Snapping the Sluggishness

Sometimes, writing is the best antidote. A few days ago, I lamented the breakdown of my usual self-discipline. Most of the month of March had gone by and I had logged only nine workouts, compared at least five and often six that I usually achieve. With the breakdown had come a lapse into some bad habits that I associate with excess workaholism: a lack of sleep, a turn toward chocolate, sugary soft drinks, and other junky high calorie snacks. I posted the lament, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning with every intention to get back on the wagon and set myself right.

Three days later, it feels happily as if I might be on the road to recovery. I have moved my body three days in a row, including the running of a 5K this morning that was nearly one minute faster over my time in the same race last year. I also have logged three nights with eight hours of sleep, and a wonderful nap this afternoon following the 5K. It’s one of these moments where I feel like I can declare that Moving Your Body is like learning how to ride a bike. Once you’ve got the basic principles down, you never forget.

I am looking now to April with a renewed sense of energy. Starting Monday, March 31, I will have 18 weeks to train for the Fronhofer Tool Triathlon and 26 weeks for the Adirondack Marathon. I find myself looking forward to beginning my training for both — but with a certain degree of anxiety, especially where the triathlon is concerned.

A few weeks ago, my husband Jim and I attended an annual Fitness Expo at the Saratoga Springs Convention Center. While there, I met a woman who recognized me from a couple of places I frequent: the Saratoga YMCA, where she and I both swim; and the Fronhofer course where she was a volunteer lifeguard and had run the final tenth of a mile of the course as I crossed the line long after everyone else had finished.

“You were fantastic,” she said.

I laughed. “And I came in last place. I was so far behind everyone else! But it’s okay. I’m going for it again this year, and I’m totally focused on doing better.”

“That’s what I mean by fantastic,” she said. “Your attitude all the way through is just amazing.”

I saw her a couple of days ago at the Y, as I was preparing to swim. She told me she doesn’t train for triathlons anymore. She just likes to swim. Very long distances, it turns out. “I don’t have anything I need to prove anymore,” she said with a laugh.

I laughed back. “Apparently, I still do.”

Behind our conversation was the issue of triathlon training itself. It seems unduly competitive and complicated for something that should be simply fun. When I had bumped into her at the Fitness Expo, I had asked why there were so few “slower” competitors. Her response was that once you get on a “certified course” and once you’re doing a distance longer than a “sprint”, the recreational athletes disappear and the diehards dominate.

Hmm, I wondered. It seems like I might qualify as a diehard. Is it possible for a diehard to not be fast?

Over the past couple of months, I have been scrolling through triathlon training programs on the Internet. I even read a triathlon training book: Joe Friel’s The Triathlete’s Training Bible. Great material with a lot of good advice. But when it comes down to mapping out the training program, it seems like the fun disappears. Or, at least what feels like fun to me. Training emphasizes speed, force, and endurance. Workouts place priority on intervals, hills, sprints, and concepts like pushing yourself to certain aerobic or anaerobic thresholds. Phrases like VO2 max that I vaguely understand but don’t really know how to follow get thrown around a lot. I know that I can do more research and that over time as my household budget loosens up invest in training tools and devices to improve my standings in these areas. But I find myself worrying and wondering whether this is the kind of training that I really want. Maybe I’m a hedonist, but exercise and fitness feel like they should be pleasurable activities, not this much work.

Which led me to wonder if training anxiety helped contribute to the March slump.

“It seems,” I wrote in my longhand journal this afternoon, “that one can make training enjoyable with a few basic steps.”

Going a few steps further enabled me to identify those basic steps: a couple of days — oh, maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays — for speed work. One day a week for an endurance workout — maybe a Sunday. Four days left over to do the relaxed, easier workouts — with at least one of those four days being a day of rest and ideally three of the remaining days being the workouts that make training fun in the first place.

We’ll see how it pans out, as April unfolds.

March madness

March Madness is underway. I’m not referring so much to the Indiana high school basketball tournaments or the NCAA championship battles, though I certainly appreciate that these two annual events also are underway. I’m thinking about the frenetic pace of life that seems to accompany the transition from winter to spring, and the way that this change can wreak havoc on even the most carefully laid out plans.
Tonight, I am shocked to discover that I can count on my two hands the number of times that I have moved my body in March: nine. The revelation is startling to me — and at the same time not completely surprising. It has been a month of hyper-productivity:
* I finished an overhaul of a 300-page book manuscript.

* I made an eight-day trip to Indiana to support my mother and father during a surgery that my mother needed, and worked on my computer virtually the whole time that I was out of town.

* I had a deep gum cleaning that has helped resolve some ongoing issues with my teeth.

* I had a deep tissue massage that helped resolve some ongoing aches and stiffness in my left shoulder and arm.

* I have been juggling multiple teaching, community, and college service commitments.

But exercising only nine days out of 26 seems somewhat incredulous. I find myself wondering, “Himanee, what went wrong?” And I find myself feeling some fear. I don’t want to backslide on all of the good that I’ve managed to accomplish for my health and my self over the past three years.

And, so the next step, of course, is to figure out how best to get back on the horse.

My usual advice is one step at a time. Will it work this time?

My husband asked me a little while ago if I slept well last night. I responded that I did, and then I realized, I slept well, but I did not sleep enough. I have not slept enough through the month of March. I’ve been managing to get by on as little as five hours of sleep. My good-health reserves have made this possible, but the reserves are starting to dry up. Which has left me waking up tired and lacking the desire to pull on exercise clothes and work out. Even as I make resolutions to move my body, the resolutions fall short.

What I really need is about three days of eight hours sleep. And in order to get that eight hours of sleep, I need to exercise. That simple truth has helped me understand a fairly key truth. Movement and rest are directly related to one another. When the body moves, rest comes easily. When fully rested, the body desires to move. Reduce movement and you reduce the desire to rest. Reduce rest and you reduce the capability of the body to sustain movement.

This, I believe, is another way of diagnosing workaholism. Let me explain.

As I look back on the twenty-nine years that I have worked on computers — as a journalist, as a graduate student, as a teacher and a writer — I have noticed a certain trait. Hard work is considered a mark of loyalty, service, and dedication to self, employer, colleagues, community, and planet. This is a good thing. Except, hard work is often measured on the basis of certain physical and/or emotional appearances or states of mind: bags under the eyes, a worn-out look in the face, unkempt hair, a cluttered desk. Behind these markers often lie people who are too busy to exercise regularly, who hear the call to duty more loudly than the call to exercise, eat healthy, and get plenty of rest.

I might be accused of making a sweeping generalization, but I can say that I suspect my assessment is somewhat on target because I’ve been guilty of such behaviors myself. Lately, my guilt has mounted because I have felt a great deal of pressure to produce: to finish the book; to be present at meetings; to volunteer ideas, service and time for projects, events, and endeavors; to participate in multiple layers and levels of family life: my own, that of my parents, that of my husband’s parents, and so forth.
This is all good — maybe even admirable — until it cuts into time for the self. Time for exercise, time for rest. To make this admission in an overworked society is something of a radical statement because if we are noble contributors to the world in which we live, it is believed that we should sacrifice ourselves for the greater good.

I will close for the night because the promise of an eight-hour sleep night is calling to me. I would like to propose, however, that sacrifice in this manner is detrimental to the mission it advocates.