Body as a Machine?

Since my last post, I've had a particular workout worth sharing. The workout itself wasn't anything special: just a 1:40 Z1 [endurance zone] trainer ride. Granted it did come in the afternoon following a power-lifting session earlier that morning, all in the spirit of building leg toughness and acclimating my body to being efficient on already heavily worked legs [since that is what Duathlon is all about]. So these Thursday rides are comparatively tougher than other Z1 rides given I'm starting on already worked legs, but they still normally are not that hard to get through. This particular ride, though, turned pretty ugly about 1 hour and 10 minutes in, when my legs turned to bricks. Ironically, my health care economics class focused on deadweight loss earlier that afternoon, and now, all I could think about was the deadweight loss that had become of my legs. I got through the ride, but it was pretty shitty, and my power output totally crapped out for those last 30 minutes.

Why did this happen? I can't be certain, but I have a sensible guess. My pre-ride meal was leftover trout from a great dinner the night before [I didn't want it to spoil, but fish is not a simple carbohydrate] and I ran out of energy gels, so my caloric intake while on the bike was about half of what it usually is. Before getting on the bike, I'm thinking it's only a 1:40 ride, so no big deal, right? An hour and 10 minutes later, I learned that I couldn't have been more wrong.



Now aside from those miserable 30 minutes, this was a really cool moment for me in that it let me get philosophical. Basically, Descartes got it right when it comes to athletic endurance training. Once an individual achieves a certain level of training, the body absolutely becomes a machine. Put the wrong type of fuel in a machine [e.g., protein instead of carbs] before revving it up, and the machine isn't going to work as it should.


But is that really all endurance sports is about? At first this kind of troubled me, but after a bit of thinking [on, at this point, jello legs] I arrived at a different conclusion. Yes, smart training does hinge on a highly calculated mechanical-like approach. But on race day, it's the soul of an athlete that matters most, and the soul's integral connection with the body. In addition to races, even during a few critical workouts each year, the machine approach can go to hell. During these particular workouts (heard them called "seeing god," or "going to the well" and races, peak performance comes down to an individual's belief in him/herself, ability to suffer, and their psychological fortitude to rise above what they thought were [mainly physiological] limits. I still wouldn't recommend trout right before a key-race of over an hour, but even the most perfectly formulated carbohydrate only gets you so far so fast.

To summarize my thoughts: much of effective training is about zoning out, giving the machine what it needs, and letting it run. But racing [and those few workouts that we all hate to love] encompasses far more than that, and actually has much more to do with soul and mind-body connection. Descartes's machine-like approach is a necessary pre-requisite for peak performance, but it only gets you so far. At a certain point, it's the human elements that make or break your day. How will you react when you are stripped down to your core? That's when the true growth occurs, and I think why so many people love endurance sports.



As for my training more generally, things are progressing nicely, and without much excitement. Base building is definitely in the Descartes zone; fuel the machine, run the machine in a calculated way [heart-rate] and rest the machine. More training details to be posted at the end of this current cycle in about two weeks.