Science and Shamanism

This morning I watched two crop dusters strafe the highway as they wove yawning figure eights around telephone wires and dusted the fields on either side of me. If I'd had a young, impressionable kid in the car with me, I would have told her that that's where fog comes from-- giant hoppers of chemicals in planes-- and on clear days, it means that the pilots are hung over.

I'm continually floored by how busy farmers are. My impression of farming as a whole was mostly formed by annual treks across West Texas, where cotton and corn seemed to sprout up in rows as orderly as corduroy with no visible trace of a human for miles around. I figured you planted and waited and prayed. If God was home, you got a good crop; if you got his machine, you were financially ruined.

Now that I drive by the same 60 miles of fields every day, I see how much you can do to nudge fate along, and how much of that takes place in the fragile hours of the early morning. Men in white pick-ups (the white pick-up has an unofficial offialness to it-- my grandfather once commented that there was no limit to where you could go in a white pick-up) bump along the margins of fields with all kinds of measuring instruments, prying up random plants, taking jars of soil, sifting powders along the rows like modern day shamans.

I have my own early morning rituals, and one of the best, most soul-clearing things in the world is an early morning run. The high school track is made from shavings of recycled tires and makes up for its boring elliptical shape by being mercifully even and easy on my knees. Across one field is the brand new Lowe's, and when the wind is right, you can hear the same sullen, sleepy-voiced girl making announcements over the loudspeaker.

My brother was always the athlete in the family, and for years I was focussed on other things, things that kept me mostly indoors and mostly inside my own head. In fact, if our bodies developed proportionally to our interests, I would probably just be a giant head that scuttled around on giant hands. I figured that being an athlete was something you were born into-- either you are or you aren't, and I wasn't, but I was OK with that. Lately though, I've been trying to reconnect with my body and learn how it works and if, maybe, it could be capable of something mildly athletic.

Part of this motivation comes from the fact that my metabolism is changing, and lying on my stomach reading a book doesn't seem to burn as many calories as it used to. But another part of it is the belated discovery of how delicious it feels to thoroughly exhaust my muscles and marinate my brain in a slurry of endorphins. It's incredible. It's like natural crack.

Unfortunately, there's also a whole world's worth of obvious things that I don't understand about exercise, having never engaged in it competitively or regularly or with any kind of guidance. For instance, why does the exact same workout feel like delicious crack one day and painful, boring horror the next? Regarding my retardedness with food, there's a whole mountain of questions-- how much of what kinds of things can I eat that will give me enough energy to run?

There's also an element of shamanism that goes into athleticism. What do you say in your head while you run? How do you manage your fatigue, and the despair and elation of either not hitting the mark or hitting it? How do you develop patience with your limitations yet still keep pushing yourself?

I'm beginning to realize that there's a lot that goes in to taking care of a body when you want it to perform, and I've decided to use a white pick-up approach to learning about it. I'll ask the dumb questions, I'll experiment and measure results, and hopefully, through some combination of science and shamanism, I'll get it right.