What is

Last week was a bit of a milestone. It was the first time since April that I made it a full week without putting in at least one 24+ hour workday. That sounds like I’m boasting, which would be a little bragging about going without bathing. It’s not a good idea, no one's impressed with you when you do it and it doesn't help to tell them why you did it. But sometimes it’s what you have to do to get things done, just like you have to go through the Death Zone if you want to get to the top of certain mountains. Above 8,000 meters, there is simply not enough oxygen to think clearly, perform well, even heal the tiniest injury or even extract sufficient nourishment from whatever foodlike substances you can haul up there. Life in the Death Zone is a downward spiral that, when necessary, must be made as temporary as possible.

Put that way, it sounds a lot like sleep deprivation, except sleep deprivation is easier to come by than thin air, and it generally makes your body add fat instead of eating its own tissues. At any rate, I don’t like it and I was happy to be done with it.

My streak lasted as long as the typical Detroit Lions winning streak, except I blew it mid-week instead of waiting until Sunday. But it’s a start.

There are positive signs in other areas. I’m starting to train again, as opposed to working out, following a plan designed to ramp up my fitness instead of just getting tired on an opportunity-by-opportunity basis. It will be a while before my physiology adapts, but at least I’ve succeeded in ruining my cell phone. I try to carry it with me on workouts, especially solo ones. That’s easy on a bike, not applicable in the water, and always the source of much internal debate on a run, especially the kind of medium-to-long run I should most have the phone along for. Like Sunday’s 13-mile run in the heat. I survived just fine, and it turns out it’s the phone that needs rescuing. I guess I overestimated its ability to withstand sweat and underestimated how well I’d protected it.

One of my wiser friends (I have more of those than you’d guess from looking at me) mentioned a line in Harry Middleton’s book The Bright Country that goes, “What is, moves.” Isn’t that elegant? Middleton more or less consolidated my whole life into three words, and without even asking me. Now I have a phrase to follow when I lose my way.

It’s not as simple as three words, of course. What is, moves. But what moves must rest, and I’m still trying to work on that. What moves also consumes. It demands nourishment and wears out gear and ruins electronic devices that hardly existed a few years ago but now seem to require immediate replacement. I’m told that’s not a lot of fun. Those stores have a reputation for making you feel like you don’t exist. I’ll have to remember to move around.