Cycle of Karma

I did a good-karma do-si-do with a co-worker this week. She's the nurse practitioner for the mental health clinic where I work, and also an avid cyclist (she owns a beautiful Soma). When I told her I had caught another head-cold while I was in Moab, and it was hanging on way too long, and I was thinking of going to the doctor to get some kind of insight into my immune system, she asked a handful of questions and drew the simple conclusion that my system is still recovering from pneumonia; tiredness, catching colds, etc., are part of that. This was amazing to me; I haven't had obvious symptoms in weeks. But it explained a lot, so I was grateful, even though it extends the whole "take it easy" period by yet more weeks to come. (She said it can take six to eight weeks after symptoms have disappeared until the body has normal energy... No hard training until then. Sob! I haven't truly trained since January, and words can't describe how I miss it.)

Yesterday, she left me a voicemail saying she'd gotten a flat on the way to work, and, surprisingly, didn't know how to begin repairing it. Would I have time to help? Well... of course. We wheeled the bike outside, and I taught her how to remove her rear wheel, check for debris, properly seat the tube, all that good stuff. She was very grateful, and just that was worth it. (Plus I got to stand in the sun and work on a bike during work hours!)

Later, I was driving home and saw a cyclist up ahead. I'd never seen her either coming to or going from work, even though she rides my road once a week. But lo, it was her, pedaling along happily.

Talk about payoff! I'd helped her fix that very wheel just hours earlier! It made me happy to see her chuffing along toward home.

Tone Poem, 3/7/09

First decent ride outside in weeks. Rock and roll!

Wow, the driveway looks like a swamp… My cleats are going to get sanded down pretty good inside the pedals today, with all this mud and grit.

Yeesh, my legs feel like they’re filled with sand. Pneumonia sucks.

What’s that funny smell? Oh, yeah – earth and trees and things. Been a long time.

Sun is warm on my back. Nice.

My legs feel like they’re filled with sand.

How far… oh, yeah, decided not to take the cyclocomputer today. Good move. Trying to listen to the body more. So, how does my body feel? Hmm… ready for a little more. Cool!

What’s that smell? Right: horses. Been a long time. Nice.

Before the pneumonia, I wouldn’t have even noticed this little bump. Now it feels like Mont Ventoux… Crap.

Wheeze. Wheeeeze.

Pnuemonia sucks.

Wheeze.

Wow, check out all the phlegm that comes up from my lungs after a hard effort! Cool. I do love hawking on the fly, it's almost as good as blowing snot. Two of the best things about riding.

Huh – guess pnuemonia has an upside.

Okay. I wish I was home already. My legs feel like… Right, stop thinking that.

Good to be home. After 55 minutes, feel like I used to after four hours. But you know what? Glad I went out. Real glad.

Supposed to be sunny tomorrow, too. Do it again.

Listening Deeper to My Body

The larger opportunity in having pneumonia, which is so tenacious and long-lasting, is to learn to be at ease with and in touch with my whole body, in all of its states: healthy and strong, weak and tired. This is true acceptance, without which true change is not possible. My body might heal, but I would miss the larger lesson, which is that I stand in opposition to my body when I try to force it to heal. “Listening to your body” means to truly be in concert with it at all times.

~ From my journal, under today’s date

Pneumonia will get an endurance athlete thinking pretty hard. Pnuemonia is like taking a wrecking ball to the edifice on which endurance athletes labor so lovingly and painstakingly: Our ability to convert oxygen to performance. If VO2 max is your sine qua non, you’ll really start to ponder the eternal verities when it’s been weeks since you’ve taken a clear, deep breath.

So this week, instead of training, I'm thinking about living in concert with my body. As an endurance athlete, I spend a lot of time challenging my body’s limits. I stretch its ability to convert oxygen to energy. To store and use energy from food more efficiently. To convert that energy to power more efficiently, and to use that power to create higher speeds. It’s a wonderful adventure, benefiting us in too many spheres to number.

Watching all this, our friends who don’t cycle think we take absurdly good care of our bodies.

But there is a knife-thin edge we walk in relationship with this one body we are headquartered in. Speaking for myself, I tend to my body a quite lot – but I ask of it even more. I push myself harder than I should. I ignore the fairly sizable stressors in my life. And then I don’t wait for full healing before returning to too much volume or intensity.

Through all of this, I am beginning to learn about my own embarrassing obstinacy. This week, I noticed myself still behaving and thinking like I am ready to ride. I check Accuweather upon awakening; if the weather is sunny and in the 30s, I try to rationalize a quick outdoor ride later in the day. With pneumonia. Right. Thankfully, it quickly became patent how absurd such a move would be. So, I turn to the jolly task of thinking about my friends who are able to go out that day. I envision how much fun they’re having, diving down winding country lanes. I think about how I won’t be able to keep up with them when the group rides start up again in a few weeks. And then, perhaps dumbest of all, I think about where I would have been today if I’d been able to keep up my training through all these weeks of being off: Build phase, instead of looking at starting up Base 1 all over again in early March. I think these thoughts even though I know that, bottom line, the reason I can’t go out today, the pneumonia, is due to this very kind of thinking, which led me to push too hard in the first place.

