fit or what?

The four people I share an office with keep telling me how fit I am. I don’t openly disagree, but they haven’t a clue. What they mean is that I ride to work and go to the gym so I must be fitter than they are, although they’re years younger and much better looking. But fitter for what?

Training to be a phys ed teacher, I learned that fitness is entirely relative. In a general sense fitness simply means physically fit, a meaningless definition. More specifically, and usefully, fitness describes suitability to a particular purpose.

Hence tuna fisherman Dinko (Dean) Lukin, Australia’s only Olympic gold medal weightlifter—he won in 1984 when the Soviet bloc boycotted the games so the field was open—was fit to lift huge weights, and big fish. Gary Ablett senior made his debut for Geelong that same year and kicked eight goals for Victoria in an interstate game.

For all his remarkable abilities, Ablett was not fit to lift the weights Lukin lifted—nor as a born-again Christian, but failed human being, to be a fisher of men—and Lukin was never fit to play first grade football. Fitness is relative to the task or purpose.

I work for a community welfare agency. My office-mates work with adolescents at risk of homelessness and their usually dysfunctional families. I merely occupy the fifth desk in their office because I’m an ‘odd-bod’ and the desk is spare.

For twelve years I worked in specialist school settings for adolescents with social and emotional problems, ending up as principal. I did what my current colleagues do: worked with difficult, unlovely kids and their often difficult, unlovely families.

These days I don’t truck with the adolescent form of any species, especially homo bogensis. My colleagues are fit for the task (of working with young people) and I am not. So when they tell me I am fit, I demur in a vague way and move on.

The fitness that obsesses me is the fitness to ride a bicycle up mountains. Right now I struggle up One Tree Hill, but come Sunday 24 July—182 days from today—I will ride up the Col du Galibier, whatever the weather, and whether I’m fit for the task or not.

This evening I take my first evening ride for a long time and what an agreeable thing it is. Pedalling east down Tannery Lane, as the sun westers, I cast a twenty-metre-long shadow in front of me. The heat seeps out of the day and although it’s still 28 degrees, the zephyr that wafts over me has a cool tinge to it.

I pedal 33.28kms at 27.7kph but that’s irrelevant because I’m now in Week One, Day One of the Carmichael Training System’s intermediate level success plan, and heart rate is all that matters. My ride tonight is supposedly “one hour in zone 2 with ten minutes tempo on flat terrain”.

Based on a maximum heart rate of 176, zone 2 for me is a heart rate between 115 and 122. I sort of did something roughly like that. A bit. Well, maybe. Supposedly.

Forget the numbers: I feel good and ride well.