Fear of a Book Planet
February 18th, 2012 § 3 Comments
I have a bookshelf with several of my favorite authors. When I was more more organized, the top two shelves were dedicated to two writers exclusively. Hunter Thompson and Douglas Adams.
I have spent some time in collecting everything that they have written, at least within reason, as some books and editions are redundant or impossible to find. But for the most part, I have a complete collection. And now I fear it.
When you truly enjoy a great writer, you can just burrow through their pages, absorbing the words and prose, and burst out the other side of the book with a sweaty glow, soaking in the the feelings and emotions of the writing. Great works you can read over and over, but nothing replaces the thrill of picking up the next work. And I can now look at my shelf and not only see the next work, but the last work.
I have unread books from both Hunter and Douglas. And I will read them, but not yet. I have gone over the covers several times, feeling the spines, then sliding the books back into the gaps they leave in the shelf. Pulling one open and starting at the first page is carefully planned. These are influential works to me, even when they are just scribbled rantings, because there will be no more.
I met Douglas Adams when I had just graduated high school. He came to Seattle to the University Book Store for a book signing. I was thrilled to learn this, and was there right of the bat with my copies of hitchhikers guide to sign. Once I got to the front of the line, I had no idea what to say. I had been reading his books since Elementary school, and I didn’t know what to ask.
So I asked him one of the stock questions he always got, about getting the idea for the books lying in a field. I knew the answer, but hearing it from Douglas was worth it. He was my height, well over 6 feet, looking me in the eye. And he was sincere and happy to answer even the most basic question from one of his fans. I never forgot that moment.
I only read Hunter after becoming trapped in Las Vegas after Chuck’s wedding. We flew down on stand-by tickets into Las vegas, and by accident, the wedding was during March Madness. The wedding itself was fantastic, but Vegas was a zoo. By the last day of the long weekend we were ready to leave. But with stand by tickets, there was no space. So we waited another day. Nothing.
Yulia and I were trapped in Vegas with our daughter, and the estimate was that it would be at least 3 to 5 days before a clear flight would let us out.
At that point, I had The Fear.
To escape out of our desert gulag I worked a scheme with a car rental company, three airports, and getting put on the Terrorist Watch List that had us driving from Las Vegas to Seattle via San Francisco.
I knew of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and after that experience, bought it to relate to what just happened to us. I was immediately struck by the writing, and never looked back. I read The Curse of Lono just before our last trip to Hawaii, and have the rest of Hunter’s books on the shelf.
Both Douglas’s humor and Hunter’s brutality influence my writing today. I love peeking into what they have written, but am not sure that I want to hit the end just yet.
Perhaps, once my writing us matured, it will be what fills that gap for me. The same way their own writing filled the gap from their literary heroes.
I’m not there yet. But each time I pull another book off that shelf, just a bit remains in me afterwards, and lives in on in my eyes and fingers. And is inflicted upon you.
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Rock around the Block
February 11th, 2012 Comments Off
So I completed my Deadlifting cycle for a bit. That was a ton of fun. (Actually, if you add all the pounds moved, it was well over a ton, but that involves doing a lot of math, so I’ll just round down)
As I have written before, I use Pavel Tsastouline’s Power to the People protocol for Deadlifting. But I was able to have even more fun with this. Over the summer I had picked up Easy Strength by Pavel and Dan John. Easy Strength is an amazing book that details out how to understand and identify your goals for lifting and training, track progress, and set your programs to hit those goals.
I had read through it twice, and found a great protocol that I thought would fit my Goals (general fitness as opposed to sport specific) and it fit both my skills and equipment. The program worked out to be:
2-week Block Training (for a minimum plan of 10 weeks (5 sets))
Block 1: Single-arm Kettlebell Clean and Presses with Goblet Squats
Block 2: Power to the People Deadlifts
If you aren’t familiar with these these things, I’ll clarify.
Block Training is an old training method (very popular in the Former Soviet Union) where different exercise types are organized into Blocks, with a period of two weeks being the most common. You alternate the blocks over a period of several weeks before changing or moving to something new. Each block would differ from the others by either area worked (say, and Upper body block followed by a Lower body block) or it could differ by exercise type (in my case, a Pressing and Squats block followed by a deadlift block) You can run at a fairly high intensity as you recover from one type of work as you change to the other. Also, it lets you combine things in a way that keeps everything interesting.
Kettelbell Clean and Presses are surprisingly less common that I usually think. While kettelbells are very popular via Crossfit right now, most folks out there are just using them for swings (and typically the American Style over-the-head swing. – I follow RKC methods myself). I favor the C&P because when you are handling a large overhead weight on one hand only, then add the inherent eccentric balance of the Kettlebell, you turn an upper-body exercise into a whole-body lift. You need tight Glutes, core, and lats to achieve a good, straight lift, or you just wobble all over the place.
