Few people are allowed the solitary thinking compartment that is a trash truck cab on a rural, driving-heavy route. I am one of them, and it's something to be grateful for, the interminable sensation of it notwithstanding.
As I rolled through remote locales and past bizarre over-sized statues of trout and hippopotamus (yes, Otisco owes all of us an explanation), I was thinking about the approaching evening and what I was going to attempt in this effort to regain my fitness.
I've done lots of kinds of exercise under a lot of different coaches over the years. When I was about twelve or thirteen I got to play on my older sister Natalie's travel soccer team, which was the next age bracket up. It was a big deal for me, particularly as an affirmation-driven sort of individual. The coach's name was Don Edwards, and in my memory he is kind of like a skinny Hulk Hogan, sans the facial hair and always wearing sunglasses. Coach Edwards believed in running and yelling, and we ran while he yelled. We ran a lot, most of the practice as I recall. I don't know if this strategy actually made us any more fit than the teams that we played, but I know it eventually led to him being asked to step down from coaching. According to reports, there may have been yelling involved there, too.
But in these more modern times, they don't do that kind of thing. The research seems to indicate that interval training - doing something intensely in a series of sets with short breaks between - is the best way to condition one's self.
So in the think-tank that is my garbage truck, I got an idea. An idea that percolated nicely over the afternoon.
So when I made it home, I got my cleats, soccer ball, four screw drivers, and trotted down to a park just a couple blocks away from our house.
It's a pretty sparse little public space. Just a month ago the cops busted a meth lab in a white, ramshackle garage that sits directly on the park's edge. It was still there. But as the punishing sun cooked everything, the basketball court sat empty, the plastic playground got wobbly, and with my four screw-drivers I marked out a square in the bleached grass, each side fifteen yards long.
I set my timer, put down my soccer ball at one corner, and-
The Fatigue:
20 minutes on The Square
[the concept was fairly simple- jog two lengths of the square, sprint a third. I could reverse my direction at any corner, and when I came to the soccer ball I could either keep running or dribble it to the middle and do a fake or a turn, dribble to another corner, and resume the jog-two-sprint-one routine. I expected this to be difficult, and I was a lot more correct than I expected. Ninety-two degrees in full sun didn't help. After thirteen minutes I changed the rules and allowed myself to mix-in running backwards instead of sprinting every third side. It helped a little, but in the last several minutes I was dying. It was really hard to keep my touch on the ball from getting sloppy, and eventually it wasn't just accelerating INTO the sprint that was difficult. STOPPING at the next corner, after such a short burst, that became really tough.]
I'm sure someone else has already invented something pretty much exactly this, but I'm proud of it. It definitely pushed me. I'm sure the square is going to become part of bigger fitness plans as my conditioning improves. But I didn't have time to do more this evening.
Time is always going to be an issue. I can see that already. But I think making time is going to be biggest benefit I can give myself. Even if it's just this twenty minutes of effort.
I bet if I thought about it, I could find that principle wanting to improve a lot of other areas in my life.
But psssshhh. Whose got time to think about all that?
Thanks for reading. Y'all are way more motivational than you know.
Indefatigable. Let's go.
No comments:
Post a Comment