Fartlek, Time, Black Holes and More!
We've been lucky, indeed. The weather continues to be quite warm and wonderful and we are taking full advantage of it. Rather than our normal exploratory ride, our plan today was to engage in fartlek training. I can imagine some English speakers chuckling just a bit. The word fartlek is not related to the English word fart! It is, in fact, a Swedish word (pronounced nearly identically to the English) that approximately means "speed play".
Linguistically, the Swedish word fart comes from the Indo-European root *per-, while the English word fart comes from the root *perd-. The former is a complicated root, difficult to write about, but the latter is very straightforward and gives all our familiar European words for the passing of gas, including: fart (English), furzen (German), fisa (Swedish), pierdzieć (Polish), prdět (Czech), péter (French), pederse (Spanish), and others. Do you want to know why the Germanic languages have the initial 'f' sound? Hint: Read about Jakob Grimm of Grimms' Fairy Tales fame; he will take you to the answer.
Anyway, enough of that. For those of you who are avid runners and do serious training, you may already know the word fartlek. For the rest of you, fartlek is a type of unstructured interval training, during which the runner (or cyclist in my case) varies the intensity en route and ad libitum to achieve a desired training effect. So today it's training time, albeit unstructured!
Kościuszko and I set off early today, hoping in great part to be home before the gnats began to swarm. As I said in my post two weeks ago, it is important to embrace the gnats as part of the experience, but of course there's no reason to go out of your way to find them. Riding while the temperature is cooler and they are still sleeping is the best tactic to avoid them.
We warmed up around the four villages of Kępa Zawadowska, Kępa Okrzewska, Kępa Falenicka and Kępa Oborska (see the map to left). This word kępa is somewhat interesting.
The Polish word kępa means ‘clump’ or ‘cluster' and is related to our word ‘camp(us)’, which we borrowed from the Latin word meaning 'field'. The original Indo-European root (simplified) is: *kam-p. Any guesses as to what the directly related English word might be? Bearing in mind that we lost a lot of words after the Norman Conquest (and gained quite a few directly related to Latin), you may be unsuccessful in finding the English word... Perhaps, though, if you know German (or another Germanic language) or, if you're fortunate enough to be versed in Old English, the answer will come to you.
Anyway, these villages are situated in areas where small clumps of trees were growing on small mounds surrounded by low-lying, swampy land. Because of the geography and evidence from other languages, I believe these village sites were once actually tiny islands in the Vistula River.
As we rounded the corner near the village of Kępa Falenicka, we began ramping up for our first interval, the only planned and prescribed interval of the day. It was to be a maximum effort over the course of about 8 km (5 miles) to get new baseline stats for our heart rate and power levels. The route was alongside the embankment of the Vistula, a flat course, all the way to Gassy. The rules for this interval were simple. Go as hard as possible for the prescribed distance.
On intervals like this you go "into your cave" and focus on one thing--cadence, heartbeat, power output--it doesn't matter. In my case the focus would be on left/right pedal balance and the smoothness of the cyclic motion of the pedals. We brought up the power to a sustainable level and were done in under 15 minutes. The interval itself ended up to be very demanding, made worse by a number of very large construction trucks that decided to use the path this morning for their shortcut. These trucks pulled our attention and forced us to slow down and move off path on a number of occasions (path--narrow, trucks--wide). Still, Kościuszko and I finished with much better power readings than a few months ago. We will spend the next couple of days looking over the data and modifying our training zones.
After our first effort we found ourselves at Gassy Ferry. Kościuszko was just fine, of course, but I was completely blown and needed a bit of rest. My mind wandered to the notion of 'time'. After all, I had just sprinted for nearly 8 km (5 miles) focusing on the rhythmic, repetitive motion of the pedals. The time came and went so quickly. How is it that "time flies?" "Why does our perception of time vary so much?" I have so many questions about time!
In physics, I'm told, time can "go" in both directions, that spilled milk could just as likely go back into a bottle, as if one were rewinding a movie. This apparently is possible at the subatomic level, where there is no milk and no bottle, but not in our macroscopic reality. In other words, time "flows" in one direction, and one direction only in our experience. This unsolved physical mystery about time--that it can be symmetrical at one level but is asymmetrical at our level--was formulated by one of my favorites of the 20th Century, Sir Arthur Eddington. This concept is now referred to as "the arrow of time".
Ultimately Eddington accounts for this dichotomy by maintaining that the arrow of time moves in the direction of increasing entropy (= disorder) in a system. Others have tried to explain this in various other ways and many others are simply uncomfortable with the entire idea of time symmetry. Of course, to us, this theoretical stuff doesn't matter at all. To us, time passes, causes create effects, and time "marches on". We have memories of the past, but not of the future and our present choices never affect the past, only the future. Time doesn't go back. You can't go back. We are born, live and die. No "do-overs".
