Who is that jerk?!

All riders know this guy. You're riding along and he passes you without a word. As he goes ahead of you he doesn't even acknowledge you're alive. Then he peddles into the distance and disappears. You think to yourself, "What a jerk! There isn't a race going on around here or anything. Geez."

Well I've turned into that jerk it seems. Haha.

I think there have been a few things that have turned me from the nice guy that says "Hi" to everyone to the guy that never looks at anyone else and just wants to get past the slow poke in front of him.

The short list:

- Stress in life (thus I need an outlet, which means riding "angry")
- Wanting to get faster
- *Enjoying* riding faster and not wanting to settle for slow
- Competitive nature

All these things listed above add up and make me want to ride faster. With riding faster comes a few bad side effects. You don't have the time to talk to other riders as you pass and you seem to not care for anyone else because every stop etc. takes away from your "time".

I think I need to take my time more and not try to race around every trail I go on. Maybe 1 race day a week and the rest at a casual pace.

The real problem is that on certain trails I'm not having fun anymore unless I'm pushing myself and trying to go faster and faster. Especially on shorter rides. I feel like I've built up a lot of stamina for 1 hour rides, so anything around that time means I'm going to push _hard_ for an hour. After all my body seems to handle that with no problem.

Also I'm wondering if the biggest boon to my performance hasn't been girl problems. The more girl problems I have the more frustrated I get, which in turn means the more I want to take out those frustrations on the bike.

I'm sure someone somewhere said "You can't ride away from your problems ...", but they were obviously WRONG. Ha.