If you’re reading this blog, chances are you would describe yourself as an “outdoorsy” person. There are other areas of the country that are saturated with “outdoorsy” people when driving down the freeway, it’s common to see bike racks, rocket boxes, and ski racks on cars, and various bumper stickers indicating your various outdoor obsessions. People define themselves based on what they do with their free time. “Hi! My name is Sonya. I’m a mountain biker. what’s your name?” “Hi, my name is Ryan. I’m a climber.” “Hi, my name is James. I’m a Renaissance Man.” You get the picture.
I was working at Veloswap on Saturday at the Ergon booth and I realized that most people that live in this area are people who spend their free time and funds on outdoor activities. It shouldn’t have been a shock or realization, but when you see it every day, you kind of forget that the rest of the country might do different things on the weekend. The point of this post is to bring to your awareness this very fact if you’ve never thought about it.
In other areas, people will run for exercise, and 30 minutes is good…. or they go to the gym for an hour to lift weights. It doesn’t take up over half their day. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this picture. The fact is that people perform physical activity for different reasons, whether it be to look good, they like how they feel afterwards, guilt, because their doctor told them to, or simply because they have a love for what they are doing. For me personally and I know for a lot of my friends, our weekends are centered around an outdoor activity – bike riding, hiking, climbing, kayaking, skiing to hit a few big ones. That is considered pretty “normal.”
On Sunday, I had a bit of a mental breakdown simply because I had being doing too much for too long. I decided not to spend my day playing in the great outdoors and have a change of pace. I thought to myself, “Ok, what do people do on the weekend if they don’t do an outdoor activity?” Actually, I phrased it, “What do ‘normal’ people do” and depending on what you define as ‘normal’, this question gets tricky. So I sat down on my couch and picked up the remote control. I don’t condemn TV watchers, I just don’t make time for it. I realized that I had not turned on the TV to watch a channel in probably 9 months. My housemate had even updated our cable package and we have one of those comcast remotes with a million buttons. I admit that it took me a minute to figure out how to use it with all the buttons(like how do I turn on the damn thing?). I quickly grew bored channel surfing, and that was that…I gave it a shot. Next, I went to a Broncos game (UGHHH, bad game) and also to a movie. “This is what normal people do on weekends,” I thought. I wonder what else people do when they don’t spend a lot of their time outside on the weekend? I can think of things I like to do that don’t involve exercise – read, play guitar, watch a movie until I get ADD and have to go do something else, write, hang out with friends, cook, go out to eat, go shopping, go for a walk (oh wait, that’s exercise…!) As much as I fight to be a well-rounded individual, it is still clear to me that my life is heavily weighted on playing outside, and that’s they way I like it.
The fact is that we love our outdoor activities and our weekend filled with nature and fresh air. Some of us don’t do much else on the weekend. I started wondering if we are missing out on other aspects of life by being obsessed with our sports and concluded that the answer is yes. While you might have a love affair with different mountain activities, you miss out on time with certain friends and our family. We don’t do as many “cultural” things as we could. Heck, we probably don’t relax enough either, but this is the opportunity cost for our obsession. We probably spend our money on different things (like a ski pass, a new bike, a new down jacket). I think it’s good to take a step back and look outside our own little world every once in awhile, who knows what new, fun thing or perspective you might find.
It felt good to do something different for a day, but I definitely heard the mountains whispering to me to come back! Just some food for thought… now where is my bike! ;)