Certainly as an armchair philosopher I think about all these aspects of time and have spent a great deal of it (time) pondering unanswerable questions about all sorts of other things, as well. However, when a theory, whether it be one in physics, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, biology or any other field has persistently unanswered questions, one might want to ask if there is something wrong with the theory, rather than creating ad hoc solutions to the theoretical problems. And, in the case of time, perhaps the current model in physics is lacking in some fundamental way.
Interestingly, there is one researcher who has taken a look at a number of unanswered questions in astronomy and physics and has formulated a different hypothesis about the way our universe works. His name is Nikodem Popławski and he has hypothesized that our universe may have actually formed within a black hole and that every other black hole has another universe within it. Now that's interesting! Popławski's full hypothesis, which I will not detail here, does seem to neatly answer a number of questions I've had about the Big Bang, black holes, matter and anti-matter and certainly the problem with the arrow of time. While the hypothesis may answer questions, the only one I have is: Is it testable? In other words, how can we know if Popławski is right?
Nikodem Popławski (1975- ) was born in Toruń, a town I've written (briefly) about before. You might recall if you read my post, that Toruń was the birthplace of Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicholas Copernicus) and I imagine (rightly or not) that young Nikodem must have been influenced by Toruń's most well-known citizen. He (Nikodem) remains a Polish citizen, currently working at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.
Popławski is a rising star (so to speak) and I'm looking forward to the refinements he can bring to our understanding of our universe. If you're interested in cosmology, astronomy or physics, I encourage you to check out his work and let's have a conversation. I love conversations about astronomy and physics, too!
In the same vein, and also bearing on the topic of time, I encourage you to think about cycles of time. I first became aware of them in the 1960s and 1970s when "biorhythms" were "in". Biorhythms, as such, have been largely discredited as pseudoscience, but there is still ample evidence that there are bona fide cycles that govern our lives. We have daily rhythms, tidal rhythms, lunar cycles, sleep cycles, menstrual cycles. They're everywhere! There is data to suggest that there are high and low points during the day for body temperature, blood pressure and a host of other functions. These suggest "cycles" to me. As I am now retired and (relatively) freed from arbitrarily imposed external cycles, I am noticing that I am tuning into rhythms and cycles that were forgotten (or suppressed) during my working years. I like this awareness of natural cycles. Focusing on cycles while I'm on the bicycle is just one further aspect of this. Cycling. Cycles. The motion of the feet, the beating of the heart, the movement through time. Wonderful, isn't it?
The investigation of bio-cycles is now, incidentally, a legitimate field in biology, called chronobiology. Unfortunately for you, Dear Readers, I don't know much about this and the only Polish biologist whose name I happen to know is a certain Stanislas Leibler (1957- ) who is also an engineer and physicist (currently working at Princeton). Still, Leibler has been doing a lot of work recently in creating networks of genes that act like clocks. I don't pretend to understand it (yet), but it sounds a bit related to "time" to me. Well, perhaps that's a stretch, I suppose.
Returning now to our ride, I believe that in true fartlek, the "play" part of "speed play" is ultra-important. If you "forget yourself" and follow the lead of the body to naturally play, amazing things can happen when you train like this. It may not get you to the Tour de France, but your cycling--I believe--will be better and more rewarding.
Can our minds let go long enough to listen to the body? Can we hear the cycles over and above the desires of the mind? For me, this is what it takes to get "in the zone". Some athletes call this "in the zone of peak performance". Meh! Forget "peak performance", just get "in the zone" where "you" become the bike, the road, the play, and everything else. I like it that way.
Kościuszko and I continued our journey on now-familiar roads, "fartlek-ing" as we went. For example, we saw a large, solitary tree and decided to sprint to it. Ahead, there were cyclists--could we chase them down and overtake them before the intersection? No, but it was a fine effort! There--a slight rise in the road--an opportunity for a power sprint for 30 seconds. Cruise easy for a while. Now there's the Słomczyn hill climb. Can we set a new personal best? We did! Coast downhill. Time to rest in motion. In the distance. See it? Should we? The bridge over the Jeziorna? Sprint, sprint, sprint! Whew! Heaving chest, beating heart. Now easy does it. Go fast, go slow; I don't know! It doesn't matter. This was an opportunity to play on the roads, and we had a grand time.
Soon we became aware that the temperature was rising quickly, so Kościuszko and I turned towards home. Approaching the "gnat-zone" we were surprised that they weren't out. It may not have been warm enough or their short lives may have already come to an end. Whatever the reason at this point, I felt like a horse, sensing the barn and unconsciously picking up the pace even more, knowing that a large bowl of calorie-rich pasta awaited as a reward for this particularly fun and difficult effort. What a great ride!
