Poco adagio

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The marathon game is new to me, and last week I learned something new about it: I’ve been training too hard. At first this made me feel dumb, because who could miss that the best athletes spend most of their training time at a blissfully light effort? (Reasons they do this include to optimize their fat-burning aerobic metabolisms for use over long stretches and to limit the burden on their bodies.)

Then I remembered that I’m still kind of a novice, that my recent adoption of the sport has been driven and guided by instinct. For me, that instinct includes a desire to push hard over and over, and comes with the capacity to do it. I’ve been vigilant against the kind of overtraining I knew about, looking out for persistent fatigue or conditioning plateaus. Absent those, it felt like I was doing OK.

Three guesses who has no problem moving slow.

But now I’m doing better, because now I’ve figured out that most of my runs should be slow. My watch is now set to alert me when my heart exceeds 75 percent of its maximum rate, and it’s kind of shocking how often I get a buzz on the wrist admonishing me to slow down—how much precise intention it takes to stay in the specified range. The strangest thing of all, maybe, is to cultivate this kind of slowness in New York; we don’t do that.

As a compromise, I’ve been seeding these slow runs with fast, brief intervals, and here too is a small revelation: For those two-minute islands, I’m running like a demon. My watch, with the caveat that I’m sometimes skeptical of its GPS, recorded me at a 5’49”/mile pace one morning this week—decent for a 40-year-old civilian. I’ve done interval training before, but somehow this feels more effortless, like the overall takeaway for my body is not the hard parts but the easy ones.

A few years ago my yoga practice went through a similar evolution, as I realized that, in my particular case, slowing down was its best use. I sometimes have a fantasy of opening a studio called Poco Adagio, a musical marking that means “a little slowly.” This studio, though set in Brooklyn, will operate in open defiance of local norms. We’ll go for the gentlest of runs, then flow at a snail’s pace. People from Barry’s will walk by, shaking their sweaty heads on the way to their 8 a.m. meetings, and we’ll offer them ice cream we took ages to make; but they’ll have passed out of earshot by the time we finish describing the flavor.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram or Threads, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.