The Goblet Squat is one that Dan John promotes all the time as a way to dial in clean Squat form. Holding a weight out n front of your body, you pull yourself down into a low squat, with elbows resting on the inside of your kneecaps. It is very hard to get out of alignment with this exercise, and it really dials in great squatting form. The Kettlebell handle is a perfect alignment for the grip in a goblet squat, making it a perfect bookend for pressing sets.
With varying weights, this made my sets look like the following:
Block 1:
Single Arm Presses & Goblet SquatsMonday (16kg x 5, 20kg x 5, 24kg x 5) X 4 sets
Wednesday (32kg x 2, 24kg x 5) X 4 sets
Friday (20kg x 5, 24kg x 5) X 4 setsBlock 2:
Power to the People deadliftsMonday: 185lbs/135lbs
Tuesday: 205lbs/185lbs
Wednesday: 225lbs/205lbs
Thursday: 215lbs/205lbs
Friday: 225lbs/205lbs
Saturday: 235lbs/225lbs
After a Kettelbell week I would see if I felt up to adding an extra set for each day. At the end of a lifting week I would dial back 20 pounds, then add 10 each day. If the set felt too hard, I dialed back a bit.
This progressed fantastically! By the last Kettelbell week, I could get in 5 solid sets, and I was on track to break through a deadlift of 300 pounds. A few days before my cycle completed, I racked up 285 pounds to the bar.
In proper form, I made two excellent pulls. On my third pull, elves snuck in and glued the weights to the floor.
I mean, the bar didn’t move at all.
I was at my body’s limit, so I cut it short. I was well past my Personal Record, I had finished 9 weeks of solid, intense training, made amazing gains, and had no injury. So when my body said stop, I listened.
I took the next two weeks to recover with walking and some light bodyweight. Then is is on to the next challenge…
On Pain and Suffering (the good kind)
January 27th, 2012 Comments Off
When I first got the bug up my ass to quit killing myself slowly with the couch, and actually try to get in some kind of shape, I was not motivated by the standard new years resolution, but by the impending doom of MY 40TH BIRTHDAY! It was good motivation.
I had been demotivated from working out so many times in the past, usually because I never saw any results, or I got hurt. Needless to say, this sucked. So I did the thing any OCD-enhanced individual would do, I started reading.
I buried myself in magazines, blogs, books – pretty much everything I could find about effective exercise. Doing some prep work turned out to be a good plan. Through one of my chains of reading I found out about Kettlebells, and the assorted books by Pavel Tsatsouline. In Enter The Kettlebell, There is an entire chapter entitled “It’s Your Fault”.
This was terribly enlightening. The whole section is the opposite of the usual bravado that you read in any fitness writing, and is an admonishment to pay attention and not get hurt. I really hadn’t read that anywhere else, as an explicit fitness topic, and it is one of the things that has kept me buying Pavel’s books.
After that, one of the online friends through the kettlebell forums summed it up better in a single phrase:
“Don’t move into Pain”
Of course, the difficulty in following that advice, is that as you push yourself harder towards a fitness goal, it hurts. You are moving heavier weights, testing your endurance, and frankly, hurting.
It is a fine line between pushing yourself through the hard work, and not injuring yourself. And if you are new at it, it can be a very fine line. For me, fine enough where I ended up almost damaging a tendon in my elbow before I realized that this wasn’t just part of my lifting, but something was wrong. It ended up costing me three months of physical therapy to recover, and probably another three months of starting from scratch.
That was fine. It gave me time to focus and see the difference between stopping before the pain, which is there to warn you about getting hurt, and ignoring the suffering that pushing yourself to the limits causes.
Really, we are actively seeking out that suffering, and trying to drive through it. That’s what makes us stronger – both physically and mentally.
When I did the Livestrong Ride two years ago, it was my first time doing an organized ride of that size. it was 45 miles, of flats, hills, city and back streets. It prepped myself and trained for the distance, but the race day was miserable. It started cold, then once we were part way into the race, started to rain. It was sticky, oily roadspray, with cold, biting winds. my hands froze on the handlebars, and I was sore all over. My lesson to myself as I was on the road was that I could tell that while I was sore, tired, and freezing, I wasn’t actually hurting or in Pain. I was just suffering through a crappy ride. It actually cleared just a bit as I made it to the finish line.
I had nothing left in the end. I could barely walk to the car until I warmed up, but I felt great. The sense of reward and accomplishment was indescribable.
