[Sportsandrec] Motivation

[Thornbury, Kelly]

Well, the first person to come up with the universal answer to motivation will earn PhDs from the over priced ivory-league university of their choice, and Nobel Prizes will rain down on you for years to come. Sports psychology is a billion dollar industry these days, with everyone from golfers to MMA fighters using sports psychologists for motivation, not one of those sports shrinks has the real answer. On the other hand, just because there is no one right answer doesn't mean there isn't a thousand right ones, its just a matter of finding the ones that are right for you, and ultimately only you can decide which ones those are. 

Based on what I've read from and about you, and on a very brief conversation at a Dallas convention tandem ride a few years ago, my guess would be that competition and striving at those competitions was a big motivator in your exercise life...You had a goal to work towards and that got you in the gym. My second guess would be that you've lost the "goal of competition," and hence the motivation. 
While I am physically active every day, and I workout between three and six days a week depending on which cycle I'm in, I don't compete, and I don't have the motivation to do anything more than "maintenance" workouts instead of really pushing towards a performance goal. 
In the areas of sports and exercise psychology, most texts stress the importance of setting goals for motivation, followed closely by using intrinsic (internal) motivators as much as possible. On goal setting, my favorite paraphrased quote is that you may have the best compass, maps, and GPS units, but you'll never know what path to take if you don't know where you want to end up". On intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, you may be motivated by filling your mantle with trophies and ribbons, but in the end the true and lasting motivation has to come from inside yourself...You have to have the mindset and desire to perform any task, and that's a great source of motivation. 
There was a time when you were motivated to hit the gym religiously, now its time to look back on that part of your life and try to rekindle those factors of your exercise life, and possibly find some new avenues of motivation from the rest of the list.