Roz – Page 4 – Serenity Through Sweat

Curiosity

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. My extended winter holiday has come to a close. That has meant a lot of quality time with my boys and my wife. As well as a much needed break from work. With that comes less time spent on this platform, and on my other projects, which mostly take place during my downtime on the road.

As I start to transition out of vacation mode and back towards a more normal routine the inevitable new years conundrum comes up.

I’m not a big believer in arbitrary calendar flips dictating significant life changes, but it is a tidy, human way, to compartmentalize the passage of time and overcome stagnation and inertia to make a change.

If there is something you want to do, or explore, or learn, don’t wait for January 1, just do it. That said, my mother gifted me a subscription to Masterclass for Christmas and I am trying to make that a more regular part of my routine.

Time that would otherwise be spent scrolling news articles without direction and somewhat mindlessly, can now be dedicated to a more tangible and appreciable watching or listening, and learning experience.

The lessons are broken down into very digestible 8-15 min sections so it isn’t a huge commitment. It is one that I feel I can make a routine of, and feel better about my time and attention allocation.

I started off with Malcolm Gladwell’s Masterclass on writing. It seemed the most directly related to my current projects and it was highly recommend by my brother who is an English teacher and something of a writer himself.

In section five while discussing research, Gladwell shares the story of visiting a town in eastern Pennsylvania, where the the residents seem to live unexpectedly long lives, despite a number of what would otherwise be considered unhealthy lifestyle choices.

He had read an article about the town, and decided to visit. He walked through the towns shops, and took notes. He met and dined with the mayor and recorded their conversation. He shelved the information for the better part of fifteen years until it found a place in the opening of his book Outliers.

Malcolm followed his curiosity and then sat on the resulting product for fifteen years. That is a long time, and a not insignificant investment, waiting for something to bear fruit. And yet, it did.

After sharing the anecdote, Malcolm goes on to tell the students of this class.

“You have to feel free to go down roads that don’t lead anywhere immediately. I was going for a wander and collecting something and sticking it on a back shelf in the hopes that I would someday use it. If you do enough of those little wanderings then you have a shelf that is packed with really really cool things.”

“But doing something only because you can perceive in the moment that it might be useful is a really good way of not gathering anything at all because you can’t know in the moment. There is too much pressure.”

Obviously this strategy has worked out well for Gladwell, who has been prolific over his long career. Following curiosity in search of things that are truly interesting. Trusting that what you uncover will be worth the time and energy to uncover it, even if only for its own discovery sake.

There is a certain bravery and faith required for this approach. An inherent trust that your instincts, if followed, will reward you appropriately. Even if it isn’t in the way you hope, or think it might.

I followed my own interests recently diverting from my language and communication research to read the book Lifespan. It has nothing to do with my current projects but I thought it was interesting.

Within the book was a singular mention of a mathematician Claude Shannon, referenced in a passage on cellular aging. This again seemed interesting, and let me to purchase two more books, Shannon’s doctoral thesis, as well as his biography.

I didn’t imagine when reading a book on longevity, that I would be introduced to a mathematician, that would lead to another 500 or so pages of reading and a number of other interesting findings.

These weren’t just really cool things to put on a shelf, they ended up being immediately useful in my current projects. Following my curiosity on a seeming wandering bore fruit.

Furthermore, I was reading because I was curious, rather than reading like a stoic researcher. The wandering was not just productive, it was enjoyable.

I’ve found this same approach extremely productive in my grappling as well. It isn’t when drilling a position over and over that you come up with a breakthrough. It is when you are playing. Unencumbered by the moment. Moving through positions with a curiosity and lack of intentional direction. Wandering, physically, and even mentally, that the eureka moments happen.

Curiosity can lead you down unexpected roads. Ones that might not seem to be in the direction you intended, or initially set out on. Following these roads with an open, wandering mindset can lead to incredible places. Not the least of which is serenity.

