Solo or No-Go?

I'm feeling a little lost today and I need to sort through all the junk in my head. Please bear with me!

Actually I'm not sure I even can sort through it all here, because it would end up being the longest blog post in the history of the internet, and anyone who made it all the way to the end would quickly be looking into whether it's still possible to have crazy people locked up in an asylum!

So here's how this unraveling started: Candice, my partner in crime and much-needed kick in the pants who restarted my triathlon journey this year, might have to drop out due to injuries. I'm praying she will find a way to continue, but I have to face the very real possibility that she can't.

Now, WITH Candice, doing a tri this year is an insane adventure and an opportunity for bonding and deepening our friendship. We both came into this with different emotional baggage, different things to prove, and different obstacles to overcome, but we've been able to learn from and encourage each other. Even though the timing seemed crazy when she first presented the idea, it quickly began to feel right somehow, perhaps even "meant to be," as cheesy as that sounds.

WITHOUT Candice, doing a tri this year is all of the insanity with none of the good stuff that makes it almost make sense.

I could make a rather lengthy list of reasons why I should not be preparing for a triathlon at this moment in time. I've been working on such a list in my head all day, in fact. Some of the top factors are inadequate supplies of time, energy, and money. I could go into detail about each of those, but "longest blog post in history," yadda yadda. In a nutshell, I can think of MANY reasons why I should not proceed with my triathlon plans without Candice, and instead should spend the next year building up my base level of endurance and working through all the other obstacles before actually entering a race.

That conclusion is almost too logical though, so naturally I have to second-guess it and wonder if I'm really just looking for excuses to chicken out and give up on myself rather than follow through with something so challenging. Is that it? Am I just being a big ol' wuss? Do I need to go ahead with the tri ASAP just to prove to myself that I'm NOT a wuss? Aaaaaaand the headgames have begun. I'm a mental case for sure.

I truly don't know what to do. There is an earlier event that I could do without Candice that would solve some (but not all) of my problems, obstacles, fears, and issues, but it creates a few more of its own by being sooner -- I seriously doubt I will be ready in time. So I don't know if that's a reasonable solution. All I know is I need to figure something out soon because I'm cracking up and starting to wonder whether I really want to do a triathlon at all, ever. Maybe my brand of crazy isn't the right kind needed for this sort of thing.

Or maybe it's exactly the right kind. I just don't know.