Peak Summer

The Missouri sun swelters in July and ensures any outdoor exerciser a challenge in maintaining a low heart rate.

I found my running pace steadily slowing this morning, mile after mile, as I lowered my cadence to keep my heart beating at a relatively easy effort. My run was essentially a long deceleration from what started at a slow pace to begin with.

Regarding “slow runs,” I’m of the belief that heart rate is more important than pace. Why would there be a pace dictating “easy effort?” Easy effort is simply an effort that feels easy. That feeling should not have a “pace requirement” to it. I think that we are too obsessed with clocks.

These days I do monitor my speed more closely when embarking on higher intensity runs; I used to just run for as long as I felt like it.

I try not to obsess over the clock. It was Captain Hook’s downfall to have his ears acutely attuned to a clock that signified his own mortality.

I ran through the soupy summer air and my feet skipped over the debris from the previous night’s Fourth of July downtown festivities. The sun already pierced at 7:00 am and I was drenched thirty minutes into my run. It was assuring to know though that my heart rate did in fact remain low for almost 8 miles (about 13 km) and I finished the run feeling invigorated.

The previous night, the cynic in me enjoyed the fireworks while also noting a great fallacy in the urban world: the concept that fun must be linked to consumption. The holiday must be celebrated by buying beers, buying food, buying firecrackers, and in turn doing very little. Pleasure comes from spending money on someone else’s creation. No action is required or recommended.

Meanwhile, I read somewhere that most adults cannot run one mile. This would not surprise me.

The value of running, to me, is the possibility of connection to the earth that it provides. How many people can genuinely feel the earth with their feet? In this day and age the modern human is either propped up, seated, or standing with a physical barrier (typically cushion) between his or feet and the earth.

There are currents and micro currents that sift through our DNA when we are outside and walking under sunshine. What happens to a soul that fails to feel the earth, the sun, and all of its magnificent invisible remedies?

I reckon that running, like cycling, is a stand against the urban rat race. It is a reach backwards, in a sense, to the persistence hunt and the evolution that occurred from the first bipeds.

Over thousands of years we learned to run. It would be a tragedy to lose that gift in a century.