Dr. J will see you now: On crosswinds in health and fitness

Contributor: "Dr. J"

Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Crosswind is a term that can strike fear in the hearts of even the most seasoned pilots! Chuck Yeager, considered by many to be one of if not the best pilot ever, has not escaped the danger of crosswinds.

Ideally, take-offs and landings are performed directly into the wind. Unfortunately, unless you are flying a helicopter or landing on an aircraft carrier, with the immobility of runway direction crosswinds are going to happen.

Taking off with a crosswind is the lesser of the two evils. The plane tends to weathervane into the direction of the wind, and using the controls, it's just a matter of maintaining runway direction as the climb out continues. Landing, on the other hand, can be much more challenging, if for no other reason than with takeoff the plane is headed into the soft sky while with landing we are headed toward the firm earth!

Landing with a crosswind

There are basically two techniques that pilots use to land in a crosswind, the crab and the sideslip. Most of us use a combination of the two as we transition from flying the machine to taxiing it along the runway.

The less the wind is from the front, and the more it is from the side, the more difficult it is to maintain runway direction. Also, if there are gusts where the wind speed and direction is constantly changing, the landing difficulty increases.

Professional pilots test airplanes before they are ever let out for us to use. "Plays well with others" is a standard requirement for the modern aircraft, within certain limits. For the Arrow, 20 miles an hour is the maximum recommended crosswind component for landing, meaning that the pro could not keep the plane on a straight course with any greater wind speed coming directly from the side.

Crosswinds in health and fitness

I'm sure all of us have or will have to face problems that are at odds with the direction we want to go. How we handle these crosswinds can make all the difference in whether they are a mere wind bump or a hurricane in their effect on our health and fitness efforts.

Because I like to run outside, I have had to deal with poor weather, especially when I was in school in the northeast. The cold never stopped me because I found Gore-tex running suits and dressed in layers. When the mechanical obstacles like ice and snow were too severe, I changed to using a treadmill to get it done.

Injuries have come and gone. I've been fortunate enough to know when I could ice and bandage it, or when I needed to find cross-training ideas to keep on keeping on. Of course there have been wardrobe malfunctions on my fitness voyage, but enough about that.

I think if I've learned any lesson, it's been that if I wanted to, I could find ways to maintain my fitness.

I'm sure each and every one of you have felt the push and power of your own unique crosswinds. Hopefully, as I have, you have taken them one at a time and found your way to safely land and move on to fly another day.

One of the nice things about the health and fitness community online are the many resources that are available for help. This site, and several of the regular commenter's sites are always open to questions and offer solutions based on our individual experiences. It's a wonderful example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts!

Flying the winds

I went flying the other day and the winds were quite strong. You can see from the takeoff video that the orange wind sock is straight out, meaning a 20 mile an hour wind at the least. You may also have noticed that it is in the direction of the runway, however, while I was in the air the direction changed.

Later in the day when I returned to base, the winds were 20 miles an hour sustained and coming directly from the side of the runway heading, with variable direction gusts to 25 miles an hour.

We have a saying in aviation, "Better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than in the air wishing you were on the ground!" Takeoffs are optional, landings are not. I was, however, confident J.

You can see on the video of the landing, how the plane was buffeted and rocked by the winds. None of these movements are staged, the video camera is fixed to the left side of the windshield. I just turned it on and flew the plane.

So what kind of crosswinds have you faced, and how did you make your landing sweet?

(Send your questions for Dr. J to calorielab@gmail.com or leave a comment. If your question is used by Dr. J, CalorieLab will send you a $25 Dining Dough restaurant certificate — limited to U.S. residents. More Dr. J posts can be read in our archives.)

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Dr. J will see you now: On crosswinds in health and fitness