Kid in a candy store, musician with a new guitar, my daughter listening to just-acquired classic vinyl — pick your metaphor — but that’s how I felt when I started playing with my new fancy Garmin Fenix3 sports watch. Geeky, I know, but on this current training quest, it can make a difference. Plotting intervals, and tracking heart rate and other biometric data on a wide variety of physical activities, will really help. Armed with it, I ran intervals up Railroad Grade early this morning, the watch alerting me at the end of each segment, and at the end of each rest cycle, constantly spitting out pace and heart rate data. And the data seems much more consistent and accurate than the heart rate data I was receiving from my ancient (three year old) watch and chest band. Since monitoring and controlling heart rate seems to be the name of the game, this fancy, fairly expensive piece of equipment, is worth it.
I was thinking about my heart later today when we had a lunch presentation on inherent bias, the (pretty much indisputable) unconscious or subconscious biases people have that cause us to think and act inconsistently with our conscious (less biased) beliefs and that lead to intractable discrimination against racial, gender and other minorities. Both fascinating and disturbing. Our conscious mind can process 42 frames a second. Pretty impressive, right? But our subconscious brain processes 1.2 millions frames a second, and, not surprisingly, plays an oversized role in our beliefs and actions. Using fancy MRI brain scans employed while patients are asked various questions, neuroscientists are beginning to understand how our minds function, or more accurately, how different sections of the brain address different thoughts/activities, and the resulting behavior that flows from that brain geography and topography. Incredible progress on understanding how our brains function, though it is early dawn in the long day of neuroscience.
No question, the human brain is extraordinarily complex. Our heart, on the other hand, is a pump. An amazing pump, don’t get me wrong, but it does the same thing roughly 100,000 times a day, or 25 billion beats in a lifetime. We know how to repair the heart when it’s arteries get clogged, and can get it back in sync when it’s timing gets wonky. And in the world of endurance training, we’ve learned how to push our cardiac limits, strengthen this ten ounce muscle, and get the most out of our hearts without putting our overall health at risk. So, armed with my new device, and increasingly technical training (intervals, pick ups, low heart rate burns), I’m ready to continue to prime my pump for a challenging series of summer trail running adventures.