Archive → January, 2006
A Thin Line
I know the symptoms just as well as I know the adjectives: burning thighs, cramping calves, aching knees, screaming lungs, and side stitches so sharp I can’t inhale. And all this on top of nagging back pain and that nasty stinger that pops up between my shoulder blades on occasion the last few years.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt too badly, like when I have to dig just a little. Maybe I’ve got to pull through at the front of a fast paceline, the effort’s intense, but after a few seconds the next guy pulls through and everything’s okay. Or the hill is steep but short. Other times, it’s the duration, not the intensity that makes the pain so bad, like a huge headwind that beats down every bit of morale I ever thought of and I’ve still got 10 miles to go.
Or I curse myself as I cannot answer another rider’s move even though I’m drooling and blacking out from the effort. Or the group disappears yard by yard up the road as my legs simply refuse to work any harder.
Why do I subject myself to this kind of suffering? Why do I ride when my legs are cement and I feel like ****? Or plan my entire Wednesday so I’ll be at my strongest in order to suffer like a dog trying to hang with the Hammerheads? Why did I strap on a brace and go riding 10 days after I broke my collarbone?
There’s something completely different about pain I choose to subject myself to. I do, after all, get to hold that internal debate about when enough is enough. And of course, Darwin teaches only the strong survive. I don’t quite think this theory holds up in our coddled society, but I haven’t entirely given up on it either. I do know that I remain enamored with growing stronger and faster, even though I can’t figure out how all the suffering this entails benefits me one whit otherwise.
Except that hard rides provide frequent, powerful reminders of one of the great lessons humanity offers: that the fine line between pain and pleasure is very thin indeed, and one cannot truly know one extreme without knowing the other equally well.
Excerpt from The Adventures of Axel Kleat by Doug Kirk
Birding in Piermont Marsh
I went out to Piermont Marsh today to do some bird photography. A couple weeks ago I was on a ride through Talman Mountain State Park and ran into a fellow who had actually wandered out into the marsh to do some bird photography. That sounded like fun, so today I put on my rubber roots and overalls and headed into the muck.
Initially, I was walking on a 12 inch wide deer trail through 9 foot high reeds. I kept my feet near the edges of the path to avoid stepping into the water and mud in the center of the trail, which was about a foot deep. After 100 yards or so, the reeds gradually decreased in size until they were about 4 feet high. In the end, I walked almost to the Hudson (though I couldn’t see it because of the reeds):
Here’s the view from the end:
Here’s the path back before the reeds before I got back into the 9-foot-high section:
I didn’t see a single bird, but being out there was really something!
New Jersey Children’s Museum
We went to the New Jersey Children’s Museum today:
A good time was had by all!