It's Personal What the Body Doesn’t Forget Our muscles’ memory is sometimes sharper than our mind’s. My ass and my mountain bike seat are just starting to make friends again this season. I haven’t seen this narrow Adirondack trail in seven months, and I can’t quite remember if there are two or four more switchbacks before the hill ends. It’s hard to say which fills the air more: my wheezing or the hope of only two more turns. This spring I’m not in my usual state of fitness. My arms are puny from nights in front of the computer rather than in the weight room, and three weeks of inactivity due to stitches from a removed melanoma have made my belly go soft. And yet, despite all of this, my body remembers when to stand up in the pedals—early, before the pitch of this hill has me rolling back into a well of disgrace. Two hairpin turns. A log. A hop over the log. My motor nerves and muscle cells ripple from the synapses that fire down my spinal cord in exponential waves. They know better than any conscious part of my brain that I should throw my weight back on the descent, hop to clear the fallen tree, and tilt my bike ever so slightly to the right to squeeze my battered handlebars between two pine trees that bear their own scars from fellow bikers’ chipping chunks of bark from the trunks. I have a bit of a love affair with this neuromuscular facilitation we call muscle memory, when something that is a learned activity becomes automatic, unconscious in its execution. I love that first effortless turn on the inaugural ski run of the season and the immediate familiarity of how to soar on a bicycle. I aspire to the grin of a gray-haired 73-year-old with stiff knees who carves the most graceful arcs of us all. Muscle memory latches on to everything we do— from the mundane activity of brushing our teeth to the more rigorous gross motor skills of running and jumping. It’s ubiquitous and ordinary, and still it seduces me in its every synapse. It’s been nearly nine years since my last college track meet; my legs are slower, and I now retreat to trails and hills for their lack of stopwatches. But I can still make a detour to the nearby high school track, toe the line, press the familiar Ironman Timex button, and immediately fall into 90-second quarters. Even when I have no business running 90-second laps, my legs know that cadence cultivated from hundreds of interval repeats; they know that turnover down to the second. The body doesn’t forget. I may struggle on this hill or that lap on the track, and I may have to finally admit that I need to rely on lists—not short-term memory—to pluck through the tasks of my day. But each year that I ride my bike or slide into ski boots, the muscle memory seems to improve. The neural networks and the motor neuron pathways become faster. My body, despite occasional fitness deficiencies, appears to be getting smarter. I wear scars of learning, of muscle memory in training: the one on my big toe from diving too deep into the pool, the one on my knee from fording a stream with sharp wedges of ice, the one on my thigh from trying to hurdle a coil of barbed wire. My bike wears scratches from tumbles over fallen trees and rock gardens. Some days it is a slick root that foils what my body thinks it already knows; other days I crash and burn with a movement my body has not yet committed to muscle memory. This neuromuscular system is still in training; it always will be. There are synaptic transmissions to improve and skills to transition from conscious to unconscious. In all of this, though, I must admit, what I love is not the complex biology of neurons; it is how brilliant my body feels in a quick descent through the green of maple trees, the fat tires of my bike linking my body to the terrain of my mountains. It is that moment of grace granted when muscles engage, I grin, and we descend the last hill in some state of simple remembrance. |
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