Necessary
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Half. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing a New York City street emptied of cars, and on Sunday the northbound FDR Drive was blocked off for a good 50 blocks. Robert Moses, not to my knowledge a runner, can’t have been smiling down on the 27,000 unenclosed humans clogging his concrete artery, making their way northeast from the Manhattan Bridge and then turning left past the United Nations onto 42nd Street, where crowds of Irish-ish revelers cheered us on over their pints. (Again with the bizarre experience of being cheered for in New York, though easier to square when it’s holiday tourists.)
I used my watch’s pacer function as a chaperone, setting my intended finish time and tracking my progress against it throughout. In the first stretch, all fresh legs and adrenaline, it showed me crossing the finish line 30 seconds early. But I resisted stockpiling any more time, knowing the goal I’d set was already several minutes faster than my last (and first) two half-marathons. That would be a stretch, by the end, and that would also be enough.
And it was a sound strategy. I crossed the line in Central Park 1 hour, 41 minutes, and 42 seconds after I hit the first timing pad, my foot a little sore but enough gas left in the tank for a swim. (The Ironman approacheth.) That got me thinking about calibration, about finding the level of effort that will get you right where you need to go right when you need to be there, no more and no less.
I’m about to hit three years as a runner, and believe me you’ll be hearing about it. But here’s, as they say, a key finding: that although yes, I’m getting a little faster, and yes, I can both measure and feel my stride becoming more efficient, and yes, I can survive longer distances than I used to—the real progress is in perception, awareness, intelligence. The ability to calibrate, to push the right amount in the right places so as to grow but also stay within the margin of recovery. That’s where this kind of expertise is most valuable, I think. Insight is worth more, pound for pound, than capacity. And it takes a while to show up in bulk.
That’s not to say imprecision or misjudgment ever go away. But the self-inflicted errors that are so common in the beginning of something, the getting carried away—those start to fade a bit. You realize there is no inherent value to the maximum. It’s information, but life is lived in the middle range, the place you can sustain. When they say “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” that doesn’t mean it’s a breeze; it just means it’s deliberate.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.