In praise of American beach culture; the exercise-induced Nirvana Zone
14 April 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
There are few places I like better than the beach in the off season and few places I detest more than the beach in season. As PJ once quipped about France, I love everything about France except the people who populate it. I had an opportunity to travel to Ocean City Maryland this past week. My daughter was competing in a gigantic regional cheerleader festival and as a national qualifier it drew perky contestants from as far away as Massachusetts and Ohio. Held in a packed 10,000 seat auditorium, this Barbie Nuremburg rally was a story in and of itself. We stayed at a 26th street oceanfront condo and relatively speaking, the city was deserted. I love to walk and the weather was perfect. The boardwalk runs 27 blocks to Division Street at which point numbered streets are replaced by name streets for the final 15 blocks. At the very end of the boardwalk lies the permanent amusement park. I would guess its probably four to five miles from my starting point to the fishing pier that houses the Ferris wheel at the far end of the boardwalk. Since the walk terrain was flat as a pancake, in order to generate a heart rate sufficient enough to constitute a good workout, velocity and distance would replace my usual highly intense-short duration mountain cardio. In order to get the heart rate up to a reasonable initial elevated level, I did a series of short sprints, jumping jacks and pushups five yards from the waters edge. Sweet Nirvana-on-a-stick, what better free-hand cardio location? The salt-filled wind, the sound of the waves, the gulls, the sand and a visual clarity that allowed you to see for miles and milesafter jacking my heart rate up to 85% of age-related heart rate maximum, I hit the boardwalk. I put the walkman on (Steely Dan, Thelonious Monk, Waylon Jennings) and began to power my way down the boards. As those of us who use HR monitors are aware, once the heart is initially elevated it is fairly easy to keep it that way.
On my boardwalk walk anytime my heart rate dropped to 70%, I picked up the pace. Motoring along at 75 to 80% required I push the walking pedal to the metal; I was substituting intensity for duration in order to net the same exercise effect. Once I got my groove on, the walking was effortless. Suddenly a familiar wordless state-of-being enveloped me. A great exercise session produces a euphoria that is indescribable and never predicable. Krishnamurti would have been proud; my brain fell totally silent of its own account, yet this wasnt stupefied dullness, rather an incredible electric alertness and an amplified state of awareness. No pathetic mental thoughts interfered with this vibrant, electric alertness: the music, the smell of the salt-filled wind, the vivid colors of the shops, the beach, the ocean, the people, the endless blue skyI took it all in, absorbed it all simultaneously. Everything combined and produced an indescribable euphoria. I was truly in the immediate present, effortlessly residing in that exact instant, no mental projections or reflections defiling or distracting me from what was unfolding at that precise point in time. I tooled along with a stupid transcendental grin plastered across my battered mug, every one of my five senses blissed-out. On and on I went until eventually I ran out of real estate and the spell was broken. That was fine and appropriate. It seems the older I get the more frequently the exercise-induced Nirvana Zone appears. You cannot conjure up the exercise-induced Nirvana Zone, its far too subtle and delicate for purposeful manipulationrather, if conditions are right it might appear. You can open the window but that is no guarantee that the breeze will blow in.
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