We have reserves

I'm back to walking to work a couple days a week. Today I was conscious of having strength I wasn't using; of having reserves. But I was also conscious of how shallow those reserves were. I feel like I am healthy for the first time in at least a year, but I also feel really out of training.

I was in the Army Airborne and that kind of physical demand gives a young man a ridiculous physical reserve. I kept up a significant percentage of that with weight training and cross country running after I got out. It is an interesting way to be. You are always conscious of having a lot more strength available than you need for activity of the moment.

There were times when I would chose to "drop" an extension ladder, or climb on top of a piece of scenery, or move a piano by myself, but even then, I wasn't peaking out.

It's like working with free weights. When you work a weight machine those clever cams balance the load to what your muscles can provide at the extension of the moment, and all those pivots and slides guide the weight, keeping it just where it needs to be. In free weights, you don't press your ultimate limit. You can't. You have to have that extra bit of strength to balance and support.

Running, even walking with a reserve, means you have strength left to support your ankle and cushion the heel strike and otherwise protect and ease the motion. When you lose that reserve, a walk becomes a process of letting each foot slam down in front of you just before you would topple over. You don't have enough left to deal with an unexpected curb or even a crack in the sidewalk.

The only thing I've done that I was conscious of finding that exact point where my muscles could give no more is in rock climbing. Specifically, in bouldering, which places the crux (the hardest moment of the climb) in a position of prominence. Even doing a gym pitch of less than a hundred feet on top rope you husband your strength and move smart so as to save yourself. On a bouldering problem, there might be only a dozen moves total. So the climb becomes much more about that one place where you either can hold it, or you can't.

So I'll never have what I had when I was still in the Army; that overabundance of strength and endurance that made every walk a dance, that sometimes made moving and working feel like you were on tiptoes in a china shop -- a "World of Cardboard" perspective. But I look forward to having, again, more than the minimum needed to put one foot in front of another. Or to make it through a work day without having to collapse at a desk and take as long as possible to catch up on emails.