Hey! Jogging is easy
Now, the red blood cell, or haemoglobin, transports oxygen to where
it is urgently needed to produce energy - in our muscle cells. No fewer
than 430 skeletal muscles have to be kept supplied, all those muscles
that keep us standing up straight and help us to move our limbs, wrinkle
our brows, laugh - you name it. Nearly half of our body weight is made
up of muscles, and they can't function unless they receive fuel and oxygen.
As in the auto-mobile engine, the fuel is burned with aid of oxygen,
releasing the energy needed for our muscles to work.
In an engine, this combustion occurs in the cylinders. A mixture of gasoline
and air is made to explode with a spark from the spark plug. If it weren't
for oxygen, the explosion would never take place. That is why oxygen
constantly has to be drawn in through the carburettor. In our muscles, the
combustion occurs in the cell - or, more specifically, in the mitochondria.
Mitochondria are tiny power plants located deep in the interior of a muscle
cell. A muscle cell doesn't just have one of these power plants, it has
hundreds of them. A heart muscle even has ten thousand. And that's
where the oxygen has to go - to these power plants.
From the gatekeeper to the power house: transportation inside
the cell
The red blood cell can only take oxygen to the gatekeeper of the muscle
cell. From there it is transported to the power plants by myoglobin.
Myoglobin is the stuff that makes your muscles red. If the power plants
are only working at half-capacity, the transfer of oxygen is slow and full
of bureaucratic red tape. Once the muscle starts warming up, however,
all the red tape is cast aside and the transfer goes by in a flash. Otherwise
the power plants wouldn't be able to work at full throttle - during jogging,
for example. So, if the blood temperature goes up, the red blood cell hands
over the oxygen quickly to the myoglobin, which rushes it lickety-split to
the chugging power plants.
As long as enough oxygen is supplied, combustion takes place with
sufficient oxygen, or "aerobically." (There's that word again, which
means so much to us runners.) And we know what is burned along
with the oxygen: glucose and fatty acids.
We also know what waste products are produced by combustion: water
and carbon dioxide. Unlike oxygen, carbon dioxide is easily soluble in
water. It therefore doesn't need its own means of transportation to get from
the cell to the lungs. It diffuses directly from the cell to the capillary blood,
where it joins the water in the blood plasma for further transportation to
the alveoli in the lungs. Once the carbon dioxide arrives there, it is exhaled
through the lungs. The water produced by combustion remains for the
moment in the body, unless the body has to be protected from overheating,
in which case we "sweat it out".
- Your target next weekFirst day: Fifteen minutes, slow.
- Second day: Fifteen minutes, slow.
- Third day: Twenty minutes, slow.
[You've already learned a lot and are making good progress. You can
now run over ten minutes on a regular basis. In Part 5 Winni Mühlbauer
tells you where you get the strength to do it.]