Theater of the Mind

I had a dream a while back where I suddenly realized that my hand hurt. I peeled off my climbing glove and looked at my hand, which was gangrenous from frostbite, black and swollen and vile. Apparently I was somewhere high up on K-2 and my hand had frozen and then thawed, as hands are wont to do high up on K-2, I guess. So I poked at my hand and the meat and tendons sloughed off while the wind blasted powder off the summit a few thousand feet above me...

I woke up in a panic and found that I had rolled over on my hand and cut off its blood flow. What a wonderful thing the brain is! My brain could have simply commanded me to roll over again, thus freeing my trapped hand, but no. It availed itself of the opportunity to climb K-2, if only for a few minutes. If only I could tap that creative energy when I'm awake!

Are Heart Rate Monitors Considered Bling?

I am readily irked by Fitness Nazis. I am readily irked by the way they dismiss things like reading books as being sedentary. "Oh, I don't read books; that's sedentary," they say, always with the supercilious smirk that transforms the word sedentary into a sword. One must spend one's time running up hills while wearing shiny underwear or succumb to the dread character flaw of being sedentary.

But having said that, events in my life have led me to suspect that I am maybe a tad too sedentary. In the last year about eight people where I work have suffered heart attacks ranging in severity from inconvenient to fatal. Many of them have been in my general age bracket, and I woke up one morning and thought "You know, that's a trend I believe I wish to buck."

But what to do about it? Running appeals to me about as much as a root canal. Rowing seems interesting enough, but rowing in the middle of the Arizona desert is made difficult by the complete absence of open water. I quickly realized that cycling was my only realistic option. I've always liked cycling, I enjoy exploring the world by bicycle, and it happens to be something that can readily be done around my house.

So I went to the nearest big box store and bought a big box store bike. I can hear the jeers of the real cyclists already they lower their heads and cough and shout "buy a real bike!" But at least I bought the best big box store bike I could find, a Mongoose Blackcomb. It's a pretty good bike by toy store standards. The worst criticism of it I could find in the cycling press, other than its provenance, is the fact that it weighs 37 pounds. Apparently that's a lot for a bike. But since my goal is tolose weight and improve my cardiovascular health, not win the Tour of California, the weight doesn't matter to me. When I lose a great deal of weight off my own body, then I'll worry about a 37 pound bike, and I look forward to the day when I can go to a real bike shop and whine "Man, does my Blackcomb ever weigh a ton! Got anything lighter?"

So I went out riding, and immediately hit the wall. I was pedaling along, huffing and puffing, and presently huffed and puffed myself into apoplexy. Heart hammering like the crankshaft bearings in my old Pinto, lungs wheezing and tearing like rotten sails in a stiff wind, legs burning, muscles locked up, head throbbing, stomach heaving. I was, in Sam Kinison's old phrase, starting to see dead relatives and heard voices saying "move toward the light, my son." It was devastating.

I parked the bike, collapsed, thought about it for a while, and reached a conclusion. "Cycling sucks," I rasped. "It hurts, I can't walk, my lungs hurt, I'm going to throw up, and it's going to kill me."

More out of a sense of duty than anything else, I read a few more cycling websites, searching for the magic phrase that would motivate me to mount the Machine of Certain Death one more time. Most of the websites strongly urged that one use a heart rate monitor, especially if one was interested in improving aerobic fitness.

So, feeling a bit like a fool, I went out and plunked down serious money on a heart rate monitor (a Polar F6, for those who are interested in nomenclature). I strapped the thing on and went out for a ride.

Man, what an education that turned out to be!

It turned out that cycling didn't suck. What sucked was my understanding of what aerobic exercise should feel like.

Just out of curiosity, I rode at my previous pace, mushing along until I reached that familiar state of near-death devastation. My heart rate was around 170 and the heart rate monitor was flashing so fast I worried that it was going to burst into flames. So then I started over and rode along, trying to maintain a target heart rate of 138. What a difference. My heart no longer felt like an angry cat trying to claw its way out of my chest. My lungs didn't hurt. My legs kept working. I could tell I was working, but I found that I could carry on a halting conversation if I felt like it (though it would have been with myself. The only thing freakier than a man talking to himself is probably a man on a bicycle talking to himself). In other words, it was a level of effort that I could maintain without popping like an overripe tomato.

In fact, it was hard to stay under 140. Even going along desert trails in low gear I tended to average about 144, which felt okay, and on the mild climbs around here peaked at 156, which didn't feel so good. To drop below 140 I had to barely poke along at a pace so slow people probably assumed that I was crawling on my hands and knees through the brush. It felt like cheating, actually, a level of effort so devoid of the usual rumpus of exercise that it seemed that I was accomplishing nothing.

We're always told to "go for the burn", to dig deep, to find hidden reserves of strength, to find the athlete within, and that no pain means no gain. Exercise is supposed to hurt. Pressure makes diamonds! It's supposed to be hard. We're supposed to grimace and fight and make tendons pop out in our necks, right? Come on, bust a hump, suffer purgatorial pains to make up for being sedentary! This cramp, that's for reading the whole Tarnsman of Gor series! That deep lung pain, that's for getting a job where you sit down all day! That lightheaded fixing to go meet 'Lizabeth feeling, that's for spending all that time trying to understand Larry Niven! Right? Right??

Maybe in some cases, but not in mine. As long as the goal is to lose weight and improve cardiovascular fitness, none of that hairshirt nonsense is apparently required. All you have to do is maintain your 80% target heart rate, and as it turns out, doing so isn't painful. Sometimes it's hard to actually go that slow. This was a major revelation to me, and I would never have had it without a heart rate monitor.

