I tend to write my blog posts ahead of when I need them. At present, I have twelve draft posts at various stages of completion. As a new month comes around, I pick a draft that seems the most ready and complete it for that month. In between, I work on various of these drafts as ideas come to me. Sometimes one of these drafts reaches final form before the beginning of a month such that all I have to do is post it. Almost as easy, sometimes when I turn my attention to an unfinished draft, it comes together pretty much the way I expected it to when I started it. However, as I have mentioned on this blog before, one of the ways I think is to write, and that means that sometimes I pick a draft to finish for the month and as I try to complete it, it goes sideways. That is exactly as it should be, that is what it means to think by writing. From a practical point of view, sometimes that is fine but sometimes it is a challenge. Sometimes I simply follow the post where it wants to go and that is what gets posted. Sometimes, however, I cannot do that, either because completing that post would take more time than I have or because what I learn as I write is that the idea that inspired that draft was flawed and I end up discarding it. In that case, I move on to one of my other drafts. In the case of this month's post, I repeated that process three times. At that point, almost half way through the month in which the post was to appear, I decided my inability to complete any of my draft posts had to itself become the post; I have to blog about the fact that I have Blogger's Block.
Why do I have Blogger's Block? A while back, I posted that when I have trouble blogging, that often reflects a problem with my cycling and that certainly could be true this time, both in the long term and in the short term. Long term, I have found it harder to maintain a consistent and sufficient riding schedule ever since my move to Emerald Hills in 2020. I think the hills around my new home, the COVID pandemic, and my advancing age all factor into this. In the short term, I am just now coming out of a month long slump caused by a combination of a nasty norovirus infection, bad weather, and discouragement. However, in addition to whatever impact my cycling problems had on my ability to complete a blog post, I think there was a conceptual issue which also got in the way. That conceptual issue is that I don't understand how to quantitate the impact of Intensity on both my Fatigue and on my Fitness. (Intensity is how "hard" I ride, e.g. how fast.) I know Intensity matters, I just don't know how much. I think that every time I tried to finish a post, I ran into this issue and got stuck.
What are the twelve draft blog posts I have queued up and why can't I complete any of them? Here are their tentative titles:
- Perverse Incentives
- Perspective
- Heart Rate: A Sanity Check
- Using the Banister Model Before and During Training
- Displaying Fatigue, Fitness, Form, and Load
- I Am Old
- The Metric Revisited
- Current Status of My Bikes
- Not Door to Door
- 50,000 Miles ... and Now What?
- Hughes ToDos
- Ideas
