body

As I mentally drafted a typical (read: long) report for yesterday’s race, I realized that I was actually meditating on the unintended consequences of my new hobby.

There’s a fitness consequence obviously. (You should see the 55+ y.o. racers, who’ve been doing this for decades. They’re built like college kids.)

And being sore and bruised and probably scabby until about Tuesday.

Damage to the bike: oh my yes. Even if you don’t crash, mud acts like an abrasive so everything wears out much faster. I haven’t degreased my chain for a month.

My notion of “bad weather” has changed. I spent all October wishing for rain. How sick is that?

I discovered my body is capable of much more than I have ever asked of it. It’s an amazing machine untested by modern life. I went almost 40 years regarding myself as “unathletic” because I can’t throw or catch (true!) but it turns out throwing and catching are optional components of “athletics.”

Here’s a biggie: 45 minutes of pretty hard suffering every week has reset my concept of “suffering.” For example I have dispensed with rain gear on my commute. It seldom takes longer than 45 minutes to get wherever I’m going, and that’s only when I want it to. What, you can’t be wet and cold (alternatively: hot and sweaty) for 45 measly minutes?

Or when a colleague asks for a “small project” that I know will be an annoying pain in the ass ... the kind of thing I might shove to the edge of the desk and defer and delay until the last possible minute. Seriously, how long do most small projects take? Maybe 45 minutes of intense concentration? More than this?

Photo by Will Sullivan

I spent the whole weekend cleaning. I mean like the whole weekend because I got up at 6:00 each day and fell into bed exhausted at 8:30. And I mean like cleaning as in rake up all the leaves and windfall from last week's storm, and pick up the dog poop in the yard, and sweep the porch and the patio and the street in front of the house (and did you know red cedars lose about half their needles in the fall? I did not), and mulch the garden¹, and air out the garage, and scrub the bathrooms and kitchen, and vacuum the basement and stairs.

Then last night I shaved my head and shaved my face like I do every Sunday night and I woke up this morning feeling new born.

¹So I have this theoretical method of garden mulching inspired by a phrase I heard somewhere: “compost is what happens when you pile up organic material.” In September, I cleared the vegetable garden (which had become badly overgrown under the previous owners’ tenure) and have been fighting weeds there ever since. So instead of spending the winter fighting those weeds, I piled up all the pine needles and leaves from the yard, which cover the garden to a depth of about 8 inches. My theory is that some of those leaves will compost into the soil (which is pretty rich already), and the rest will a) discourage weeds and b) encourage earthworms. I can pull away the mulch in the spring and add it to the compost pile, which should be pretty mature by then anyway. We’ll see how that works out...

The traffic dangers of cycling fatalities are offset at least 10 to 1 by the cardiovascular health benefits.

From John Pucher, via this video (around minute 23)

Update: Also: “For every hour you spend cycling, you add more than an hour to your lifespan.”