4 miles with my stroller buddy Speedy, and a 5 mile tempo run

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Kindness

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. Against all odds, I found myself in a central Iowa bar, in the middle of a snow storm talking about surfing this Christmas Eve, and I wanted to share the experience with you.

This trip was the first line choice on my bid for December. I should have known better, but as has been revealed here before, I am a masochist and a glutton for pain. This trip was set to have a 30 hour layover in cedar rapids Iowa, followed by a 15 hour layover in Boise, and then finishing on Christmas day in Orlando around 2:00 pm.

It looked good on paper when I was bidding it in early November. The bomb cyclone that appeared days beforehand had other ideas. We landed in Cedar rapids around ten o’clock at night in blowing snow and 40+mph winds.

The crew who was bringing in the airplane we were to fly out didn’t fair as well, and never made it in. So that is what set me up to be in a local bar on Christmas Eve, watching the Bills game with some locals, and engaging in the conversation I want to share with you.

The first couple that sat down next to me came from an army household and had lived all over. One of their stops was Patrick air force base in Florida. We talked about the changes in central Florida over the past few decades. We talked about surfing the warm water of the Atlantic in contrast to the below freezing wind chill outside.

We shared our fondness for the space coast. The welcoming and small town feeling it had, despite it’s continuing technological progress. We shared our appreciation for the sunshine state.

They left around half time of the bills game, to be replaced by another local mother and son duo. The son appeared to be around my age or so, heavily bearded and heavily jeweled. I think he was wearing more rings, with more gemstones than my wife owns in entirety. Granted that is a low bar, but every finger was covered in a unique ring with a different color stone.

His mother was a self proclaimed long muscled and lithe woman who would outlast me on the bar’s non existent dance floor. She was an ardent disciple of stretching and long muscles, and as I found out, a proponent of being “kind” to your body.

Despite my agreeing with most of what she had to say about stretching and long, lithe muscles, when I twisted my chair to show her the IronMan logo on the back of my jacket, and I told her this was the eleventh year of my annual Christmas half marathon tradition, she rolled her eyes in disapproval.

Running for any length, but certainly a marathon (which she thought was 25 miles, but that may have been the 2-4-1 happy hour talking) was being ‘unkind’ to your body. Why would you ever want to be unkind to your body? What good could that bring?

We had a very nice conversation, agreeing on many fronts and agreeing to disagree on many others. It was a refreshing human interaction. But, it also got me thinking about the primary point of contention. Certain activities I was participating in were deemed as ‘unkind’ to the body, but then what is kindness?

Her argument was that running, biking swimming, triathlon, and certainly weight training, were unkind to the body. That their short term benefits did more long term damage. That the practice of them was unkind to the body, in pushing it beyond it’s limits.

It was difficult to pin down exactly where limits where pushed. Where was too far, or what was too heavy, or when a limit was exceeded. But in her mind stretching, lengthening exercises that promoted mobility and flexibility, and the ability to dance in her 70’s were all that mattered.

By this point the Bills game was wrapping up with the Bills coasting towards a division clinching win over the Bears. The 2-4-1’s had been flowing steadily throughout the duration of the game and my normal excitement to engage in debate was wanning.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, what is it to be kind to your body. What is it to be kind to your children? My five year old loves to tell me that making him do difficult things by himself is not being kind. And in a sense he is right. I could do it for him with greater efficiency and effectiveness. The immediacy of that kindness, would in my opinion, be dwarfed by the disservice it would do him for future development.

I feel the same way about my body. Treating it ‘kindly’ at the expense of future development doesn’t seem like a good option to me. Sure the masochistic tendencies might seem ‘unkind’ to the outside observer, but they come from a place of love. I love my body and all of the incredible things it can do. All of the grand adventures I am able to have and share in because of the ‘unkind’ stresses my body has endured and grown from.

No one watching a parent talk a toddler through a ten minute shoe tying session would deem the exchange ‘unkind’. Providing the parent was coming from a place of love and respect and engaging the toddler on an appropriately challenging level.

