Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously - Softcover

McKibben, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605291242 ISBN 13: 9781605291246

Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A new edition of a classic book about what it takes to be a world-class athlete and where the true meaning of endurance can be found.

At 37, the celebrated writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben took a break from the life of the mind to put himself to the ultimate test: devoting a year to train as a competitive cross-country skier. Consulting with personal trainers, coaches, and doctors at the US Olympic Center, he followed the rigorous training regimen of a world-class athlete.

Along the way, he learned to cope with his physical limitations and, when his father was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor, discovered something about the real meaning of endurance.

Told with his trademark intelligence, humor, and honesty, Long Distance is an insightful examination of the culture and mind-set of endurance athletes, and a moving and inspiring meditation on finding balance in our often harried lives.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes often for Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global-warming awareness campaign that in October 2009 coordinated what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

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1

I came seeking sweat and found only enlightenment.

It was the first day of January, and I was checking in to the Kripalu Center, a "holistic retreat" in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. I'd come to meet Rob Sleamaker, who had agreed to help turn me into an athlete-- to coach me for a year until I was as tough a cross-country ski racer as my genes would allow.

Wandering the halls in search of Rob, who had been hired by Kripalu to teach a weekend course on yoga and skiing, I came across the dining hall, where they were serving butternut squash for supper. "They've put orange juice on the squash," said the woman next to me in line, in a tone that implied orange juice was a tangy form of arsenic. I took my tray to the nearest empty chair, which turned out to be next to a man describing craniosacral massage. "You know," he told me in a confidential tone, "if you're generating mucus in one membrane, you're generating it everywhere."

For some reason I ate more quickly than usual and then checked the bulletin board to see if Rob had left a note, but found only posters for upcoming events: "Healing Ourselves/Healing the Planet with Grandmother Rainbow," "The Weeklong Never-Ending Chant," "Living in the Higher Worlds Without Getting Altitude Sickness," "Somatic Explorations of the Jaw." I wandered into a room where a man was orienting first-time visitors. He himself had moved here full-time, he explained, and changed his name to Domadaar. "I want to thank you for coming to share your energies," Domadaar said. "Don't worry about remembering what I'm going to tell you--what's important for you will stick with you, and the rest will dissolve into air." I was beginning to develop a rash. I had come here to jump-start the process of jockification. Forget Grandmother Rainbow; I was looking for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or so I thought.

Finally I found the room where the cross-country skiing group had gathered. They were sitting cross-legged, listening as a man talked. It must be Rob, whom I'd spoken with on the phone but whom I had never laid eyes on. I'd read his book Serious Training for Endurance Athletes, which was filled with lots of graphs of things like "Ventilation and Lactic Acid Changes at the Anaerobic Threshold." The blurbs on the back came from people who, collectively, had won the Ironman triathlon twelve times. And yet as he spoke he sounded sort of like, well, Domadaar. "There's a lot of synergy between yoga and cross-country skiing," he was saying. "You perform so much better when you're relaxed." He glowed with the same sanctified sheen of good health as the other people here.

Happily, though, he proved more than willing to get an unorganic beer in town that night. As we sat, he told me about his life--a boyhood spent playing every possible sport, a degree in exercise physiology from the University of Arizona, a stint working with the U.S. biathlon team. "I started to see the threads of truth that ran through all the various coaching philosophies," he said. "Most of the athletes I knew, their training programs made no sense. Everyone talked about how many miles they'd run, but no one talked about how hard they'd run them." As he warmed to the topic, he took his knife and started drawing a graph on his napkin. "Here's the intensity of your exercise," he said, charting one axis. "Right now, you'd start to get overcome by lactic acid down here, going pretty easy. We want to get you going faster and farther before that buildup starts. That's what racing is--it's the ability to endure the high production of lactate for a long time."

This is more like it, I thought. Enough about the spirit--finally we're getting down to bodies, mine in particular. Finally we're concentrating on what the next twelve months will bring. "After a while you'll get to know your body," Rob said. "After a while it's like getting up in the middle of the night and going to the bathroom--you know where to go. You'll get to the last two kilometers of the race and know that you're not going to bury yourself by going too hard."

But then Rob mentioned in passing that his dad was a preacher, and his granddad too, and just as suddenly the mood shifted. He'd left the church behind, he said, but not an abiding interest in "the process of living." Maybe I rolled my eyes, because he began to speak more quietly and firmly. "Look, life truly is a journey. One of the ways we become whole is to embrace the integration of mind, body, and spirit. If it happens simultaneously, so be it. But we have a whole lifetime. If there is any kind of higher power, I think what it wants is for us to learn as much as we can. You have a mind, you have a body, you have a spirit, and it's important to learn in all three realms. If you want to use just your intellect for one long period, that's okay. But you were born whole, and you can get back to that." Day one of my new life, and already more than I'd bargained for. I had a coach, but I had a guru too, and I was starting to wonder how much difference there was.

For three days our small band skied and stretched; indoors for yoga in the early morning, and then out into the cold. Few in the group had skied before, and since I'd been skiing the woods and lakes of my Adirondack home for a decade, I was the fastest and most fluid. But every once in a while I'd look at Rob or his girlfriend, Carol, who was helping him teach, and be reminded what a real athlete looked like: the economy of motion, the quiet body. Me, I strained constantly, trying to look good. On the last afternoon, I was skiing up a long hill when I noticed Rob behind me. I poured on the coal and powered up the slope, but when I got to the top Rob just said quietly, "You're pushing real hard." I knew that in order to race I'd eventually have to push harder than I'd ever pushed before, but I also knew I was a long way from figuring out the time and the place. For the moment I just relaxed and tried to glide.

That night, after a particularly evolved dinner of something called seitan burgers, I had a dream, one of the few each year I managed to recall. I was the captain of a small tour boat taking sightseers around an improbably compact globe. Though it would have taken just a few minutes to visit the tropics, I kept my boat up north, in the Arctic Ocean. Ice loomed up in great mountains, the winter sun hung low on the horizon, the aurora borealis turned the night sky green and gold. The beauty of this winter was so total it made me tingle while I slept. Omen one.

After I woke up, I came down to breakfast--some new form of soy mush--and read the local paper. A boy from down the road, Patrick Weaver, had just won a spot on the U.S. cross-country team for the upcoming Nagano Olympics, despite a virus that had kept him vomiting throughout the race. "All the time I've been skiing, people have asked me if I was going to the Olympics," he said. "And I always told them, 'Maybe.'" Sign two.

After that, I found our group for our last yoga session. (If I was the most seasoned skier, I was also the most miserable stretcher, hands barely dangling past my knees, groaning as I tried the Warrior Lunge, toppling when I tackled the Tree.) When we had finished our final bends, Rob called me aside and gave me his heart rate monitor to use for a few weeks until I found my own. He showed me how to strap it across my chest--it felt like some kind of talisman, as if I'd wandered into one of those scenes where the hero hands over his sword or his lariat.

The symbols were piling up too fast; I had to nasally generate some mucus to cover my emotions. But I was launched.

From the sublime to the sopping wet. I left the Berkshires that morning and drove due north, nearly to the top of Vermont, to the calendar-perfect New England village of Craftsbury Common, and then a little farther still to the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. I came...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1605291242
• ISBN 13: 9781605291246
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland