In Praise of the Stationary Bike

I love biking. Sometimes I power up a hill until my lungs are bursting and the sweat is pouring off of me and I crest the hill with satisfaction, pride and relief, but mostly I amble along enjoying the day or coast gloriously down hill. (Coasting downhill is the closest that I get to flying on a regular basis, and I would love to be able to fly. I can fly in my dreams which is a true delight. When people ask me what one superpower I would choose, I always choose flying despite how cliche it is) I like the speed of riding a bike for exploring. Walking is too slow and driving too fast, but when I am biking I am traveling fast enough to encounter many sights but slow enough to take them all in. I can appreciate a homemade sign for tomatoes for sale, a sudden glimpse of a lake, a sunshine-dappled bend in the road, a corner deli. Biking I can feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my arms. What could biking on a stationary bike possibly have to offer to rival that?

Biking outdoors is an experience; biking at the gym is pure exercise.

On the bike at the Y down the street, the display displays my heart rate, my distance, my RPM's, my calories and my time. There is no fascinating scenery or intoxicating whiff of spring air to distract me, no shady stone bridge to tempt me to pause and sketch the horses in the field, no long downhills to soar down without effort (I always choose a single level and leave it at that for my whole workout) to distract me. The room is dull, the view out the window is the parking lot, the lights are unpleasant flourescent lights, the closed caption TV giving me the daily business news or a long infomercial on something that looks like a fanny pack that supposedly zaps your abs away does not interest me (and without my glasses I have to strain to read the captions anyway) so I am completely tuned into my own experience of my body and to the constantly-updating data in front of me.

I can begin to quantify the qualitative experience I always have running: About 30 seconds into the run I am already tired and at two minutes I hit my low point. Two minutes into every race or run I've ever run I think "I'm this tired already. . . There's no way I'll finish!" And yet I always finish. I experience just this on the bike at the gym, too. I try to keep my heart rate and my rpm's steady and so I can see when I am working steadily or flagging. So I can also tell when my subjective experience differs from those objective outputs. On Friday during my cardio workout on the bike everything suddenly felt easy at 14 minutes. This morning that second wind hit at 8 minutes.

I am also completely fascinated by being able to track my heart rate. In general, I had always thought of my heart rate as a constant (or as something that would slowly decrease as I improved my fitness) and concentrated only on increasing my distance and improving my speed (running). To be able to monitor my heart rate throughout an entire workout is a boon. When I warm up on the bike before my strength training session, I have to pedal as hard as I can for four minutes before finally my heart rate creeps up to 165, where I then keep it for the last minute. After my strength training session, when I get back on the bike for a cardio workout, my heart rate first registers at almost 150 and is about to 165 after one minute and by ten minutes I have to struggle to keep it below 175. To what degree is my heart rate increasing because I am working harder and to what degree is it increasing because I am getting more tired? Well, I get to watch the RPM's to try and tease those apart.

The uninteresting surroundings are allowing me to focus all of my attention of my body and the data constantly flashing in front of me. I feel that I have only just begun to scratch the surface in interpreting the data about my heart rate, RPM's, time and calories, and there are so many variables that I have not even begun to play with (or consciously hold constant). I may not be admiring scenery while biking in the fresh air, but on the stationary bike I am off on an odyssey into the workings of my own body.

Bring on the Puns!

I love puns. I find them almost impossible to come up with myself. (I thought the title of this post ought to be a pun, but I couldn't think of one.) Which makes me that much more delighted when other people come up with them.

In general I'm often slow to get a joke. And if it's based on a popular movie, I'll probably never get it. I think it's a combination of my general gullibility and the way I understood jokes to work as a kid. I thought someone would tell a joke, then you would look blankly at them, then they would explain the joke, and then you would groan. I thought this because of my dad's jokes. Here's an example (told to me and my sister when we were very little):

"A man was climbing a mountain. He came across a group of natives throwing rocks at birds. He asked them why they were throwing rocks at the birds. 'Up here,' one man said, 'we believe in never leaving a tern unstoned.' "

My sister and I looked blankly at my dad. He explained stoning and defined a tern and told us about the saying to "never leave a stone unturned".

