Mind over body

Last week, the New York Times published an article, appropriately titled “I’m not really running, I’m not really running ...” about the effectiveness of dissociation in endurance racing. It’s commonly believed that humans use only a small part of their intellectual capacity, but dissociation plays off the idea that humans also tap only a fraction of their physical ability. The article calls it “mind over mind-over-body:” the art of tricking your mind into believing it’s not actually forcing your body to do the things that nobody but your ego and maybe a small part of your spiritual self want it to do. The result is an ability to jump higher, run faster, and cycle farther than the preconceived - and rather unimaginative - limits of the concious mind would generally allow.

Athletes who practice dissociation learn to block out the white noise of the human condition - past events, future goals, perceived fatigue, real pain - and focus completely on the immediate moment. Many athletes count. Some chant. Some fixate on a distant point, or a shadow, and watch only that. However they do it, dissociation whisks a person away from the task at hand and all of its complications, and transplants them in a simpler place far away from the weaknesses of the mind ... the weaknesses that tell a body it’s too slow, too tired, in too much pain, and tell it to stop.

In the article, an exercise psychologist asks the reporter to imagine she is running on a wet, windy, cold Sunday morning. “The conscious brain says, ‘You know that coffee shop on the corner. That’s where you really should be,” said Dr. Timothy Noakes. And suddenly, you feel tired, it’s time to stop. “There is some fatigue in muscle; I’m not suggesting muscles don’t get fatigued. I’m suggesting that the brain can make the muscles work harder if it wanted to.”

A scientist who tested this method based his research on a group of Tibetan monks who reportedly ran 300 miles in 30 hours. It's an unbelievable story, if only because monks aren’t typical athletes. They don’t spend all day training their bodies, ingesting scientifically precise diets and maintaining an unwavering focus on their fitness. But in their spiritual pursuit, while breathing in synchrony with the moment, these monks achieved something that many of the world’s most elite athletes would consider impossible.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that’s especially intriguing to me. It gives mere mortals like myself hope that we can overcome our own athletic mediocrity and rise to extraordinary feats. Geoff, who fits more in the athletic freak of nature category, finds the idea frightening. “If a person can really find their way into an order higher than physical pain,” he said, “what will stop them from running themselves to death?”

What indeed.

Whipping up a slushy

Date: Dec. 9
Mileage: 18.1
Hours: 2:15
December mileage: 227.4
Temperature upon departure: 36
Rainfall: .26"

Some days, my rides are less about physical fitness and more about psychological endurance. Unfortunately, I never know which one it's going to be until after I leave the house.

Within two blocks, I had no doubt about what kind of ride I was in for today. The roads were an absolute nightmare. Still mostly unplowed, a continuous cold rain had saturated yesterday's snow, which traffic stirred up into a substance that is best described as a dirt-flavored slurpee. I don't believe there's a bicycle invented that can efficiently navigate this stuff, or a car for that matter, and I found myself walking (walking!) my Surly Pugsley on the road (on the road!) to reach the trails.

The trail itself was devoid of traffic of any kind - not a footprint, not a pawprint, not even a shuffling porcupine track. Not a single soul had attempted to slog up the trail, and that wasn't big surprise. Imagine taking six inches of already wet snowfall, letting it melt a little over night, then injecting it with a quarter inch of rain, and you have a thick blanket of sludge that is only slightly more pliable than peanut butter, but a lot more slippery.

I walked for a while up the trail, holding out eternal optimism that any moment it would become rideable, and muttering my mantra that trudging with a bike is an important skill to forge. But even without me on top of it, the bike occasionally slipped out and fell over, or I slipped out and we fell over, and the whole thing was so stupid, and I was glad nobody was there to tell me so.

But it true Pugsley form, running the tires at about 5 psi no less, we were actually able to ride most of the way down. I slid around often. But not enough to crash. It was more like semi-controlled falling ... fishtailing fun ... like when I first took up snowboarding and learned that true control was an illusion, but true disaster was easily avoidable.

To be honest, I'm not sure why I don't just give up on rides like today's, rather than pushing through two planned hours on the cusp of either laughing out loud or screaming obscenities. I think it's because I believe that any hardship, real or perceived, is good for my mental fitness. I also fear that once I let myself give up on one thing, no matter how minor, I'll start on that steep and slippery slope that ends in me throwing in the towel on the whole Iditarod dream.

Re-learning this snow-riding thing

Date: Dec. 8
Mileage: 22.2
Hours: 2:45
December mileage: 209.3
Temperature upon departure: 32
Snowfall: 6.5"

I spent nearly three hours this morning grinding away at 22 miles of trails, beach sand and a fair amount of road. Everything was covered in about an inch and a half of wet snow that increased to more than three inches by the end of the ride. That's not exactly a lot, and I tried not to think anything of it ... even as the hours passed and the miles crept along and I ground my legs furiously for traction through the wet, sticky slop. My quads are still burning.

Snow riding hands out some hard lessons, and its time to wend my way around the learning curve, again. Every season, I start school with a new bike. You'd think snow-riding on the Pugsley would just come naturally, being the tank that it is, but it has its own issues. Its slack turning makes it harder to control around sharp, slippery corners, and the lack of tread in the tires has a hard time gripping in the sloppy mixures of snow, slush and mud that are so prevelant in Juneau. I spent a lot of time playing with the tire pressure, until I finally just let enough go to find the control that had been eluding me all morning long. I was also making loops on a small trail system, and by that point had doubled over my own lines enough to leave a thin semblence of a groomed track; that probably helped, too.

This was only my third or fourth "snow ride" of the season, but I just wasn't all that into it today. I'm missing the cold and sun. Temperatures are forecast to just keep warming. This snow isn't likely to stick around long, although there's already more than six inches on the ground from today's storm. But what an incredible workout. Despite the skidding and pedal mashing, I could not come to grips with the idea of two measly inches of snow getting the better of me, and I pushed really hard. I think I'm more tired now than I was after riding nearly 100 miles on Thursday. Of course, that might have something to do with riding nearly 100 miles on Thursday.

In other news, I talked to the friendly people at NPR's Bryant Park Project again. Interview No. 3 is located at this link. I'm also writing a weekly update for the radio show's blog. It's basically just a condensed version of this blog, with some editor-injected humor. The blog is at this link: "Biking the Iditarod." I hope you enjoy it!