Here in Chicago, the sports pages have begun to fill with stories of spring training. Cubs fans are still misty with flush from the baseball orgasm delivered late last fall by their favorite team. Meanwhile, Sox fans lurk in hopes their team can rise from its lowly status of black and white ashes.
It’s all part of the seasonal cycles people love to follow. And speaking of cycles, that’s exactly what we did in 69-degree temperatures yesterday. It was fun. But it was also freaky.
As a nearly lifelong resident of Illinois, I’ve seen my share of ups and downs when it comes to weather. But for most of my life, the month of February meant freezing your ass off. We ran cold, hard intervals around Kaneland High School during weather so raw the backs of your hands would be scalded from the cold even when you wore gloves.
That was forty years ago. In recent years we’ve had several February warm spells that popped the crocus and snowdrops right out of the soil. For most of my life, that typically did not happen until well into March, or even early April.
In terms of running weather, I specifically recall a bitterly cold Shamrock Shuffle held in Chicago when the March temps were fifteen degrees. Racing that last mile into a stiff wind off Lake Michigan was some of the colder conditions in which I’ve ever raced. My thin Nike tights barely kept my thighs from frostbite, and my lips were blue at the finish.
March is still a dicey month no matter what year you choose. But February was almost always a lock for big snows and freezing cold. Things are changing in our climate. And it’s having effects.
Last week while doing research for a book I’m writing, I downloaded an Audubon Society whitepaper that models the anticipated changes in bird habitat due to climate change over the next eighty years. It also outlines the known changes due to climate warming that have already occurred in bird migration, winter and summer breeding ranges.
That information has been gathered over the last fifty years by birders conducting annual surveys in spring and winter. It also chronicles millions of bits of data from breeding atlas surveys conducted by citizen scientists. I know about these census efforts and bird studies because I’ve done them. The Audubon Society has gathered information of this sort for more than eighty years actually.
So we know actually know with great accuracy what’s happening to bird populations. That’s how science works. You study the patterns of cause and effect.
Every athlete should know how this works as well. You put in training in order to stress your body in positive ways. This produces a relative state of fitness, which you put to the test in races. Cause. And Effect.
But we all know how things can go wrong. A sudden cold or injury brought on by too much training can turn your workouts into a struggle. That’s a product of cause and effect too. Poor diet or other factors such as cold or hot weather can affect your results. The athlete that does not learn how to adapt to changing conditions will suffer poor performance as a result.
And if you don’t choose a coach wisely, all this madness can become the status quo. More than one coach has burned out athletes by trying to squeeze the maximum out of their protege in the short-term. All living things have limits.
That’s true of living systems, too. If you’re not making the connection here, here’s some help. The very earth on which we live is much like an athlete. It lives. It breathes. It chills. It overheats. All these factors amount to cause and effect.
And right now the whole earth is effectively suffering the effects of overtraining. Industrialization has turned out to be a stress on the climate. The planet can’t breathe fast enough to process all the CO2 being released by human activity, and we’re heating up as a result. It’s like the earth is being asked to run a mile while holding its breath, or encased in one of those plastic weight-loss jackets on an increasingly hot day. We know this for a fact.
February warmth is a symptom of climactic changes. But so are heavy snows in other regions of the country. The warming of the oceans is occurring with rapidity, leading to chemical changes that are killing off some coral reefs. This is the lactic acid buildup in our environment.
Some argue that human activity could never be the “cause” that produces these “effects.” They even pay for studies in an attempt to disprove the science that has shown climate change to be a real phenomenon.
Personally, I’ve watched the effects of climate change, and it is quite profound. The arrival time of spring songbirds has crept up by nearly a month in my own lifetime. This is based on empiric data, not some ideological perception. There are real and present changes happening all around us. Thousands of robins that once migrated south during winter no longer do so.
This is how evolution works, by the way. All living things are subject to the cause and effect of environmental and climatic conditions. If the weather gets too harsh or food supplies dwindle, populations either adapt or die off. We see that same phenomenon in winters when snowy owls populations fly south from Canada into the United States. If lemmings (their main food supply) suffer some disturbance that leads to a population crash, the owls are forced to find food elsewhere or they perish.
