He sat in my office with his arms gesticulating over his head in a foggy blur telling me “You’ve got great ideas, but it’s this, and this and that going on all over the place. What you need to do is pull it all together.”
He has a point.
One of my biggest problems is focus. 
I get into something hard core, then leave it for a shiny new object. I have several blogs and video channels and have great starts on a lot of them, but they are wasting away like an extinct culture.
But training has me by the balls. It reminds me of drumming, and just like sports, I have always had a jones for drumming.
I used to bartend at a dank little live music club in Rockford, Illinois and I would ignore customers much of the time to watch drummers. It was vaguely creepy, but I just had to learn drums.
One night after my favorite band finished the drummer stood by the bar throwing away what looked to me like perfectly good drum sticks.*
I’m like, “Dude, what are you doing?”
“Ahh, these things are fraying all over the place.”
I said I would take them and another shitty drummer was born.
I lived across the street from the club above a t-shirt company that I owned at the time and went home that night, grabbed four card board boxes, and set up a “drum set” in my living room using lamp shades as cymbals. While it might strike you as strange, I actually got bored with hitting boxes so I started lugging the entire club drum kit back to the print shop on nights when we didn’t have open stage.
I played those drums all night long. Me, locked alone in an dark storage area, lost in my beats, and pissing off my only neighbor, but he was rather demure and had several issues he didn’t want his landlord to know about.
I was obsessed and drove local drummers crazy with my questions.
What’s your favorite drill? How do you make that sound? How do I clean cymbals? Should I use a metronome or play to music? How do I hold these sticks? Who’s your favorite drummer? Do you get a lot of women?
One night, I asked a drummer, if the shoes he was wearing were good drumming shoes. He kinda gave me a look, then peered down at his loafers and said, “They are tonight.”
With that lesson in the can, I am doing my best to refrain from too many questions because it seems like people who are good at things (and do them often) don’t like to talk about them in social settings. Too bad runners! I have some fucking questions!
But, that’s for another blog.
My point is, I have the same passion for triathlon training as I did for drumming and it makes sense. I’m an athlete to the core and for years he has been buried under a quest for irony.
Recently after seeing a post-triathlon picture of me smiling like a little kid, a friend of mine told me “You seem much happier as an athlete. The lean without the mean.”
He has a point, too.
Like my co-worker said, I need to weave it all together. I have been into so many things and have so many interests that I need to design it all into a lifestyle. What fires me up more than anything is, I can see how training will be the catalyst that brings the diversity together. It is slowly stripping irrelevant thought and letting me focus on the prize.
* It’s worthy of note that this drummer has also recently gotten into running and is kicking ass. This weekend’s Chicago Marathon will be his first and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he qualifies for Boston.