"Checkered by Failure"

As the start date of a substantial hike (about 220 miles) approaches, I have been contemplating various possibilities of failure relating to physical challenges and exercise. When I did a similar hike two years ago, my body didn’t fail me in any way, though I did experience serious blisters. My companions and I completed the hike on schedule. But in between that hike and this one, two of those companions had to curtail a long-distance hike because of serious knee problems (too ambitious a distance on hilly terrain on their first day). Their hike, in a sense, was a failure.

In other ways, of course, it was a success: the time enjoyed in each other’s company and the impressive first leg of the trip. Failure and success are relative, and with exercise, they can be two sides of the same coin. In most of my weightlifting, I do a set of an exercise to failure. So not 10, 12, or 15 bicep curls, but as many as I can do until my strength gives out. I usually plan the amount of weight in hopes of doing an approximate number—that is, I don’t randomly choose a weight and shoot for the stars—but I nearly always plan to fail. The success part of this is either a personal best number of reps or the best effort I could give.

One potential failure that stands out in my experience is an aborted cross-lake swim. Three years ago, some cousins and I decided to swim across Lake Alexander in central Minnesota, where the cousins have a lake cabin. We didn’t have total confidence we could make it across, but we felt reasonably sure of ourselves. Others were boating alongside us, just in case. Unfortunately, we had made it perhaps a third of the way to the opposite shore when tornado warnings blared from the boat’s radio, forcing us to abandon the mission and get back to the cabin’s storm cellar.

I have wondered several times since then if we would have made it across, and I wonder if any of us will try it again. The lake is still there. I go there about once a summer. Will the mood strike again to try, to risk failure? In general I don’t think I take that risk enough. Although I regularly set myself up to fail with my weightlifting routine, it’s really a safe way to fail, by now well within my comfort zone. I should push myself to failure in different ways, especially while I’m still fairly young and physically resilient.  

To return to my upcoming hike, I can only hope that the training we have done and the general good health we’re lucky to have will prevent knee problems, muscle strains, and any other injuries that would force us to discontinue the journey. Since the hike will be in North Dakota, I’ll conclude with a quote from someone who loved that state, Theodore Roosevelt:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”¹

1. From “The Strenuous Life,” a 1899 speech to the Hamilton Club in Chicago, according to wikiquote.org.

The Bloodflow Hypothesis Rabbit Hole

A few weeks ago I injured myself while lifting weights—while putting them down, to be exact. The incident, though a bothersome interruption to my workout, served both as a reminder to observe good safety practices at the gym and as an opportunity to expand my knowledge about science, a loose goal I set back in July.

I was doing shoulder presses with 25-lb. weights, and I wasn’t very careful in replacing them in the weight rack. Instead of placing them properly, I managed to crush my fingers between the weights and the metal ridge of the rack. Within seconds blood started to stream out of my left and right ring fingers, so I headed to the front desk for some first aid.

As I sat there waiting for the desk attendant to put his gloves on, I watched the blood begin to roll down my hands. The cuts didn’t hurt much at all, so my thoughts freely drifted. Looking at the unexpectedly large amount of blood (it wasn’t a great deal more than expected, but enough to be noticeable), I began to wonder if the fact that I was lifting weights right before cutting myself—using hand and finger strength to grip the dumbbells—was making me bleed more than I normally would. Though I simultaneously felt like an idiot for being so careless, this hypothesis made me feel a little proud. I’m not very scientifically curious, as a rule, so it was nice to catch myself theorizing without being prompted by someone else. I decided to check into the increased bloodflow idea later that day.

Later that day turned into a few weeks later. Either I wasn’t that curious, or other matters took priority—probably both. Nevertheless, I finally began searching the internet for information, soon finding some answers from sources that appear credible:

"Blood flow through tissues is matched with the metabolic needs of the tissues. During exercise, blood flow through tissues is changed dramatically. Its rate of flow through exercising skeletal muscles can be 15 to 20 times greater than through resting muscles."¹

^{Image by Chris Aldridge.}

As science writer Craig Freudenrich explains,

"As you exercise, the blood vessels in your muscles dilate and the blood flow is greater, just as more water flows through a fire hose than through a garden hose. . . . As [the chemical compound] ATP gets used up in working muscle, the muscle produces several metabolic byproducts. . . These byproducts leave the muscle cells and cause the capillaries. . . within the muscle to expand or dilate. The increased blood flow delivers more oxygenated blood to the working muscle."²

Next I decided to learn a bit more about specific muscles in the hand and fingers, but I quickly discovered that in fact there are no muscles in the fingers.³ When I first read this I wondered if it might be one of the many “crazy facts” lurking on the internet that are just crazy, not factual. Further investigation, however, confirmed that the muscles that help move the fingers are located on the hand and forearm.