Finally, for today, forgive me, but I can't help returning to the root, *perd-. Apologies to those of you shy about bodily functions. Did you know our word partridge (the bird) comes from this same root, too? It was borrowed directly from the Greek word, πέρδιξ. This is, presumably, because of a particular sound that the female partridge makes. Regardless of the relationship, I cannot listen to the song "Twelve Days of Christmas" without thinking about farting in a pear tree. There is a cursed side to being a linguist.
Until next time, Dear Readers, have a great week!
Linguistically, the Swedish word fart comes from the Indo-European root *per-, while the English word fart comes from the root *perd-. The former is a complicated root, difficult to write about, but the latter is very straightforward and gives all our familiar European words for the passing of gas, including: fart (English), furzen (German), fisa (Swedish), pierdzieć (Polish), prdět (Czech), péter (French), pederse (Spanish), and others. Do you want to know why the Germanic languages have the initial 'f' sound? Hint: Read about Jakob Grimm of Grimms' Fairy Tales fame; he will take you to the answer.
Anyway, enough of that. For those of you who are avid runners and do serious training, you may already know the word fartlek. For the rest of you, fartlek is a type of unstructured interval training, during which the runner (or cyclist in my case) varies the intensity en route and ad libitum to achieve a desired training effect. So today it's training time, albeit unstructured!
 |
| Camp-Village Races. |
We warmed up around the four villages of Kępa Zawadowska, Kępa Okrzewska, Kępa Falenicka and Kępa Oborska (see the map to left). This word kępa is somewhat interesting.
The Polish word kępa means ‘clump’ or ‘cluster' and is related to our word ‘camp(us)’, which we borrowed from the Latin word meaning 'field'. The original Indo-European root (simplified) is: *kam-p. Any guesses as to what the directly related English word might be? Bearing in mind that we lost a lot of words after the Norman Conquest (and gained quite a few directly related to Latin), you may be unsuccessful in finding the English word... Perhaps, though, if you know German (or another Germanic language) or, if you're fortunate enough to be versed in Old English, the answer will come to you.
Anyway, these villages are situated in areas where small clumps of trees were growing on small mounds surrounded by low-lying, swampy land. Because of the geography and evidence from other languages, I believe these village sites were once actually tiny islands in the Vistula River.
As we rounded the corner near the village of Kępa Falenicka, we began ramping up for our first interval, the only planned and prescribed interval of the day. It was to be a maximum effort over the course of about 8 km (5 miles) to get new baseline stats for our heart rate and power levels. The route was alongside the embankment of the Vistula, a flat course, all the way to Gassy. The rules for this interval were simple. Go as hard as possible for the prescribed distance.
 |
| Vistula embankment looking north near Gassy. |
On intervals like this you go "into your cave" and focus on one thing--cadence, heartbeat, power output--it doesn't matter. In my case the focus would be on left/right pedal balance and the smoothness of the cyclic motion of the pedals. We brought up the power to a sustainable level and were done in under 15 minutes. The interval itself ended up to be very demanding, made worse by a number of very large construction trucks that decided to use the path this morning for their shortcut. These trucks pulled our attention and forced us to slow down and move off path on a number of occasions (path--narrow, trucks--wide). Still, Kościuszko and I finished with much better power readings than a few months ago. We will spend the next couple of days looking over the data and modifying our training zones.
After our first effort we found ourselves at Gassy Ferry. Kościuszko was just fine, of course, but I was completely blown and needed a bit of rest. My mind wandered to the notion of 'time'. After all, I had just sprinted for nearly 8 km (5 miles) focusing on the rhythmic, repetitive motion of the pedals. The time came and went so quickly. How is it that "time flies?" "Why does our perception of time vary so much?" I have so many questions about time!
In physics, I'm told, time can "go" in both directions, that spilled milk could just as likely go back into a bottle, as if one were rewinding a movie. This apparently is possible at the subatomic level, where there is no milk and no bottle, but not in our macroscopic reality. In other words, time "flows" in one direction, and one direction only in our experience. This unsolved physical mystery about time--that it can be symmetrical at one level but is asymmetrical at our level--was formulated by one of my favorites of the 20th Century, Sir Arthur Eddington. This concept is now referred to as "the arrow of time".
Ultimately Eddington accounts for this dichotomy by maintaining that the arrow of time moves in the direction of increasing entropy (= disorder) in a system. Others have tried to explain this in various other ways and many others are simply uncomfortable with the entire idea of time symmetry. Of course, to us, this theoretical stuff doesn't matter at all. To us, time passes, causes create effects, and time "marches on". We have memories of the past, but not of the future and our present choices never affect the past, only the future. Time doesn't go back. You can't go back. We are born, live and die. No "do-overs".
