Being in the world

From an article on psychogeography, available at http://blogs.abc.net.au/allinthemind/2009/09/bicycle-meditation.html

“I have been taught that meditation is not designed to take you out of the world. Rather, it is all about making you more aware of the world. By learning to live with the world, one grows stronger, more focused, self-disciplined, and strong.”

I wrote those words early Thursday evening, as I was trying to calm my pre-Bike to Work Day jitters. I was planning to bike anywhere from fifty to eighty miles the following day and to give three presentations — yes, in bicycling attire — at two different academic conferences. The first one, set for 8:30 a.m., was the one that had me the most nervous. It was called Moving Your Body: Making Fitness a Part of Your Daily Life.

For years, I have wanted to create an audience around fitness. Not necessarily because I am an expert on the topic, or am trying to make some money off of it. But more because fitness informs my life in more ways than one and quite frankly I love talking about it. I get frustrated when visit web sites, athletic stores, and fitness expos and see and hear people talking about fitness as constituting eight-minute miles and mega-marathon paces. I know that fitness is more than that, and I know that obesity and a lack of activity are killing off the human race. I firmly believe that anyone and everyone who wants to complete a marathon, a triathlon, or any other major sporting event can do so if they put their minds to it. And I believe that a simple goal of moving one’s body for at least twenty minutes a day is a laudable place to start.
So when my employer, SUNY Empire State College, announced a call for presenters for its first-ever Student Fitness and Wellness Conference, I was more than excited to participate. I saw the call-for-presentations at about 1 a.m. on a winter’s night, and probably had my proposal together and submitted in thirty minutes flat.

But the day before came the proverbial wall. Like mile 23 of the marathon, I was nearly there. But getting to the finish (or in this case) the start felt formidable, to say the least.

I had decided earlier that day to bike not from my house in a town called Greenfield Center all the way to conference site in Albany, but to start instead from a town a little south of Saratoga Springs known as Malta. That decision trimmed the one-way ride from thirty-six miles to twenty, but it didn’t do much to calm the jitters. Because I am new to upstate New York and often get lost when I try to navigate my way in and out of Albany, I decided to drive the route I planned to bicycle the day before in order to see what the roads looked like and to make sure I knew where I was going to go.

The decision was a smart one because, true to fashion, I did get lost twice: once while trying to locate the Desmond Hotel (where the fitness conference was to take place) and again while trying to navigate the most bike-friendly path between the hotel and the College of St. Rose, the site of the second conference — a lovely Technologies in Education gathering that brings together K-12 and college educators interested in the uses of social media and other web-based technologies to enhance learning for the day. Each time that I got lost, I noted the wrong turns, and dutifully typed directions into my iPhone so that I would not repeat the mistakes the following day.

But driving in a heavily trafficked city on a hot May day is also a physically and emotionally draining experience. By the time I made it to the College of St. Rose, the pre-conference workshops that I’d hoped to attend were nearly half over and I had barely had the energy to hang up a poster for one of the presentations I was to do the next morning. And, in the meantime, the e-mail coming into my three accounts via my iPhone was going into overdrive with what seemed to be immediate perplexing crises: an adjunct instructor hadn’t logged into classes; an advisee was trying to apply to graduate school and suddenly discovered that he needed to take a few additional courses as prerequisites; and a student in a digital storytelling course was writing — yet again — to seek feedback on her final projects.

By the time I got home, I was hot, dehydrated, and feeling frustrated enough to want to call the whole Bike-to-Work Day challenge off.
That’s when I remembered two things: An interview I had read years ago by Ironman Mark Allen, who described fear as a friend, and the idea of meditation as being a practice that is designed not to escape reality but to make one’s self more aware of it.

Suddenly, I saw the path from my home to the Fitness Conference via bicycle as a meditative practice. The path could not be smooth and free of distractions because that’s not the way that life operates. Instead, it would be fraught with tension, frustration, snags, roadblocks, obstacles, and distractions. Awareness of those obstacles was what would make one, as I free wrote, “more focused, self-disciplined, and strong.”