Be kind to yourself. Sometimes that might mean a little bit of a break, but sometimes it might mean a kick in the ass. And, it will always include a little serenity.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Binary

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. While continuing my linguistics research I seem to have taken a fork in the road to information theory.

Sometimes you follow these paths to dead ends. But sometimes, the path leads to somewhere interesting even if it isn’t exactly where you thought you were heading, or needed to go in the first place.

Information theory was pioneered in the 1940’s and 50’s by Claude Shannon. We talked about him a little bit in the post on noise.

One of the ideas that helped kickstart Shannon’s theory, was that of the mathematician and logician George Boole.

George Boole in the laws of thought, explains the way that any question of logic can be turned into math. This is done with conditional statements AND, OR, NOT, and IF, along with an evaluation of if the statement is true 1, or false 0.

Imagine you want to find out how many people in your city are blonde women. The characteristic blonde can be represented by x and female by y. The statements will either be true 1, or false 0. AND would be represented by multiplication •, OR by addition +.

Each data point (person) can then be evaluated by the equations which can be translated easily back and forth between math and plain English.

1•1 = 1 blonde and female. 1•0=0 blonde and male. If you decide you are only concerned with how many women there are, 1+1=1 for the group of blonde women and 0+1=1 for the group of non blonde women.

This foundation laid by Boole in the 19th century set the stage for Shannon and other inventors to build our modern computing era. Boolian algebra would work with electrical circuits laid out either in parallel or in a series to evaluate the data.

Binary implies and either/or, true/false, 1 or 0. When setting code to evaluate these statements or questions, computation can be accomplished at lightning speeds.

This is why definitions are so important. As more and more of our world is driven by this binary code, true or false, statements can only be properly evaluated if we have agreed on the definitions.

This is a blessing for our modern information age. Tasks that would require huge amounts of human time and energy, and would be very error prone, can now be automated.

2+2=4. Is the picture of a stop sign. Are the letters in This scramble grstl. These can all be assigned yes or no values. True or false. And they are very simple examples. But as we move away from simple examples and in to more complex questions, the binary coding becomes more challenging.

Writing code to evaluate human defined terms is where I want to focus. The past few years has seen a rise in social media platforms restricting posts in one way or another.

Sometimes this is done by removing the posts entirely. Sometimes it is done by flagging the post, putting some sort of warning, or label, or explanation on it. Sometimes it is done by adjusting the post’s visibility.

Most of these restrictions are performed at least initially by a computer. A computer operating in binary. The post is true or false. It contains misinformation or it doesn’t. It contains banned content or it doesn’t.

This is not a blog post about censorship, those platforms policies, or one specific position over another. It is about the process. The mechanisms behind evaluating posted content.

If these posts are being flagged initially by an algorithm. That algorithm has to be programmed to observe certain characteristics or definitions.

As we saw from the onset, computers are faster and less error prone than humans at binary logic. When it comes to subjective rationalization, not so much.

If misinformation, or objectionable content, or hate speech is clearly defined, and we all agree on the definitions, then a binary logic calculation is magically fast and efficient.

However, if we go all the way back to 1964, to the court case Jacobellis V. Ohio which ultimately ended up in the supreme court, we see the root of the problem.

A movie theater was being sued for showing a movie with a sex scene. As the court case moved it’s way up the legal system to higher and higher courts, each court was unable to successfully define obscenity and pornography.

The problem is summed up well by justice Stewart in the popular legal quote “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

If humans “perhaps can never succeed in intelligibly defining” such terms, how can we expect a computer code, written by humans to do so?

Yet this is to a large extent the situation we find ourself in. Whoever controls the definition, and writes the code, establishes the binary. What is tru and what is false.

I have said it before, and I will say it again, words are important. The way we collectively define them is important. Participating in conversations about those definitions is important and everyone has the right to a voice in that conversation.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Belonging

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. Last week I stumbled into a little hipster coffee shop on a long layover in Oklahoma City. They had a bourbon maple pecan latte that caught my attention.

