Self Sabotage

I keep having to remind myself how much I dislike hiking by myself. I forget. I start thinking about how fun it will be to climb something and someone else isn't around who wants to go, and when I go and do it I find myself pretty much instantly now saying "I hate this" It's the weirdest thing - a complete cognitive disconnect. I wonder if this is what childbirth is like? No, this isn't even close, but the crave/hate phenomena seems to come up in a lot of ways. Addiction comes to mind but I don't have an overpowering urge to hike, I just like to explore, but don't like to feel like I *have* to do it alone.

One issue is that after snow, dirt just isn't any fun at all. Climbing snow is much more work, but snow is much more fun. It's prettier, and it often doesn't hurt when you fall on it. (Though granted it can be cold, and it can be hazardous in different ways than dirt and rock.) My last snowshoeing day trip I was fine, my last time on dirt at Mt Diablo (Eagle Peak) I was miserable even though everything went well.

I'm also setting myself up to fail on Shasta and I'm not sure what's going on. I'm not getting enough time to train and am unwilling to make more time. I even paid a trainer to design a perfect strength workout for me, but the best I can do is once a week instead of twice. At least I am exercising in some fashion pretty much every day, but it's not likely to be enough. My goal at Shasta is pretty modest. Get further than Lake Helen as that's the furthest I've been so far. This is totally within my grasp as I've been up to Helen at least twice and could have gone further, but wanted to glissade. Now that I've spent a couple of winters skiing I can probably resist the perfect glissade and continue on.

But I'm having a major attitude struggle and after this climbing season I really do need to take a break from it. (It really is time to get that road bike and deal with my hip injury). Though I fear pausing climbing as I will be 50 in a few years and while people climb well into their 70s, it's harder, and I fear my MS symptoms coming back and interfering with things like walking. Of course, this worry and stress doesn't help preventing my MS symptoms. They say that MS really isn't stress related (an old disproven theory was that MS was stress related), but the more stressed I am the worse my symptoms are. Within 3 hours of learning that my beloved dog Cali had a spleen full of tumors and had to have it removed right then, I went half blind in one eye. This wasn't psychosomatic, a later MRI showed damage to the optic nerve. Fortunately, I recovered from that, but the lesson for me is pretty clear. Beat up on yourself at your peril. Of course, then I start beating up on myself for beating up on myself. I'm so good at this. Sigh.