Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat ...on a bicycle

I am so anxious to go running today. why? Not because it sounds pleasant. Actually after a pretty intense interval day yesterday (oops, I fartlek'd - har har har, ok not funny unless you 1. know that fartlek is a swedish term for a kind of "speed play" often used by runners for training purposes and 2. have the glistening wit of a mentally impaired five year old...), moving at all doesn't sound particularly exciting.

This enthusiasm is a mental thing. I'm not sure what my body thinks about my future run. Something like "ouch, I hurt!" I suspect. But nevermind; it will feel great once I get out there. Some people call their recovery days "junk miles," but I have come to prefer the analogous term "comfort miles;" similar to comfort food. They're the miles where you accomplish a dizzyingly divine *nothing* - you aren't going longer, you aren't going harder, you're just going. And because you've been going longer and harder, the going on these days feels so comparitively easy that you think to yourself "damn, I'm fit, I am a running god!!!" which is kind of a necessary psychological break from "oh god, I can't breathe! Sweat! In my eye! AAAAA!" and other joys of the harder going.

I love intervals for so many reasons - comfort not being one of them. It definitely breaks up any monotony, not to mention offering that satisfying burst of energy that runs completely counter to all that discipline with pacing. I guess I'm just jumping on the anaerobic bandwagon. Anaerobic, you say? Why yes thinly-veiled-transitonal-rhetorical-question, anaerobic! In terrifically and inaccurately basic terms, athletes can be athletic (and thus realize their Aristotelian potential being-at-work-staying-themselves) in either aerobic or anaerobic zones. The distinction has to do with oxygen and exertion. In the former, you are fueling your muscles with the oxygen you're breathing - it's nice and self-sustaining. In the anaerobic zone, you can't breathe in enough oxygen to fuel your muscles, so your body goes all-American and starts racking up the oxygen debt (run now, breathe later!). And some lactic acid gets released - making all your muscles burn - and shortly after you start thinking to yourself "holy crap this is hard!!" Hopefully you do not, in fact, have to declare oxygen bankruptcy, because this totally screws up your credit report, thus condemning you to a life of singing about how you have to be a pirate and drive a crappy car on television commercials; oh and it probably means that you are, in fact, dead, which does not generally boost athletic performance. But I digress.

Sprinters, weight-lifters, and others who require intense bursts of super-performance perform in the anaerobic zone; endurance athletes - who as the name might suggest need to, well, endure - perform in the aerobic zone, so why are endurance athletes so fond of intentionally hurling themselves into the nether lands of Anaerobia (trademark pending)? It has something to do with the oft bandied "VO2 Max," which if it isn't already the name of a hyper-charge sports drink, really ought to be. It's just a fancy way of saying "being able to get more oxygen to the muscles more efficiently, so you can run longer and harder without being sent to oxygen collections." The idea being that you're upping your endurance by raising the point at which you'd enter into the anaerobic zone; and, as always, doing whatever you can to pummel your muscles down to force them to rebuild themselves better and stronger than before.


Editor's Note: It might also cause you to be overwhelmed with the desire to force rats to run on treadmills and do laps in swimming pools. See, e.g. Here; here; here; or here... there are more! I feel like some scientists just didn't have a proper childhood...although I am envisioning little rat triathalons as being pretty awesome - rats on bikes!

Actually, I am afraid I jest not about the rats on bikes. Never underestimate the internet for providing you with all your rat-bike needs. May I reiterate that some scientists just never had a proper childhood? I'm thinking maybe they had some traumatic sports-related embarrasments in their delicate teen years? Where's Willard when you need him?

But like I've said, the real joy of interval training is that it makes your recovery days so overwhelmingly easy that you feel like a god. Also, I'd be lying if I said, I didn't get a kick out of working out hard enough to really feel it the next day. I know that technically I'm still running the same distance, but it feels completely different. Everything aches in new and different ways and my appetite kicks into overdrive. I just feel like I've *accomplished* something; I'm guessing the accomplishment is the sort that makes me want to celebrate by forcing vermin to waterski...

But, no, I'm actually excited about my run because... I put new music on my mp3! New music!
I've been sifting through a recently acquired bounty of musical collections these last few weeks. Let nobody say that I am not vigilant about my music collection. I find it objectionable to have music that I have never listened to; I also liberally delete music that I would find myself skipping through a majority of the time. Others click their tongues at me when they hear I only have fifty billion gigs worth of music, but honestly, I can endorse every single song in my collection, which I find to be a rare quality in most people's collections. Anyways, these songs are part of my mp3 experiment of finding the perfect running tunes. I extrapolated from some of the previous songs that sounded to be about the proper intensity, energy and rhythm for running, warming up, cooling down and stretching. Now to find out if I'm correct.