This makes me doubt my original hypothesis, because I was bleeding from the fingers. It was the lower part of the finger, so it makes sense that increased bloodflow to my hand muscles resulted in abnormally high bleeding nearby. But for all I know, what seems like proximity to me is actually remoteness on the level of capillaries, and the increased bleeding was simply illusory. Or caused by something else entirely.

What other factors cause bloodflow to increase? Do any other body parts besides fingers operate in a remote control-like way? I use the phrase “rabbit hole” in this post’s title because one empirical observation can create a never-ending chain of questions. I like that. The humanities scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith (who at first studied chemistry in college, actually) has written about literature, “The completed work is thus always, in a sense, a temporary truce among contending forces, achieved at the point of exhaustion...”⁴ With scientific inquiry, too, one eventually has to stop somewhere, at least for the moment.

This can be frustrating when the desire to know, to understand, persists beyond our energies. But the idea that there’s always another question to be asked is bracing. None of us will ever reach the final answer of any line of inquiry. There will always be another question. And because we’re human, we’ll always make mistakes—like smashing our fingers with dumbbells—that set off the whole process.

1. Rod Seeley, Trent Stephens, and Philip Tate, “Blood Flow Through Tissues During Exercise,” Anatomy and Physiology, 5^th ed., McGraw-Hill, accessed April 27 2013, http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/ap/seeleyap/cardio/reading4.mhtml.

2. Craig Freudenrich, “How Exercise Works,” Discovery Fit & Health, accessed April 27, 2013, http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/diet-fitness/exercise/sports-physiology8.htm.

3. Apart from the tiny muscles that form goosebumps.

4. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Contingencies of Value,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2^nd ed, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), 1810.

 

Thomas Jefferson on the Value of Exercise

Right now I’m in the midst of studying for comprehensive exams for my master of English degree. As you can imagine, this involves plenty of reading, note-taking, and reflection. The semester will be one long mental workout, in a way. But it is important to me, critical, that I keep up with my physical exercise. Once a week, the weight room at my university is a refuge I cherish. Every other day or so, I walk around my neighborhood, in the park or along the lake. I have a handful of workout DVDs I rotate through. And so on.

There are those who exercise more than me and keep their lives in better order, but I still want to add my voice and example to the view many have expressed before about the value of mind-body balance. I am surrounded in my current situation by academic types: professors, graduate students, researchers, librarians, and administrators. Some of them maintain exercise routines, but there is a contrary mindset shared by others in academia that dismisses or even scorns such practices. This attitude elevates mental achievements above physical ones. “People with an average IQ can worry about their resting heart rate. I have more important lines of inquiry to pursue.”

Thomas Jefferson may be the ideal role model for someone like me, trying to find balance between the life of the mind and a physical vitality, and seeking reassurance that a true scholar can attend to both. Among other roles, Jefferson is famous as a statesman, writer, and bibliophile. In 1815, he wrote to John Adams, “I cannot live without books,” and indeed he read and collected a prodigious amount of books in his lifetime.¹

Yet by no means did Jefferson care only for books, reading, and writing. In some of his letters, he linked physical and mental health:

"If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is best.” (1786 letter to Thomas Mann Randolph)

“Give about two [hours] every day to exercise; for health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong." (1789 letter to Peter Carr)

 

Sculpture by Donald De Lue; Image source covertress.blogspot.com

In another, he actually placed the physical health gained through exercise above academic achievements:

"...leaving all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading; I will rather say more necessary, because health is worth more than learning." (1790 letter to John Garland Jefferson)

Scholars disinclined to exercise might argue that as long as they are in basically good physical health, it doesn’t matter if they exercise or not. Or they might argue that physical health is worth sacrificing for the advancement of knowledge. To either argument, I take Jefferson’s position that regular exercise is very likely, if not quite guaranteed, to produce better academic work.² Even were this not the case, walking in the shadows of trees, stretching fingertips to toes, picking up heavy objects, and all manner of like things are valuable just for what they are and how they make the body feel.  

1. All quotations are from monticello.org.

2. For scientific support, one place to start is the website of John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.