After that experience, I would add an addendum to my earlier advice:
Don’t move into Pain, but feel free to punch Suffering right in the cock.
Like this:
Ours goes to ’11
December 31st, 2011 Comments Off
I suppose that the end of the year is a time for reflection. Sadly, since I do not actually wear a tinfoil hat, I am not that reflective.
This year, I really appreciate the number of people who came into my life, and will truly miss those who have left. The thing that I truly enjoyed about Facebook is how you can add new people to your life even in a small way, and though you might not be physically close to each other, you have a connection that you might not have had before.
The downside to this also means that sometimes you learn about the loss of people who might completely passed you by. I found out today that an old friend from high school, died this week trying to save someone else’s life. I’m never sure how to feel about something like this, in that I might never have reconnected with this person in life, but knowing that they’re gone still feels like such a loss.
I suppose the best we can hope for is to keep building as many new, great, wonderful people as we can, and hope for as little loss as possible.
On the personal front, this marks one full year of Paleo style dieting, which has meant 20 pounds down and feeling a lot better. I’ve seen a lot of my friends get healthier this year, and a lot of family get healthier as well.
My lifting has improved. I’ve been able to try a lot of different, unique systems, and everything is been a fun and interesting challenge. I feel good that I can end the year feeling stronger and have had a lot of fun in the process.
To friends, family, and acquaintances alike, I wish a good year. Rarely, if ever do I agree with people on everything, but even when we disagree I hope that things work out the best for everyone.
Hope your 2012 is good, and as the Mayans say – Time to buy a new calendar, this ones out!
Ringside at the BULLfight
December 22nd, 2011 Comments Off
One of the things that I really like about social media is the exposure you get to large groups of people normally you wouldn’t be able to interact with. In good times, this allows you to get information and feedback from people but you might find useful and interesting. And in other times, you get to watch them pick fights each other. This is one of those other times.
Two of the big groups I’m exposed to right now are the Kettlebell crowd and the Paleo diet crowd. In both of these groups are having big internal conflicts. Personally, I’m rather enjoying the show. I’m lucky enough to have some of the better minds in all these groups available to me on Facebook either as direct friends, or through their business pages. And for the most part, they’re a smart, professional group of people.
Currently, I’m trying not to take sides in the arguments. I’m still pretty much a novice in all these areas, and I am hoping to learn from these people. But after a while, you can start pick out the wheat from the chaff.
I can see the point of the arguments for both sides in these situations, and usually they simply have a difference of opinion, but generally are moving towards the same goals. In some cases, I can see where one side really has a difficult time explaining its point of view, and that makes me feel like they don’t know what they’re saying in the first place. Or that they are just BS’ing to gather attention.
I might be wrong, but if you don’t know where you stand in the first place, you probably shouldn’t be arguing. It might be fun to watch for the rest of us on the outside, but it ends up being a colossal waste of time and bandwidth. And worse, you look like a real dumbass after a point.
There have always been splits in the Kettlebell community, and this time looks to be not dramatically different. I think that’s fine. Most of the players are arguing more about form, and details, and they tend to be mostly polite and professional about it. I think thats fine. In the end, we are really just talking about picking up hunks of iron, and there can be many successful roads to the same destination in this area. most of these folks seem to get that.
The paleo crowd has been quite a bit different. Since this summer there has been a core argument between the argument of the “Insulin Hypothesis” (too many carbs raise insulin which triggers fat storage) and the now opposing “Palatability Hypothesis”
This palatability hypothesis supposedly says that if food is better tasting you eat more of it in this causes obesity. If you buy into the whole “well it’s all just calories” argument, then this works.
That seems to make sense on the surface, but from an idea like that, all we can really difficult conclude is, “eat really crappy food and then you’ll be healthy!” So far, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot said about what mechanism is happening (it’s complicated!) or how this is borne out by the evidence; whereas on the insulin hypothesis side, there’s a pretty large volume of writing about what this is and how it works. It might be wrong, and probably is to a certain extent, but at least we know what they’re trying to say.
As I’ve been following this across all the blogs and other media, watching the same small number of people over and over making the same arguments and I feel like they’ve never been very clear. This has frustrated the heck out of me. These are people who I’ve really respected before, and have really appreciated their writing, and now I’m left trying to effectively fill in the blanks on what they’re trying to say, because they’re so outrageously unclear.
