A Beautiful Day, But For the Wall

This has been a week to remember here in central Minnesota. Sunny days and temps in the 80's--and it is October! In anticipation of the upcoming long winter, my friend Jeff and I took Wednesday afternoon to ride. The Lake Wobegon Trail from Avon to Albany, then up the Holdingford spur was truly spectacular. The trail wove between farm fields and woodlots and the tree-lined tunnels glowed with golden leafy-ness. Despite the beauty of the day, a danger was lurking that later in the ride reared its ugly head--hitting the wall, or the bonk.

Bonking is a term for the time when your body exhausts its stores of glycogen and turns almost exclusively to using fat for fuel. For someone like me, I welcome the time when my body starts using fat for fuel, but the physiological reality is that the body has to work harder to use fat than to use glycogen. The way to address the situation is not complex--either replenish glycogen or reduce the exertion level so that the body can keep up with converting fat to energy.

I have bonked before--about three times that I can recall (if you cannot recall if you have, then you probably haven't). The other three times were toward the end of high-exertion races. This was just a pleasant, autumn afternoon ride. Granted we were hitting a good pace, but we weren't racing. I did not recognize the signs, so did not take the actions necessary to avoid the bonk. It should not have been a surprise, but it was because I wasn't being attentive to the signs that would have been apparent had I just been paying attention.

Life these days does not foster a posture of attentiveness. Economic concerns, political turmoil, world events, the press of caring for a family--these all take us away from being attentive to our souls. Yet, if we fail to pay attention to our souls, we can bonk in our spirits just as much as in our bodies.

The notion of Sabbath was designed, at least in part, to call us to be attentive to our souls. One day each week that is devoted not to the ordinary and the pressing, but to the eternal and the everlasting. A day not devoted to daily work, but to restoration. For those of us from religious traditions that do not have a strong connection with Sabbath, it is easy for Sunday to become just another day (just with church in the morning). If we could--or would--recapture a practice of Sabbath, I wonder how our faith and our work might be different.

I feel like I have fully recovered from Wednesday's experience, but it did knock me off of my game for a couple of days. I am also reminded of the value of remaining attentive--even when a ride seems like it should not be a big deal.

Pressing on,
-Ken