JQR’s secret city

I'm just back from this morning's run and can gladly report that it
was just about the same as yesterday's run: same number of calories,
same time, same distance. The one change is that I was a little faster
toward the end today and (conversely) slower in the beginning. My
guess, however, is that it's better to speed up toward the end
(reverse split) rather than lag, so I'm pleased by that.
 
Yesterday's bike ride was again a model of consistency, although I
changed my song to "In These Shoes?" by Kirsty MacColl, the
one gem from her otherwise disappointing Tropical Brainstorm
album, from the other day's "Metronomic Underground."
No me gusta caminar/no puedo andar por caballo, sings Kirsty's
backup chorus, and there I go, andar por bicicleta.
 
It was quite warm and pleasant out yesterday, and even though the wind
was kind of brisk, it was from the south, so it didn't bother me as
much. I knew I would have a good lap when with my torso tucked down
and pacing myself briskly along the open spot just parallel to the
runway I looked down and saw that I was working at 82% max heart rate.
I did the whole 7-mile lap in less than 22 minutes, or a 19 mph pace,
which was enough to bring the average for both laps up to a whisker
over 18 mph.
 
Today's bike picture is from Antwerp. I like the plastic leaves on the
fender stays, personally.

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Yesterday afternoon I managed to work in a 7.3 mile run, doing a
figure-eight, with the first loop down the long hill parallel to the
converted taxiway to the west from my lodging, around past the
junkyard and the secret city's front gate, then back up along 2nd
Street between the lodging and the refectory, and around to the east
along my usual route, past the giant white hangar where they keep the
UFO and down to 12th Street, where I turned around and then back past
the car wash, the firehouse, and the stadium.
 
By the time I got to that last mile, from the firehouse back to the
lodging, I was nicely warmed up and I had that long stride going, the
kind of stride where you feel as if the ground trembles a little bit
at each step from the sheer exhilaration of being such an important
part of such a good run for you. Where you feel as if the entire earth
is canted about five degrees downhill in your direction of travel,
that all that's necessary is to just cast yourself onto that azimuth
and gravity will take you along, like being in orbit, where you keep
falling toward the earth as is natural, but unlike ordinary running,
the earth keeps moving away and a little bit back from you.
 
This was the second time in a month that I'd done the same route, and
I was a little faster on it the first time (although on 12/22 I didn't
have the lovely gazelle stride down pat like yesterday). That day I
was all excited because I had managed at the very end to get my heart
rate up to what the monitor told me was 100% of maximum heart-rate
(but which was actually one measly beat-per-minute short.
 
Yesterday I had that in mind, and as I was coasting along the earth's
surface there on my last mile, I kept on trying to push myself hard
enough to finish strong, without wearing myself down prematurely.
There's some kind of balance there between the kinetic memory of
moving your muscles at a certain cadence, the rhythmic impact of the
feet on the pavement and the angle of attack of each footstep as
determined by the alignment of the pelvis, the memory of how to align
the spinal column on that moving platform of the pelvis and how to use
the hip flexors and abdominal muscles to keep it steadily upright, the
memory of moving breath in and out of the chest cavity using the
diaphragm muscle to squeeze and release from the bottom up, pressing
for leverage against that awesomely gliding platform of the pelvis,
the cadence again of breathing and feeling the air move in and out of
the pharynx (with its little skull mounted on top, like a plastic
baseball stuck on a car antenna) which is being kept open and inline
by the spinal column.
 
All those kinesthetic memories are flooding back, like a
seven-minute-mile madeline, at the same time that today's energy is
flooding out, and an entirely different nervous system is busy
checking on that, feeling how hard the heart is beating in its little
cozy cavity nestled between the lungs and the ribcage, feeling the
deoxygenated air being forced out of the lungs and newly oxygenated
air being drawn in through the alveoli, feeling the lactic acid build
up in the muscles of the lower extremities and being carried away by
the bloodstream: all that is entirely new every time I run and
entirely dependent on circumstances; how much I ate for lunch, how
cold is it outside, how much water I've drunk in the last couple
hours, et alia.
 