If you can’t clearly state your hypothesis, then I suspect that you don’t really have one. It ‘s a bit like the Monty Python sketch with the guy selling arguments. It ends up as contradiction for contradiction’s sake. (I could be arguing with you in my spare time…)
But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this will be much clearer once there is some better writing and better arguments on this topic. But I just don’t have a lot of faith in that case. So in the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing right now. The way I’m eating, and the way I’m lifting, are working pretty good so far. And there’s always room for improvement.
That much will probably never change.
Za Chem!
November 25th, 2011 Comments Off
When I was living in Moscow, We had a post Soviet Chess Grandmaster that would hang out upstairs in the hotel bar, and you could sit down and play chess against him. Being an idiot, I figured, Hey, why not?
I should note that I am a terrible chess player. Miserable.
The bar itself was much larger than my room at the hotel, and as such, I spent most of my off hours there. It had a great balcony view down into the lobby, and out the glass windows of the front of the hotel giving a perfect view to the Dynamo neighborhood of Moscow, which was essentially the crappy area around the Dynamo Soccer stadium. The whole place was a marvelous shade of grey.
The Grandmaster sat in a quiet corner of the floor, with no view, and darker lighting. He was reading the paper, slowly sipping on a glass of vodka and smoking. There were three chessboards in front of him, set with pieces, ready to play.
He had been there all week, and no one had even approached him the whole time. (And yes, I had been in the bar all week for enough hours to make my personal observations statistically significant.)
So I sat down and smiled.
It took a moment, but he looked over at me from behind his paper, stared me square in the eye,and put the paper down, folding it in half. He took another sip from his vodka, cigarette still in his mouth, and knocked down two of his own pieces.
He then motioned for me to start. Apparently knocking down his pieces was a standard form of handicap or something. I was cool with that, so I moved a pawn. He immediately grabbed my pawn and put it back.
“Nyet” he said.
Okaaaay. I had to think for a second to determine if I was actually stupid enough to move a pawn the wrong way. I hadn’t, but apparently, it was still wrong.
Fine. I started again, moving a different pawn. This was apparently better, as he moved a piece. I moved again, and as fast as his hands could move he reset the entire board.
The Grandmaster looked exasperated. “Nyet,” he said again, “dumats! za chem?”.
My Russian was just passable, but I could translate: “No! Think! Why?”
He started to move pieces about the board to illustrate his point, while my brain continued to translate. In Russian, there are two words for “why”, the philosophical “Pochemu?” (as in “Why did this have to happen to me?”) and the concrete, “Za Chem”, better translated as “for what purpose?”
He was using “za chem?” and trying to make his point. He would move a piece on the board, look at me and ask, “za chem?” then show with his fingers where that piece could attack. he then would move another piece to defend, ask “za chem?” and show the defensive attacks available for that piece. he did this over and over, replaying some gave stored in his head to make the attack and counterattack point to me.
The waitress showed up at that point with more glasses of vodka, and I bought two, handing the grandmaster one, which he quickly downed, and we started again.
I focused. I moved my pawn.
He countered.
I focused again on his pawn. “Za chem?” I examined all the attacks possible, which of course was two. I moved another pawn to defend the first.
He countered again.
This continued for nearly six moves before he shook his head, grabbed all the pieces, and reset the board. We started over.
We played through another two shots of vodka, and I was able to make it up to nearly ten moves. Eventually my friends showed up, and we were planning to head out. I thanked him and he dryly lit another cigarette, and went back to his paper.
—
As I reflect back, nearly 20 years later, I find that I still remember the important lesson of always looking and examining situations – “Za chem? – for what purpose?” Each movement and each action by others is to be judged, “Za chem? – for what purpose?”
—
But I also now have a second lesson that I wish my younger self knew:
When playing chess with a Grandmaster, get the fucker drunk first.
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When Private Power Owns The Government
November 3rd, 2011 Comments Off
You said it.
October 5th, 2011 Comments Off
“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
-Steve Jobs 1955-2011
42
September 6th, 2011 Comments Off
“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
“Forty two?! Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?”
“I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”
Yank my chain
September 2nd, 2011 Comments Off
This has been mostly a light week for workouts. The deadlifts last week got up to 255 pounds, then I dialed back a bit. One of my first lessons from starting workouts is to go slow, muscles strengthen quick, but tendons much less so, and they heal even slower.
I’ll pick up next week with some new stuff and we will see how that goes.
I’ve also been biking to work a few days each week, that’s 3 miles each way, and that has been a lot of fun, and a nice addition to the workout as well. I finally managed to clean my chain, which made a much bigger difference in my ride than I expected. The bike is much quieter, and shifts soooo much better. It is still a total tank, being an old chromoly frame, with fat 700×38 road tires, but it takes the curbs and potholes well.
I’m glad we are finally getting some summer… in September.
