Serenity Through Sweat

Generalist

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. Two very different books that I’m working my way through brought up an interesting concept that ties in to a lot of what we talk about here. I wanted to share it with you.

From the book Peak the new science of athletic performance that is revolutionizing sports, Dr. Marc Bubbs introduces the idea of the expert-generalist.

“In the wake of overspecialization, let’s consider the expert-generalist, a term coined by Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain & Company, to describe ‘someone who has the ability and curiosity to master and collect expertise in many different disciplines, industries, skills, capabilities, and topics”

Gadiesh highlights that the expert-generalist can draw on a pallete of diverse knowledge to recognize patterns and connect the dots across multiple areas. Rather than diving deeply into one subject, the expert-generalist casts a wide net across multiple disciplines, expanding the breadth of their knowledge rather than simply plumbing the depths.

The context for Dr Bubbs, is that it is difficult for the athlete to be a true expert in their individual sport or discipline, and also be an expert in nutrition, hydration, sleep/recovery, training/programing, etc… But, an expert-generalist, can have a breadth of knowledge across those many disciplines to maximize athletic performance.

The second book is The Storm Before the Calm by George Friedman. A geopolitical forecaster, Friedman’s latest book examines the history of the US through the lense of institutional and socioeconomic cycles.

Below is Friedman’s theory on the issues plaguing the current institutional cycle that will need correction as it reaches the end of its useful life.

“The second problem is that the expertise that won World War II and built the postwar world is now encountering its own problem of inefficiency—diffusion. Diffusion is the distribution of authority among several departments or agencies. At a lower level, it is the diffusion and fragmentation of knowledge among individual experts. Knowledge of what is happening is diffused rather than integrated. Diffusion ties in with the problem of expertise. Expertise is needed. But experts are experts in different things, and when entities are constructed with specific expertise, barriers are built between entities that are sometimes dealing with the same issue.”

“Instead of creating a single perspective on a problem, experts have perspectives on different parts of a problem, and the entity they represent has parallel responsibilities for fragments of an issue. This creates diffusion with the federal government and frequently contradictory directions for entities. What had begun in World War II as an effort that was highly focused on war and tightly controlled turned into a highly diffused undertaking frequently lacking a center from which it can be understood. This is not unique to the federal government. It happens in all, particularly large, organizations. Expertise has this inherent defect. But in the federal government, the problem is the size of the defect.”

Being an expert in just one area can lead to a myopic view. This leads to errors when the project or problem spans across multiple domains.

Triathlon immediately comes to mind. It is impossible to be a true expert in any one of the three disciplines, without developing shortcomings in the others. Throw in, hydration, nutrition, recovery, strength work, and being an expert generalist is the only reasonable path forward.

Mixed martial arts is very much the same. There is too much to learn, to many holes to plug, that it is impossible to be a true expert in all of them. Even Brazilian Jiu Jitsu on its own, has so many different unique positions, that you are starting to see experts in very specific “games”, rather than well-rounded expert-generalists.

Hell, even just being a parent nowadays requires being an expert-generalist. There is no instruction manual. Trying to keep up on what is healthy, what will nurture and promote proper development, what will keep them safe, is a full time job. Too narrowly focusing on any one aspect will inevitably lead to overlooked and mismanaged areas.

We rely on experts for advice, and that is important. But taking too narrow of a focus can lead to missing the forest for the trees. It is sometimes better to know a little about a lot, rather than a lot about a little.

There are two built in benefits to embracing being an expert-generalist that jump out to me right away.

Before you can learn a little about a lot, you have to have a natural curiosity. Being an expert-generalist inherently promotes continuous lifelong learning.

It will also lead you to a lot of situations where you don’t know the answer. Getting comfortable with not knowing is a difficult but worthwhile pursuit. It pushes you to learn. To be comfortable in uncomfortable situations. To go out and find the answers. (Coming full circle to curiosity and lifelong learning)

If Friedman and Bubbs are right, embracing an expert-generalist mentality should help us be better athletes, better parents, and better people. I’m sure there is some serenity in there along the way.

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

Merriam-Webster

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, I wanted to share another interesting story I found while researching my linguistics project.

The history of dictionaries may seem like a boring subject. You write down words, and you define them. How hard could it be? There are actually a lot of questions that must be answered when deciding how to make a dictionary.

“What is the relationship between words and phrases? How far should a dictionary go in recording nominal phrases? (Fire escape, forest fire)”

“How strictly should a dictionary confine its inventory to recorded usage? Can a spelling form be shared by more than one word (record as a number and record as a verb).”