I typically load up my coffee at home with a lot. Creatine, resveratrol, NMN, collagen, cinnamon, and turmeric all make a regular appearance. Even still, there was a lot going on in that latte. To include chopped pecans for an oddly satisfying chewy sensation I was surprised to enjoy in my mid morning cup.

Between the heavy history of linguistics research and the multitude of flavors in the latte I was surprised when my attention was drawn to the window outside.

It was a windy day in Oklahoma. I had spent the morning running along the brick town canal and then the Oklahoma River. It was mostly quiet and just a few other walkers or cyclists were out. There was however, a small army of landscapers weilding leaf blowers.

It seemed like an exercise in futility, but there they were, it seemed a new team around every corner, battling the wind with their air cannons trying to corral the rogue leaves.

This was especially apparent outside the coffee shop window, where the small army and their mini jet engines could be heard through my ear plugs and over the hipster coffee shop music as I tried to work.

I finally looked up and saw this silly tree across the street. A lone act of defiance in an otherwise concrete jungle landscape. From my seat at the window it was hard to tell where the roots even had access to any dirt.

This was the source of all those rogue leaves. Which drew the army of jet blasting landscapers. Which in turn was providing a myriad of distractions from my project at hand. This tree obviously didn’t belong here.

Or did it.

I am very grateful for these long layovers. Away from the inevitable busyness of a flying day or life as a father and husband, I am able to have such trivial contemplations.

The tree certainly didn’t fit with the rest of the scene, and my initial reaction was that it didn’t belong. The landscaping team certainly shared my belief, fighting their uphill and upwind battle illy equiped against the leaves.

What if I got it wrong? What is the tree did belong there. What if it belonged there more than the sidewalk, or the condo, or the hipster coffee shop? Who gets to decide what belongs and what does not.

I smiled to myself as I chewed on my latte, suddenly much more appreciative of the distraction from my project. My initial reaction was unnecessarily hostile and misguided. As quickly as it came though, a competing idea bubbled up.

I thought about my boys, growing up in a world that seems to be increasingly divided and polarized. A world with spaces were belonging can be artificially defined.

I’m not sure they are old enough, and even when they are they might not fully appreciate this story. It is after all one trivial contemplation among many that I hope to bequeath them.

Maybe you had to be there. Trying to block out the hipster music and the leaf blowers, oddly chewing on pecans in a latte, reading esoteric linguistic research to really appreciate that renegade growing tall out of the concrete and peppering passers-by with it’s foliage.

But, I think it’s lesson is a valuable one. Our first reaction to who or what belongs, is not always the right one. There is beauty to be found especially in outliers, that might not seem to belong.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Durability

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. While this blog tends to wander with my mind and interests, it had at its heart the foundation of rigorous physical movement as a part of the path towards enlightenment and some sort of inner peace.

With that in mind, i wanted to talk about the concept that was presented on one of my last zwift workouts. Durability.

Zwift is the virtual cycling platform I use to train. They have curated a very extensive library of training plans and workouts, developed by professional coaches and athletes across multiple cycling and and endurance disciplines.

Each of these curated workouts has some text pop ups periodically throughout the workout. They range from small coaching tips and motivational messages, to full scientific explanations of the training methodology. The latter normally coming in the warmup phase when you aren’t focused on sucking air and trying not to embarrassingly fall off a fixed bike trainer.

As I was spinning my legs, warming up, and getting into the right headspace for a more focused training session, I wasn’t really ready for the very scientific and research based information that was being displayed in fading text bubbles.

The words passed along the screen, and I had enough otherwise unoccupied attention to realize they were important and interesting. I immediately pulled out my phone to search for the fragments of the explanation I could remember.

I found the following research paper, which was obviously the one the coach and designer of the workout was referring to, since he quoted the definition of durability verbatim.

