to unwind from the stresses of their work by drinking like the world is going to end on Saturday and staying out until dawn to find out if it will. At any given bar, you’ll see college students partying in the bubble that protects them from the real world, even though a Friday night isn’t all too different from a Wednesday or Thursday to a college student; thirty-something young professionals at the bar gibing at the college students, trying, and failing, to mask their envy; and the regulars eating peanuts and nursing individual pitchers of beer, although they’re slightly happier than other days because it’s Friday, after all. Even the bartender serving you your drinks is expected to join in the party. This Friday, I went home kind of early – if you consider 11 p.m. early – and fell asleep soon after that. As I was nestling under the throw blanket on my couch, the soft glow of ESPN putting me into a trance – I am a bachelor, you know – a friend who had come home from school for her Spring break sent me a text message urging me to go back out to the bar. I was already wearing sweatpants and still more than a little buzzed, so I ignored it and fell asleep. I apologized for flaking out on her the next day, but she not only rejected that apology, but also called me a ghost. Ouch. It’s not that I don’t like her – she’s an awesome person, someone as charmingly nerdy as I am – but rather, my Saturday morning is so damn busy that I can’t afford to stay out later than 11, and staying at the bar even that late is probably too long.
Every Saturday, I wake up by 7 a.m. to meet up with a group of other (and better) triathletes to run, swim, and bike, not always in that order, but always all three. I usually don’t finish working out until noon and by then I’m exhausted. Training to race triathlons takes hours of practice and unparalleled commitment. It’s something that I’ve decided to jump into with my fullest determination, hazy Friday nights be damned, and because of my bullheadedness, or maybe my incapability to allow myself to half-ass anything, I show up every Saturday, not really bright-eyed or bushy-tailed, but ready to work nonetheless. To say you can’t understand why I’d do this to myself, to limit my “fun” on weekend nights, to exercise until my veins pump battery acid, would be a lie – you understand completely, you just haven’t thought about it deep enough.
We all have goals, reasons for being. We work our jobs so we can start families or earn enough money to fall into the lifestyles we dream about having; study hard to ace tests to be the best in our classes so we can land our dream jobs; or pluck at guitar strings for hours each day until we sound like John Mayer clones. Humans are driven by their obsessions, or to make it sound less like a disease, goals. When we find something we really want, we work tirelessly to get it, and those who reach their goals are successes. Or so I’d like to believe. I’m walking a fine line between abandoning my social life on weekends and exhausting myself, but in doing so I’ve found something worth striving for. My day job isn’t what I want to do for a career and I’m not in school, but I’m working on both of those things and I hope to have something new to drive me in the near future. I’m putting such great effort into my training to reach my goal of being an above average triathlete, an elite amateur if you will, and subsequently to have a purpose for being.
I’m giving up a part of my social life to have a better, happier life. I hope I won’t alienate some of my friends while doing this. And I hope I don’t lose my taste for beer.
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