This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Yoga. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
My hair wasn’t dry yet from the pool when I emerged into a drizzle on Saturday and started to run. Human life is interaction with water—ingesting, expelling, falling under the spell of, wading through—but some of the cycles get sped up in athletics, and mismanaging them is a shortcut to the sidelines or worse. In the triathlon a couple of weeks ago, I was so overwhelmed diving into the Pacific that I kept gulping it down, the salt sucking the water out of the parts of me that needed it. So Saturday I edited my training program: running home from the gym after a swim, rather than to the gym before it, to better simulate the progression of race-day fatigue and dehydration.
I sweat a ton—more than you—but I sweated lightly through those fleet five miles, listening to my favorite rainy music, the pavements of Manhattan shining and crowded and the Williamsburg Bridge footpath doing a steady business. We were all unwilling to cede an October day of this city which is definitively its most handsome now, the remnants of summer serotonin still spriteing everyone along in their sweaters while the air-conditioners hover in the windows, hedges against one last sucker-punch dose of July.
Before someone finally figured out what was making my bones break, I had to pee in a jug that I carried around for 24 hours. It was a hassle. I’m a large man and I consume great quantities of water by original habit—a professor in college referred to my ever-present half-gallon Arrowhead bottle as an “adult sippy cup.” I had to do the test twice, to confirm the analysis. The collection containers are bright orange, so I disguised mine in a tote bag. It was a vivid reminder of two things: the ruthlessly corporal economy of water that undergirds our lives, and the fact that people in New York City are doing all kinds of weird shit right in front of you.
The jug study showed me leaching calcium well above the norm. One treatment for idiopathic hypercalciuria, this bone-thinning condition, is hydrochlorothiazide—a diuretic, or water pill. It seems that reducing the volume of fluid in the body keeps the kidneys from throwing away so much calcium, and voila. Since 2014 my bones have strengthened from near-osteoporotic to basically normal. Recently I decided, swigging my pills at the breakfast table, that even if the nutritional supplements I’m taking alongside this highly efficacious drug are useless (they are), I could maximize their placebo effects by naming what each one is supposed to do as I take it. “This one’s for my immune system,” I say perkily, and down it goes with a gulp. “This one is to ‘combat metabolic aging.’”
“You can’t swim in the ocean,” my nephew said to me, astonished or disdainful, when I stopped off in Utah before the race. He’s right, of course. You can only hope to survive in the ocean long enough to get out, and these days if you live by a coast you look out on the water and wonder how long it’s going to give you that. I watched the video of the man rescuing the cat in Florida last week and admired the composure of the cat; either of mine would have torn his face off.
The athlete’s task is simpler: You swallow the right amount of water to offset its impending loss; keep doing so enough to sustain your systems without overtaxing them. You don’t drink the water you’re swimming in. You wear your sweat gracefully, and welcome the water from the sky that sweeps it from your brow and sends it back down to the river, to the sea.
Coming Friday: Inspiration.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.