I’m not sure I’d say I love–or even like–working out. I do it, largely because I have to in order to get and stay healthy. To some extent, there’s a social theme to working out when I go swimming with my friends on Thursday nights. But aside from that, I do it because I believe it’s in my best interest.

All of that said, there can be a large difference in the way I work out, even if I meet whatever goal I’ve written down for the day.

Today’s bike ride was what I call a “mid”–mid length, meaning about 25-30 miles, so about two hours. The weather this afternoon was sunny but relatively cool and quite windy. So I took off for two hours, but the course was mostly flat–no hills of any significance to speak of–and the pace was quite leisurely. I did break a sweat–a somewhat significant one–but it was far from a challenging ride.

Tomorrow, on the other hand, will be different, weather permitting. The goal is 45 miles in under three hours. That ride is from my home in Kane’ohe to the top of Makapu’u by way of Kailua and Waimanalo–those of you who live on the island of O’ahu know what that’s like. There’s two significant hills on that ride: Makapu’u and Keolu. It’s not like I’ve not done this before–this ride is a mainstay of my training–but if I’m going to get it done in under three hours I have to ride pretty quickly, which means hard up some hills and fast back down them. Hard workouts are not always fun–while I like the feeling of having eaten a big hill for breakfast, I sure don’t like the hard breathing and painful legs on the way up–but they end up giving some positive rewards.

Could I do an easy 45 mile ride? Sure. It would involve lots of flat ground and a leisurely pace. There’s certainly training benefit to that–doing something is far better than doing nothing. But some workouts need to be hard, and some need to be easy. If I did easy workouts all the time, I’d be much less likely to benefit as much as I could.

So tomorrow I’ll do hard time. It’s okay. I had an easy day today. It’ll be worth it in the end, even if it isn’t something I love–or even like–to do.