The illness, thank heavens, has been mild, as these things go, but it also has lasted 4.5 weeks so far. And the honest truth is that all of the aforementioned pining and self-abuse is really just misplaced anger at my body for not being as strong and resilient as I wish it were. Even off the bike, it’s me against it.

I point all this morbid stuff out as a way of saying that I am actually changing all of this. I’m learning that listening to my body, much like a spiritual path, is a never-ending process. And that, while external goals are useful and praise-worthy, right now, my bigger job – obviously, or I wouldn’t have tried to ride my way through pneumonia, which I unknowingly did for the first half of this thing -- my bigger cycling goal right now is to learn to balance exciting objectives with day-to-day body awareness. To say, “I will have this much fitness or do this ride by that date,” but also to take the time and patience to tune in to the signals from my body each day. Can’t get my heart-rate up? Red flag. Brutal week at work? Red flag. Rode a couple hours more than I planned to last week, and I’m planning to just go ahead and build on that this week? Big red flag, waving like mad.

It's easy to say "I'll listen more to my body." I'm aiming for the kind of deep, intuitive relationship older cyclists I know have with all aspects of their bodies -- heart rate, immune system, sleep patterns, moods, little wisps of differences in performance on the bike. These are guys who've been doing this for decades through blistering sun and icy winds. Whip-thin guys with white beards and legs like beef jerky, all gristle and lean muscle; guys who can ride me into the ground without breathing hard.

Jon Krakauer, with typical savage accuracy, said: “It is easy, when you are young… to assume that if you want something badly enough it is your God-given right to have it.” Next week I turn 45, closer (in years, at least) to those Zen-master vets than to my impetuous youth. I think it’s time to set both feet firmly on the path that Paul Fournel (one of those Zen masters) so deftly sketched:

By remaining attentive to the messages your body sends, through exercise and in pleasure, you can take an elegant inner voyage on the bike. A lasting voyage, a permanent school, continuous retraining. The dialog you establish with your thighs is a rich one that helps you set your limits, improve your endurance, tolerate pain, and recognize the intolerable.

I find it useful every day.

~ Paul Fournel, The Need for the Bike

Well, THAT explains a lot.

Just came from the doctor's.

I have pneumonia!

After four and a half weeks of better-to-worse-to-better-etc., it took him about three minutes to figure it out. When he pronounced it, I almost broke down in tears of gratitude. Here I'd thought I was going crazy. I was a pretty healthy guy, I thought I'd rectified all the overtraining mistakes I'd made in August and September (you'll have to search for that related post -- no time to link right now...), thought I was being reasonable in my goals, following Friel's training plans to the letter, making progress, then... bang. Everything came to a screeching halt 4.5 weeks ago when I came down with a small cold -- that wouldn't go away -- and then moved to my lungs -- and then I started coughing up this flourescent green stuff in the mornings... so on.

It was so insidious! Symptoms waxing and waning... I took every natural remedy known to mankind, and a few unnatural ones. They must've helped, because I never felt really terrible. (In fact, I'm proud to say that the doctor and nurse were very impressed with my lung capacity test today; I couldn't help but kvell a little when she told me I had good results -- for someone without pneumonia. I may not ride like a hard man, but I can puff like one!)

So, the gratitude was for the fact that there was a good explanation why I couldn't kick this thing. It wasn't some stupid inexplicable immune system failure. It's my first year working in public schools and I caught pneumonia; welcome to the club.

I'd never met this doc before -- my first PCP on my new health plan in my new living location. But I literally almost kissed the guy when he told me he thought it would be fine for me to ride lightly, mostly indoors, as long as I don't get worn out. "Heating the body up is great for this kind of thing," sez he. Doc! Will you be my adoptive kindly uncle? Wait, I think you already are!

But wait. It gets better yet.

I mention my cycling training, and he tells me that he does some local triathlons. I get a sudden thrill, that "Oh, this is too good to be true" moment. I'd been hoping to find a PCP who understands the endurance athlete mentality, and wouldn't lecture me about it. I grip the armrests to keep from jumping up and hugging him, and manage to ask quietly, "What kind of bike do you have?" Needless to say, a wonderful discussion flows from there, including an invitation from him to go riding. Soon. As in, he gives me his home phone number.

Woah!

Cool!!

He prescribes some antibiotics and assures me I should be feeling all better within two weeks, maximum. You mean after four and a half weeks, there is an actual end to this? I'm not mysteriously, endlessly ill?

I'm the happiest person ever to hear that he has pneumonia.