“How much attention should be paid to etymology? (Weave intransitive vs transitive verb)” Weave in and out of traffic, and Weave clothes on a loom come, from different origin words as an example.

Making a dictionary becomes a little more complex than just a book to check when you don’t trust your scrabble opponent.

One of the most popular dictionaries in the US, is the Merriam-Webster brand. Their story was featured in the chapter I was researching, on the history of lexicography.

“The Merriam dictionaries trace their history back to the American Dictionary of the English Language dutifully compiled by the polemical lexicographer Noah Webster in 1828. It contains no fewer than 70,000 entries”

“Webster was an indefatigable collector of words with a rare gift for definition writing.”

“Unfortunately, his etymologies were influenced by his belief that modern languages, including English, are derived from something called Chaldean, which he believed was the language used by Adam and God for their conversations in the Garden of Eden and the immediate precursor to Hebrew.”

“After his death, his successors-including his son-in-law, Chauncey H. Goodrich, and the redoubtable Noah Porter, president of Yale College- quietly abandoned the Chaldaean hypothesis and brought the etymologies into line with the findings of Germanic and Indo-European scholarship.”

That is a lot to unpack for a book that has been mostly superceded by online reference checking. But recall that for generations, the Webster dictionary reigned Supreme. It is eerie to think about how much power definition holds, and how that power was held by a religious fanatic.

I grew up Roman catholic, and considered myself fairly devout until after high-school. Even I had never heard of Chaldean before.

After some very preliminary research it seems that the Chaldean people were in Mesopotamia around 11-12 thousand years ago, and were assimilated into the Babylonians. You may recognize that name from it’s own biblical reference the tower or babel.

Apparently there are multiple references not only in the Bible, but also from other renowned scholars, (Pliny the elder and Cicero) to Chaldean knowledge. There appears to be multiple references to their expertise in astronomy, astrology, vibrations, and numerology.

Some or all of that may be nonsense. I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t know how to know if any of it is real or not. Either way, it is fun to think about next time you have to check the dictionary when your five year old asks the difference between gunk and sludge.

We base our lives on definitions. How we identify ourselves, each other, the occurrences of our day to day experiences, they all depend on agreed upon definitions. The ability to set those definitions is a great power. And, as Uncle Ben would say, with great power comes great responsibility.

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

Presupposition

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. In continuing research for my linguistics/communication project, I found this interesting back story that I wanted to share with you.

I am a sucker for a good academic cat fight. For one thing, academics, especially linguists and philosophers, have a way with words. Their ability to feud with civility, yet use absolutely scathing remarks, is truly a hidden treasure. Sadly, it is one that often goes overlooked. Because, well, you have to be a nerd to read these papers.

This nerd was reading and researching about semantics, and came across the theory of presupposition. Presupposition in interpersonal communication is very easy to take for granted, but it is critical to an effective transfer of meaning.

Putting some more focused time on the pool

Here is a quick example. The sentence “I have lost my keys”, presupposes “I had keys before” and “I do not have my keys now”. While that seems obvious, think of all the things we say to each other every day that require significant amounts of presupposition.

Now imagine talking to a hunter/gatherer. Someone who has very little in shared cultural/societal experience. Even if they understood each of the individual words and their semantic and syntactical significance, there is a good chance they would not have the same presuppositions.

Presupposition has been explored a few times in the history of modern linguistics, but its first recorded (however, often unattributed) explanation goes back to the time of Aristotle. This leads us to our academic feud.

Easing into some recovery rides after the half iron man

The story starts with Aristotle’s bivalent theory of truth. Aristotle’s truth theory states: (a) that every proposition is by nature either true or false, without any possible middle or any possible third truth value, and (b) that a proposition is true just in case it ‘corresponds’ with reality and false otherwise.

Eubulides came from the school of the Stoa, and taught philosophy at Megara. He came up with several paradoxes to challenge Aristotle’s truth theory. You can read about them here.

The paradox of the horns lies at the basis of presupposition theory. It is illustrated by the following fallacy: “What you haven’t lost you still have”. “You haven’t lost your horns.” Ergo: “you still have horns.” (How fun is it to say ergo, right)

The statement is obviously silly and false. It does however illustrate presupposition quite well. You have to have had horns in order to lose them. So the sentence cannot be true in the Aristotelian sense, hence the paradox.

This is all great, a bunch of linguistic and philosophical shenanigans, but the story gets better. There is some evidence that this specific reference, was not only a challenge to Aristotle’s intellect, but also to his manhood.

The reference of a man having horns comes from a historical reference of the man as a cuckold. So now Eubulides is playing word games, whilst telling the world Aristotle’s wife is stepping out on him, all in a philosophy class. Shots fired.