I transferred thoughts from the free-write to an e-mail message to myself, and used it to organize the talk on making fitness a part of one’s life. Somehow the quote stayed with me, and when I opened up my e-mail before a pleasantly surprising audience of approximately a dozen Empire State College students and spouses, the quote about meditation was one of the first things that projected out to them.

An elderly male student based at the college’s Metropolitan Center in New York City demanded an explanation. He explained that he had once been very physically active but had somehow lost the motivation to keep moving. “How do you get away from the distractions?” he asked. “How is meditation different from prayer?”

Grappling for an answer, I suggested that meditation might be awareness of the fact that we’re all human and cannot escape the realities of the world. By walking, running, swimming, lifting weights, doing yoga, dancing or moving our bodies in any other way, I proposed that we were meditating and in doing so finding a way to live with fear.

“But what about prayer?”

“Perhaps,” I responded, “It’s simply this, ‘Dear God, Give me the strength and power to make fear my friend.’ ”

Thinking back to the conversation a few days later, with the bike ride completed and all three presentations delivered — in bicycling attire — with success, I started to think about how my own fears were intertwined with the idea of riding a bicycle itself. Of the three sports associated with triathlons, the bike ride is the one I fear the most. I fear riding with my shoes clipped to pedals. I fear riding in a group. I fear drafting. I fear the struggle of the uphill climb. I fear the almost-too-fast soar of the downhill acceleration. I fear fatigue. I fear falling, and most of all I fear being left behind by other cyclists. Growing up in Muncie, Indiana, I was the last kid on the block who learned to ride her bike without training wheels. Three and a half decades later in Honolulu, the front wheel of my bicycle went over a sharp rock and into a pothole. I fell off my bike, landing on my right knee and scraping myself so badly that blood and skin splattered all over my shorts and socks. It hurt to walk for weeks. I recovered from the mishap but not enough to overcome a fear of falling like that again. As a result, I pedal cautiously and carefully. With safety, however, one sacrifices speed.

Yet, when I am comfortable on a bike, I feel free. I love cycling to work, and leaving my car and its budget-draining gas guzzling at home. I love arriving at my office warmed up and invigorated from the fresh air I inhaled on a ride, slightly sweaty but alert and eager to take on the day. I love the traveling light that bicycling demands, and the fact that as my legs and lungs get stronger, the uphills seem less daunting and the downhills not so frightening.

Might the fear overwhelm the joy? Only if I allow myself to forget the joy.

The Bike-to-Work challenge was full of joy. I saw a glowing sunrise over Round Lake, and noticed the glimmer of the Mohawk River as I crossed the bridge between Saratoga and Albany counties in a way that I could not see from behind a steering wheel. I noticed for the first time that the welcome sign to the town of Half Moon depicts the figure of a smiling half-moon. I also got a sense of the kindness and tolerance that northeast New Yorkers hold for cyclists. Many motorists waved me forward as I tried to cross through difficult intersections or make my way through heavy traffic into a necessary right or left turn lane.

The challenge, however, also was, well, challenging. The worst fear met me straight in the eye when on my way back home from Albany I followed my Google map directions to U.S. 9, only to discover that the particular on-ramp closest to the College of St. Rose shared an on-ramp with Interstate 87, with no bicycle lane or shoulder in between. I parked my bike at a light just before the on-ramp, and prayed that there might be a safer way to Saratoga than the entry that lay ahead. There was. It just took seven miles, a frustrating hour of stop-and-go consultations with my iPhone and re-googlings of directions to find a quiet route around Siena College and ultimately the way back home.

Recovery

That one-word title has been the focus of the past four weeks. Recovery from nearly two weeks of inactivity following the removal of two wisdom teeth. Recovery has meant management of residual pain. It also has required in me some redefining of my year’s training goals.

On April 11, one day before the surgery, I ran six miles in 70 minutes and followed that with a 1,700 yard swim. I joked that I needed to put in the mileage because I wasn’t sure when I would be able to work out that vigorously again. I expected that I would have to rest for about four or five days. I didn’t expect to still be struggling and popping pain pills a full month later.

