The Fable of the Lion and the Gazelle.

People! Have you ever read something so stream-of-consciousness absurd that it made you want to tear your hair out? No?

Well, today's your lucky day!

Let me begin by reciting my all time favorite inspirational running quote, The Fable of the Lion and the Gazelle.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. 
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. 
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up...

...you’d better be running. 

Never fails to get my blood going.

But this week, I sort of thought a bit about how much sense this makes in terms of running, in pure biological terms.

If you've come across Darwin's Principle of Natural Selection during your school years, you'll be familiar with the colloquial phrase that is often used to summarize it - 'Survival of the Fittest'.

At the risk of repetition, let me tell you the story of the Lions and the Gazelle that is often used to illustrate the principle.

On a plain in the verdant African savannah, lives a herd of Gazelle and a pride of Lions.

The Lions, as is their temperament, often set off at a jolly bound across said savannah to pounce upon Gazelle for the purpose of snacking. The Gazelle, on the other hand, not particularly amused at the prospect of being pounced, and subsequently snacked, upon... set off, as a precautionary measure, away from the Lions.

Unfortunately, since all Gazelle aren't created equal, the slowest ones, to their own great irritation, end up enclosed in various Lions.

And these fast Gazelle that are now left? They tend to romance each other, one thing leads to another, and well, boys and girls, soon we have little Gazelle babies who have all the 'fast' genes of their fast mommies and daddies. And they grow up to be fast Gazelle.

So, in effect, the Lions might at first sight seem like the bad guys with all the pouncing on and the snacking of innocent Gazelle, but if you look at the big picture, they are doing the Gazelle population a favor, by making successive generations of Gazelle faster, and thus, better able to avoid being snacked on.

Now, as the Gazelle herd gets faster, the slower Lions who can't do the jolly bound fast enough, often find themselves without any Gazelle tidbits to wash down with their evening tea. Eventually, they are starving to death at best, or at worst, they aren't getting any (if you know what I mean...) and are starving to death, still bachelors. Either way, none of their slow-ass genes are getting perpetuated.

And the fast Lions? Like the fast Gazelles... romance...one thing...another thing...fast Lion babies... successively faster Lion generations. Savvy?

This becomes a happy cycle, with both species needing the other one to get faster, in order to become faster itself !

Now I'm no evolutionary biologist or physiologist, but I think that the above nonsense is a pretty close analogy of how workouts, um, work... 

The muscle cells are like the Gazelle here, and running is the Lions come a-huntin'. 

When you work out, you aren't directly making your muscles stronger... quite the opposite. You're breaking them down by inflicting stress.

Muscle cells can be thought of as independent organisms. They feed, grow and reproduce. And when we work out, the weakest of them die. Which leaves the stronger ones to divide and thus, multiply (simple Mitosis, no hanky-panky involved).

Thus, by killing off the weakest muscle cells, your workouts makes muscles as a whole stronger...which in turn increases their capacity for exercise.

Happy cycle!

I took away two additional things from this when my head stopped hurting from all the thinking...

One- You have to get enough rest... If the Lions are replaced by humans in turbocharged SUVs with guns in the above story, it becomes an analogy for too much exercise. The Gazelle population will be wiped out.

And Two- You have to keep increasing the intensity and volume of the workout as your body adapts to it... If the Lions decide that the Gazelle are too quick and start eating grass, the Gazelle population will soon start becoming slower, as speed will no longer be essential to their survival.

Week four of eighteen. This week is supposed to be recovery. Just four Easy runs. However, you may notice that after I made such a big deal out of an inflexible training sched, I'm still a wee bit flexible. I am planning on running long this weekend, and postponing recovery to the next one.

That "?" on the 9th... That was supposed to be an Easy run, but the weather was so incredibly pleasant that morning, that I ended up running faster. Although, not quite fast enough to call it a Tempo. A buddy coined the term 'Twilight Zone Pace'. Yep, that works.