I’ve settled back into a decent fitness schedule that should have me back in triathlon shape by spring, and then I’ll start thinking about my first summer event. It’s back on the bike again tomorrow. Today’s morning swim went well, with my year-end concentration on strength training paying off with improved stroke pull. Swim coach mentioned to me that I should finish my workouts with harder sprints, so I’ve been forcing that on myself each time I get in the
pool. I refuse to just space out and not count laps, but I wish there was a better way to keep track, because I miss that feeling I got in my long lake swims last year, when I could just get in the zone and find a good endurance pace, like being out on the road running for distance, letting the imagination fire at will.
Archive for the ‘Exercise’ Category
Swim-Bike-Run
Tuesday, January 25th, 2005Cold fear
Sunday, January 23rd, 2005This morning I decided to go out to the Jackson farm before sunrise to run some of the cross-country trails before friends gathered around the wood fire in the cabin for “shared silence.” I suppose I’ve run in more frigid conditions, but not recently. The raw intensity of these workouts are impossible for me to verbally capture, but they come loaded with rich sensory moments, like the crunch of refrozen thaw under foot, the visual pattern of animal tracks in the dusty snow, the sound of startled ducks temporarily fleeing the nearby wetland, and the massive heads of the horses as they surround and nudge me, wondering, perhaps, if I’ve come to deliver their overdue ration of hay.
It goes without saying that these stimuli make me feel very close to nature, and her power. I can’t say I particularly enjoy the cold. I realize I don’t have the same resilience as my father had. I know that, because I spent too many hours shivering, watching the steam of his breath, as he repaired rabbit pens or some other winter task, when I desperately wanted to seek the warmth. On mornings like today I think about whether he might have had similar experiences as mine, moving through nature on his cold, all-night ‘coon hunts (ventures that I was never equipped to endure at the time).
Years ago I came upon the words of Robert W. Service and shared them with Dadbo at Christmas, but we never got to talk about those poems of the Yukon. I just knew it was his life-long dream to visit the far North Woods. He never did, but I like to think that my gift enabled the same vicarious experience that Service provides for me with lines like these:
"The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb…"
On mornings like today I think about my friend Mack, the man who created the trails. As he confronts the foe of cancer, much too far from his cabin, I run them in the bitter wind for him, because I can.
Because I must.