There are several different theories about the horns referencing cuckholdry. This article from the BBC shows a more recent instance of the insult between Portuguese government officials in 2009.

The article gives a fairly succinct summary of the gesture, and it’s history. The etymology is from the cuckoo bird that would lay its egg in other birds nests. Thus leaving the chick to be raised by the unsuspecting other bird.

And of course Chaucer’s the miller’s tale gives us, “For she was wild and young, and he was old, And deemed himself as like to be a cuckold.”

In Roman times, horns were given to returning soldiers as a symbol of success on the battlefield. They took on the unintended meaning of cuckholdry when it was discovered a significant number of soldiers returned to errant wives.

Celebrating summer and the end of school

The gesture is more recognized, as well as more offensive, in certain countries and cultures. I had no idea it was even a thing, but latin countries such as Columbia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Italy seem to take the most offense at the gesture.

From the article again, “This is a Latin country. If you say to someone, your wife did this, it is humiliating.”
“It is a great thing to do if you want to start a fight.”

Playing operation: it’s easier to win when you cover up the light

I didn’t think I would end up exploring insults to manhood between government officials when I started my research on pragmatism, but life is full of winding roads and uncertain paths.

I hope you enjoyed wandering down this one as much as I did. Thanks for joining me, stay safe, and stay sweaty my friends.

70.3

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. last weekend I raced in the Ironman Gulf Coast 70.3 event and wanted to share my experience.

I have been in the sport of triathlon for over a decade now. With the exception of the full Ironman race I completed in 2013, I have mostly trained intuitively. That is, without a coach or a training plan.

I have a rough idea of what I need to do in order to be prepared. Benchmarks to hit along the way. How to set a reasonable goal that will be achievable but still lofty enough to keep me motivated.

With all the other demands in my life I want to put out a performance that I can be proud of, and I want to find the minimum effective dose of training that will help me achieve that.

With those parameters as the goal posts, this race was a huge success. It was my fifth time racing the 70.3 distance and I set a PR (personal record) by a pretty wide margin.

I did so, with less training volume than all of my previous attempts. To be fair, I have better equipment, more base fitness, and more time and knowledge in the sport than those previous races. No two races are alike. Each one presents their own unique story that unfolds on race day.

Trixie, all cleaned up and making friends

I think I swam maybe 4 times in the build up for this race. Not exactly ideal, but I like to tell people, you can lose the race on the swim, but very few people win the race there. Minimum effective dosage indeed.

The swim start was, like most all open water ocean swim starts are, abrupt and violent. You charge, full of adrenaline, down the sand and into a body of water that is actively opposing you. There was a strong quartering onshore wind from the left resulting in choppy conditions with a significant drift. The buoys were very difficult to sight. The jellyfish were up early and were active.

Knowing you have close to five hours of work Infront of you, the last thing you want to do is let your breathing and heart rate get out of control in the first ten minutes. Everything about the first ten minutes of the swim leads to exactly that. The waves and wind disrupting your stroke and your breathing. Constant contact with other swimmers. The anxiety of the amount of work still ahead. Jellyfish stings. I am a strong swimmer from years of surfing and countless hours in the pool. The hardest part of every triathlon swim for me is calming down and finding rhythm. The quicker I can do that the better I can perform.

I know I swam pretty wide of the buoy line after the second turn of the rectangular course. The wind and the waves made the buoys hard to see and the current was now pushing away from the course line. Despite the self inflicted extra swim distance I was on track for my overall goal getting out of the water and getting on my bike.

It was a beautiful day for a bike ride. I bought a new bike (Trixie) back in November and did all of my training except maybe 4 or 5 rides inside on a smart trainer. One of the more recent joys of racing for me, has been riding outside with the added comfort of some traffic protection. I have almost entirely given up on riding a road bike outside anymore because the dangers of being hit outweigh the value and pleasure it brings.

Trixie was fast. I knew she was fast but I was delighted with how the bike segment went. From a training perspective, I spent more time in this buildup working with power zones and my FTP (functional threshold power). FTP is the most amount of power you can sustain for a one hour all out effort. That number can then be scaled and adjusted for various intervals, race distances, and training sessions to optimize performance. It’s not perfect but it is a much more targeted approach than I’ve utilized in the past.

Power training and racing is also extremely reliable and relocatable. Your heart rate or pace might be different day to day, and course to course, but 200 watts is always 200 watts. I wanted to average 200 watts for the 56 mile bike ride. I estimated that would put me at about 22mph and set me up in striking distance for a sub five hour finish.