“Therefore, applied exercise physiologists working with endurance athletes would benefit from development of physiological-profiling models that account for shifts in physiological-profiling variables during prolonged exercise and quantify the ‘durability’ of individual athletes, defined as, “the time of onset, and magnitude of deterioration, in physiological-profiling characteristics over time, during prolonged exercise.”

The team from Auckland University argues that much of the information that goes into training plan design and race pacing strategy is based on variables that are measured in a static, and usually rested, environment. Those variables of course change and degrade with time and effort. The time of onset and magnitude of deterioration is important to understand for each athlete in maximizing performance.

The workouts seek to measure or at least help you understand these characteristics in yourself by putting you into a state of fatigue, and then having some sort of repeatable assessment .

A cycling example would be a five minute time trial at the end of designed one hour workout. A running example could use an all out one mile time after a similarly structured one hour workout.

5 min time trial after a deliberately fatiguing effort

How long into a prolonged effort does your performance start to deteriorating? What is the magnitude of that deterioration? Is it linear? Does it change drastically with different perceived levels of exertion? Just how durable are you?

These are important questions. Regardless of your status as an endurance athlete, or an athlete at all. How durable are you mentally? Emotionally?

I can certainly think of more than a few instances with my boys where the ‘time of onset and magnitude of deterioration’ in my emotional profiling characteristics would not be considered durable.

As a triathlete this research fascinates me. I also directly benefit from it since coaches are reading it and using it to design workouts I have access to. I also think the ability to say ‘here defined as’ is magical.

The research team is able to specify the niche in which they wish to work. The set the definitions. They remove the potential for misconception as well as focus the readers attention in the desired direction.

Of course my mind takes the concept and wanders with it. Applying it to fatherhood, to my marriage, to research and writing projects after a long run. All of that is still within the confines of their definition. Here defined as.

The coaches and exercise physiologists can develop workouts and training plans that improve durability. Increase the time to onset. Reduce the magnitude of deterioration. Maybe even a little of each.

Who wouldn’t like to be a little more physically durable? Who wouldn’t like to be a little more mentally or emotionally durable? I think there is plenty of room for crossover between the two.

I’m by no means suggesting you deliberately exhaust yourself prior to handling a temper tantrum. But the next time it happens, as a parent and an athlete it is a matter of when not if, see it as an opportunity to become more durable.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Noise

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about noise.

Maybe not in the typical sense that we think of it. There are different types of noise, and they all play a part in disrupting not only effective communication, but our general happiness and even our health.

I found the idea of noise disrupting our health in the book Lifespan by Dr David Sinclair. Dr Sinclair’s message condensed down to an elevator pitch, is that ageing is a disease that can be treated, halted, and even potentially reversed.

A significant part of ageing is noise in the communication between our genes and our cells. Minimizing that noise, and ensuring genes and cells effectively communicate, keeps cells healthy, operating properly, and young.

Dr. Sinclair goes on to quote Claude Shannon, one of the founding fathers of information theory back from 1948.

Shannon’s noisy channel coding theorem, says that “however contaminated with noise interference a communication channel may be, it is possible to communicate digital data error free up to a given maximum rate through the channel. (a mathematical theory of communication, 1948)

Dr Sinclair uses this theory of information transfer as an example for how our genes and cells communicate, as well as what we can do to minimize the noise, thus maximizing the error free data transfer (effective communication)

This got me thinking about the types of noise we experience in interpersonal communications, some of which I recognized without knowing they had their own specific domains. Physiological, physical, psychological, and semantic noise all play their own part in disruption.

Physiological noise refers to anything going on within our personal body that might hinder communication. This could be a headache, hunger, fatigue or other physiological conditions. Think those Snickers commercials. Why don’t you have a Snickers, you don’t listen so well when you’re hungry.

Physical noise refers to disruptions that are physical in nature but external to the receiver. Think headset/radio/phone malfunction, a crowded room, or even a bright and distracting light.

Psychological noise refers to disruptions that are internal to the receivers thought process. If you are preoccupied with another problem, or day dreaming instead of listening that would be psychological noise.

