27-Feb-2000 It's the legs
After not writing in about three weeks!? I have to remind myself how to use my journal setup. I think it's working now. Phew.
It was like that this afternoon when I took my road bike out for the first time since fall. I hadn't ridden it all that many times all last summer, anyway, but I forgot how the shift levers worked. I stopped before I got to the end of the block and reviewed them, and then rode down and back a side street to practice before going out on the main road.
It's all the legs. In the winter my upper body gets into good shape from swimming, and my aerobic capacity is great, but my legs fade away and I have to use lower gears than normal when I start cycling.
I suppose you might wonder, don't I kick when I'm swimming? Actually, not much. One of the big breakthroughs I made in learning to swim distance without getting tired was to stop kicking so hard. A strong flutter kick is, as far as I've been able to tell, a poor investment of energy for distance swimming. For a 50 or 100 meter race, or maybe 200 meters, it's a different story, but I get out of breath right away if I kick hard.
The single biggest breakthrough I made in learning to swim distance was really believing that the air was right there. That I could turn my head and breathe when I had to. I still don't really believe that when I'm swimming in a lake or the ocean, and I start working harder than I have to in order to get where I'm going faster, and that makes me get out of breath quicker. In a pool, though, I'm fine.
After those two, there are a few things that helped me swim faster without getting tired. One is keeping my head down and just turning it as little as I have to in order to breathe. Lifting your head way up out of the water is a big waste of energy and slows you down a lot. A second is to use a lot of body rotation, so your shoulder that's in the water (this is crawl, now) is almost vertical at the peak of rotation. The last is to take long smooth strokes, not short choppy ones. I noticed that I was doing the same thing when I was raking leaves one day -- long, smooth pulls of the rake, not a lot of short ones. It seemed to be getting the job done just as quickly, and a lot more easily.
Well, for a quick recap of the month, there were several other good birding trips after the walk in Dunback Meadows. A week after that we went to Cape Cod for the weekend. We saw a shrike on the Goose Pond trail at Wellfleet Bay, totally unexpectedly, brant in Wellfleet Harbor, and a short-eared owl hunting over the Highland Links golf course next to Highland Light in Truro. We saw a Coopers hawk behind the River City strip mall in Waltham after going out looking for ducks in the Charles (and seeing lots of them, too). A week ago we drove out to Royalston, in central Massachusetts, to look for Bohemian waxwings, and sure enough, people were there to point them out to us. I looked down a side road and saw a wild turkey crossing it, so we drove that way and saw a half dozen turkeys in the woods about 20 yards from the car. On the way back we stopped at Oxbow national wildlife sanctuary and saw very little until we were driving away; there on top of a tree was another shrike. They're all over the place this winter. Last Monday we went to Dunback Meadow to look for saw whet owls that had been reported, and ran into some people looking at them; we wouldn't have found the owls by ourselves, but there we were, four owls in the month. Tuesday, back along the Charles in Waltham, there were hooded and common mergansers, ring-necked ducks, a widgeon and a pair of wood ducks, and the Coopers hawk again. Yesterday in Marshfield we got close looks at a harrier, and a shrike was where we saw one at the end of January.
In museum trips, we went to the MFA to look at a show of prints by Mazur. He had been one of Arlene's teachers at Brandeis, and it's easy to believe he was a big influence on her work. Yesterday we went back to the Fuller museum in Brockton for a Black History Month event. We were hoping to see the artist who had done the doll houses we saw there, but she was ill and cancelled her talk there. We did see some good dance performances and got a good soul food lunch.
Am I back? I'd like to say yes, but I can't be sure.
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