My bike segment went about as flawlessly as I could have hoped. I averaged just over 200 watts of normalized power and just over 22mph. My hydration and nutrition plan left me feeling fresh when it was time to dismount and lace up the running shoes.

The run was hot. There is no way around it. Running in full sun, in Florida, in mid May, is a recipe for cramps, dehydration, and a rough afternoon, if you find yourself prepared or unequal to the task at hand.

Thankfully, my nutrition and hydration on the bike set me up for success for the three loop course in the sweltering heat. I was targeting a 7:30/mile pace. While I fell a bit short of that, I had built enough wiggle room into my goal finishing pace that I felt comfortable my goal was still very much achievable.

I could feel my feet start to blister somewhere around mile 5. I knew that they weren’t going to get any better with 8 more miles to go. The mixture of sand residue, layers of dried sweat and the fresh water I was dousing myself with at every aid station were only making the blisters worse.

My shoes squished and squeaked noisily with every step. This new pair of racing shoes is significantly different than the minimalist trainers I tend to prefer. With a huge foam platform and a carbon plate meant to act as a sort of spring, these felt more like moon shoes. Still, I tried to keep my feet moving and focused on a high cadence. Repeating a mantra I had read about the most successful ultra runners. “Be a prancy pony”. Keep those feet moving, high and fast.

The aid stations would shimmer in the distance like a desert oasis. Volunteers crowding around to help weary travelers. I doused myself with water and dumped cups of ice down my back at every one. Small moments of relief. Short lived as the sun continued to beat down.

I’m very proud of my race performance. Like I wrote about in my last post, I was able to stay present for the experience. These are my burning legs. These are my aching lungs. No far off caves and power animals. I was able to remain calm in low points, and have overwhelmingly positive self talk throughout. I finished in 4:58 just under my goal of 5 hours.

Every race is different. What you take away from from every race is different. Those 70.3 miles, more than anything else, gave me gratitude. Gratitude that I was able to perform and push myself, especially with my “minimum effective dose” training. Gratitude that I was able to race safely on a beautiful course and a beautiful day. Gratitude for a weekend together with an old friend. Gratitude that I was able to race at all. Not everyone is so physically blessed and lucky. Not everyone can afford to indulge it what is a very selfish, time consuming, and expensive activity. And, that my wife indulged my selfish habit, taking care of our boys and the house while I play exercise as sport.

There is a beautiful and profound sense of peace at the end of a hard effort like that. The training, the scheduling, the opportunity cost of it all, and the race itself, leaves a huge wake. In that vacuum, is serenity, in the most essential form I am familiar with. SerenityThroughSweat, if only for the briefest of moments.

This is where the wheels started to fall off the post race “recovery”.

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

A special thank you to my wife and my mom and a very happy mother’s day. I was able to race and still make it back to take them out to dinner.

Wandering

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast on meditation, and he referenced an interesting 2010 study out of Harvard that I thought was worth sharing.

“A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” by Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert details their study into happiness and day dreaming.

This weekend I’ll be racing in the Gulf Coast Ironman 70.3 event, and I was particularly interested in this study and its interplay with endurance sports.

A quick stop in Murphy and a trail run at lake nottley before work

The Harvard based researchers designed a web app and recruited participants to self report their levels of happiness and what they were thinking about.

Participants were prompted to use the web app at randomly assigned times during their waking hours. They were asked what they were currently doing, how happy they were on a 0-100 sliding scale, and what they were thinking about with four options.

Participants could report thinking about; what they were doing currently, something else positive, something else neutral, or something else negative.

Taper week training run through the Bellevue botanical garden

Participants would be surveyed 1-3 times daily until they opted out, which resulted in a significant data set. The researchers made sure to vary their participants across age ranges (18-88), gender, countries, and occupation.

The results showed some interesting insights into the human mind and happiness. What participants were thinking about turned out to be a significantly better predictor of happiness than the activities themselves.

In other words, being present in the moment, thinking about what it is you are currently doing, will likely make you happier than letting your mind wander to something else, even something pleasant.

Taper week training on a multi day Seattle layover

“multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not, and this was true during all activities including the least enjoyable. Although people’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity, and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics or unpleasant topics than about their current activity (Fig. 1, bottom). Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering, time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness.”

“In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Enduring anything is as much a mental/emotional battle as it is a physical one. While covering the 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride, and 13.1 mile half marathon, there will be plenty of time for my mind to wander.

Sometimes that mind wandering is helpful and even desired. There is a unique state of clarity and creativity that becomes available with extended physical exertion and an empty mind that is free to wander.

