When did you last feel like you had been reborn?

Maybe you know this: You freed yourself from something or someone and are free and crisp! First you feel stale because there is a hole, and the old habit is missing. But once you’ve overcome that, things get good!

For me it was like this: Once I understood there wouldn’t be any races due to Corona last year and I wasn’t following a training plan anymore, I felt like I had been reborn. I never got up at 5:15 am anymore to dunk my sleepy body into the cold water to swim. I didn’t go on 6-hour bike rides and forced my tired legs to run afterwards. No more track workouts, no tempo runs. Suddenly I had such magnificent gaps in my day. Oh, those gaps, those exquisite gaps! There weren’t just time slots available, occasionally I found myself not having a single appointment all weekend.

Triathlon will most certainly remain part of my DNA. It’s a part of my biography, the desire to move is in me and will always be there. I know that. But things change.

„The times they are changing.“

Now I wake up on saturdays and instead of jumping out of bed to go train, I stay there, naked and clumsy like a newborn on a white sheet, looking at the wall, waiting for the sunrise as if I’m seeing it all for the very first time. And then I start having all these ideas I wouldn’t have had if my head had been filled with questions like: Did you charge your Garmin? Is there enough Carbopro? Where is my dark weather lens? Now I just lay there, and my main character starts to talk, the dialogue I am currently working on develops itself … all by itself. Just because I … yeah, because I don’t have ANY plans. So. Hooray to doing absolutely nothing.

New light, new life.

Thies song by Depeche Mode comes to my mind. Suddenly there is music everywhere. Everything feels new and very beautiful as if I had opened a valve and joy is just gushing out of it. You must write this down, I think. And that’s what I do now. I write. That’s my new world.

Do you know this free and easy feeling of happiness?