Rest
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Six months. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
My last couple of weeks have involved a lot of conveyance: from New York to San Diego on a subway then an AirTrain then a plane. San Diego to Los Angeles on the Amtrak Surfliner, a double-decker haven from which you can pity the occupants of Interstate 5 at close range. The metro to a bus to LAX for a flight to Salt Lake City, then a several-hour drive south to the high desert, then a drive back, then a flight to New York, and a ride home from a hellish outlying icescape at Kennedy Airport where Uber traffic is being diverted during construction. (You get to the icescape on a shuttle.) Now I’m in Amsterdam—subway, AirTrain, Boeing 787, train, bus—visiting my friend Stine, who, in the prevailing style of the locals, lent me a bike. And all the while, I’ve been reading (with some envy) about levitation.
At the same time, my body is moving itself quite a bit less than usual, part of a deliberate post-marathon recovery. Gone are the 15 hours a week of cardio that filled the months before the Ironman in July and subsided afterward only slightly. Its substitutes are strength training, mobility, and intentional rest. I’ve never taken a seasonal break like this before, but some coaches and athletes swear by it, so we’ll see.
I tend toward believing them because of something that already changed my life, indeed that formed the basis for my becoming a triathlete: In 2021, taking up a new meditation practice, I planted 20 minutes of nothing in the middle of every day. My teachers in that technique encouraged me not to resist sleepiness if it came; for my afternoon session it’s about 50/50 that I zonk. The actual loss of consciousness can be fleeting—that old thing about waking up as soon as you drop the spoon—but it’s enough to be a reset. That reset is the bridge between the creative and cognitive work that forms the first part of my day and the physical effort that closes it out. I’ll swear I don’t have a workout in me until I meditate, and after that I’m almost raring to go.
What’s most surprising to me about this practice is that everyone doesn’t do it—that so many of us think it possible to make it through an afternoon without giving our bodies and minds even the briefest moment to purge and recharge. I did try, for a season when I was working at The New York Times, to take a few minutes for mindfulness meditation; but, even when I could make the time to cloister in an out-of-the-way office, it felt freakishly out of place.
Having eventually internalized that rest—aside from being quite delightful—is the key to performance, I’m experimenting with a bigger remit for it. If 20 minutes out of a day can, as we say about yoga blocks, bring the floor up to you, then how about a month out of the year? My goal is to do the Lake Placid Ironman an hour faster next time, most likely in 2026. For that kind of difference, everything comes into play: food, sleep, interval structure. But if I had to privilege one tactic, it would be rest.
Rest is a little different to my mind, a little less teleological, than recovery. But something I already wrote about the latter feels relevant here, so I’ll close with that:
The lesson of the athlete for the creator is that the conditions do not have to be “right” to create, because there’s no such thing as the right conditions, or if there is then they’re about to vanish. Your patellar subluxation will come back two weeks before the race. Your writing trance will be interrupted by the Amazon guy. Much worse things will happen, one on top of the other. [Ed.: And how.] When they do, the recovery you’ll have to do will be of yourself, your strength, your reasons. This is as good a justification as I can think of for practicing intentional hardship: so that when the uninvited kind comes along, you have some experience recovering yourself; can remember why you want to.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.