Other times it is important to center yourself on the task at hand, even if (or especially if), it is unpleasant. I’m reminded of the acid burn scene from fight club.

Edward Norton’s character wants to go to his cave and find his power animal. Brad Pitt’s character slaps him to bring him back to the present moment.

“This is your burning hand, it’s right here. Don’t deal with it like those dead people do, Come On! What you’re feeling is premature enlightenment. This is the greatest moment of your life and your off somewhere missing it.”

“A cognitive achievement with an emotional cost” is an extremely astute observation with some very powerful ramifications. Being able to dissociate from difficulty is a valuable survival mechanism. But being present, feeling that pain and difficulty, is the best way to learn. It is a tightrope walk for sure, but one worth walking.

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

Path Dependence

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I came across an interesting anecdote while reading Guns Germs and Steel, that I wanted to share.

Author Jared Diamond lays out a very thoughtful and easy to follow theory for why humans have developed the way the have throughout history. Why was it Europeans colonizing the Americas and not the other way around? Guns Germs and Steel, provides some very compelling arguments.

While discussing the evolution of technology, Diamond discusses how societal vested interests sometimes get in the way of what would otherwise be advantageous adaptations of new technology.

The example he gives is that of the modern QWERTY keyboard. His anecdote is just a single paragraph, but I found it fascinating. Researching further, I found a paper written in 1985 by Paul A. David, a professor of economics at Stanford titled, CLIO and the Economics of QWERTY.

“The story of QWERTY is a rather intriguing one for economists. Despite the presence of the sort of externalities that standard static analysis tells us would interfere with the achievement of the socially optimal degree of system compatibility, competition in the absence of perfect futures markets drove the industry prematurely into the wrong system– where decentralized decision making subsequently has sufficed to keep it there.”

David goes on to share the history of the QWERTY keyboard in greater depth, along with the economic analysis that is so interesting. The story goes something like this.

A Milwaukee printer and tinkerer, Christopher Sholes, with some help from his friends, filed a patent for his “Type Writer” in october 1867. David lists him as “the 52nd person to invent the type writer”, which I found particularly amusing.

Sholes’ model was a mechanical up-stroke device where by the type bar struck underneath the paper cartridge making it invisible to the user. This non-visibility was a major issue because, when keys were struck in rapid succession, there was a tendency to clash and jam, and repeat the same letters. This could only be seen when the typist raised the cartridge.

Sholes’ continued to modify his device to combat this problem. His solution was changing his previously alphabetic keyboard into one that was deliberately less user friendly. Making it harder to type would slow down users, and thus prevent the jamming that plagued the machine.

The most commonly used letters were placed apart from each other and shifted to the left side of the keyboard where they would be harder to strike in rapid succession for right handed users.

Made the most of my Asheville layover getting ready for gulf coast IM 70.3

The type writer with the updated keyboard was sold to Remington where it went into production in March 1873, with the final change of adding “R” to the top row. This allowed salesman to type out the product name “type writer” with all keys from the top row.

Around the same time (1870-1880’s) more advanced type writers (without the visibility and jamming issues) and better keyboards were designed and manufactured, and yet the QWERTY remains to this day the standard. The question David asks, is why did we stick with the inferior model?

David goes on to explain that a series of decisions and events coincided to make the inefficient QWERTY model entrenched.

Future typists were learning how to type on QWERTY keyboards. Increased manufacturing ability made it easier for other companies to change their design to match the typists rather than retrain them on a new keyboard. As more typists learned on QWERTY keyboards more jobs became available that required that skill and that equipment, further perpetuating the cycle.

David lists technical interrelatedness, economies of scale, and quasi irreversibility as the factors that led to the path dependent sequence of economic events that led us to an inferior typing system. Small historical factors can have disproportionate influence on potential outcomes.

This blog is being written on my phone on a QWERTY keyboard. Doing things a certain way because “that’s the way it’s always been done”, or “I can’t learn another way” is a common occurrence. After learning the history of the keyboard the natural question arises, how many other things are we doing suboptimal because of a path dependent history.

David again, “I believe there are many more QWERTY worlds lying out there in the past, on the very edges of the modern analyst’s tidy universe; worlds we do not yet fully perceive or understand, but whose influence, like that of dark stars, extends nonetheless to shape the orbits of our contemporary economic affairs”

When my father was learning how to homebrew beer, he shared with me a story from one of his mentors. The brewing equipment was built in a way that required the use of a step ladder to reach the top of the pot on the kitchen countertop. When my father asked why he built his equipment this way, there was no logical answer, it was just the way it was designed. My father’s equipment was later built in a way that did not require the step ladder.

