For most of my adult life, I have been intellectually aware of sweat. I have seen sweat. I have heard people complain about sweat. I have watched athletes on television drip onto basketball courts and runners finish races looking as if someone had sprayed them with a garden hose. I have lived through Oklahoma summers. I understand, conceptually, that human beings sweat.
What I apparently forgot was that I sweat.
Not a little moisture on the forehead. Not the respectable sheen of a man who has done some light yard work. I mean sweat. The kind where you finish exercising, peel off your shirt, and briefly wonder whether someone threw it into a bathtub while you weren’t looking.
For the past thirty years or so, I’ve walked quite a bit. I’ve tried to remain active. I’ve wandered through neighborhoods, parks, vacations, airports, museums, and whatever other places life has required me to move my legs. But thinking about it recently, I realized something mildly embarrassing: I’m not sure I’ve really exercised hard since high school.
I have moved. I have been active. But there is apparently a significant physiological difference between going for a walk and asking your body to actually do some shit.
A few months ago, after spending several months focusing on diet, I started riding a bicycle every morning. Thirty minutes at first, then thirty-five, then forty. Each week I added another five minutes until eventually I reached an hour. Somewhere along the way, the ride stopped feeling like an obligation and became something I genuinely looked forward to.
I found a resistance trail I like, and now I ride it for an hour each morning. I’m not particularly trying to break records. I just keep finding that I can go a little farther than I could before. At this point I’m up to about seventeen miles.
When I finish, I’m tired, but not destroyed. I’m not gasping for air or collapsing dramatically onto the pavement while someone administers oxygen. I just feel like I’ve used my body.
And apparently when you actually use your body, it responds by releasing approximately Lake Erie through your pores.
The first few times this happened, I was genuinely fascinated. I would finish riding, look down, and think, What the fuck happened to my shirt?
It wasn’t damp. It wasn’t merely sweaty. It was wet. As though I had showered fully clothed.
There is something strangely funny about rediscovering a bodily function you have possessed your entire life. Sweating isn’t new information. I learned about sweat sometime around elementary school. I knew why it happened. I understood its biological function. I had thirty years of accumulated observational evidence confirming that people engaged in strenuous activity tend to perspire.
Yet apparently there is an enormous experiential gulf between knowing about sweat and standing in your driveway at six in the morning holding a shirt that now weighs three pounds.
Knowledge and experience are not always the same thing. Sometimes you can know something perfectly well while having completely forgotten what it feels like.
And strangely, I love the feeling.
Not the specific sensation of being soaking wet, necessarily. I have no desire to spend my afternoons wandering around Target looking like I’ve just escaped a shipwreck. But during the ride, it feels fantastic.
There’s something almost primal about it. Pedaling, breathing, legs working, heart beating, sweat pouring off you. For an hour, the body becomes very difficult to ignore. There isn’t much philosophy required. No theory of consciousness. No elaborate framework. No recursive examination of the self. There is just the bicycle, the resistance, and the next turn of the pedals.
Maybe that simplicity is part of what feels so good.
Most of my life happens in my head. Thinking, writing, wondering, analyzing, building theories, dismantling theories, rebuilding them again. But the bicycle doesn’t particularly care what I think. The hill remains the hill. The resistance remains the resistance. My body either turns the pedals or it doesn’t.
There is something wonderfully honest about that.
And every morning, without really intending to, I seem able to go just a little farther. Sixteen miles becomes sixteen and a half. Sixteen and a half becomes seventeen. Not because I declared war on yesterday’s version of myself, but because the body adapts. It learns. It quietly says, Oh, we’re doing this now? Fine.
And then it becomes slightly better at doing it.
Which, when you think about it, is remarkable.
After three decades of mostly asking my body to carry my brain around, I’ve begun asking a little more from it. And it seems genuinely pleased to have been invited back into the conversation. Its first contribution has apparently been: Did you know I can make this much water?
No. No, body. I absolutely did not.