The same thing happens with human populations during times of drought or famine. Major migrations have occurred throughout human history. The potato famine sent many Irish across the sea to the United States. All it takes in some source of cause and effect to eclipse the status quo and human populations can be thrown into chaos.
If you’ve ever been in a race where there is not enough water at the aid stations, the cause and effect of such situations is dire indeed. A few years ago the weather for the Chicago Marathon turned out hot and stifling. Thousands of runners suffered heat stress and many could not get enough water to continue. Race organizers had to stop the race or risk having people die in the intense heat.
That race essentially served as a case study for the planet as a whole. Granted, race organizers could not control the temps that day. But when it comes to manmade climate change and the effects it is causing around the globe, we do have some degree of control how excessive that cause and effect cycle needs to get.
The changes are relatively simple. The solutions are progressing fast. Solar and wind power are turning out to be viable sources of energy. The conversion of vehicles from gasoline to electric can proceed apace as these energy sources grow in practicality.
Just a few years ago LED lightbulbs were far too expensive for most households to purchase. Yet the technology has advanced to the point where LED bulbs are now competitively priced. The market is embracing these bulbs as a result. They use less energy and last far longer than traditional light bulbs.
Yet technologies such as these are typically mocked by people who hate change. And yes, there are failures along the path to invention and conversion. That’s the nature of the free market. It is sometimes a case of failing faster in order to bring about true innovation.
Somehow we’ve come to a point where the opportunity to moderate human influence on the planet is being arrogantly opposed by people opposed to change. They happen to be the same group that mocks efforts to improve the American diet, and refuses to recognize the fact that the beef industry consumes 50% of the water used in America to produce a product known to cause health problems. The same goes for the sugar industry and cigarette manufacturers. Oil and coal producers as well. All these products have known negative health effects on human beings that can be mitigated through simple lifestyle changes.
Cause and effect often runs into stubborn belief systems. We’ve all known athletes who refuse to listen to coaches or trainers who warn that their habits might be harming them. Pride is the vicious enemy of purpose in many circumstances. But so is ignorance and the strange brand of confidence that comes with it. The priests who gathered up Jesus Christ and threw him to the Romans thought they were doing the righteous thing. On the surface, their cause seemed just.
That’s the exact same position we find ourselves in today. The cause of short-term economic preservation favored by today’s conservatives seems just. But the long-term effects of this are far more costly than this faction of society dares admit.
And those are the people currently in control of the political narrative. They’re concerned only with the short-term cause of wringing profit from the populace and the earth that supports it. That is their cause.
Some of us have been carefully watching the effects build up for years. We see it in the empiric changes in the birds and living things around us. We know that too many people are ignorant of the significance of these changes. Because blinded by their religion or their ideology or their politics or their economics, they are disconnected from these realities.
But cause and effect is an unforgiving reality. And the race we’re running is not a healthy proposition for any of us.
There are plenty of points in my life where I was proud of some aspect of performance or character. Taking care of my wife during cancer and my father during his stroke come to mind. That took a lot of focus and dedication.
Following college, I kept training and racing to the point where my roommate at the time saw it as self-indulgent. Again life had tossed me a situation or two that I handled by blasting through with my head down and eyes focused only on the road ahead. Running was both a symptom and a cure for everything going on in my head.
But one day we all lined up for a mile interval, and I’d been opening up a little as I’d gotten to know the other runners. There were one or two guys faster than me, but not by much. So we took off for the mile and ran a 4:30, in practice.
We’re all head cases in some respect. But that doesn’t mean you need to go through life letting mental health challenges such as depression, anxiety or anger rule your existence. In my case, it has taken a combination of personal forgiveness, self-examination, recognition of mental health patterns, changing thought processes and practical engagement in faith to find a better path to quell the head case issues that once dogged me in life.
