It’s late in the season, the nagging voice in the back of my head tells me. Yes yes. Only two and a half months left to train for my ride in late September. The heatwave has broken temporarily.

Saturday, July 21, wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t too cold. It was all very Goldilocks.

And yet. After a long, intense week that had me awake until after 1am every night, and usually between 2 and 4am for most of them, my body rebelled. I woke up yesterday at 5:30am, in plenty of time to get on the road to Nyack and put in a good 70 cycling miles or so. No good reason or excuse not to ride.

Our dog Sadie rearranged her chin on my foot. I couldn’t move.

Sadie, keeping the bed pillow warm for me.

“I’ll sleep another hour,” I told myself. I texted my training partner in crime, Terry, to say I’d be heading out late and that he should leave without me if he needed to. I was out again in less than a minute, that dreamless sleep of the half-dead. I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, so when Terry vibrated back at 6:30, it woke me.

“I am bailing, too, how funny! Enjoy the day,” he wrote. “I’m not bailing yet,” I thought to myself. “It’s still early.” And I promptly fell asleep again.

My friend Kerri, who is training for a half-marathon (I know; I can’t imagine doing it, either), often runs on the same West Side path along the Hudson that I take to bike out of Manhattan. She sent a text at 8am to say she was starting late, so she probably wouldn’t see me on the road today. Kerri was on her way out the door, but in my Brooklyn bed, Jen was snoring her light cat purr, and Sadie got up, stretched, and spun in three circles before flopping back down into the crook of my knee. In my head, I was mentally dressing myself, slurping down coffee and a smoothie, and rushing out the door to zip zip zip the eight miles to catch Kerri.

“I’m in a blue tank,” Kerri wrote. “Bet you bike faster than I run!”

“I am in my jammies,” I wrote back. And I rolled over and zonked out again.

I didn’t go riding today. These things happen. Jen and I talked over coffee and crumpets, the latter part of a food birthday gift package from Jen’s brother and sister-in-law. It’s the first time in weeks that I’ve has something other than a fruit smoothie for breakfast on Saturday. It is also the first time in ages that I’ve had a real, leisurely weekend morning with my spouse.

Later in the day, we took a long walk to Brooklyn Heights to the dog run, and I checked in with my friend who lives nearby to see if she wanted to meet us there with her nine-month-old baby. No hills yesterday except the Hillside Dog Run.

My usual inclination when I don’t feel like riding is to push myself. I go anyway. Discipline was so hard for me to learn, some part of me feels like I have to practice it all the time lest I lapse into my old, feast-or-famine ways. But I guess adapting and listening to what your body and spirit need is as much part of training and discipline as anything. For my usual 70-mile training tide, I went today, Sunday. I hadn’t planned to ride this Sunday for sure. But I did. My body didn’t know it was Sunday. The hills didn’t care either.

Maybe some weekends, discipline is knowing and accepting your limits and adapting. If you can’t today, you adapt and do tomorrow what you didn’t or couldn’t do yesterday.

On Saturday, this is what I did instead of training, which is, some days, it seems, just what a body needs.

Me, unable to resist the baby cuteness.

Jen, serving as the practice patient for a future dental technician.

“Fur, especially on the ears, is very, very soft.”

Baby sandwich!