0002 - On First Realizing the Magnetism of Mountains

I first apprehended the hold the mountains had upon me while living on the Winward Coast of Oahu in the winter of 2011.  A few weeks prior I had been up in The Green Mountains, inland on the mainland, where I lived a life of privation and seclusion.  My recluse neighbors on the adjoining ridgelines were accustomed to this life, but I was racked with the weariness of a long winters within a wind-whipped cabin, where a  ubiquitous monotony was rooted in the dark pines that stood over me while I watched a world of ice, rock, and bark sleep  in the cold.  There was always the ache of the cold, weighing upon me like a lead vest, as I stumbled through the morning light scrambling to find wood to tend the fire that threatened to expire during the few hours of dulled sleep I seized beside the wood stove.  Anxiety, euphoria, loneliness, and dread:  I drank my fill during the slow crawl to solstice and the slower death march towards equinox, while I endured the strain of living alone in a natural landscape that made no allowances for emotional weakness.  Often enough, in weariness of being in this state, I longed to retreat backwards, following the New York City water supply and I-87 southward towards Jersey, my birth place.

Now, in Kailua, I was sitting on a beach blanketed in warm surf and moonlight.  The palm trees shrouded my seat  upon their root systems; the sand at my feet a welcome alternative to the dry, dusty ice and snow I habitually tracked in upon my icey wood floor.  There was warmth in every breeze here, a seasonless consistency rocking you in its womb.  There was everything that I had conceived as being a constituent of a tropical paradise, the everyday acts of existence were studies of the book of Genesis; never in my wanderings there, was I far from gardens.  Yet it was here that my mind escaped towards the mountains, seeking new investigations and journeys back in a barren place, where I could only sustain outdoor efforts for less than an hour.  It was one thing to romanticize about Vermont as a New Jersey hipster, it was another thing to long for it after finding myself on the easiest of terms in Hawaii.  But I know that it was the uneasiness of life’s harsh context  in the mountains that drew me there .  It was the land’s ability to push me, rather than simply sustain me, that beckoned.

Returning from where I had just fled would be to resume a challenge, and to stay there for years would test my resolve.  But I was unexplored, I felt, and Vermont was one of the few places that I had found on this planet that illuminated a pathway within my own understandings of myself.  When the horizon is without movement, one can read clearly within, and the comprehension of what was inside of me, or, more meaningfully, what was not within me, was the gift that would render every insufferable moment meaningful, and keep me from the realms of needless masochism.  

0001 - A Morning Run to the Stone Cabin

0001 - A Morning Run to the Stone Cabin


Purple light silhouettes barren and stark ridgelines.   With the sunrise, a ribbon of pigment illuminates the horizon and delineates an otherwise colorless and hostile landscape of pine, granite, and ice.  

The texture of the countryside is triangular; one always feels off balance, as if standing on a hillside, one foot lower than the other.   One feels that there are nearby mountain peaks, there is a  valley floor, and there is the angled land between- and that is all.  One intuitively feels the water table, the governance of gravity unto that which yields, pulling you with it.  

19th century humorists attributed the invention of the one legged milking stool to Pittsfield- the terrain being too continuously sloped for anything else.

But the land is tamed.  Animals graze on the many cleared mountainsides, gridded with fences:  some made of wood, some wire, some stone.  Most of the stone walls are deep in the woods, remnants of 17th and 18th century farms that are now covered in a second, third, or fourth growth of trees.  

Columns of smoke rise from isolated homes tucked up in the hills the rise from both my sides.

At -5°F the atmosphere feels more vacuum than substance; your cough is as dry as your lips and you always feel thirsty.

A fresh, dry snow dusts Tweed River Drive, a dirt road now cemented with snow and ice, but enough gravel and sand, to be drivable.  Drivable, if you have four wheel drive. Best to have a Jeep or a Land Rover.

I don’t have either, so I just run.  I’ve got another 1200 feet of climbing till I’ll reach the stone cabin at summit, where I can try and thaw out a bit before turning myself back to the West, running the 3 miles back to the valley floor, and running up the opposing hillside back to my home.

There could be worse ways to start a day.

There can be better.  Like staying warm in bed.  That’s what the rest of the world chooses to do.  It must be the case since I’m labeled as the crazy one.

Am I?

Bad Body Math

Bad Body Math - The Why and the How of a Food Journal
by Jason Jaksetic

What goes up comes down for the most part - but what goes on doesn't necessarily come off.

The purpose of this blog is to show that poor calculation, or rather, the absence of calculation, is at the root of excessive body fat.

Being thin is a matter of addition and subtraction.  It's not rocket science - yes, there are immeasurable variables all over the place in your life - it's what makes you unique and dynamic and so interestingly you - but all things considered, if you balance what goes in your body, with what what your body emits out, you derive a perfect figure.

Not rocket science, just thermodynamics.

Think of your body as a furnace.  Or better yet, a star.  Your body is a radiant point where matter ignites into energy.

(The whole Einstein-ian equation thing, remember?)

We can build bombs because we can unleash energy from matter.

Your body unleashes energy from food in the same way.  The calorie is a unit of heat measurement.

You get fat because you are piling up fuel, but not burning it.

In fact, maybe you are so fueled up, you can't even get a spark going.

Herein, lies the problem.  Here it my be beneficial to think about the First Law of Thermodynamics here.  Matter is not created or destroyed.  It just changes form.

Herein, lies the solution.  You can transform the body fat into energy.  You need to carry all the excess  numbers on one side of equation to another.  Actually, light them on fire!


If you want your body to drop energy bombs all over your surrounding landscape you might want to consider a food journal as part of the equation to balance your weight.

