{"id":252,"date":"2015-01-01T20:24:12","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T01:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/?p=252"},"modified":"2015-01-02T21:47:33","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T02:47:33","slug":"journeys-and-destinations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/journeys-and-destinations\/","title":{"rendered":"Journeys and Destinations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/115761075\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" title=\"Rapha&#039;s Festive 500\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t been cycling long enough to make a grand statement like &#8220;the <a title=\"Festive 500\" href=\"http:\/\/pages.rapha.cc\/festive-500-2014\" target=\"_blank\">Festive 500<\/a> made me fall in love with the bike again.&#8221; But it sure did make me realize just what makes this sport so special. But not at first.<\/p>\n<p>When I heard word of the challenge &#8211; ride 500 kilometers between Christmas and New Years &#8211; I reacted with a half-hearted and non-committal, &#8220;why not.&#8221; There are so many excuses for not riding over the holidays that I knew there would be an easy out, if and when I&#8217;d come to my senses to stick to shortbread cookies and roast turkey leftovers. Maybe it would be the Canadian Winter. Maybe it would be family commitments. Whatever the reason, I didn&#8217;t think I&#8217;d feel guilty about spending time off the bike.<\/p>\n<p>And then the challenge started. Each morning I&#8217;d look at the weather, and set goals for myself. Some days I&#8217;d surpass them, other days I&#8217;d fall short. But as the kilometers added up, I felt like I owed it to myself to finish.<\/p>\n<p>But then a funny thing happened. I realized that this whole time, my rides had been about getting to 500km above all else. Including actually enjoying myself. It sounds like a trite cliche (because it is a trite cliche) but the destination had become more important than the journey. This narrow focus on collecting miles made riding brainless, and kind of a chore. To fix that, I just went for a ride. I didn&#8217;t care about &#8220;segments&#8221; or PRs, my only focus was enjoying myself. Which meant going further than I ever have, to places I had never been. It meant laughing out loud to myself when it started snowing. And it meant witnessing the most beautiful winter sunset I&#8217;ve seen all year, and not caring one bit that I didn&#8217;t bring my camera along to #proveit.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s how I made it to 500km. And that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to take into 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t been cycling long enough to make a grand statement like &#8220;the Festive 500 made me fall in love with the bike again.&#8221; But it sure did make me realize just what makes this sport so special. But not at first. When I heard word of the challenge &#8211; ride 500 kilometers between Christmas [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[87,85,86,84,63],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-festive500","tag-gopro","tag-rapha","tag-strava"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidstrasser.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}