Email It | Print It |  Save It

Source: Joseph Vinciquerra
Bio, More Articles

It’s easy to feel the little differences from day to day and week to week… Maybe today’s run felt a little bit faster than the same one last week. Maybe yesterday’s bike a bit stronger than the day prior. You get the idea. But what about those big changes? Those quantum leaps? They’re harder to recognize, harder to appreciate. So many things change at once – we get faster, hills get easier, our pedal stroke gets more fluid… More circular. Our run cadence, faster… Our swim times, shorter. And we grow, taller, stronger. The seasons change, Fall through Fall again… Year after year.

There are few things that remain constant through these times, but we seek them… Maybe a specific route we’ve ridden over the years, maybe the river that we run by. For me, there are these things, but there is also my music. For as long as I can remember, I’ve just absolutely loved exercising to music. And the magic with music is – as we’re out there doing a long run, or turning the pedals over somewhere in the middle of nowhere – we don’t just hear the music, we absorb it. Sub-consciously, we take it in, while simultaneously recording our surroundings, our feelings… Our place.

I was putting in the volume the other night – just working through my weights routine – and my mp3 player was on random. On came a track from 1998, and though I was sitting in the warmth of my house, about to push off a new set of bench presses, my mind was catapulted back to Waverly Ave, running up that hill on some cold, blowing, winter night on the campus of SU. My good friend was by my side – my good friend who was the first to get me into running as cross-training for cycling – we pushed each other all the way through our loop, and we always finished off with that solid climb up Waverly. I had my music in my head that night – that track from 1998 – and it was just some song I liked, and some song I’d retain years later to store in the archives of my mp3 player. I hit 12 reps on the press, switched to work my lats, and the song played on… We reached the intersection with the blinking light, we toed off, we sprinted. Our lungs burned, our legs screamed. There was no such thing as periodization, no differentiation between aerobic workouts and anaerobic structure. There was simply: going hard. Snow was blowing from across the courtyard of the dorm to our right as I focused on the handrail that lined the steep sidewalk to our left. Out-kicked, once again, I took second place of two that night.

The song ended that night at the top of the hill – The song ended the other night. The memories of a solid run just that… A distant recollection that passed just as quickly as it came. But the distance between that memory and the present was made identifiable by simply hearing that old familiar track.  And in that moment, just for an instant, I could see just how far I’ve come. How, when I used to hear that song as a regular part of my “running mix,” I could just barely run an eight minute mile, and these days… Well… These days I can do a whole lot more.

Thanks for reading.

Joseph Vinciquerra, Amateur Triathlete
Swim. Bike. Run. Repeat. This is our routine, our Grind. Joseph is an accomplished cyclist, marathoner and age-group triathlete currently residing in the Northeast and training for Ironman Lake Placid 2007. Coffee is a common theme with Joseph, as his love for training and racing is matched only by his affection for deep, dark, and complex javas. Between workouts, Joseph is an aerospace engineer, working for one of the world's largest research and development centers. Contact information: The Daily Grind Blog | jvinciqu@gmail.com.