“You had major surgery,” my husband reminds me. “And you’re fifty.”

Words of support that both help and frustrate me. I’ve always been proud of my age, of looking, acting, and having the energy of someone so much younger. Deep inside, my body does let me know in a variety of ways that even if it looks thirty-five or younger, it is the half-century that it is. I have learned to be mindful of what and how much I eat, how much I sleep, and how I pace myself at work. I have accepted — and perhaps embraced — the reality that medications to control blood pressure and cholesterol will probably be with me for the rest of my life. But the triathlon is now just over thirteen weeks away. I desperately want to get back on “the plan.”

Bicycling feels pretty good and so does swimming. Running is where it hurts. My pace is still that of the six miles in 70 minutes that I did on April 11, but I have run twice since the surgery. Both times, my jaw has felt jarred and tender. This convinces me that I need to modify my plan a little: bike and swim as much as I can manage, and for at least two more weeks, go walking instead of running.

The need to slow down is oddly infuriating. But perhaps teaching in and of itself. The last time that I ran, I went out resolving to go gentle, to walk five minutes and run one minute on a 4.5 mile loop around my house. As soon as I started running, I turned into a race horse. The loop ended up being run fifteen to twenty minutes and walk one minute. By the time, I hit the last one-third mile, I felt as if my mouth was full of broken bones and teeth.

The lesson: Patience. Take it slow.

On a positive note, the diet that I have taken to calling the “No-diet diet” is bearing some very happy fruit. I weighed in at 118 pounds twice last week and all three days so far this week, falling into the “healthy weight” category for a person of my height for the first time since 2004. I have enrolled in a free Nutrition and Healthy Lifestyle course through a website known as Coursera.org, and am gaining some valuable advice from the course on how to add more calcium, protein, and iron into my diet through the locally-based, fresh and inexpensive foods that have come to comprise my daily meals.

I also am taking part in the National Bike to Work Day this Friday, May 17. Both my mountain bike and my road bike are now functioning, and I have been riding the eight miles from my home to office about three days a week. Friday, May 17 happens to be a day when I am attending two conferences in Albany, NY, some 36 miles from my home, and making three presentations total. On a whim, I decided to try biking at least part of the way to Albany, and stated my intention of doing so with the Saratoga Springs biking group, Bikeatoga.

Initially, I predicted that I would ride 100 miles. A Bikeatoga organizer told me that would set a one-day bike commuting record for the group. After consulting Google map, I realized the distance would be more like 87 miles. Still, the organizer said, I would probably log the longest commute for the day.

These predictions motivated me. Then, I realized that my first presentation Friday was at 8:30 a.m. Being at the conference in time to eat some breakfast would mean leaving my home at 4 a.m. Even as the days are getting longer, it’s still dark at 4 a.m. And my body — that body that naggingly reminds me every so often that I am 50 — isn’t particularly fond of waking up at 3 a.m.

In addition, the Google Map directions for biking from my home to the two different conference locations where I would be presenting were crazily complex. To top these challenges was the fact that I don’t currently possess functioning head and taillights for my bicycle. Procuring these items would be possible — if the monthly mortgage payment hadn’t left our bank account virtually dry.

The challenge began to feel a little too overwhelming, and daunting for me to handle.
That’s when the lesson of the run kicked in. Patience. Take it easy. One step at a time.
My husband can drive me part of the way to Albany. I can start riding at 5:30 a.m. and get in a decent morning “commute” of about 20 miles. The sky will be light, and I will be a little more awake. After presentation #1 at the Desmond Hotel, I can cycle the ten mile distance to the College of St. Rose and do my other two presentations and have lunch. I would be able to leave St. Rose by 4 p.m. From there, it would be no problem to cycle the full 37-mile one-way trip back home.

Not the 87 miles that I had envisioned. But 67 miles is nothing to sneeze at. It’s perhaps where I am, physically, as I continue to train and continue to recover.