Exercise and Entropy
Abhi, Sagar and I
Exercise and Entropy
My swim was done by nine in the morning, though I could have done without the 800 meter run to the holding area, where I transferred the timing chip from my ankle to Sagar, our team cyclist.
“Let’s go back to the hotel for breakfast”, said Kukreti, the slim naval diver who had given me a ride to the race, and was out of the ocean long before me. We both ate generously, far more than warranted by spending 45 minutes in the water, and agreed that we needed a snooze before we returned to the race to join our team-mates.
By the time I climbed back on to the pillion of Kukreti’s rented scooter, the sun was high in the humid Goa sky, and the tarmac sizzled. We were diverted at the Dona Paula roundabout, from where the cyclists threaded back to Miramar. There was little joy to be seen. They pedalled as if through aspic, sluggish and dazed. We parked our scooter and walked on the pavement along the cycle lane, where a middle-aged cyclist was slowing to a stop.
“Cramps” he pointed to his right calf, as Kukreti jumped into the road. A volunteer ran up with orange segments, Kukreti poured water over the cramped legs to cool him down, another volunteer sprayed a muscle relaxant.
“I think he should bail”, I softly told Kukreti.
“He’s slightly delirious”, Kukreti agreed.
Groggy as a defeated boxer, the cyclist pulled his sagging head off his chest, and rolled away from us. Eighty four cyclists, I was told the next day, were evacuated from the course for medical attention. Both of our teams had fared better, and by the time I met Sagar near the cycle racks, our runner, Abhi, had been gone twenty minutes.
I exchanged swimming notes with friends from Delhi and Mumbai, and Sagar looked for cold water. “Should I try a Red Bull… I’ve never had it before”.
When we joined the crowds near the finish line, Sagar fetched up Abhi’s position on the race app, and pointed to a little spot on the screen, “He’s done 10.06 km.”
That was fast - he was running at under five minutes a kilometer, and in twenty minutes, we should see him at the second turn. Meanwhile, I spotted my old friend Sridhar - ‘Coach Sridhar’ to Sagar and Abhi, cooling sponges tucked under the shoulders of his running jersey, focused on his task, not looking up, not seeing me. Others struggled more obviously, slowing to a walk as they contemplated the second, or the third, lap of seven kilometers.
Sanju strolled up - “the ride was a killer, not a speck of shade. This is a different race from any ride I’ve done. Thank God I’m not running.”
Where does a test of endurance descend into masochism, I asked myself. I thought of Sister Madonna, the American nun who completed 325 triathlons, and at 82, set the record for the oldest person to complete an Ironman in under 17 hours. In her last attempt at the Ironman, she had to be pulled out of the ocean, where she was floundering.
Athletic training involves extending your zone of comfortable exertion, pushing out the border between the green and the orange. While fitness and training dictate your zones of green and amber, wisdom must hold you back from pushing into deeper hues of strain. That morning in Goa, scores of athletes had lurched into their red zone, and less than two-thirds of the field finished the race.
Competition does that to people - coaxes them to scan their watches for their pace, to make that last push for the finishing line, to regard others rather than listen to their own bodies. While “the scientific evidence demonstrating the beneficial effects of exercise is indisputable”*, it is ironic that data around elite athletes is less clear: “Olympic level athletes probably have slightly lower life expectancy”* than the average population.
I love athletic events for the sense of community, for the shared love of sport. The very act of registering for a race forces a structure and a timetable to my training, nudges me out of bed when another hour of sleep is alluring. Raceday also urges you to do your best; that morning in Goa, the adrenalin of the event had pushed me to my fastest swim in three years. But I didn’t know this till I returned to land. In the water, I didn't look at my watch, since I wasn’t about to win any medals, and my primary goal was to cross the finish line with a smile on my face.
A couple of days ago, a paragraph in an essay** on entropy brought whimsy to my visage:
“Man is a highly improbable and complex system of subsystems, organs, tissue, cells, and processes. This complex system has by nature an optimum configuration of parts and interrelationships that involves about 60 trillion cells. If we examine this system in operation at a microscopic level, it appears very unlikely that all cells and combinations of cells will stay in their exact locations for very long without help. Constant work and energy are needed to keep them in their proper places or put them back there.”
I can’t speak for the science here, but I like to think that athletic training is a joyous way of coaxing those wayward cells back where they belong.
*https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8CR5T2R
**The Law of Entropy and the Aging Process - TT Samaras
James Fixx had been a heavy smoker in his youth. That kind of damage is permanent.
The last couple of years of unexpected deaths could be due to two factors:
1. Long Covid, often undetected, and the pathology of damaged heart muscles, a side-effect of COVID that took a while to be detected.
2. Running, and endurance sports more broadly, have become something of a fad, and people are in a hurry to do their first marathon, their first Ironman, without expert consultation.
I read Finn, yes - great writer.
The course was brutal, and I think the organisers should have put out much stronger warnings. But, in the ultimate analysis, it's incumbent upon the athlete to know his body, how far to push himself. Whether in the Himalayas, or in endurance races, I find too many people who underestimate the task at hand.