the wonder that is the body
When you stop to think about it, our bodies are pretty magnificent. It’s a small wonder that they don’t malfunction more often than they do (luckily for us), but of course, when they do, it can be (understandably) pretty catastrophic. When we really scrutinize and dissect everything that goes into making us, well, us, it’s all pretty inconceivable.
We know so much, and yet there’s still so much that we don’t know or can’t replicate. It’s amazing.
It’s on my runs that I often think about this stuff, about everything that must be going on in my body, at that very instant, in order for me to alternate one legged hops and (generally speaking) propel myself forward without eating shit in the process. Of course, I certainly don’t even know the half of what’s going on internally, physiologically speaking, which speaks to the magnitude of the machine that is the human body.
Easy runs, hard runs, it’s all relevant here because our bodies have to successfully do so much in order for us to a) generically speaking, move and b) more specifically, perform.
Being a couple weeks into marathon training mode has brought all of this to the forefront of my mind, since all my runs are no longer more or less the same volume or intensity as they were in the past six months. With marathon training, given the typically-high intensity and volume of each week and each month, it’s so important to keep easy days easy, hard days hard, and the like so you can appropriately (and adequately) stress your body in the right way on the given day.
A lot has to go on over the course of successful marathon training — strictly in the physiological realm, though in everywhere else, too — to give us a fighting chance of being able to show up on The Big Day and execute on The Big Goal. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that only workout days and long run days matter in training — that all the other easy or aerobic miles are purely junk — but man, I don’t think that could be further from the truth. Everything matters.
Good training is more than just the sum of its smallest parts; it’s when everything is working in concert that the magic can happen.
My worlds are colliding a bit because it was just in the past week that my library order for Bill Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants finally came in after a couple months of being waitlisted. It has been a long time since I’ve been in a science class — women’s health, circa 2005? maybe? — so my armchair knowledge of advanced biology is rusty, at best. Still, I can assure you that this book is captivating and has often left me at the end of each chapter with a new-found appreciation — or a reminder to appreciate in the first place — all my various bodily components. (I’m only about 30% through the book, so while I can’t yet speak of the book in its entirety, I can at least say that what I’ve read is quite amusing and entertaining, due to Bryson’s wry style, and is almost dizzyingly informative).
It has also been within the past week that my kids and husband (and consequently, I) got turned onto a newish Netflix series called “Cells at Work!” It’s an anime series that anthropomorphizes each component of the cell (think white blood cells; red blood cells; all manner of bacteria and viruses, like meningococcal, pneumococcus and staphylococcus cells; platelets; phagocytes; you get the idea). Again: worlds colliding.
It sure is easy to always have the body on the brain when most everything you’re reading or watching in your spare time is on the subject.
So what’s my point? To be honest, I’m not really sure I have one. Sometimes what I love most about running is that it reminds me how small and insignificant I am in this great big universe as it puts everything — absolutely everything — into perspective. Having the recent reminders about the complexity that is human life has given me pause to periodically take a metaphorical step back, zoom out, and simply observe, take care, and be grateful.
You don’t need to log a bunch of miles or ratchet up your heart rate to come to that conclusion, but you may find — as millions of others often do and can attest — that doing so yields greater clarity than you can ever imagine.