Treadmill – Serenity Through Sweat

Intimidation

The lights seem to pulse around me. I know this is only an illusion. The effect created by the spacing of dim lights and alternating darkness as I float down the hall.

The sweat has gone past the point of beading and running, and has progressed to a steady trickle. I can feel the gentle squish of wet socks in each step as I make my way down the seemingly psychedelic hallway.

I know my body is depleted from the training and the fasting that is now approaching twenty hours. I don’t feel depleted though. I feel light. Liberated. Unburdened.

The squishing intensifies as I start bouncing gently to the music. It is a short way around the courtyard from the fitness center to my room. The twang of the guitar and the blaring horns during the bridge of Gregg Allman’s Midnight Rider, the dim alternating lights, and the runners high work on union to transport me back in time.

The pulsing of lights, footsteps echoing off the tile floor and the walls of lockers, breaths heavy with exertion. I’m running sprints down the freshman hallway of my highschool after wrestling practice.

Sometimes with my teammates. Sometimes in solitude. Occasionally the chemistry teacher, a great runner in his own right, pokes his head out to investigate this intrusion to his own late night solitude.

The same trickle of sweat fills my shoes and bounces off the tile as it cascades off my younger self. That same liberated, unburdened feeling seeps in. The work is done, and it was done in earnest.

The moment fades as I reach my hotel room. I haven’t had a runners high like this in a while. One that alleviates and transports in such a powerful way. I spend a lot of time chasing that dragon, but it is elusive.

I’m in Atlanta and spent the morning in the simulator. Cortisol levels run high in this place. There is no way around it. Knowing it is a simulation, doesn’t take away the feeling that the emergency is real. Being a simulation, it can be reset to the next emergency with daunting speed and efficiency. We aren’t designed for catastrophe on repeat, and it takes it’s toll.

I figured after the sim was as good a time as any to try this new workout. 6 rounds of 6 minutes at threshold running pace, with 2 minutes moving rest between sets. Add in a warm up and cool down and that makes a solid hour block on the treadmill in the training hotel’s lack luster fitness center.

One of my best friends and training partners had done this workout a few times before and shared it with me. I was intimidated.

I’m not even sure what my threshold pace is but my best guess was around a 6:30min/mile pace. That is, as the term threshold might imply, right where things start getting uncomfortable. Each interval is long enough to really make you think about it. The total time in zone accumulates quickly. The rest is enough to recover, only by the smallest of margins.

As much time as I spend intentionally putting myself into discomfort, there are still levels of it that intimidate me. Places I will shy away from. Workouts that I will procrastinate or put off entirely. Or tap out from early.

This was one such workout. I had toyed with the idea of trying it for weeks. An excuse always seemed to pop up. I didn’t have enough time. I would be too depleted afterwards. The alternative I gave myself was better suited to my goals.

It is easy to convince yourself of something you already believe. It is even easier when you are intimidated.

4000′ of climbing, I finished the event but the didn’t make it to the top of the mountain. Another intimidating challenge and an excuse made.

I’m not sure what about it was so intimidating. Extended time at threshold as we have discussed can be uncomfortable. But I like uncomfortable. I know growth comes from being uncomfortable. I actively seek out those situations. This workout though was an outlier in that paradigm.

It went so much better than I thought it would. The intimidation, transformed into satisfaction and serenity. I don’t know if my initial trepidation added to the post workout sensations I described at the start. That light, liberated, unburdened state of post run serenity.

The only time a man can be brave, is when he is first afraid. But the benefits of standing tall in the face of intimidation only adds to the elation when the task is ultimately completed.

Putting in miles in my old stomping grounds

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

Exposure

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I’m reflecting on my 35th birthday. How I feel. How I’ve grown. What type of man I have become and what type of man I want to be.

Listening to Zach Bitter and Aaron Alexander on the Human Performance Outliers podcast, Aaron said something that made me reflect on my last decade.

Zach is very literally a human performance outlier as an ultra marathoner, and Aaron is a movement coach and author of the Align Method. Their conversation covered wellness topic such as mobility, training, breathing, and mindset.

Whenever you wade into the world of endurance sports, the somewhat unanswered, elephant in the room question, is that of longevity and vitality. What are the long term costs of pushing performance? What is the cost of being an outlier? Specifically on your long-term health and wellness.

Looking back, I have pushed myself pretty hard in the last decade. And not just physically. The volume of miles from triathlon training alone is staggering. Jiu jitsu, despite being the gentle art, takes it’s toll on the body. I’ve finished a graduate degree. Changed jobs twice. Found a partner and started a family. Just in the past few years I’ve cultivated new hobbies and habits.

I feel better now than I did at 25. I walk around at a lower weight than I did at the starting line of IronMan FL in 2013. (Which I hope is the lifetime peak of my training volume). I prioritize sleep and nutrition in a way that I was uneducated about a decade ago. I have more balls in the air now and struggle with balance, but find myself better equipped for that struggle.

