After somewhere around a month of ice on the walk-roads, the recent milder weather with sunny days has laid the ground bare on most of them. I could finally take a long walk again without risking life and limb, so I walked for an hour and a quarter.

My daily commute includes nearly a quarter of an hour of walking each way, so I am not completely atrophied, even apart from my attempted biking.

Even so, I must have stored up quite a bit of energy, because even though I walked as fast as I could without running (where the terrain allowed it, at least) my pulse remained ridiculously low.

I would not mind if this weather continued for a while. But of course it is not a big thing. If I was eager enough to exercise, I would find a way to spend more than an hour at a time doing so every day. But walking fast is my favorite.

Biking seems like a good idea. It is not purely natural, like walking, running, climbing and swimming; but thanks to the ancient invention of gears, you can adjust the load to your muscles instead of the other way around, at least to some degree. And thanks to more recent inventions, you can now have indoors exercise bikes that take relatively little room and provide a way to work your leg muscles and your heart and lungs.

It did seem like a good idea, which was why I bought one shortly after I moved to Nodeland, two houses ago. It has followed me to this day, but I still don’t use it much. This is because even though I like biking, my legs hate it, and they make their opinion known quite clearly.

While I can walk fast for an hour or two before getting tired, I can only bike with a similar pulse for less than half an hour, even shorter if I don’t hop off now and then and stretch my legs.  It has been like this since a month or so after I got the bike (it was even worse when it was new, since I had not biked for years and years).

One of the cool things about exercise is that the more you do it, the better you get. Or so it is with every other form of exercise I have tried or heard of. But not biking! There is no progress at all. The next day it is just as bad if not worse. The next week it is just as bad. And the week after that my knees start hurting so bad I have to stop biking so I can continue to go to work.  By the time the knee pain has fully disappeared, so has any tiny progress I might have made in the week or two before the pain started. Back to the starting line!

Now for a couple weeks, the roads have been so slippery that walking is a slow and cautious adventure, undertaken only for urgent needs like yogurt and dark chocolate.  I have tried to at least use the exercise bike as much as my body lets me get away with, so as to keep the old blood pump running. (I am still single and celibate, so the more attractive indoors exercise is not an option.) Thus my sudden mention of biking and why it doesn’t behave the way I want it to.

An hour and a half of moderate exercise today, starting with indoors biking followed with a brisk trek outdoors. I was kind of inspired to make a tiny bit more effort after reading a popular science article. I may however need more science, and not quite so popular, to find out what happened next.

After I came home, my pulse remained 30-40 beats above normal for about half an hour. The heartbeats were also stronger than normal, so there must have been a lot of blood rushing through the body. However, I was not breathing any different from normal, so it seems it was not oxygen the body was screaming for. What then?

Exercising a bit harder than usual may have used more glycogen compared to fat, so I suppose the muscles and liver may have been busy rebuilding these reserves. However, a glass of sweet juice had no noticeable effect, although it should have caused a spike in blood sugar within a few minutes, sugar which the muscles could have absorbed to build glycogen.

Possibly protein, then. Muscles that are used more than normal will try to add more muscle fiber, and unlike fat and carbs, it doesn’t seem the body has much of a storage shed of unused protein. In all fairness, there is protein in almost all food (not just meat, as Americans seem to believe). Not in juice, though. But in vegetables, milk, egg, even pasta and bread to some degree. After a while I ate some yogurt, and 10-15 minutes after that the heart rate returned to normal. This could be pure coincidence, of course. I need to experiment more with this if I am to find out what causes this.

It is normal for people after hard exercise, like running, to be winded for a while and have a high heart rate until their breath returns to normal. That is not what happened here. I was breathing normally and the heart rate was not near maximum at any time, but it just did not return to much below exercise level for half an hour. So the body must have been doing something.