Everyone that has ever served on a committee knows the frustrations of trying to establish a legitimate, healthy compromise to the most difficult items on an agenda. People typically weigh in with all sorts of opinions. In the end, the committee members vote and something gets decided. But it can be a painful process.
A very few riders might ride for the right to say “I led a stage of the Tour de France for 110 km.” There is always some room for individualism in cycling. That’s why people have long loved the likes of Jens Voigt, and why people root for 
Jamie Block Mayer is not much more than five feet tall. Her legs are thus in perpetual motion as she speeds along at just over 6:00 pace in a 5k. Those legs keep her going for much longer than that as well. Last fall she won the women’s division of the Fox Valley Marathon in St. Charles, Illinois in a time of 3:19.
Yet she did hold the lead, and the joy on her face coming across the finish line expresses the relief and thrill of accomplishing a win in a marathon with more than 1000 competitors. “I try not to make things too complicated,” she says of her training leading up to the race. “It’s pretty much 40 miles a week with a tempo run and some intervals every week. A friend named Mike Behr told me how to train a few years back and I’ve tried to follow the same program. Maybe I’ll go online and find something that sort of matches. Then I just do it.”
Her schedule and obligations demand that kind of focus. She is a professor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. She has her Ph.D. in Communications Disorders and Neuroscience and instructs her students in Speech Pathology. Her husband Steve, an orthopedic physician with Northwestern Medicine, threw her a nice little party when she received tenure a few years back.
“I won a 5K a few years ago,” Jamie notes. “I was just over 6:00 pace. And I’m pretty competitive in every race I enter. A couple years back at the Sycamore Pumpkinfest 10K I was standing next to this 20-something girl at the starting line and she was going on about how she was up late partying and didn’t feel that great. But then she beat me. And I was pissed,” she laughs.
Perhaps that contrast was more in evidence as she raced the bike trails in the Fox Valley Marathon last fall. The race follows the Fox River south to Aurora and back to St. Charles. Typically the weather has been fair and clear for the race, with leaves starting to change and the river surface reflecting the glory of the valley. The predominant noise is often the honking of geese and the cheers of happy fans staged along the course.
Yesterday we ran 10 miles in the Morton Arboretum, a hilly landscape in suburban Chicago. There aren’t than many places in northeastern Illinois where you get a set of hills so close together. The Arb cover a series of glacial kames in DuPage County. That means it is an attractive place to train for dozens of runners who descend on the place every Saturday and Sunday morning.
You can’t just run up a hill using the same running form you use on the flats and expect the same efficiency and results. The simple physics of hill running demand a change in strategy and technique. Runners who employ a fairly erect body position while running on the flat would actually find themselves leaning somewhat backwards if they tried to maintain the same relative position to the ground.
It seems so simple, and yet there are plenty of people who make the mistake of carrying their arms a bit too high. You actually lose the companion drive necessary to run hills well when carrying the arms too high. But you also don’t want to straighten the arms completely when running hills. By definition that forces you to lengthen your stride in sync with the arms. That’s not the most efficient way to climb either long or short hills.
Anyway, I walked over to pay for my good choices when I looked down to see the clean round shape of a powdered sugar donut. “I’ll have one of those too,” I told the young lady.
This morning while running I noticed yet another Real Estate sign featuring yet another “team” dedicated to selling a home. This trend to assemble “teams” rather than operating as lone wolf Real Estate agents has been building for years. There are reasons why it is so necessary.
As I swam in the outside lane of the Marmion pool, I glanced across the surface to measure my pace against the better swimmers in the middle lanes. They did not seem to be going much faster me, but I knew too well they were.
“And how long will that be?” I wanted to know. “Do I get my soul back before I die?”
Yesterday turned warm and I was all set to go out on the Venge when I realized something had snapped a spoke in my rear wheel. Probably the wheel got knocked or caught on a bike pump, but whatever the cause, it was not fit for a ride.
It felt good to be riding at any rate. Today is also supposed to be a balmy day here in Illinois, with temps in the mid-50s. For February, that’s a heat wave. I might go out again on the bike.