Despite all of that, the question remains, am I burning the candle at both ends? Will this impact my longevity and vitality? My healthspan?

Aaron said something that I found incredibly reassuring. “your body adapts to what it is exposed to, even if that is nothing”

If you are exposed to nothing, your body will adapt to that as it’s default. The smallest offset can then be momentous. On the other end of the spectrum, if you vary and amplify your exposure, your body adapts. Your level of resilience is directly correlated to your level of exposure.

There are some obvious caveats. My days of thinking “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” are long gone. Lower intensity work, mobility, and less “demanding” practices like meditation and breath work are a critical part of my routine now. Not every session can be a grip it and rip it sweat fest.

El Duderino and Speedy playing in the water

Beyond what I expose my body to in search of positive adaptation, my boys become exposed to fair portion of it is well. They are always watching and listening. Being exposed to someone pushing themself. To someone who struggles, falters, and ultimately grows. I can only surmise what lens they see me through but I hope that the exposure is beneficial.

I’m grateful for all of the beauty, challenge, pain, and struggle that I have been exposed to. I’m grateful for all the ways my body has adapted over the last decade. I hope for continued exposure to push my adaptation. I hope that I find the appropriate level of exposure for my boys as well. In some dynamic interplay of exposure and adaptation, I hope to find serenity.

Zwift, peleton, treadmill, and some mobility work from a birthday week spent mostly on the road

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

What’s Cookin’

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, against my better judgement, I want to talk about gender stereotyped activities. Wish me luck and come along for the ride as I traverse this modern day minefield.

I often find myself flying with captains who are much older than me (20 to 30 years older) and at a different point in their life. Anyone who has spent a career in aviation and anyone who has raised a family has a wealth of knowledge and no shortage of stories to share. While I appreciate these peers and mentors and the wisdom they share freely (sometimes uninvited) I find that there are some generational gaps that can’t be overcome.

One such generational gap came up on my most recent trip and I thought it was worth discussing. This trip was a three day, with a real kick in the pants type of first day. Five legs, lots of convective weather, a prolonged sit in an out station, and then a deadhead on a regional jet that was delayed.

My alarm went off at 5:00am and I didn’t make it to my hotel until after 8:00pm and the only real opportunity to have a civil meal in that time was our prolonged sit at the out station.

The captain told me I packed like a senior flight attendant (notorious for carrying lots of bags) when he saw my oversized cooler bag along with my flight bag and suitcase. As I unpacked some smoked brisket and curried cauliflower he became more intrigued. When I told him that I cooked before I left so that my wife and kids had prepared food while I was gone, and I had healthy meals on the road, he responded “you cook for your wife before you leave, that’s different”. He shared that his wife had packed his PB&J bag lunches that were indistinguishable from those a kindergartner might show up with.

I’m under no illusion that my meal prepping is not the norm. Im also not so self involved that I think I can change those gender norms. I do think however, I can raise my boys with the understanding that something you are passionate about, that also benefits others, can be a source of joy and pride regardless of norms.

I love to cook, especially when I am not time constrained by the already untenable list of things I enjoy spending my time on. I am also passionate about diet, exercise, and overall well-being, and those overlap very well with my cooking/meal prepping. Pair in an aviation career especially post covid with limited food options in airports and on layovers and my meal prep/ cooking habits are done just as much from a self serving sense as they are from that of a provider.

Not a bad spot to write down your thoughts, Naked River Brewing Co Chattanooga TN

Don’t get me wrong, I love that my 1 and 3 year olds eat roasted asparagus and brussel sprouts, curried cauliflower, and smoked meats. Fueling my training and work schedule with healthy foods is an admittedly selfish priority, the fact that my boys eat that way too is a wonderful bonus.

But I hadn’t thought that much about the behavior modeling of dad (me) doing all the cooking, and especially cooking ahead of time for when I’m on the road. As a child of divorce, both my parents cooked for me when I was hungry, I never saw it as a gender specific task.

When I stopped eating what my mother cooked because I was cutting weight for wrestling, I started cooking for myself in my sophomore year of highschool. Again, this seemed a practical and realistic division of labor rather than an against the grain trend.

Starting to build up the milage this week, 75+ miles over 3 rides

One of the guiding questions that fuels this blog, is how I will answer my boys when they ask me what it means to be a man. The conversation in my head normally spans multiple sittings, involves at least me drinking, and tends to be full of inconsistencies. The truth is I’m not really sure, and that’s O.K.

But the message will sure as hell include doing what you are passionate about, especially when it helps other people. If that means that cooking is manly, I’ll be the first one to help them tie on their aprons.

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

The injured knee held up pretty well to 7 miles on the treadmill, helped along by some De La Soul