Will Gadd is a smart guy.  If you don’t semi-regularly read his blog (in sidebar), I’d suggest that you do.  I learn a lot from it.  Besides the kinship I feel with him (we both spent time at Colorado College, climbing some of the world’s weirdest “sport routes” freeing old Carter drilled angle ladders), I respect and identify with his polymathic multisportism.  While some outdoor sports have for me been more appealing than others, I’ve yet to meet just one that deserves all of my time and attention.

Which brings me to the subject of energy.  Today and yesterday I’ve been feeling super run down, which seems to pervade everything I do.  I’m taking a blogging break here at work, as most of what I’ve manged to do this morning is stare blankly at journal articles, rereading paragraphs with a 45 second attention span.  Three consecutive days of reasonably hard riding last week (don’t let Jill fool you, she’s a hammer), then chasing Bill up Sheep on Saturday had me on the limit by Saturday evening.  It being the first week of 90+ degree temps for me this year didn’t help the recovery process, no matter how well I hydrated.  The point being, with a few exceptions I’ve been pretty useless at everything for the last 36 hours. 

Which is one of the ideas I find most valuable about this post of Will’s, that while our energy might be parcelled into work, family, socializing, and sport, the tank which allows us to do all of that is fed from just one source.  If one area is especially demanding, the others will suffer. 

The problem is of course that we’d all like to be able to devote more energy to and get more done in all of these realms, ideally at the same time.  So, taking Will’s idea of 100 energy points for a given week, the question is then twofold:
1: Can we increase our available energy points long term and permanently?
2: Can we cultivate the ability to more efficiently use what point we possess?
Looking at the last four years, I have to say that my answer to question 1 is no.  Just as Will wrote, I’ve found that if I try to do too much for too long I go into debt, and have to end up doing less to get back on terms.  Under good conditions this process can be pushed out for a longer time, but I don’t think it has ever fundamentally changed.

As far as the second question, I think the answer is yes.  This time two years ago Sheep would have certainly required much less of me, both because my fitness was much better, and my heat adaptation was exemplary.  Similarly, the academic work I was able to do this spring semester would have been unthinkable a year previously, with respect to both complexity and volume.  On the other hand, it came at a price.  As the content of this blog over the last three months has shown, grad school temporarily retarded my mental acuity in a pretty substantial way.  Staring a month ago it finally started to come back, stronger than ever.  Which is encouraging, as I didn’t take out student loans just to make my life more interesting.

So then, our efficiency at using energy can be improved, and seems to go in cycles.  How to conceptualize that?  I think of cause and effect cycling on three different levels, which vary both in their immediacy and in the depth of their significance. 

Two Week Cycles
Two weeks ago I had a big week.  I did some good intellectual work, and rode a bunch.  Later this week I should begin to get a surge of strength on both fronts as a result, but right now I’m feeling tapped.  Lesson being, what you do two+ weeks out has a direct and predictable effect.  Quality training and nutrition, for instance, can pay out big just two weeks later (and of course the reverse is equally if not more true).

Three Month Cycles
Three months ago I was prepping for the Grizman, and staring down the barrel of a pretty dark period of academic suffering and existential ruminating.  Late April, in other words, really sucked.  Whatever minimal short term fitness I cultivated for the Grizman went right out the window in short order (another rule: I seem to shed fitness about three times faster than I can build it).  This goes a long way towards explaining the lack of depth I’ve got on the bike right now.  I could keep moving forward on Sheep no problem, but for most of the way up to Blue Point I had no zing whatsoever, and thus walked a lot.  Lesson being, three months out is a good place to assess your foundation.  You can do a lot to shape fitness in three months, but if the raw materials for a big event aren’t present three months out then you’ll be in trouble if you try to push too hard.  This is why my June 2008 Kaibab ride went as well as it did.  My riding in March of that year was very good, and I was able to pin it fairly hard from the store all the way to the line without blowing up.  I haven’t had that depth of power since, and I would like it back.

Two Year Cycles
Ahh, the big one.  Most profound and most mysterious, the ineffable “base fitness” that comes about from the way sustained endurance efforts change your physiology and psychology semi-permanently.  This is why I was able to keep grinding away at the ride on Saturday, why I was able to survive the Paunsaugunt Enduro last summer without undo durress, and perhaps most relevantly why I was able to pull off the Thorofare traverse back in late May with hardly any meaningful prep.  That last example is a good one, because of the amount of on-the-foot suffering I’ve done (canyon wandering since 2003, ultras since 2007), I was able to skip two week and three month fitness almost entierly, provided that I didn’t string myself out too hard.  With more immediate, high end fitness I would’ve been able to push the pace more on the snow day down Atlantic Creek.  Instead I moderated my effort and survived, able to push on at a similarly moderate pace the following day.  The other side of that is two year fitness being a key prerequisite for truly hard efforts.  Kaibab ’08 being a paradigmatic example.  Others are Landis’ 2006 Tour, and a future example should be my 2011 Wilderness Classic.  Lesson being, long term planning can pay off huge, creating the opportunity for great days as well as allowing big but not brutal trips to be done with minimal direct prep.

And that, folks, is the Monday training blog.  Now I need to go get an iced Americano so I can be a bit more present this afternoon.