Fitness
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Editing. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
You might, like me, tend to think of physical fitness as a steady state, changeable over time but not fluctuating much in the short term. This conception is reinforced by empiric measurements, like the common athletic metric VO2 max: The more oxygen you can distribute to and consume in your muscles, the more energy you produce. (If you have an Apple Watch or the like, its cardio fitness score is an algorithmic estimate of VO2 max.)
What’s funny about this measure, though, is how little it has to do with what it feels like, in any particular instance, to physically perform. For example: On Friday I felt an unusual burning sensation in my lungs during a hard cycling class, and figured my high-intensity fitness must have dropped as I trained for endurance ahead of my half-marathon this weekend. On Saturday, I came down with the actual culprit—a sinus infection. My VO2 max was the same on Saturday as it had been a week earlier, but I spent two and a half days horizontal beside a box of Kleenex watching the 1959 gay TikTok “Ben-Hur.”
You always hear about artists needing incredibly precise conditions to work in, the cork-lined bedroom, or, as Daniel Day-Lewis has it in “Phantom Thread”: ”I simply don’t have time for confrontations.” One way of responding to the volatility of true in-the-moment fitness, its intricate composition from many factors, is to seek control—to choreograph your effort and nutrition and rest and compression tights and mobility training and cold showers and ruthless abstention from nitrates so exquisitely that nothing can possibly interfere, as if Proust were prepping for an Ironman.
But then you might get a sinus infection. So can I propose an alternative? Sometimes you’re going to do great work. You’ll nail the last line of the book, you’ll hit your best time on a 4-miler in Central Park, you’ll improvise the most divine piano music ever heard. And sometimes you’re not. The thing you do control is trying again later. Fitness to run or to write can fail you in the moment. Its value is in the aggregate.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.