The red-footed booby. It’s not what you think.
While sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for a physician’s assistant to look at the weird bruise I picked up on the back of my arm, I glanced through a children’s nature magazine sitting on the counter. And there were revelations to be had there.
But first let’s talk about the bruise, and put that behind us. Because a week ago the back of my arm starting hurting like a fat bee had just stung me. And that’s a possibility, because it’s August, which is better known as the start of Bee Sting Season. Or Yellow Jacket season. But I had not been stung by a bee. In fact I could not recall anything that happened to the back of my arm that would cause both surface and deep-seated pain.
Well, fortunately, the doc thinks I just popped a blood vessel in my arm. We’ve been cleaning house prepping it for both occupation and sale as my fiance moves in, and I might have jammed the back of my arm with a blunt object and never realized it. And now that the Physician’s Assistant has prodded my arm and explained the blood vessel thing, it feels exactly like it does when I pop a blood vessel in my finger or hand.
So that’s a relief. And while I sat there thinking about the sequence of events* and looked at that kid’s animal magazine, it made me wonder how animals survive without ever seeing a doctor. Our pets for sure get to go see a vet if they’re sick. There is even health insurance for your pet. They sell that these days. It’s a little know fact, perhaps, but you can get it.
The other fact of the matter is that wild animals depend more on adaptive evolution to get through disease and life rather than running to the doctor every time they get a suspicious bruise. Instead they just scratch it or lick it and move on with life.
But that got me thinking about what other animal characteristics would be helpful to have if you swim, run or ride?
And as I looked through the magazine about animals, I found some answers.
That’s right. Hippo sweat is red.
For example, did you know that hippotomas sweat is red? Think how useful that could be to triathletes? Rather than that crusty white salty sweat we all release into our clothing, we could sweat red like a hippo and actually see how much hydration we need to replace?
And did you know that a butterfly’s wings are actually covered with tiny scales? That is the secret to all those beautiful patterns, bright colors and cryptic eyeballs crafted so that their enemies will think they are looking back at them. If human beings had tiny scales growing out of their skin, they could replace Ironman tattoos and save people a ton of angst over the choice of a design and the pain of getting inked.
And how cool is it that a chameleon has eyes that can look two directions at once? That animal characteristic would be enormously helpful when riding a bike or running on a
Look out! Being able to see two directions at once could be confusing.
busy road. It would be great in the swim leg of the triathlon too, so you could see who to follow and who is coming up behind so you don’t get run over by some behemoth who swims like a crocodile. Cyclists could keep an eye on the road ahead and the road behind, and runners of both sexes could check out those cute potential partners with a discreet glance. How useful!
We all know cyclists love their kits. All those engaging designs and bold fashion statements in lycra are the mark of a real cyclista. But cyclists aren’t the only ones with
Think if you could spray stinky juice from your ass. Your enemies would quiver in fear.
flashy kits. A baby skunk is also called a kit. And its cool black & white pattern is well within the cyclist’s call to Obey the Rules.
And think how very useful it would be to be able to simply raise one of your legs or point your tail and squirt an offensive smell at people who stop their cars to yell at you for riding on the road. That would shut them down in a hurry. Sure, the stench might stick around a few days, but what cyclist doesn’t stink after a four hour ride in the heat. It’s an animal thing to smell when exercising. Let’s be honest about this.
And when it comes to getting nutrition during workouts, no human being has anything on a catfish. See, these fish have taste buds all over their body, not just in the mouth. Which means you could take a PowerBar or some other source of nutrition and just rub it on yourself to get the same effect eating things on the go.
Some species of catfish
can also live outside the water and walk across land to get from pond to pond. This would be a very helpful skill among triathletes seeking to become better in transition from Swim Out to the bike. Grow some fins and your swimming will improve, but being able to breathe through your skin while trundling up some sandy beach onto a sidewalk to transition could be really helpful too.
So there you have it. Animal characteristic from which we could all benefit. And given that we human beings shared 90% or so of our DNA with all sorts of living things, we’re not that far away from being able to sweat red, grow reflective scales on our bodies, or shoot stinky fluids out or butts as a defense mechanism. We’re all just a science experiment away from perfection. Just ask all those Hollywood actors and actresses getting all that work done. They all look like strange animals in the end.
*The sequence of events ot which I’m referring is the cellulitis that somehow appeared on the back of my hand earlier this summer. The Urgent Care people assigned antibiotics, which I merrily ingested for several weeks. When they were over, my gut bacteria was all messed up and I got this weird condition called C-Diff, in which bad gut bacteria takes over your lower abdominal region and turns your butt region into a zoo without cages.
Which is a wild place, if you catch my drift. So that meant even more antibiotics to knock back the bad bacteria. So my body was basically like a Superfund site in which chemical warfare was taking place.
Finally the C-Diff was eliminated and I tested negative for that. But them my body was wracked by a weekend bout of the flu. Most likely I got the flu from the little animals I taught in Vacation Bible School, where Kid Bugs are likely rampant.
So finally, after eight weeks of medical experiments I was starting to feel normal, and could run again without hiding in the bushes to take a spray dump, and even felt safe to get into the pool.
Then the bruise showed up. And I was like, “Whoa, WTF?” Because I’m not a hypochondriac, but when one bad event leads to another you learn not to take any of this stuff lightly.
When watching a cycling or triathlon broadcast, one often hears the announcers refer to an athlete as having “good legs.” And while that is often true in the sense of appearance, the condition to which they’re actually referring is the athlete’s conditioning and how it is paying off that day.