If you burn more calories than you consume your body will burn the fat weighing you down.  Your body has to burn the fat - it won't let you die.  Though you feel like your starving, your not.  Your body is snacking away on the lard your carrying around 24/7 when you are not resupplying via your stomach.

Exercise accelerates this process by pumping up the burn, but you will probably notice that just observing what you eat will put the weight loss odds in your favor.

A food diary let's you see one side of body's equations.  (We'll worry about the other side - the burn - in another article.)


The Food Journal - 3 tips to consider on getting it done right


- it's about awareness...

The first thing I find people notice when they even attempt to write down what they eat is that they are blown away with how they've never examined such the mundane, yet brilliantly enjoyable and complex  behavior of eating..  Humans are so busy these days it seems eating as become an autonomous motion to accompany our other activities.


 - don't stress...
You are doing your food journal wrong if it's a burden.  Don't stress about descriptions and nutritional information of what you are eating.  (Look at that later.)  Just take quick notes throughout your day on a pad you keep handy or on a notepad app on your smartphone.  Oh, there are 10,000 apps, too, but don't use these if the technology will stress you out.  Just grab a napkin at breakfast and jot down what you eat, every time you eat.



- try it for a week...
You can learn a boatload of information with just one week of data.  It usually is enough to make your bad habits obvious.  Knowledge is the power to that allows you to shift the momentum of your habitual behaviors.

When in doubt...burpees!

From one thing, know ten thousand things.
- Miyamoto Musashi

When in doubt do burpees

I'm interested in axioms.  Why?  Because everything you do must have foundations and those foundations must continually be examined, corrected, and transcended.

Euclid brought to the world 5 basic precepts to all geometric thought.  Riemann did an even greater service to the world by eliminating the impossibility of parallel lines meeting and restructuring our perception of the world.  We literally see something different now when we peer at the universe because Riemann simply asked a simple question:  'why'.

Studying the basis for Non-Euclidean geometry will serve an athlete well.  And so studying burpees with discipline and patience will serve an athlete well.

The moral of the story:  always stick to basics from which you build whole architectures.  Stick to foundations and you will build great things.

For me the burpee is grounded in all the important components of fitness and movement.

Never substitute form for achieving higher numbers.  I'll do 2 good burpees over 200 so-so ones.  You are only cheating yourself.  Break down each and every movement of the burpee.  Stop yourself at every point and feel every muscle contracting and flexing.  Go maddeningly slow.  I remember as a musician how hard it is to play slow.  Same for fitness.

(Good luck trying to play this at the original tempo...only a skilled master should dare attempt!)

I fret and fuss over form all the time.  Why?  Because there is the root of all your future successes.  You will never excel beyond the starting line if you are not digging deep into fundamentals for traction.

Here the work of Thomas Kuhn becomes paramount.  Newton was a very smart man but his work could not account for WTF Mercury's orbit was doing.  Einstein, who was nerding out over the foundations of space and time, quite simply solved the equations by looking at foundations.

Why all the links and references to scientific and philosophical heroes of mine?  If I can convey one thing in this post it would be this:

If you want to excel as an athlete, embrace your inner scientist.  If you want to excel as scientist, embrace your inner philosopher.  If you want to excel as a philosopher, embrace your inner athlete.

Run Out for Food

When I get hungry I go for a run.  It helps keep the guilt in check if I feel like indulging.

It helps that my driveway has more elevation gain than the entire Boston Marathon.  It helps that the grocery store is 1 mile away.

I run because I need to get somewhere.  The only obligation in my running is to sustain life.  Why complicate it more than that?

I have to cast my mind back to Swaziland where people ran to live.  And, unfortunately, because there are not just enough calories in that beautiful country, people ran and died all the time.

I think of all the years I penciled in workouts at set times and struggled to show up and get it done.  I think of all the stress I put on myself to perform.  I think of all the bullshit I piled up just so I could carry it with me for a 'relaxing run'.

If you have shoes and need something that is not currently in your home start running.  If you are tired of not running enough start running.  If you hate running start running.

An ounce of performance is worth a pound of promises.

Mae West said something very eloquent that I admire:

An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.

If only we put half the effort we do into delivering the goods as we do purchasing and wishing for them.

It's easy to write checks with your mouth that your body can't cash.  I've written plenty.

But I'm done with that. 

How much would your life change if you forced yourself to run out for groceries?  Or batteries for you TV remote?

Keep it simple.

You run
You fall
You bleed
You get up again

Repeat, often.

That is the instinctual ambition cycling through the DNA of a HUMAN.

I want to run, fall, bleed, and get up again.

So don't ask me why I'm going to run so far.

We're on the same course.  Mine just might have more dirt than most.

Murakami’s Fire

I re-read all the time.

Some people are impressed with reading.  I’m not.

We read all day, long.  Billboards, ketchup labels, any item manufactured for that matter.  So I am not impressed that your read a book a week, or day. 

I’ve re-watched the movie Man on Fire probably 75 times.  I’ve re-read Emerson’s Self Reliance at least 25 times.  These things never get old.

We take for granted that we actually perceived something when we take it in the first time.  The brain registers a stop sign, and you stop at it.  You got it right.

But what about more complicated things like Beethoven’s 4^th Symphony?  Or a conversation?

Things are never as they seem if we examine them. 

I think I used to believe I was smarter if I read 25 different books in a month than if I re-read the same book 25 times. 

But these are one and the same.  Reading the same book 25 times is reading 25 different books.

I thought of this as I made a fire this morning.  I piled the kindling and logs and it took off marvelously from one match.

Maurakami wrote a short story where he descries a trio of individuals building a bon fire on the shore.  I never understood it the first two times I read it.   

Now I understand.  I can't wait to re-read it for the first time again.