Consistency, fitness, and junk food

 As Driving Season winds down for this winter, I endure the last few commutes in which I am completely at the mercy of whoever is in front of me. It will probably be more than a few, given our typical weather, but the trend is clear. Daylight Relocating Time has started.

Bike commuting time in transit is much more consistent than driving time. I've written about this before. My average speed follows a predictable curve, increasing to a peak in July before tapering as the summer drains away again into autumn. As age takes its toll, I don't know from one season to the next whether I will make it to the previous year's high range. Just feel it out carefully and settle into a moderate, steady pace. Don't stress the cardiovascular system or the joints. Whatever the average turns out to be, I can set my starting time to get me to work more or less on time. Usually less, but that's not the fault of biking. I can have just as little enthusiasm for punctuality when I'm trapped in the car.

Bike commuting was part of a long-term, open-ended strategy to provide consistent exercise around scheduled employment while saving lots of money and burning off my consumption of snack food. Lots of money is a relative term. I've never earned lots of money in my life. But I haven't pissed away a lot of it on motorized activities, particularly getting to my various jobs. Having my winter job at a cross-country skiing shop and touring center has helped somewhat with the winter interruption to cycling, but I can't count on getting out there as regularly as bike commuting. I even wrote a song titled Snacking out of Boredom and Depression about the toll that the dark and frozen -- or inadequately frozen -- months can take.

Learning to bake has given me greater control over the ingredients in what I make, but it has also made it a lot easier to slap together sweet comfort carbs. And I'm not quitting. I built a whole lifestyle and career around not having food discipline, dammit! At some point, your consciousness ends as your energy is recycled into the universe. Have a damn brownie. Have two. Then go run or ride around.

The rest of my diet is generally pretty healthy: meals made with few ingredients, a high proportion of non-meat items. It looks even better if you count maple syrup and coffee as fruit juices. Oh yeah, and chocolate is from plants, too. I just need to get out there and burn it off. It's all fuel.

Holiday treats

Here's another one that could go as appropriately in my ski blog as in this one.

The turn of the year brings holidays typically associated with food and festive beverages. But the combination of weather, darkness, and the needs of my employer usually reduce my physical activity to its lowest point in the year.

I'll freely admit that one reason I chose human-powered travel so many years ago was so I could be a little undisciplined about what I ate. Humans were meant to move themselves around. We have invented various devices to carry us, but that fosters a mental addiction that leads to physical decline. Forcing myself to ride a bike to get from place to place inserted a naturally recurring period of exercise, augmented by additional exercise to travel anywhere off of my routine paths. Motorized transportation has its place, but a life built around minimizing it as much as possible helps the body get the regular use it needs. It also makes tasty treats taste better. It's fuel! It's fun! It's both! Oh hey, I ate a little too much. Sorry, everybody. I just have to ride farther. Or walk farther.

There is a form of bulimia in which the purge phase is excessive exercise, so that's another spectrum we can find ourselves on. But just because one end of the spectrum is a dangerous condition doesn't mean that the middle is bad. I would bet that most of us -- myself included -- slide more readily toward the sedentary end than the gaunt and haunted figure stomping on a treadmill at 3 a.m. And I do not make light of that person's plight. These days, I eat too much and I gain weight, because it's harder to justify the time spent playing outside. What do I need my health and fitness for? I should be trying to die, to make way for the younger generation to flourish in the space I vacate.

Life is habit forming. I don't want to live any longer than I'm enjoying it, but I don't want to cash out before I've had the last possible fun. How do you know when that is? You kinda want to hang around until it's obvious, since you can't unkill yourself. Besides, I can still be helpful to people who might need to learn something I can teach them.

Pretty heavy musings on a buche de noel, eh? But I used to be able to burn off baked goods within minutes after I ate them. Now I promise to try to burn them off some time in June. If all goes well I will be laying down base miles to get ready for bike commuting by early April, but the winters have been such physiological quicksand that the first month and a half is just damage control.

On the plus side, I'm not a very imaginative cook or sophisticated eater, so I revert to a fairly boring diet based on my attempts at nutritious food. Even so, I enter each new bike season with deep fear and doubt, which deepens my appreciation when I regain strength. Always in the mist of the future I can see the thickening shape of the serpent that will one day trap my limbs and squeeze my lungs as I fight vainly to rise one more time.

I love to start the day with a nice cup of coffee and some kind of baked goods. The coffee pot alone is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed, but throw in some pie, or home-made cinnamon rolls, or a whole bunch of other things the cellist is good at making, and every night is like Christmas Eve. And, since she's home so little now, I have to get it while I can.

This year I have front-loaded the queue of baked treats by making the cellist a Boston cream pie for her birthday cake. That's what got me started thinking about the Solstice baked-goods binge. The recipes I used for the pastry cream and ganache were not printed out, they were scribbled on scrap paper, so I -- inexperienced in the kitchen -- couldn't visualize the amounts. I'll be carrying pastry cream and ganache for lunch tomorrow...and probably the next day.