Certainly as an armchair philosopher I think about all these aspects of time and have spent a great deal of it (time) pondering unanswerable questions about all sorts of other things, as well. However, when a theory, whether it be one in physics, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, biology or any other field has persistently unanswered questions, one might want to ask if there is something wrong with the theory, rather than creating ad hoc solutions to the theoretical problems. And, in the case of time, perhaps the current model in physics is lacking in some fundamental way.
 |
| Nikodem Popławski. Source. |
Nikodem Popławski (1975- ) was born in Toruń, a town I've written (briefly) about before. You might recall if you read my post, that Toruń was the birthplace of Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicholas Copernicus) and I imagine (rightly or not) that young Nikodem must have been influenced by Toruń's most well-known citizen. He (Nikodem) remains a Polish citizen, currently working at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.
Popławski is a rising star (so to speak) and I'm looking forward to the refinements he can bring to our understanding of our universe. If you're interested in cosmology, astronomy or physics, I encourage you to check out his work and let's have a conversation. I love conversations about astronomy and physics, too!
In the same vein, and also bearing on the topic of time, I encourage you to think about cycles of time. I first became aware of them in the 1960s and 1970s when "biorhythms" were "in". Biorhythms, as such, have been largely discredited as pseudoscience, but there is still ample evidence that there are bona fide cycles that govern our lives. We have daily rhythms, tidal rhythms, lunar cycles, sleep cycles, menstrual cycles. They're everywhere! There is data to suggest that there are high and low points during the day for body temperature, blood pressure and a host of other functions. These suggest "cycles" to me. As I am now retired and (relatively) freed from arbitrarily imposed external cycles, I am noticing that I am tuning into rhythms and cycles that were forgotten (or suppressed) during my working years. I like this awareness of natural cycles. Focusing on cycles while I'm on the bicycle is just one further aspect of this. Cycling. Cycles. The motion of the feet, the beating of the heart, the movement through time. Wonderful, isn't it?
The investigation of bio-cycles is now, incidentally, a legitimate field in biology, called chronobiology. Unfortunately for you, Dear Readers, I don't know much about this and the only Polish biologist whose name I happen to know is a certain Stanislas Leibler (1957- ) who is also an engineer and physicist (currently working at Princeton). Still, Leibler has been doing a lot of work recently in creating networks of genes that act like clocks. I don't pretend to understand it (yet), but it sounds a bit related to "time" to me. Well, perhaps that's a stretch, I suppose.
 |
| Lone Oak Tree. Sprint Point. |
Can our minds let go long enough to listen to the body? Can we hear the cycles over and above the desires of the mind? For me, this is what it takes to get "in the zone". Some athletes call this "in the zone of peak performance". Meh! Forget "peak performance", just get "in the zone" where "you" become the bike, the road, the play, and everything else. I like it that way.
Kościuszko and I continued our journey on now-familiar roads, "fartlek-ing" as we went. For example, we saw a large, solitary tree and decided to sprint to it. Ahead, there were cyclists--could we chase them down and overtake them before the intersection? No, but it was a fine effort! There--a slight rise in the road--an opportunity for a power sprint for 30 seconds. Cruise easy for a while. Now there's the Słomczyn hill climb. Can we set a new personal best? We did! Coast downhill. Time to rest in motion. In the distance. See it? Should we? The bridge over the Jeziorna? Sprint, sprint, sprint! Whew! Heaving chest, beating heart. Now easy does it. Go fast, go slow; I don't know! It doesn't matter. This was an opportunity to play on the roads, and we had a grand time.
Soon we became aware that the temperature was rising quickly, so Kościuszko and I turned towards home. Approaching the "gnat-zone" we were surprised that they weren't out. It may not have been warm enough or their short lives may have already come to an end. Whatever the reason at this point, I felt like a horse, sensing the barn and unconsciously picking up the pace even more, knowing that a large bowl of calorie-rich pasta awaited as a reward for this particularly fun and difficult effort. What a great ride!
Finally, for today, forgive me, but I can't help returning to the root, *perd-. Apologies to those of you shy about bodily functions. Did you know our word partridge (the bird) comes from this same root, too? It was borrowed directly from the Greek word, πέρδιξ. This is, presumably, because of a particular sound that the female partridge makes. Regardless of the relationship, I cannot listen to the song "Twelve Days of Christmas" without thinking about farting in a pear tree. There is a cursed side to being a linguist.
Until next time, Dear Readers, have a great week!
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