Now if I can figure out how to sit on a bicycle seat without hurting myself...

It's Only Polite

I suppose it's only polite for me to say a little about myself. But what would the average reader of my blog (assuming anyone ever does read it) want to know about me? Or care about? Beats me, but here goes.

I was born in Flagstaff, Arizona, but I've lived most of my life in and around Phoenix, particularly the far west side of Phoenix. (Like all cities, Phoenix has areas that are alleged to be ritzy, areas that are alleged to be bad, areas that are alleged to be blue-collar and so forth. I come from the side that is alleged to be podunk.) I went to high school in Tolleson in the late 1970s, and as people who are familiar with the area can tell you, going to school in Tolleson in the late 1970s was not exactly like stepping onto the high-speed escalator to academic success.

The best job I've ever had was running a bulldozer in a landfill, only back then we didn't call them landfills. They were dumps. Nor did we call them bulldozers either. They were dozers or cats. There's something viscerally pleasing about crushing a bunch of TVs with a D7G that words simply cannot express. The worst job I ever had was managing a production line that manufactured collision avoidance systems for airliners. I'm not the management type. I may not even be a people person.

I am currently employed as a test engineer for a company that manufactures stuff for airliners. My job is making sure that the testing process guarantees that the stuff we ship works. Next time you fly on an airliner and you land at night or in bad weather, there is a small but non-zero probability that the instrument landing systems on your airliner were tested by my software. That may or may not make you feel any better...

I am married and I'm the stepfather of two twentysomething boys. That was something of a shock. One night I went to bed a single man with no kids, and the next day I had teenagers. Suffice it to say that a long period of adjustment ensued.

Politically, I tend to vote Democratic, which in a state like Arizona borders upon complete futility. I may as well cast write-in votes for Batman for all the good voting does me, but every election I return to my polling place with hope afresh. But I have to say I have respect for old-style conservatives, the kind of conservatives that were amenable to discussion, debate and compromise. I think if I were a conservative, I wouldn't be terribly pleased with my party leadership. But that's just my personal opinion - and since it's my blog, that's the last time I'll apologize in advance for having an opinion.

My favorite sports are probably drag racing, the World Rally Championship, the Dakar Rally, and in a subdued kind of way the Tour de France. I'm not a big fan of traditional stick-and-ball sports, though I do watch the occasional football game or basketball game on TV. I haven't watched baseball since the Arizona Diamondbacks won the World Series. Color me "fair weather fan", please. I also like to watch bull riding on TV, not because it resonates with me but because it anti-resonates with me. It is such a painful-looking spectacle I simply can't look away.

I like almost any kind of food so long as it doesn't involve arthropods or molluscs. I'm also not a big fan of olives or asparagus. I know people who go to various towns specifically because of the sea food, an attitude that mystifies me. It would be like me moving to the desert specifically because of the scorpions. I did move to the desert, but it wasn't because of the scorpions.

I'm quite an avid model-builder, and I find that I specialize in spacecraft models and aircraft of the Cold War for the most part. I figure I've spent approximately a billion dollars on kits, paints, tools and gewgaws over the years, and I can go through my junk box and find parts from models I built thirty years ago. I'm not sure whether that should please me or frighten me.

The Apollo Program was a life-changing event for me. I had just turned nine when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon, just the right age for my Silly Putty-like brain to be forever deformed by the grainy TV coverage and Cronkite's avuncular commentary.

I smoke and I wish I didn't.

I run out of things to say after a while. I also tend to write overly long posts, it would appear.

Kicking and Screaming

I'm one of those people who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. It's not that I'm conservative, or a traditionist, or an armchair Lludite that spits pumpkin seeds at progress. I think I'm just lazy and not changing requires me to expend less energy than changing.

Consider: I used to dismiss iPods as the last word in pretentious accessorization. "Those things are for feckless people who can't sit still and wait for the bus calmly like the rest of us!" Then I got an iPod and realized that they were pretty handy, just the thing when you just have to listen to Dark Tranquility on a Mexican beach at midnight and you've negligently forgotten to bring your home stereo with you.

But I'm not really talking about iPods; I'm talking about my attitude toward postmodern stuff in general. Specifically blogs. I am not a fan of talk radio. Talk radio of any persuasion generally gives me the shivers, and for a long time I dismissed blogs as a kind of cybernetic version of talk radio. I have an old essay of mine where I said "Right, I want to read someone's poorly-organized and probably misspelled rants about as much as I want a lump of hot plutonium."

I suppose I should keep an eye out for the UPS truck, as I'm expecting to receive my lump of hot plutonium any day now. Not only have I begun reading blogs lately, but I now find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of actually having one (blog experts might wish to point out that a blog is as a blog does, and until mine actually expresses a point of view, it isn't a blog, it's junk).

How did this happen? What propelled me, kicking and screaming, out of my chair and into blogdom? I blame Floyd Landis, actually. I've been reading a bit about him and the doping allegations on the Internet, and there was a link that said something along the lines of See What The Blogs Are Saying. Normally I avoid those links as though they actually read Click Here To Contract Tuberculosis. But being moderately interested in the Tour de France and its latest flap, I went to said blogs and read a bit, and discovered that there was more to them than just frothing mouths and spittle-flecked invective. There is some of that, to be sure sure, but I was sufficiently calmed by what I read to think about starting a blog of my own.

"But what would you write about?" is the obvious question. I don't know. I'll figure that out as I go.