Confession time: I sometimes go in and out of a funk. Sometimes I follow that negative thought all the way into self pity party. Sometimes I get stuck at the party and need a way to extract myself. First rule: Don’t beat myself up for ending up at the pity party. Maybe part of me knew I had to release some emotions and the pity party is a safe space to do that in. Maybe I went out of an old habit. Doesn’t matter. It’s OK that I ended up there. Now, I can choose to leave.

The second rule: Decide how to leave.  Yesterday, I mentioned how visiting friends with a bit of retail therapy and ice cream helped ease me out of a funk. And it did. But there was a Gremlin who didn’t get the memo that we had left the self pity party. And we all ended up going back to the party to bring him back, even though we knew from years of watching Lifetime TV movies, that returning to the scene of a bad party was part of the formula for mid-level thrillers with an unsatisfying ending.

And so this time, I brought out the big guns. It was time to register for races for the first half of the year.

I am already committed to Ironman Texas 70.3 on April 1. I’m racing that with my good friends Walker and Theo and have been training and preparing for that for months now. But what else did I want to do? I never really gave myself a chance to reflect on what it was I wanted for my training and racing in 2012. And there was no better way to lift myself out of the funk then by diving into the world wide web with my credit card and my gut. And so away I went. All the things I’ve talked about doing, I jumped in and registered for:

Flower City Half Marathon in Rochester, N.Y. on April 29.  This will be less than a month after Texas 70.3. There is no intention to PR here. The intention is to run hard and strong. The intention is to sustain my mojo.

Sehgahunda Trail Marathon at Letchworth State Park, May 26. I found this while searching for a running event with Sue one morning at Panera’s. It looks hard. Really hard. I haven’t done a lot of trail running, but that’s part of the challenge. My goal is to hit the cutoff times and finish. It’s to push myself out of my comfort zone, way out of my comfort zone, and reaffirm to myself that I’m strong, adventurous and capable of more than I thought possible.

DoubleMussel at Musselman in Geneva, N.Y. July 14-15. I’ve been intrigued by the DoubleMussel since I started doing this event four years ago. I’ve done the sprint triathlon on Saturday. I’ve done the 70.3 on Sunday. Now, I’m going to do them both. Back-to-back. The course is already difficult, particularly the bike and the run. It’s another insanely difficult challenge for me, one that again is not about speed but about cultivating confidence and impressing myself, even if no one else gives a damn.

At the end of the day what matters most is how I feel about myself. My experiences with life will flow from there. I’ll ride the bumps and move in and out of the funks easier if my beliefs about myself center on strength and fearlessness and peace and authenticity. I’ll still visit those pity parties every so often. But I won’t be staying very long.

There’s a possibility I may throw in a first-year 70.3 race — Pain in the Alleghenies scheduled for Sept. 23 in Allegany State Park. But we’re only working on the next six months right now. Stay tuned. Because as Jay-Z says in one of my favorite workout songs: You all should be afraid of what I’m gonna do next.