Saturday, August 26, 2006
Marathon Man Part Trois
BICYCLE DAZE
By Steve Fey
So I may have mentioned that I bought some new shoes a while back. Not a long while back, mind you, but a while. Enough of a while that last Sunday, when I thought my problem was that I’d been digging ditches and stuff on Saturday and so I was tired, um, yes, that’s true in fact; anyway while I thought that, my problem really was that the padding in my left running show had been reduced by the overwhelming masculine power of my, um, stride, to have approximately the softness of Carl Rove’s heart at a Democratic caucus. It was only ten miles, and I finished it, only about six minutes overall off of my usual blistering pace as a snail catcher. Then my hip felt a little strange, so I drove home. Then I got out of the car. Then I said something like “Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch!” Something like that, I really don’t remember. It was hard to walk. I felt strangely, well, sick, because I also noticed that my left knee was about twice as big as my right knee. I discovered something all endurance runners come to know after a while: no sane body will put up with that sort of treatment indefinitely.
Well, the upshot is that I’ve spent quite a few hours this week imitating a penguin. I mean I’ve been stuffing a cold pack down the back of my pants (the back, not that it should matter; and I’m ashamed of you for thinking what you were thinking) and sitting on it while doing whatever else I was doing. Sometimes this involved sitting on it while walking around. This is made possible by the simple fact that the cold pack, plus the normal girth of my hips, makes my pants almost too tight to fasten on. See how the exercise has helped? If I hadn’t lost weight lately, I’d have had to put the cold pack outside my pants. This, of course, is ineffective as everybody can see that you’re sitting on an ice cube and will, of course, think a whole lot less of you in consequence. Wouldn’t you? So that means that you can never put a cold pack in, for instance, your back pocket and sit on it. You have to put the cold pack inside your pants where nobody can see it. If anyone asks about the rectangular bulge on your hip, just explain that you’ve recently won the lottery and you don’t trust banks. While they’re thinking about that, get the heck out of there before they mug you for your cold pack.
The short story is that I feel more or less fine after a week of that sort of treatment. Tomorrow, at 05:30, I’ll try running another twelve miles. If it starts to bother me, I’ll walk back and imitate a penguin some more.
So, what’s this about bicycles? You know, you can’t train to run 40 kilometers (actually 42, 195 meters) and just take a week off. Since I really couldn’t run (your weight triples when you start to run, did you know that?) I had to find another way to get gasping for air. What I found was the local rec center, run by the city, where there are several reclining stationary bicycles to choose from. And, oh, but a stationary bike is fun. For one thing, they have televisions to watch while you’re cranking away. At five in the morning, that means the televisions are showing the weakest, and lowest rated, of the local news teams desperately trying to score points with viewers. So, as I’m trying to get my heart rate elevated a bit, which ain’t easy on a bike compared to on foot, I get to see somebody on location in front of the Boulder, Colorado jail house talking about how that joker who confessed to killing Jon Benet is inside. They can’t interview him, they can’t even interview the police chief because he’s still in bed (it’s six in the morning there, but you see what I mean.) Still they can get some reporter up from some “sister station” in Denver to motor all the way up to Boulder to stand in the middle of an empty street in front of a deserted-looking jail and babble inanities about some dude who may or may not have killed some poor little girl ten years ago. Besides making me glad that there are no serious news stories out there, you know, wars, natural disasters, economic glitches, international incidents or whatever, this whole thing is so pointlessly boring as to make me wish that one of the reporters had eaten some bad fish for breakfast, and they end up hurling right there on camera. At least that would be more fun than seeing Boulder, Colorado at six in the morning with nobody on the streets.
And aside from that, the bike just isn’t as good as making me breathe heavy. I’ve clocked a heart rate of 150 while running (right after I stopped to walk a while because it was killing me, but still it’s true) and 130 is easy to maintain for as long as I want. On the bike, which has these automatic heart rate monitors when you grip the handlebars, I can’t get above 118, and that only for a second. I dunno, but it seems like the old feet are better exercise. Of course, you don’t need shoes at all to use an exercise bike, certainly not cushy ones like you need to run in, but all in all, I’d rather hear my footfalls than the local traffic report (what do you suppose they say at 5:30 AM, hmmm?) So, the moral is, if you like to run, get new shoes more often than you think you need them, get plenty of rest, drink plenty of fluids, and be sure to purchase a top of the line cold-pack to stuff down your pants. There. How’s that for sage advice?
Labels: Marathon
