Sunday, June 5, 2011

Healing

In a world that seems governed by entropy, by systems tending towards disorder and dissipation, the body’s ability to heal, to re-knit damaged systems, seems almost miraculous. The tragedy, of course, is that the body relentlessly trends towards dissipation; nevertheless, its ability to pull itself together time and time again is wondrous.

The whole process of training to get faster takes advantage of this pulling back from dissipation: we run hard and tear the muscles in tiny ways; then the body knits those in a way that makes us stronger, faster. Obviously, it’s much more complicated than this, but the general trend is to push the body further into disorder and then let it pull itself back into a stronger order.

This is what’s going on in my fatigued legs – my body is working its magic, reweaving muscle fibres and flushing out waste and detritus. And it’s still pretty good at it. Yesterday, my legs were feeling less stony, so I decided to do 8k at a comfortable threshold-y pace. My plan was to warm up for 2k, do 4 light strides, then do 8k along the hilly Waverly Road route at a comfortably quick pace (just going, not pushing), and finish with 4k easy. And that’s exactly what I did, averaging about 3:45/km for the faster stuff (about 6:00/mile). To me, this means that my fitness is still okay – and maybe by Wednesday, I’ll be back to the track to work on my top-end speed.

Maybe it’s crazy to put my body through all this planned damage, but why not let the body perform its miracles as much as possible? There will be plenty of time for dissolution later. For now, I want to feel myself pushing back against entropy, getting stronger and faster despite the world’s tendency to grind us down, to make us weaker and slower. Getting slower is just the way of things, and organized systems are temporary structures -- it’s just that I want to see what this one is capable of before it tumbles like a house of cards.

1 comment:

  1. It sounds like a poetry!!:D, Nice workout yesterday!! Keep up the good work!!How do you do the workouts? I mean, How do you do organize the workouts, example, today 8 x 1k at 10k pace, next week,20x 400s at 5k pace, or tempo runs, or 8 x 800s at 5k pace or whatever?

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