13. Recovery
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Discipline. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Recovery, of the athletic kind, sucks. I’ve never really liked taking a day off, and this is revealing of a vulnerability I wish I didn’t have: an excessive dependence on movement. Athletic movement confers clarity and tranquility and momentum. It structures the days (especially right now, when my work is self-directed and I’m not accountable to anybody else). It helps to keep my behavior—sleep, substance use, social endeavoring, diet—within bounds that can sustain strenuous physical training and writing. Recovery, by contrast, feels like a nice name for catatonic drifting—the worst-case scenario. What are you supposed to do if you’re not doing anything?
In this chapter of my life, though, a few things have started to change my understanding of recovery:
Longer meditations have imposed a disciplined stillness on more of each day, giving intentional nonactivity parity with exertion. This has revealed a low-key joy in genuine stillness that was not visible to me before. In turn, that joy has come to illuminate other moments in which doing something is not an option.
Fiction writing revealed that, for me at least, time away from the desk is when the most valuable work happens—that it is precisely in moments of absence from the effort that the parts of myself I don’t see can issue their surprises.
In triathlon training, what is exertive in one sport can provide relief from another: The parts of your body that get compressed by running will stretch out when you swim. Muscles locked up from leg day find relief in a little light cycling. Fatigue is not linear; it’s a negotiation, a dance. Thus, recovery is not a uniform abstention from work. It’s a form of listening, of noticing where the body needs attention and what kind.
Moreover, athletic practice acquaints us with a recovery that is incomplete and fleeting, not a striving toward a condition of being recovered but a state of perpetual recalibration, of drawing from the parts of the organism that are still capable and giving the other ones both active and passive relief. (I spent a good part of yesterday’s pool time stretching my murderous psychopath IT band.) It is not so far from recovery in the style of the mourner, the addict, or the cancer patient: a process to be kept aloft, not by freezing in place but by noticing, widely and generously—and recreating, over and over, the conditions of a better survival.
The lesson of the athlete for the creator is that the conditions do not have to be “right” to create, because there’s no such thing as the right conditions, or if there is then they’re about to vanish. Your patellar subluxation will come back two weeks before the race. Your writing trance will be interrupted by the Amazon guy. Much worse things will happen, one on top of the other. When they do, the recovery you’ll have to do will be of yourself, your strength, your reasons. This is as good a justification as I can think of for practicing intentional hardship: so that when the uninvited kind comes along, you have some experience recovering yourself; can remember why you want to.
In swimming, recovery has a more technical meaning: It’s the part of the stroke where you stop pushing the water past you and glide your hand back to the start of its propulsive arc. The technique of this movement is a small thing that, over many hundreds of repetitions, adds up, and so in swimming drills you practice exaggerated distortions of recovery, training your body’s algorithm to perform the action at its most efficient. When you stop to look for it, this more utilitarian scale of recovery is happening in the rest of your life, too, all the time. You set out to do something, you reach a limit or barrier, and to move forward you must recover. Recovery, then, isn’t drift. It’s the engine.
Coming Friday: Revelation.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.