Design

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: David. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

This is the first year I’ve treated the two months after the marathon as true resting time—pulling back to a small fraction of peak training. Several seasons into this triathlon thing, I’ve been learning more about what works well for other endurance athletes: indulging in some deep recovery in the off-season, then building bit by bit back up the ladder of successively bigger races. The idea is to make each increase manageable but also limit the periods of higher effort, to save time and budget the impact on my almost 42-year-old body. Last year my wrist saved me some time by taking yoga and weights off the table for months; this year, I’m looking at a peak training week in late summer of almost 25 hours—a time-management feat on top of everything else.

As a new triathlete, it was enough to figure out how to run, how to swim long distances efficiently, how to stack endurance efforts one on top of the other, how to be sure I had the right equipment and understood its use. I started out with a slow, linear build, year upon year, with recovery days sprinkled in to each week but no major rest periods. The Olympic distance is short enough to wing it on hydrating and nutrition with some prospect of being just fine. The Ironman last year forced me to level up: I had to have a schedule, a daylong scheme, for gels and electrolytes; had to get comfortable opening up an energy bar on the bike; and the training plan I pulled from a magazine called for a drastic dip in volume each third week, which changed the whole flow and build of effort. The more I studied, the clearer it became that I would need to follow my last big race of the season with a couple of months of downtime if I wanted to keep progressing.

So what began as a naive adventure is taking on more trappings of a discipline. This appeals to me: I like seeing that there’s always more to learn, that my performance (and the quality of my own experience) is the product not just of accumulated effort or mental toughness but also of strategy and foresight, of calculated rest. It’s fun to see what works—what makes me faster, stronger, bigger. I nerded out this month drafting a spreadsheet and a chart of my plan for this year, carefully calibrating all those surges and rests. There’s coherence here, and intention—even the suggestion of a narrative arc, through the invigorating half-marathons of spring to the more demanding half-Ironman in July and then the full Ironman at the end of summer, then a half-step down for the marathon and another November rest:

As I looked at the chart, I wondered if I’d followed any kind of similar progression last year, which for all its awfulness was my athletic peak so far. I plugged in the numbers, and here’s what I got:

I felt a lot of things looking at this chart. It took me back viscerally to the day I crashed my bike—I relived that moment frame by frame. That’s the big dip on March 30, which is followed by a partial recovery as I dial up swimming and running to make up for the biking I can’t do in the weeks after surgery. Then the cataclysm of May 18, a before-and-after moment forever. The zero-to-sixty surge of cycling as soon as I get back to New York, with all of a week to prepare for my first half-Ironman, in early June. Then the surge toward Lake Placid, an athletic effort like nothing I’ve come close to before, easily double what I’m used to. All of it shot through with so much pain, physical and psychic; and all of it resculpting that pain, giving it a new shape, consuming it. Investing it with monumental love. They’re not two different things, the pain and the triumph, and you can see that in the chart. They’re not two different things.

This year won’t look like the chart for this year, but of course I can’t yet tell you why. We’re living with more unknowns by the day. Soon there will be not one human-crafted total existential threat to humankind, but two. The hands in charge of each of those instruments (and in some cases both of them) are unsteady. But: We can trust ourselves. The path we thought we were traveling is not the one we’re going to travel. There will be a path.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.