LIFE AT THE EDGE?

BLAIRMORE, ALBERTA: Nothing new about the GRR in this posting, as you have been receivng small bulletins along the way,  Not even a photo or two as the full photographic/videographic presentation will appear later and is in Brian's hands at this stage.

This is about being at an edge.  In's  my last posting I was remarking that the country around Corning, having lots of steepish hills, was offering the opportunity to get prepared for this trip.  In a way, two hour ride of maybe 20 miles and with an elevation gain of about 1000 feet over nine miles did the trick.  However there was little preparation there for coming to a gradually increasing incline after five hours of ups and downs with a final pitch of half a kilometer that reduces one to just above walking pace, even forcing a dismount and having to walk the shoulder of the hill, and then having to do the same another ten km further along the way, and not knowing that there may be two or three more pitches like this awaiting before the end of the day's riding.

No, this stuff that we are doing takes one to the edge.  I have done route marches with full pack, run a marathon and skied three or four cross-country marathons in hilly terrain, along with some five day hikes and reasonably serious hut-to-hut skiing,but and nothing has been like the exhaustion and mental challenge of keeping on to the end we have experienced on this ride.  As Brian remarked, 'This yields a new level of respect for the Tour de France riders!'

In an earlier posting on the business of ageing, I offered the metaphor of a farm at the edge of the bush.  The bush is constantly seeking to regain the land the farmer has wrested and the farmer must not give up the wresting. Of course, I mean by the encroachment of the bush the process of ageing.  If you give in to the aches and pains, the diminution of strength, you will be quickly done for.

Not quite an aside here: I regularly go to the 'Y' and closely follow fitness research.  At the gym, one may spend much time repetitiusly lifting weights of running on the treadmill.  However, what produces fitness is brief encounters with exhaustion, followed by reduced effort and then back to near exhaustion.  For example, on three days in the week, I have found that, using the rower for 15 minutes or so and then moving on to the stepper for a similar time, great benefit arises from one minute of 90% plus heart rate followed by two at easy pace produces the best training effect.  How I dread each of those one minute intense efforts!  But then, I am out of the gym in half an hour and free to do less boring things. I have a short strength routine called 'Slow Burn' that I need to do only once a week to increase muscle mass and strength, then I am off to better things. As a minimalist, this is perfect for me.

I suppose that the point of all this, writing at five in the morning, is that life has to be lived occasionally at what seems to be the edge, an edge the turns out to be the point of growth instead of retreat. Jesus is reported as remarking that the way down to destruction and death is easy, wide and steep while that to life is 'strait' and demanding.  It seems that at every point in life one has to engage the edge.  Why is it that bad habits are so easy to maintain while those that are good are hard to acquire and keep up?

In reality, life can only occur in the presence of entropy, the inevitable process of winding down.  We must, at every stage of it, set ourselves to grow, to struggle, to win.  Entropy will win in the end, of course, the bush will resume our little farms.  Roberto will surrender to the dust from which he came and disappear back into the stuff of the Universe...but not quite yet.