This month began with a lot of forward motion.
Florian and I spent eight days cycling through Champagne and Colmar, covering roughly 625 kilometers. The trip itself wasn’t heavily structured; it was just long stretches of countryside, quiet roads, and the simple daily act of pedaling.
When I got home, I knew I was physically exhausted. I made the conscious decision to take a couple of days completely off to rest and recover. It felt like the right thing to do.
But those few days off accidentally removed the guardrails.
Instead of a clean reset, the sudden lack of movement opened the door for inertia. At the same time, the weight of navigating life began to catch up with me. The habits that normally feel automatic suddenly felt impossibly heavy.
My mistake wasn’t taking a break; it was how I tried to come out of it. Instead of easing back in, accepting my lower energy, and gathering micro-momentum, I demanded that I immediately snap back into my regular rhythm at top speed. I tried to force a 100% output when my emotional tank was running on empty. Because I couldn’t match that unrealistic pace, the gears jammed entirely. What was supposed to be a short pause quietly turned into a downward spiral, leaving me jaded, stuck at a complete standstill, and waiting for the motivation to magically return.
For a week or so, I was incredibly hard on myself.
When you value consistency, watching yourself slide into a slump feels like a personal failure. I looked at my sluggish mornings with frustration, demanding to know why I couldn’t just perform. It is easy for the internal critic to take over during a low week, but beating myself up didn’t generate any momentum; it just made the spiral feel heavier.
Eventually, I had to realize that I had the equation backward. We tend to think that motivation creates action, but when you are in a slump, it’s the other way around. Action has to precede motivation. You have to overcome the initial friction just to get the wheels to turn once, even if the first pedal stroke feels awkward and entirely uninspired. You can’t shift straight into the highest gear from a dead stop.
Coincidentally, I got a new bike after the trip. I didn’t buy it to solve my routine or to force myself out of a funk, but in retrospect, it helped a little. It became a low-stakes excuse to just get outside and feel the familiar sensation of movement without any pressure to perform. It was a small way to generate a tiny bit of micro-momentum when everything else felt stagnant.
I am slowly working my way back up now. The routine isn’t flawless, and the pace isn’t what it was, but the wheels are turning again.
I’ve come to accept that brakes do get applied sometimes in the journey, even when we don’t intend them to. A downward spiral isn’t a permanent loss of discipline; sometimes it’s just the messy, chaotic way our mind and body force us to stop and process things.
The goal isn’t to ride at top speed without ever stopping. It’s learning how to forgive yourself for the weeks you lose momentum, and finding the patience to handle the heavy friction of starting over from zero.