He could have followed the blueprint and been trapped in path dependence, climbing the ladder every time he had to add an ingredient or stir the brew. Instead he approached the subject as a beginner and asked questions which went against the entrenched views. He broke out of the dark star’s orbit.

There is a frustrating beauty in questioning entrenched methodology. It is so easy to be blinded by momentum and habit, that we become habituated to the inefficiencies that repeatedly smack us in the face. This comes to a head as a father, when inquisitive young minds are asking why the world is the way it is. Answers, are not always forthcoming.

Ask questions. Break free from the dark star’s orbit. Change your path to be independent. You will probably find serenity along the way.

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

135lb hangover

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I spent a large portion of the past weekend traveling. While that is pretty normal for my job as a pilot, this was a different kind of travel. A real, planes, trains, and automobiles adventure.

El Duderino, Speedy, my wife, and I all headed out late Thursday evening on a flight to Atlanta. Arriving well after the boys bedtime, we went to a hotel located a short walk from the airport sky train.

After a restless night of sleep for all four of us we were up and at em, picking up the rental car and out of the hotel before 9 AM. We stopped to pick up a U-Haul truck, and then made very carefully timed subsequent stops at both IKEA and Sam’s Club, enroute to our new home in North Carolina.

We had to stop at the realtor’s office to sign closing paperwork after the two and half hour drive. All of this had to be done before 2PM so we could take possession of the house before the county offices closed for the weekend.

Only an optimist can put together a plan like that. There were so many moving pieces. So many variables outside of our control. Somehow, like a rare celestial alignment, everything worked out wonderfully and we spent the weekend in our new home.

On the two and a half hour drive, winding through the mountain roads in a crosswind catching U-Haul box, I heard Bert Kreischer tell Joe Rogan a story that struck a nerve in me.

Bert was telling Joe how he watched one of his wife’s friends, a middle aged woman whose stunning beauty had started to fade, struggle to get a bartenders attention.

The moment Bert described was probably fleeting. He doesn’t say how long she was at the bar, or how long it took her to get the bartender’s attention. But he gives an eloquent and detailed description of her confusion. The puzzled look on her face. Her inability to process why the bartender is not immediately paying attention to her.

He realizes, this is a new experience for her. As a younger head turner, this was never a problem she had to deal with. And, she has yet to come to the realization that she is no longer that person.

Joe Rogan spouts out a quote from Socrates that he is apt to use in similar situations, “beauty is a short lived tyranny”.

The whole thing made me think about my wrestling. I was very successful and adept as a high school wrestler at 135 lbs. And my wrestling base, and instincts, and movements, have served me very well in life and especially in Jiu Jitsu.

But, there is always a big glaring but. My wrestling in Jiu Jitsu, especially with a gi on, bears a striking resemblance to this former beauty at the bar. Misunderstanding my current place in the pecking order. Over reliant on a skill set that has faded. Unable to recognize the need to evolve and adapt.

Running off the bike, getting ready for IM 70.3

I’m not sure why it took me this long to see it. Maybe it was egotistical denial. Maybe there are enough alternatives in Jiu Jitsu where I could hide the deficiency. Maybe I was able to get away with old habits with less skilled opponents.

Either way, the bandaid has been ripped off. I refuse to be the bombshell at the bar, past my prime and confused about how things are changing around me. It’s time to learn again as a beginner. To embrace the potential for growth and get past my 135lb wrestling hangover.

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

Backcasting

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I was listening to the Huberman lab podcast and was introduced by guest Dr. Peter Attia to a concept called “backcasting” which I wanted to share with you.

Dr Peter Attia is a physician who specializes in extending his patients’ life span and health span. He went to medical school at Stanford and worked at both John’s Hopkins and the NIH. He recently authored the book Outlive and also hosts his own podcast The Drive on health and medicine. He is a pretty highly qualified guy in the space.

During the conversation with Huberman (another very informative voice in the space of health and wellness) he introduced the concept of backcasting with the following question. What do you want the last decade of your life to look like?

This is called the Marginal decade. “Delineate the objective function and break that down into metrics that we can measure” you can set the goal posts for what you want your marginal decade to look like, and work backwards to find definable goals and measurable markers and at what ages you need to hit them

What do you want to be doing in your marginal decade? Picking up a grandchild, getting up off the floor, have an athletic hobby. Living alone. Do you want to be paddle boarding, bicycling, still driving your car?

If I ask you what is going to happen next year you can predict certain variables and make some educated guesses. This would be a forecast. The period of time is fixed and defined. You don’t know when the last decade of your life will be. Even if you did, there are likely too many variables to forecast that far out. But you can backcast.