"Ohhhh. . . " we said.

Anyway, a few weeks ago my husband made some pun and I was inordinately delighted with it. I'm not sure how he had failed to notice before that how easily pleased and impressed I am by puns, but he was clearly struck by it, and for the last few weeks has been missing no opportunity to make puns.

"What's for breakfast?" he asked me two weeks ago on a lazy Saturday.

"Egg on toast," I said.

"C'mon toast! C'mon toast! You can do it!"

I smiled but looked a little questioning.

"I'm egging on the toast."

"Ohhh, of course!" And I was delighted.

A few night later, I was busy at the stove with the tiny cast iron pan.

"What are you doing, baby?" he asked.

"Toasting nuts," I said, bringing them over to the table to spoon over our dinner, some Asian-style noodle and broccoli dish I had made up.

He raised his glass. "To nuts!"

Obligingly I raised mine too, pleased that he liked nuts so much. I myself thought they added a definite classiness to the dish in question.

And then I figured it out. "Ohhh! You were toasting the nuts!"

And then just a few days ago the whole family was hanging out on the living room rug. The baby was chewing on one of his beautiful hand-knitted hats, I was folding laundry, and my husband was eating a chocolate chip cookie.

"What's wrong, Baby Bruz," he asked. "Did something not turn out as expected? Was there a shocking turn of events?"

I knew this was a joke of some kind, and I cudgeled my brains. Could it be something about "shocking"? Like a shock of hair? Can't you have a shock of wheat or something?

My husband took pity on me. "He's eating his hat. Y'know, if 'blank' happens, I'll eat my hat!"

And I laughed and laughed.

Discovering New Math

One of the things I love about math is that I can make a mathematical discovery (sometimes thousands of years after the first person who made that discovery) and find it as satisfying as they did. Today I had the delight of discovering new (to me) math.

I was tutoring a student this afternoon in Algebra II who was learning about parabolas. One exercise asked her how she can tell from a parabola's equation if the parabola opens up, down, left or right. She asked me if parabolas could open diagonally. I told her it was an excellent question and that I was not sure. Specifically there were two things I was not sure about:

1. Does the definition of a parabola allow for a diagonally opening parabola?

2. Given a focus and a diagonal directrix, would it be possible to derive an equation for that parabola? What would the equation look like?

As to the first question, the definition that popped into my head during the tutoring session was that a parabola is a conic section (a curve generated by "slicing" through a conic: an infinite double cone). The Greeks who studied mathematical constructs as pure geometry certainly thought of parabolas that way. Our diagonally opening parabola would be just fine with this definition. We wanted to know if we could just rotate it about in the Cartesian plane. Having never studied or taught parabolas in any but horizontal or vertical orientations, I thought perhaps there was a precise definition that for some reason disallowed other orientations. The student and I agreed to both try looking it up after our session.

Regardless of whether or not it could be defined as a parabola, I was curious as to what its equation would look like, so my student and I started playing around. We drew a particularly simple diagonally opening parabola: One with a directrix of y = -x and a focus of (2,2).

To derive an equation, we could begin by saying that any point P(x,y) must be equidistant from the directrix and the focus. So PF = PN (where N is the closest point on the directrix)

Using the distance formula, we can easily write out PF:

PF = sqrt((x - 2)^2 + (y - 2)^2)

PN is a little trickier and during the tutoring session I couldn't think how to write an expression for it involving only x and y. But, as almost always happens to me if I am stumped by something while tutoring, the solution occurred to me as I drove home. I solve a lot of math problems while driving; I often even create visual proofs which my husband worries must mean I am not devoting as much attention as I should to my driving, but I think it is an entirely separate part of my mind and does not interfere with my driving.

Anyway, here's what I figured out while driving home:

Let N = (x_2, y_2). Since N is on the directrix whose equation is y = -x, we can say that N = (x_2, -x_2).