This last component is what most distance athletes who coach themselves learn to neglect. Training fatigue is your friend, but only if you are able to teach your body to perform under duress at the race level you want to achieve. That’s why some triathletes struggle to improve their runs. They simply do not do enough pure running volume to require the muscles to perform at a faster tempo. Brick runs will teach you to run tired to some degree, but the real secret is planning your run training to have at least one period per week, ideally with back to back days, where you press your body into service with a long run and then come back the next day with intensity training on the track. That is how you teach the brain to cope with training (and racing) fatigue.
The method here is to tap your cumulative fitness by planning around paces that one is already able to do in training. If a 43:00 10K runner can do 7:00 pace interval work or under during practice, that is evidence there is potential to manage that pace through the early going. But if one does not back off in training until a couple days before the race, there is not much training lost, yet the legs will feel fresher for those test races.
There is risk in the taper, in that athletes can be prone to relaxing their diet by putting things in the body that have not been ingested during training. Even a casual Coca Cola when one is not generally drinking soda during training can really mess up an athlete’s stomach. And a bad gut almost never leads to good legs.
Diver Caroline Matscusheva of Argentina was one of six slightly stoned athletes who showed up late for the competition. “We all met up on Facebook and agreed to fly to Bolivia to meet up in La Paz,” she related. “But My God, we didn’t party that much. The games are still in August, right? August isn’t over, is it?”
that we know now,” the two midfielders admitted. “We thought for certain we had won enough games to make it to the Olympics. Perhaps we were celebrating too much and did not check the Internet.”
oking Spagnoli kept rubbing his red eyes while alternately nibbling on PowerBars in each of his two hands. Periodically he would set the nutrition bars down on his gym bag and reach for his bottle of water, then seem to forget what he was doing, and grab the two nutrition bars again. “Io sono davvero molto in forma. Questo fa schifo!” he insisted.
Which is why it’s time to talk about your hip flexors. This illustration shows the precise point where a group of muscles and tendons convene in the area known as your “hip flexors” to make it possible for you to run.
Think about the many runners you see out on the road. How many actually appear to engage in a fluid stride, one that moves freely from the hips rather than scuffling along. You can see the difference in hip flexion between the fluid stride of the gal versus the tighter stride of her father. Granted, they are in a slightly different phase of the running stride. But age is no friend to our hip flexion capacity. That’s the point.
Think about the comparative hip flexibility of high hurdlers in track. They can run with their legs extended horizontally and snap them through all the way into the next stride. Their hip flexors are exceptionally loose and strong at the same time.
What we’re saying here is that having really strong hip flexors is a very sexy thing when it comes to how well you run, ride and swim. There’s always something about watching really fluid looking athletes that is visually pleasing. Think of those sexy male swimmers in the Olympic pool. Slick as seals and just as fluid, you might say.
The world moves on a woman’s hips
The first three minutes when you wake up at 4:45 a.m. to go swimming at 5:30 a.m. can be pure hell. Typically you’re waking from a deep sleep at that hour. With your head still pinned to a pillow and the light not yet turned on beside the bed, the instinct to roll over and go back to sleep is so powerful it can feel as if your brain is made of melting cotton candy.
Last night I just took a night off. The week had been full of workouts already. Morning swims on both Monday and Wednesday. Cycling all three days. Some hard riding, some easy. So I was feeling a bit gassed by last night.
And speaking of circles. I’ve completed some new paintings that are going to be installed in the new hallway at Water Street Studios. They depict the parallel worlds of everyday existence and the decision-makers who help our community grow and change. A pair of figures walking on the roof of some buildings symbolizes those people who do all the high-level decisions, yet also work on committees and commission.
We’re called Flatlanders here in Illinois for a reason. The terrain does not feature many hills, much less mountains. 150 miles to the north, west of Madison, there are plenty of hills. We travel there to ride the Ironman course and participate in rides such as The Wright Stuff and Horribly Hilly. The last hill in the latter features a 2000 foot climb to the top of Blue Mound, a rise in the landscape visible from 40 miles away.
Yet we have something else to offer resistance on the road, and plenty of it. That something is called wind, better known as the Illinois Hill. There are headwinds and crosswinds, tailwinds and shifting winds. Winds that change from West to East when you turn around and head back home. Winds that kick your tail and then kick it some more. Winds that grab your bladed spokes and laugh at your aero bike and position. Winds that try to wipe the contact lenses right out of your eyes. And winds that lovingly caress you on calm summer evenings.
We also have plenty of clouds, in equal variety to the types of wind. There are high floating cirrus clouds in fall. Low scudding storm clouds, gray and sullen in winter. Impetuous mixes of nimbus and cirrus in spring. And tall, foreboding storm clouds in summer.
There are tall cumulus clouds that rise over the farmland. That landscape, formerly composed of deep prairie, is now a corn desert that extends 150 miles to the Mississippi. The clouds over this terrain rise in anvil shapes. They take on the size of furious gods. If these clouds roll or drift east we get rain.
Which should make you appreciate the power of the skies, and not worry whether you get to ride among mountains or clouds. There is majesty everywhere if you respect it. But don’t always expect it to respect you. That’s not how it works.
The timeworn cliche of a rough old coach on the playing field calling an end to practice by yelling, “Hit the lockers, boys…” may not be what it used to be. Times have changed. Some kids refuse to use the locker room at all, and for a variety of reasons. That’s none of my concern any more. People too shy to use a locker room have problems that will likely haunt them the rest of their lives.