Start with the desired outcome and trace the markers you need to hit in order to reach it. Let’s say for example you want to be able to go for a brisk walk on the beach every morning in retirement in your 80’s or even 90’s. That sounds like a nice goal and not outlandish.

“The gravity of aging is more vicious than people realize and therefore the height of your glider needs to be much higher than you think it is when you are our age if you want to be able to do the things we probably want to be able to do when we’re ninety “

Studies show that VO2Max (your ability to process oxygen during aerobic activity) declines roughly 5% per decade after 30, almost regardless of exercise intervention. As Dr Attia so eloquently put it. You need a lot of altitude for that glider flight into your marginal decade.

Changes in peak VO2 with age (left) and percent change in VO2 per decade (right) in men and women. Source: Strait and Lakatta, 2013

A VO2Max of 35-45 is considered fair to good for males in their 30s. This can be tested very scientifically in a lab while wearing a mask on a treadmill, but many running watches or fitness wearables can give a pretty good estimation for general purposes.

From there the math isn’t hard to cary out if you are right in the middle of average at a VO2Max of 40 in your 30’s, by the time you are 80 it will be closer to 30.

Murtagh et al., 2002 (4), investigated self-selected speed of recreational walkers and their interpretation of “brisk walking”.

It turned out that the self-selected speed, which was between 1.55 and 1.6 meters per second, resulted in an exercise intensity of almost 60% of VO2max and a heart rate of 67% of the maximum. A “brisk” walking speed observed was 1.79 meters per second in a parc and 1.86 meters per second on a treadmill. The “brisk” walking speed equated to almost 69% of VO2max and 78.5% of the maximum heart rate.

By your 80’s in our example your VO2Max has dropped a full 25% (and that’s likely best case if you remained healthy and active for those 5 decades). And that brisk walk you wanted to take (4mph is the conversion) was already taking up 69% of your VO2Max. That means you are going to have to slow your pace considerably or reduce the duration of you walk to meet your goal.

Or as Dr Attia told us, increase the height of your glider now in middle age. If your VO2Max is closer to 50 or 60 in your thirties, that brisk walk (all other variables constant) in your 80’s is much more attainable.

The same benchmarks can be set for strength in individual muscle groups or specific movements. Squats, pushups, pullups, grip strength. Gravity is unrelenting, as is the “vicious gravity of aging”. The Stronger you are now and the more you continue to train, the higher you can climb the glider, and the longer you can stay aloft.

Backcasting gives you the tools to set yourself up for success, once you have defined what you want your marginal decade to look like.

So stretch out those glider wings and keep climbing. gravity is thus far undefeated, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prolong, and thoroughly enjoy the ride.

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

Loss

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This past weekend I competed in the Pan American Jiu Jitsu championships, and I wanted to share my results and my experience.

One of my favorite TV shows in college was scrubs. This was in a TV era where dvr technology had just emerged but I couldn’t afford it at the time.

New episodes of your favorite show aired at a certain time, on a certain day. If you weren’t able to watch it you had to wait till the episode reran. Or, maybe you were lucky enough to have a friend with a dvr and could watch it at their house.

This also gave rise to the spoiler, and the spoiler alert. Someone who watched the newest episode would inevitably want to discuss it with you, knowing that you were also a fan, but unaware that you hadn’t seen it yet.

My roommates and I watched a lot of scrubs. The show was humorous and heartwarming. I was never really concerned about spoilers. (Lost was another story)

Most of the show was narrated in the voice of JD, John Dorian. The main character played by Zach Braff who works his way as a doctor through the Sacred Heart Hospital and grows up along the way.

There are a few episodes which are narrated by his tough love mentor figure, Dr Cox. These episodes occur after Dr Cox’s botched vasectomy where he is having overly philosophical conversations with his infant son Jack, swinging in a baby rock n play. (Way more back story than you needed, but that was more for my trip down memory lane than anything else)

That image of a grown man, established and respected in his profession, bearing his soul to an unresponsive drooling baby swinging back and forth, is one I think about often with this blog.

It is a very one sided conversation, a monologue with a captive audience that is unable to respond.

It is also a beautiful moment of vulnerability and sensitivity for an otherwise rough and gruff character. Dr Cox bearing his soul to a child who likely won’t remember any of what is said.

A lot of this blog is directly or indirectly for my boys. That they might look back in time at the man their father was before they were able to understand such adult intricacies. I found myself in one of those conversations yesterday with El Duderino.

My wife had taken the boys to a birthday party while I went to the Jiu Jitsu tournament. I was able to join them after a rather unceremonious first round loss. By the time I got there El Duderino was in a full meltdown.