Finally semantic noise is a misunderstanding of words between the sender and receiver. This could be due to lack of shared knowledge, language barrier, or cultural differences.

There is no shortage of barriers to effective communication. There is always some noise present, and often there is a lot of it. The constant noise we live with, makes determining Shannon’s maximum error free data transfer rate a crucial piece of information to know and apply.

Staying at or below the applicable Shannon rate for a given exchange will ensure the message is transmitted effectively. If you have ever had a conversation at a loud concert, with a foreign speaker, a toddler, or someone with a bad hangover, you already understand self limiting your rate of data transfer through the given channel. (If you’ve ever been the hungover one this is greatly appreciated)

Taking account of the noise around us, and the overall capacity of our channels of communication is a demanding and everpresent task. One that helps pave the path to serenity.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Heavy

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about magic. Specifically the magical powers that our children have.

I found myself contemplating this magic while taking in a particularly enjoyable Florida evening. We have finally reached the point where summer temperatures have started to yield intheir oppression and give way to milder mornings and evenings.

The soft droning of the blower fan was soothing in it’s monotony. There were no clouds in the evening sky, at least not in my vantage point. The horizon was beginning it’s diurnal shift from blue to black, showcasing the majestic purples, pinks, and oranges along the way.

I was enjoying this unusual moment of tranquility on a school night home with my boys, because of their magic. They had made me “heavy” inside our bounce house while they ran away.

El Duderino got the idea from an episode of Bluey. Bluey is a family of Australian dogs that have cheeky adventures. It is available on the Disney channel.

The writers do a great job of working in adult humor and a family environment that children are drawn to. My only complaint is the unrealistic commitment to bits that Bluey and Bingo’s Mum And Dad have. It sets an almost unattainable bar for us real life human parents to strive for.

In the episode El Duderino is particularly fond of, Bluey and Bingo come into a magic feather with the power to make things “heavy” or “unheavy”. Childish shenanigans ensue as the kids make everything their parents are trying to do or use heavy, and the parents are all to happy to play along.

Morning breakfast cereal, heavy. Car keys, heavy. Neck tie, heavy. It is seven and a half minutes (out of a nine minute show) of Mum and Dad dragging themselves and their items across the floor until the magic feather is retrieved from the kids.

So when El Duderino and Speedy got tired of me tickling them in the bounce house, they made me “heavy” and ran away. It was there laying on the bounce house floor, taking in the majesty of the sky changing colors in the waning minutes of the evening, and the serenity of that peaceful moment, that I thought about their real magic powers of heavy and unheavy.

Their laughter, their smiles, their unprompted embraces. Their growth and learning, even if it sometimes feels like a snails pace. These are the things that magic is made of. More than any magic feather, these lift all the weight of the day I may be carrying more than any “unheavy” spell ever could.

they boys new favorite Halloween race video

At the same time their struggles, their cries, their whining, and general inability or willful decision not to listen, add a weight that can seem unbearable. Like a neck tie made heavy when you are trying to get out the door. Dragging you to the floor with a determination that is insurmountable.

To them it is just a game. But to my wife and I, to all parents, their magic is very real. It can be “heavy”, and it can be “unheavy”. It can bounce back and forth between the two as quickly as my boys imagination does when we play. From their depths of despair that I feel powerless to help them in, to the peaks of parental pleasure when everyone is playing together happily, there is a magic in children that is hard to quantify.

That magic, the emotions that it elicits within us, could also be described as heavy. Probably by a cast member from Dazed and Confused, but heavy nonetheless. And certainly a part of the path to serenity.

i may have got a little overzealous for Zwift Pretzel fest.

Thanks for joining me. Stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Disruption

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about my big toe.

My big toe hurts. It has been inflamed, painful, and a little movement restricted for more than a few days now.

It is an overuse injury rather than an acute injury. There was no singular event I can point to that caused it. Rather, the constant use and overuse from triathlon training and jui jitsu along with my lack of mobility work caused the issue.

