I am currently situated at the tail end of my second year studying Psychology at Aberystwyth University. A great deal has happened since my last post now over five months ago. Since then I have been further incentivised to get back to writing by a number of reasons, admittedly one of these reasons being a consistent rise in the value of Bitcoin. So I figured I give this another good stab.
Sunset, north beach Aberystwyth.
The start of second year was highly predictable, a lot of narrative from department staff saying the stabilisers are off and we don't have wiggle room to screw up anymore. A lot of new complex challenges were thrust upon us, learning new arts of analysing qualitative data, new statistical software to master etc. All of these things a pain and of very little interest to me. The whole reason I came to Aberystwyth in the first place was to train. I had and still have no real genuine interest in Psychology or much anything at academic, but I have to jump through the hoops in order to stay. A lot of money and debt just to escape from home and look like you are doing something useful with your life you could argue. But you cannot put a price on what I have gained outside of the academic work here, this is the place where the Lord decided to save me (if this is the first you've heard of this check out my testimony. That and a few other things I'll talk about in later posts.
It took me months to find my rhythm at the start of second year, a lot of early starts around 3 or 4 AM mostly. Which soon proved to become unsustainable. A lot of this was built on the idea of trying to cram in a lot of bike training volume in before the day really began, this mostly consisted of me riding indoor sessions in a crappy dark bike lockup a few metres from my flat.
Busting out the Watts in the dark, damp, cold bike lockup.
It began to become clear that these was unsustainable often also being forced up late and morale failing due to uninteresting sessions on the bike, I later moved onto following a program on Zwift and moving my indoor bike set up to my girlfriend's garage in the house she was renting about 700m from my place.
Regarding the rest of training I had a long road ahead to rebuild myself in my swimming and running after taking time off after Ironman Hamburg where I went absolute all in.
Swimming up to this point has gone swimmingly, I am the fastest and strongest I have ever been in the water and injury free I am thankful to say. Running started to get where it had been during the summer just after Christmas around semester two. But not long after things started looking up, disaster struck. I completely wrecked my perineal tendon on my left ankle. Purely from overuse and what has now become clear, terrible running form. I have not run to this day for 14 weeks. Most running injuries I have had have cleared up in a just a few weeks, but this one really did a number on me. I couldn't walk without being in a solid 8/10 pain for weeks. Cycling didn't seem to aggravate it so I continued for a time, but as I was making little progress making it better, I stopped that too for a about 3 weeks with the hope of it helping, long story short it didn't. So all I had to try and keep me sane was swimming.
With the lack of running and cycling, my entire brain chemistry started to fall apart, and I became miserable. For most of my more recent secular life, training was my only solid reason to not kill myself, it gave me reason to live. But now being under Grace, I had to endure. It has been a tremendous test. With little to stimulate me, former addictions started to rear their ugly heads like porn and junk food. As a result in the midst of my misery I gained 14 kg (that's just over 2 stone or 30 lbs). Not good.
At present I am about to start running again after working for weeks with an absolute star of a physio therapist. Cycling is getting up to scratch again training exclusively on Zwift and swimming strong. Academically, weak.
Got a lot more posts and announcements from the past academic year, so stayed tuned.