My wife scooped him up and took him home. I stayed with Speedy for another hour or so, letting him play while I caught up with friends.

We had a very nice rest of the evening as a family, bit when it came time for bed El Duderino was still struggling. There were lots of things I could have said to him. Things I know have worked in the past to calm him down. But I found myself giving one of those Dr Cox like monologues to a somewhat captive audience instead. (El Duderino had crawled into his trundle bed mattress while it was still tucked under his twin bed, I layed at the lengthwise exit so he was very much a captive audience)

I told him he seemed sad and upset. I told him I felt sad, and upset, and disappointed. I told him I had competed that afternoon and lost. I told him I fell short of my goals and expectations. I told him that good things can be born from disappointment.

I tried to boil my feelings down to a five year old, hiding under the bed, level. To put my disappointment, frustration, and anger into a positive light for El Duderino to see. To show him the soil that can be tilled for growth out of loss.

I don’t know if the lesson sank in. I may never know. I don’t think I was as gracious in loss as I ought to have been in the moment. Losing 0-0 by advantage is a tough pill to swallow. But there was a unique catharsis in sharing the emotions of my loss with my young son. I had never experienced that before.

I don’t like to lose. I am very fortunate to still be somewhat unaccustomed to it, after essentially thirty years of grappling. Still, I recognize the lessons to be learned. Even more so now that I am a father. I hadn’t competed in a Jiu Jitsu tournament in three years, and I hadn’t lost a competition match since having kids. It only felt right to share that with them, and I hope they can learn as much from it as I did.

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

Doubt

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I’ve signed up to compete in the Pan American Championships in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at the end of the month. That has brought with it excitement, anxiety, and doubt.

I’m no stranger to competing. And certainly no stranger to grappling or even jiu jitsu competition. I’ve completed in three smaller local BJJ tournaments, and I’ve lost count how many wrestling tournaments over a 13 year wrestling career.

I’ve also been active in triathlon and ultimate frisbee in those years I wasn’t grappling. Each had their own varying level of competition.

This one feels a little bit different. It will be my first grappling competition since before COVID. It will be my first competition at brown belt. I haven’t competed since I was a blue belt, missing out on competing at the purple belt level.

Anxiety and excitement are to be expected. I got the same butterflies and pit feeling in my stomach before every wrestling match and every big triathlon. But doubt wasn’t something I really thought about.

Maybe it is having kids (even though I’ve raced and competed in smaller BJJ tournaments as a father). Maybe it is getting older and being in the Masters 2 division. Maybe it is my lack of recent competition experience. Maybe it is the thought of injury now as a provider.

Whatever it is, doubt has been creeping in. Will I make the weight? Will I stay healthy and injury free? Will I perform in a way I can be proud of?

That doubt isn’t necessarily bad though. I’m reminded of a conversation I had about doubt, with two close friends at a bachelor party.

We were in a hotel room in Tampa. Sharing a drink, making small talk and getting ready for a hockey game. The celebrated bachelor wanted to read us the vows he had written and have the two of us help workshop them. I know, not your typical rowdy bachelor party story.

He is a scientist, a medical researcher, and one of the smartest people I have ever talked to. He is very methodical in his thinking and communication. All of those qualities came out front and center in his custom written vows.

“As I scientist I am taught to doubt” his message to his soon to be wife, on their most important day, began. “But I don’t doubt my love for you, or the relationship we’ve built”.

His vows went on with a series of “I don’t doubt” statements. Doubt seemed to me, at first, like an inappropriate word for wedding vows, but it fit perfectly with who he was. Doubt was part of his daily life as a scientist and researcher, but his marriage was a place doubt never crept in.

I modeled my own custom wedding vows, a few years later, in a very similar format. A series of “I can’t promise X, but I can promise Y” statements.

To me, this felt like the same removal of uncertainty, and exchange of promises, without the perceived negativity that doubt brings to the table.

Because that’s all doubt really is right? Uncertainty. As a scientist and a researcher, my friend is very deliberately, an active participant in his uncertainty. Trying not to bias his observation of data with his own opinions or desires.

The future is always uncertain. The degree of that uncertainty may vary, but it is never fully predictable. I think it is an old Yogi Berra quote “predictions are hard, especially about the future”

The doubt that has crept in since I’ve signed up for this competition has been an ever present feeling in the pit of my stomach. It has been my somewhat less than welcome companion. (And due to a small weight cut, sometimes the only thing in my stomach)

I’m trying to channel the courage of my friend and embrace that doubt. Uncertainty, just means I get to have a hand in writing out how the future will be told.

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