It is that lack of mobility work that i think really played the biggest part. And the culprit there, was disruption of my normal routine.

Disruption to our normal patterns and routines, is a threat that we are constantly on the look out for on the flight deck. We have patterns, flows, and habits that, when disrupted, often lead to mistakes.

We mitigate that threat by trying to minimize disruptions that are in our control. By trying to anticipate disruptions that aren’t in our control and planning our patterns and flows around them. Or recognizing when we have been disrupted and restarting our patterns or flows to make sure nothing was missed.

This process is part of the Threat and Error Management system or TEM. By understanding where there is a potential for a threat that could lead to an error, we are able to develop mitigation strategies.

My normal evening routine involves a minimum of 10 minutes but often times closer to 30 minutes or more of stretching, rolling, and mobility work.

Speedy, my two year old, recently switch from his crib to a twin bed. A bed which he is very easily able to climb out of. The multiple back to be shuffles has created a disruption in my evening mobility work.

I know it’s coming, the threat has been recognized and analyzed. But the damage is often done. The mobility work suffers.

It wasn’t until my toe started hurting that I realized what the likely culprit was. Speedy switched over to his new bed more than a month ago. It took more than three weeks before my big toe felt the ramifications.

Movement is medicine, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes. The small reduction in dose, compounded over multiple weeks, led to the overuse injury.

Now you might be thinking as you read this that a small disruption, leading to a small discomfort, in a small body part is all rather insignificant. And you wouldn’t be wrong. It is a very first world problem.

But, consider the importance of the big toe. The windlass mechanism, the flexing of the big toe is what controls the arch of the foot. This is our ability to absorb and create force as our arch contracts and extends. All driven by the big toe.

Walking, running, jumping, squatting, pushing, almost any movement where you are on your feet, starts with the big toe. If it is degraded so is your movement and your ability to produce force.

Tiny disruptions, seconds here, minutes there, can have tremendous downstream consequences. Understanding and mitigating those disruptions and their effects, can help us all on the path towards serenity.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Camaraderie

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I’m musing on our social interactions, and sometimes the lack thereof.

The last few years has seen a lot of change in the way people socialize and engage with each other. Distancing, masking, video calls, all of them remove some of what it is to be together.

It is easy to feel lonely in this profession. Lots of time away from home. A rotation of coworkers you may not even see again. Strangers with the same occupation, in some cases, is a better description.

I find beauty and purpose in what I do, and the opportunities that it affords me. But, that loneliness is one of the burdons. Always finding it’s way into your checked baggage.

This past week hurricane Ian came through the Florida peninsula. In a major shift from the early days of COVID, this was a time to rally around family instead of distance from it.

It was also a time of checking on friends and neighbors. Some that I hadn’t heard from in a while. Some that I had been meaning to reach out to but hadn’t found the time. Or whatever combination of excuse and apathy leads to old friends fading away.

Regardless phones were dialed and conversations were had. Conversations that lasted well into the night. Reviving that essential part of us that yearns for connection. That yearns for camaraderie.

The time with family. The time with friends, was good for my soul. But, it was a different scene that had me thinking about camaraderie.

Dropping off El Duderino to school and Speedy to daycare when I am home is a great privilege. I recognize there are lots of parents who must choose between time with their kids or providing for them. I’m blessed to draw balance in that regard. It is however, a bit like herding cats.

Both boys are on totally different sleep schedules. Speedy will be up most morning around 5:30. El Duderino often needs to be woken up around 7:30 so he has time to scarf something before going to VPK.

Boys day out to spooky Crayola and Waffle House

The second mommy leaves for work, she magically becomes the only one capable of solving problems. Our motley crew of misguided testosterone makes it out the door most mornings in a disheveled whirlwind of whining and pleading, with nary a minute to spare. (Despite two thirds of us already being up for two and half hours prior)

This past week after dropping off Speedy and circling back to El Duderino’s pre school, we made it to the curb in from of the drop off line right at the buzzer. The rest of the class was lined up and the teachers seemed impatient, waiting on those of us subpar parents utilizing every one of the 15 minutes in window for drop off.

