Just Slow Enough

In the latest issue of the Rivendell Reader, there’s an article about how high-intensity training—what people do for events like the Ironman Triathalon—where you try to go as long as you can at as high a heart-rate as possible, probably isn’t really all that good for you in the long run. The author bases his claim, in part, on an appeal to evolution; he notes that human beings were adapted, as a result of our hunter-gathering lifestyle, to two kinds of activity: long, steady walks across the savannah while hunting, gathering, and migrating during seasonal changes, and quick bursts of speed to avoid tigers and other predators. To buttress his case, he notes a whole slew of world-class marathoners and triathletes who have suffered heart disease, kidney failure, and other ills in the wake of their high-performance careers

His point is that we weren’t designed to go fast for long stretches and to do so requires us to burn way too much glucose (or something like that) and fuel up on far too many carbohydrates to do so, something our bodies weren’t intended for at all.

Makes sense to me, even without the questionable appeal to human nature; I feel like it’s obvious, every time I ride my bike that my body, at least, wasn’t meant to push beyond its limits—or even anywhere all that close to them.

I try to ride just below the speed of sweat, at a pace that I can maintain more or less indefinitely. Any time I find myself breathing very hard—except when I’m climbing—I reckon I’m going too fast.

Yesterday, coming home along the Burke-Gilman at dusk on the Tournesol, it was all I could do to rein in the bike; it kept wanting me to go just a tad more quickly than I wanted; balancing on that fine line between too fast and not fast enough was just right, though; I got home pretty quickly, but could have ridden all night, easy.