Fuel
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Help me build. The whole series is here. Please share this email. Sign up free or, if you’ve done that, please pledge to support my work below.
Halfway into a two-hour run last weekend, I twisted the top off a Jet Blackberry–flavored sugary goo. The packaging of these things is sublimely stupid, with a sticky main envelope and a tiny little tab that your sweaty hands will spend the rest of the run trying not to dislodge from your shallow pocket. The “Jet” was, I guess, because this flavor had caffeine in it, and given the impairment of the digestive system under long exertion, caffeine carries a risk. But the impairment is the reason for the goo, which is formulated to absorb easily. And I’ve reached the point on this year’s training slope where the gears are slipping just a bit, so I’ll take the juice.
A few minutes later, a Diet Coke’s worth of stimulant sponging into my blood and brain, I was soaring down the Empire State Trail in Highland, N.Y. The tenth mile was my fastest.
I didn’t start using these hideous gels until last summer. But if I were to go back to four-years-ago Michael, the avowed non-runner, and coach him into his dawning life as a triathlete (surprise!), they’d be on the curriculum for Day One. I might even try to go back further, to a time in my 20s when I got into cycling largely as a way of managing the size and shape of my body—when self-denial was one of the bigger threads of my fitness practice, and I thought that exercising on an empty stomach could max out the effect. In those days, the idea of taking in more calories in order to exercise would have seemed counterproductive. I sought depletion instead. And I found it.
You can’t make it through a daylong Ironman if depletion is your aim. You’ll succeed at that too easily and too soon. To work at this level is not to accomplish one big unit of effort, the way you might in a cycling class, but to enter a longer-term replenishable state. For most of the day, you’re nowhere near the start and nowhere near the finish, but out in a middle too big for your body to comprehend. So you stabilize and maintain, you protect an equilibrium, you add fuel before you’ve consumed it, and, as long as possible, you hold back the drift toward exhaustion. Triathletes have a reputation for being compact, but over my time in the sport I’ve added significant bulk. Power is useful.
I think this is also the mode of creative work, even work that has short-term outputs. A critical part of building a creative practice, in any venue, is to acquire a margin, to store more fuel than you need, to accumulate. If you empty the tank, it’ll take you a long time to recover. So suck down the gel before you run, and repeat it each half-hour. That’s not an afterthought. It’s the backbone of the whole thing.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.