The shortest distance between P(x, y) and N(x_2, -x_2) lies along a line with slope 1. (This line is perpendicular to the directrix and so must have a slope which is the negative reciprocal of -1, i.e. 1)

So we can write an equation in point-slope form:

(y + x_2) = 1(x - x_2)

So we can solve for x_2 in terms of x and y! x_2 = (x - y)/2

So, we can now apply the distance formula to P(x, y) and N((x-y)/2, (y-x)/2)

sqrt((x - ((x+y)/2))^2 + (y - ((y-x)2))^2)

Setting PF equal to PN, we get:

sqrt((x - 2)^2 + (y - 2)^2) = sqrt((x - ((x+y)/2))^2 + (y - ((y-x)2))^2)

After a few rounds of simplifying, we get:

(-1/2)x^2 + xy + (-1/2)y^2 + 4x + 4y - 8 = 0

A lot more complicated-looking than a nice y = a(x-h)^2 +k! And this was a very simple diagonally opening parabola!

Anyway, I then looked into the formal algebraic definition of a parabola and was delighted to find that the diagonally opening parabola does satisfy it! Here it is:

A parabola is an equation of the form Ax^2 + Bxy + Cy^2 + Dx + Ey + F = 0 where B^2 = 4AC and A and C are not both zero.

In the case of our example B^2 =1 and 4AC = 4(-1/2)(-1/2), so yes! B^2 = 4AC! And neither A nor C is zero so we meet that condition as well.

Now that I know that a parabola can open in any direction, it seems obvious and I almost feel silly that I didn't know that before (since I am tutoring math for a living!), but no, I don't feel silly, I feel delighted, awed, and proud that mathematics is such a rich and fascinating subject and that I can continue to discover new things every day, hopefully also inspiring my students and giving them a taste for the joy of discovery.

Unexpected Baby Strength

Yesterday I took my son to the pediatrician for his six-month check-up.

"Is he rolling over from his back to his tummy?" she asked me.

"Uh. . . no."

I think she thought he was developmentally behind the average six-month-old, but she was kind and encouraged me to put a toy out of reach to his side so that he would reach for it and get to practice rolling over.

She lay him on his back and took hold of his hands.

"I'm going to pull him up to sitting and see if he can keep his neck in line."

My baby engaged his core and held his whole body straight so that he levered straight up onto his feet.

"Wow! He's strong!" she said in surprise. And afterwards said that most likely he could roll himself over now if he wanted to, but has a contented temperament and doesn't choose to.

That's right, baby: serenely defy expectations and keep your contented temperament and unexpected strength!

6 Things I Wish I Had Been Told About Strength Training and Fitness

1. Being thin is not the same as being strong and fit.

I actually didn't know this as a teenager. I had an attractive, stick-thin, hipster friend in college whose dorm room was on the second floor of her building. One day she told me that she couldn't climb the whole flight of stairs without getting out of breath. That was a revelation to me. I had assumed since she was thin that she was strong and fit. It shocks me that I had never realized the difference.

I think that "being thin" is a superficial and potentially unhealthy goal while "becoming stronger and fitter" is a worthy and healthy goal.

2. Strength training helps to prevent injury.

For years, I didn't understand the purpose of strength-training. I worked as a theater electrician throughout college and afterwards and that was my main source of exercise. I was very fit from scurrying up and down ladders and carrying lights and lighting equipment. My strength-training logic was: If I want to be strong enough to carry two 10-K Altmans, wouldn't the best method be to just carry two 10-K Altmans? This system seemed to be simple, elegant, and effective. Why invest extra time into pointlessly lifting heavy metal objects when I could get paid to productively lift heavy lighting equipment?

Answer: Because. . .

3. Women (or at least me!) get more injury prone in their early 20's.

I set out for a 13 mile run on a lovely Saturday morning in October 2007 in Portland, Oregon. I was training for the NYC Marathon that November. (I had run 10 NYRR races in 5 months in 2005 before moving away from New York so that I could qualify for the marathon the following year. I had broken a bone in my hand hours before flying to New York for the 2006 marathon and so had withdrawn, giving me a spot in the 2007 marathon.) Suddenly and inexplicably my right knee began to hurt. I tried walking a little, stretching a little, and at last decided to turn around and walk the 5 miles home. By the time I reached home I was limping such that I could barely walk.