And somewhere in the middle is that barely conscious nervous plexus
that's adjusting the kinetic configuration according to the autonomic
nervous system's feedback about how much energy there is in the tank
and how much energy it will take to maintain the kinetic
configuration. This part changes, of course, also depending on the
present fitness level, or to put it in simple one-dimensional terms,
how fast the heart can pump the used blood back from the muscles and
into the lungs, where the wastes can be expelled into breath.
 
Maybe yesterday's answer happened to be "no, not today." I turned up
2nd Street for the final sprint to the stop sign on top of the hill
and despite a hasty cycle through several different kinetic
configurations (made different and new because now I was climbing and
had to keep lifting the pelvis, using my leg muscles as levers, as
well as maintaining that inexorable forward motion of the pelvis and
the spinal column), I couldn't do either one of two things: neither
bust that previous HR record, the 99-and-a-half percent one from
December, nor shatter my time from the stadium back home; it took
another 25 seconds more than it had earlier in the week.
 
But in the end I can declare victory: I ran further than I did on
Wednesday, and I finished feeling stronger than I had on the 22nd,
with that gazelle stride and, as I got to 25 meters out from the stop
sign, an extra measure of zip drawn from somewhere in my kinetic
consciousness: somehow some sense memory declaring, in the haste of
the instant, while seeing the finish line, while seeing safety from
the saber-tooth in pursuit, while seeing the imminence of rest, "Yes,
I have a little faster left."
 
 
(P.S. Picture is the secret city, heading along yesterday's route from
the scrap yard to the front gate. Some forgotten well-wisher sent
along the nicely wrapped sanitary roll that's ornamenting the
dashboard.)
 

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(I wrote this and am posting it not necessarily to motivate anyone
else, but more so that the next time I am in the same situation, I
have something to reference it to.)
 
Cycling this afternoon, I came around my first loop with the
straightforward intention of getting in a good ride. The wind had lightened up
since the day before and it was actually almost warm, in the low 60s
probably. Riding into the wind, I hit the straightaway from the
flagpole past the fire station, old chapel and refectory, checked my
heart-rate monitor, and set myself the task of raising my heart rate
to 80% of max from 64%. I got distracted somewhere along the half-mile
stretch and reached the turn with the monitor still stuck at 64%. I
passed the Funny Hat People running and singing their goofy songs, as
is their custom in the afternoons, then came around for a second loop.
 
Learning from the first lap, on the second I focused intently on the
pedal stroke to get my HR up and when I made the turn I was at 81%. I
didn't get down to below 70% until I got to the Leticia straightaway
(There's a clamshell structure there permanently under construction,
with the word "LETICIA" in wrought-iron letters mounted on the crane
above the clamshell; it always looks striking because when I ride in
the afternoon, I see it with the setting sun as a backdrop.) and felt
like I was falling a little short of vim.
 
Feelings notwithstanding, as I came around the tight turn, onto the
back stretch, I checked the stopwatch: it read 1:09:58, and I had
started the loop at the other end at 56:50. So I had only taken 13'
and change to complete the out stretch, fighting the wind the whole
way. That was a pretty good sign, so I sipped some water, grabbed the
drops, tucked in and pedaled hard, with the wind at my back, all the
way past the dump around to the loop starting-point by the barrels.
The entire seven-mile lap took 22:32, a pace of 18.6 mph (my target is
23:22, which is an 18 mph pace; if I've looped around faster than
that, it's a red-letter day).
 
I kept up a crisp pace on the way home from the barrels, and even sped
up a little bit at the end, trying to get in under 1:40, my full-ride
reference time (I always assume it takes 100 minutes to get in an
afternoon ride), and missed it only by a couple seconds. Not bad for a
ride where the first fifty-six minutes were pretty poky.
 
I guess the conclusion to draw from today's experiment, which I've
apprehended before but have been absorbing only slowly, is that the
first good push is critical to getting my heart starting to beat fast
enough to maintain a swift, satisfying pace. The only times I've kept
that 18 mph pace, I've had an average HR for the loop of over 70%,
which means that I need to do some serious hammering over the 23
minutes it takes to loop around. On days when I'm feeling slow, it's
hard to push past 65% at all, so averaging more than 70% is more of an
achievement than it might seem. On the other hand, as I go over my
records, I see that I only rode an 18-mph loop five times in the
entire month of December (twice on the 30th). I've already matched that sum for January, although I
haven't felt as strong this month.
 
Attached picture is my ride, in today's late-afternoon light.

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