El Duderino got out of the car noncommittally. I gave him a hug and put his back pack around his shoulders. The bag is far too big for him. The fact that it is nearly empty, and off balanced by the metal juice bottle on the side, only adds to the eccentricity of his saunter the 29 yards from my car, through the fence, and into the back of the line.

A beautiful day in Tucson, running the Arizona Wildcats’ stadium

Just as he passed the fence line two of his classmates broke rank. I could hear them calling his name as they ran to embrace him. Two more joined in the group hug before it was done.

El Duderino seemed very nonchalant about the entire episode. It is hard to tell his reaction because he was facing away from me. But he seemed to treat it as a normal occurrence. For me it was all I could to to keep it together watching through the windshield.

Such unbridled joy and excitement. Spectacular social connection for a boy who (somewhat like his father) has a tendency towards being a loner. It was a welcome reminder of the power of camaraderie.

Zwift Academy, getting faster and stronger

One I’m fortunate my son was able to show me, even though he has no idea.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Delimitation

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. Continuing to work my way through linguistic research I came across the following entry from General Course in Linguistics by Ferdinand Sassure.

“A linguistic entity is not ultimately defined until it is delimited, i.e. separated from whatever there may be on either side of it in a sequence of sounds. It is these delimited entities or units which contrast with one another in the mechanism of language”

At the same time I was reading this passage I was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast with movement and mobility master, Ido Portal. When Ido spoke about movement he intentionally didn’t define it or delimit it.

You can find the full conversation on the Huberman Lab podcast, but I’ll paraphrase his message. “A fluid is delimited by it’s container but that is not the entirety of it’s being. So it is with movement”

Ido also said it was his goal to not answer any of Professor Huberman questions because words are incomplete and delimiting entities.

I was struck the the diametric opposition of these two points. It is obviously a philosophical thought experiment. One that may not have an entirely productive outcome. But, I found it fun to engage in none the less.

On the one hand, a linguistic unit (not always as simple in academic terms but for our purposes today: a word) only has meaning by it’s delimitation from all other words. On the other hand, an idea, being delimited by a word will often fail to capture the entirety of it’s essence or being.

Words are our most effective tool to express ideas. But words are an imperfect tool. Both Sassure and Portal approach the same point, that words are primarily negatively defined entities, from different angles.

That means that words are defined more so by what they aren’t, than what they are. It is easier to define a difficult word by pointing out how it is unlike other words than what it actual is itself.

Think about a word like morose: “having a gloomy or sad disposition”. But feeling morose isn’t gloomy, or sad, or upset, or depressed. If it were, those words would do, and there would be no need for morose. The same could be said of ecstatic. Happy, joyful, glad, excited… All of these words are close but not exact. We define our some of our most important words negatively, by how they are unlike other “known” quantities.

I think that is why there is such beauty in art. Whether it is the written word, music, or some form of visual expression or story telling. We appreciate the exquisite exchange of ideas.

With an inherent knowledge that words are imperfect, and negatively defined, we are captivated when the right combination of words transcends those boundaries. When a passage speaks to us in a way that isn’t delimited by it’s container. When we feel that we truly understand it’s essence.

Maybe it was your favorite song. A poem that spoke to you. A passage by your favorite author. We all have some array of words which has deeply touched us and conferred meaning beyond the sun of their parts.

Riding through a zwift academy workout this morning “The Light” by Common came on. The rapper’s take on complex topics accompanied by captivating beats, is rivaled only by his longevity in the industry. The song is a dive into relationship communication and one line stuck with me as I struggled to breath through the above FTP effort.

“I never call you my b*tch or even my boo, there’s so much in a name, and so much more in you.”

Words are incredible tools. Occasionally we can string them together in a way that is transcendent. For the rest of the time there is beauty in the struggle to define essence with imperfect tools.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.