I am still hoping and working to find a reasonable solution to that knee pain that allows me to run (at least 5K's!) again, but that pain (which a physical therapist told me is at least partially due to muscular imbalances in my legs) has been the most dramatic instance of sudden frailty. Could I have warded off that mysterious injury and be running right now if I had been consistently, safely, and evenly strengthening my legs? Maybe.

Whether or not strength training will help my knee, I know that it will help my arms. Which I have discovered need all the strength they can get, because babies are heavy! (17 lbs 4 oz as weighed today by the pediatrician)

4. Keep (or increase!) your arm strength when you are pregnant.

Kind friends and family, especially my considerate husband (who is known to enjoy lifting heavy objects) carried things (even small things!) for me throughout my pregnancy and whatever arm strength I had withered away, so that when my son was born in July I could barely lift him. Of course I do pick him up many, many times a day and carry him for much of every day and have gotten stronger (a la my old strength training philosophy: if you want to be able to lift a baby, just lift a baby!), but there has been a very noticeable cost: I have strained (at various times and multiple times) my wrists, my shoulders and even my elbows.

When being a new mother stopped feeling quite so crazy (right before New Year's), I decided that I desperately, passionately wanted to become stronger: to be able to easily, carelessly, gracefully lift my growing baby, all his paraphernalia, or anything else with out strain or fear of injury. Imagining moving through my life in a body strong and supple filled me with awe.

Could I do it? Well, it helps that. . .

5. A strength training session only requires three exercises and ten minutes, twice a week.

I am blessed with a personal trainer who is not only knowledgeable about strength training but uniquely knowledgeable about and in love with me: my husband. All of the following information can be cited to him.

The three most important exercises in any strength training program are:

1. A leg exercise. (I'm doing a leg press with a machine at the Y: currently 20 reps of 182.5 lbs)

2. A pulling exercise for your arms. (I'm doing a pulldown machine: 10 reps of 67.5 lbs)

3. A pushing exercise for your arms. (I'm doing a forward press machine: 10 reps of 75 lbs)

That's all that's needed, but it is important to be warmed up (i.e. physically very warm, for example after getting your heartrate up to 165 for 10 minutes on a stationary bike, just say.) and you can add a few more exercises if you want.

These are my four minor exercises:

1. Sit ups (10 reps but they are really good sit-ups!)

2. Shoulder external rotators (20 reps each side with a 3 lb weight; this is a fabulous shoulder injury-prevention exercise!)

3. Toe raises (or are they called heel drops? Anyway, I do 20 of them and they work my calves)

4. Back extensions (These are fun! I do 10, holding a 5 lb weight)

Anyway, I never knew that strength-training could be so simple, take so little time, and by so exciting.

6. The joy of sports/exercise is long-term dedication and mastery.

I dabbled in gymnastics, track and field, field hockey, and lacrosse in middle school and high school, as well as taking a few dance classes and suffering through a bunch of P.E. classes. It never occurred to me that my goal should be to find a physical activity that I enjoyed and devote years to increasing my mastery. Now, I am still just at the beginning of those years of devotion, but I have found three that thrill me:

1. Running

It was all over for me when I watched the 2004 New York City Marathon from 4th Avenue and Carroll Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The rush of runners and color and noise and sweat and exhilaration and exhaustion was intoxicating. The sea of runners - everyday, amazing people of all kinds - left me awed, hoarse, and desperate to start running. I started with the New Year's Eve run in Central Park where they hand out fake champagne at the water station, earned a mug for running so many winter races including the Frostbite 7-Miler when it was 5 degrees out and I had to run with my hands in front of my mouth, and improved my times throughout the spring with my best time being in the Coogan and Salsa Blues 5K where I raced past dozens of bands and local cheerleaders.

After moving to Portland, Oregon, my running became a more solitary and meditative activity, thrilling in a different way. I went on long runs exploring new neighborhoods, proudly cresting Mount Tabor and then soaring down, or meandering through the nature paths down behind Reed College, delighting in watching my mileage increase and my times decrease.

When I read inspirational running stories, like The Perfect Mile, I know that I need to sort out my knee and get back out there. This spring I plan to begin again slowly, looping my large grassy backyard in my Vibram 5 Fingers shoes and steadily building muscle evenly in both legs. I hope to run local 5K's, maybe as early as this fall.

2. Acrobatics

I had the luck to fall into the vibrant and inspiring circus arts community in Portland (originally as a stage manager and electrician). The last year we were in Portland, my husband and I were regulars at a partner acrobatics class as well as students in a trapeze class and rope class. I had never been so inspired to be strong or found such joy in becoming stronger. To be mastering a beautiful art form and expressing myself through my body while gaining strength and balance was exhilarating.

My husband just gave me a climbing rope for Christmas which is hanging in our barn. I have been climbing it once a week to gauge my progress back to (and beyond!) my former arm strength. When my core strength returns and it becomes possible to leave our son happily with his aunt for a few hours, we are looking forward to taking occasional open circus arts classes in Easthampton, MA.

3. Strength Training

I am thrilled to be beginning a lifelong practice of strength training to allow me to live a life both full and full of ease, to keep me strong and supple, and to prevent frailty even into old age. . .

Why didn't anyone tell me that this was supposed to be what gym class is about?

Haikus

I thought I couldn't post tonight, because the baby was asleep in my arms, and I took him off to bed. But I composed these while gazing at his little face (and remembering this afternoon when I came back to him after tutoring math for an hour) and just laid him down in my warm body imprint and snuck off to my computer to type these:

Like a hungry chick

My desperate baby cries

Lashes dripping tears

Like a mama bird

I fly to hold and nurse him

Now soothed in my arms

My New Mission Statement: Baby Feet

In 2011 my husband and I moved to a new town, bought a new house, and had a new baby. So at the beginning of 2012 I brought out a freshly-sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga #2 and a pad of yellow paper.

"Let's make a new family mission statement!"

The first family mission statement we made (after reading and discussing The Seven Habits), hung on the wall over our kitchen table in Portland, Oregon for the five years we lived there and was the source of our best man's best-received jokes in his wedding toast for us. I liked glancing at it while eating breakfast or checking the mail or drinking tea.

Now we live in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut and we are three and not just two! (And I put a photo in a frame that had held the mission statement and hung it in the hallway.)

"Maybe we should start by thinking of categories. Like family. . . and home, and health. . . maybe community? Or work?" I was getting into the brainstorming zone, writing everything down. "What do you think, baby?" (This was addressed to my husband, who I usually call "baby". He also usually calls me "baby", which, with the addition of an actual baby, who we - guess what? - often call "baby", can be a little confusing.)

"How about baby feet?!"

I thought that was not terribly helpful, but in the spirit of brainstorming and improv (always say yes!) wrote it down in small letters above my list on the pad of yellow paper.

"So, for home, we want it to be clean and inviting, right? So. . . " A long conversation in which we discussed when and how we could vacuum the rug, do more dishes and purchase two more laundry baskets ensued.

Hmmm. . . not the mission statement I had in mind. I decided to wait and think about it.

The next day I glanced at the yellow piece of paper and there at the top it said:

"2012 Family Mission Statement: Baby Feet"

And I thought. . . y'know, that's a good mission statement.

Baby feet.

Don't get caught up in "accomplishing" things (that will be a frustrating experience right now). Don't worry about doing everything. Enjoy this tiny, precious, adorable, smiling, messy, silly, whingeing, thrashing baby who opens his mouth as wide as he possibly can to let out baby gurgles, show off his brand new two teeth, and see if he can chomp my whole face.

There, I just looked over at him, leaning on his Daddy's knee, and he smiled wide-eyed back at me.

There's my whole mission: baby feet.