Daily Ink Slinging

I write every day. That's the rule

On Thanksgiving, I took the day off. I orchestrated an exception to the rule. And was well aware of it. Somewhere around my second dinner, while a plate of turkey passed me and I was eyeing the rosemary bread, it occurred to me that a surplus of words was stockpiling in my head. There was a cramp forming.

A great deal of my nervous energy is streamlined into words. Most of the time it's dispersed with old-school ink slinging. I fill notebook after notebook with as many words as I can manage. I view each page as a picture as much as it is a work of words. It's a composition in form. And, as I get better, the sketchings start to be built on firmer architecture.

The practice of writing is often neglected in favor of the writing produced from the practice. You see, the practice often involves terrible writing, and this can still be good practice. Shit writing must be exorcized and exercised out of the mind and thus it is actually part of great practice.

An important book that has helped me understand the practice of writing is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.  The audiobook edition I've linked to is narrated with additional commentary from the author. She is delightful. Thoughtful. And, being older than when she wrote the book, is able to give wisdom into the processes of maturation.  The publisher, Sounds True, has long been a favorite source of mine for recordings on mindfulness and meditation. It shouldn't be surprising that they brought this great practitioner of mindful writing to my attention.

Most of my writing practice yields little but successions of words generally outlining long tangents of discursive thoughts. Procrastination from paid writing will lead to elaborate forays into imagination, experiment, memory or just random permutations of interesting-sounding words.

But sometimes I strive to keep my focus upon a topic long enough, with enough information and detail hammered into the copy, that there is something useful encoded that might be useful to other readers. I hope to direct these writings to this blog which has laid dormant for some years now. I'm going to leave the old blogs up because they are there. They are what they are.

But after slinging ink for the last few years, my chops are honed enough to work directly into the digital -- straight into the blogger interface. May my word counts here accumulate into an interconnected database of subjects, characters, settings, and scenes.

My suggestion for anyone is to dive into the practice of writing today. Make a blogger account. Let me know. I'll subscribe and watch your progress.

Or get a notepad.

It doesn't matter. Just write. Word after word sling the ink. It's the practice that counts.

A musician spends years behind closed doors working towards that ability to play when it counts. Fill your notebook. Play all the notes. Write all the words.

Then, one day, you sit down and have a great performance.

And it's a first draft...

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.

Make Your Tax Deductible Cancer Fighting Donations Here

I coach people for a living pretty much - as a writer anyway, breaking down the ins and outs of nutrition, fitness, and putting the two together for some successful weekend racing, whether that be triathlon, obstacle racing, or train running.

I write tips and programs all over the internet, and tens of thousands of readers swing by and read them. But I never really get to connect with them often, and that is kinda a bummer.

This charity page is where I reach out to my readers to give back, if, in some crazy karmic occurrence, my writings about my experiences have fostered any positive changes in your life, and make a tax deductible donation to help cure cancer. This is a damn reputable charity, and I'm proud to work with them.  

$5? Perfect! If you've read my stuff over coffee, consider donating the amount of a fancy ass coffee to help cure cancer.

$250? Perfect! That will be a sweet hunk of change you can keep from the IRS - and use it to fight cancer. Oh, and you'll get a free year or workout, nutrition, and racing advise.

Click here and make a quick donation now....will end SOON!

Facebook White Noise

Lately I've been struggling with Facebook. I log on and scan it feeling alienated and confused. It's led to a lack of enthusiasm for the whole affair, that I wish to examine now.

At a certain point all the voices turn to static, a hum of a machine engineered to lull one into the illusion that things are actually being said. Never before have the data streams of mankind been so densely saturated, and never before have they been so vacuous. The cacophonous static of pixels is just colorful enough, familiar enough, that it is not rendered by the brain as static, but as a narrative – a veil of illusion that leaves us feeling as if we belong to a community of sorts, and are thus equipped to properly respond to the stimulating static – usually, through digitized banking systems, by buying something with just a few clicks.

For me, Facebook as become a community of static - not of individual voices of friends. And I can’t understand what is going on anymore.

As we paw at our smart-phones, we are only the ghosts in the machine – our true selves lost somewhere behind the chattering output that is fed to others, and then back towards us. Our own lives are a whisper in the babel.

Commercial algorithms, the DNA of social networks, govern our senses – a noisy dream of familiar faces spouting corporate agendas served with innocent naivety  – the specter of free will infecting our judgments and the meanings we assign to the characters strung together (with the help of guiding proprietary tools of 'sharibility') by our friends. As nodes in a web we forget that all we say, and all we can say, is conditioned by that web, and serve only to promote the survival, the nourishment, and ultimately the thriving of that web.

Wiggling our thumbs upon glass screens the actual physical world falls away to a visceral infection of emotional prodding – feelings of acceptance, unity, shared beliefs, and the affirmations of a meaningfulness born of an experience misperceived as being a faithful rendering of reality. Our inboxes are too full to read, so we must be fed a feed. Bobby is at Gold’s Gym. Sally is Jamba Juice. These are the lines for the appetites that are forged for us, whet with the misguided belief that we are smelling what’s really cooking outside the realm of marketing dollars that lubricate the entire chewing and swallowing process. These people were thrust before us, not out of the merit of being our friends, but out of the merit of being our friends with something commercially viable for us to consume. We have too many friends to talk to - so we've been spared having to, the machine will do it for everyone. We can just listen. Listen to what the algorithms spit out this month.

At a certain point everything is so hyper personal, so perfectly crafted for our consumption based upon our 10,000 previous choices, that we forget we are eating it all up, all the time, every time we tune in, thus consequently tuning out all else that might actually be before us.

And suddenly, when one can hear the static, one is no longer hypnotized by the 10,000 story lines – and one can easily change the channel.

Ultimately, from CNN to your Facebook feed, there is one imperative - click here. Thus you're measured and weighed, your impulse tabulated and stored, so your next one can best be fabricated for you in the soundscape of a numbing, commercial static. 

I'm not trying to hate. I'm trying to rationalize a sudden lack of enthusiasm that has left me feeling blessedly lonely online, that more often than not, leads me to venture out into the real world, to strike up a conversation or two. 

Pissed Racers

I love racing because it is one of the few humanly practices still available for our species to engage in that still produces within the human organism true fear – instinctual fight or flight, gut wrenching, bowel adjusting fear.  And therein lies the justification for the experience the racing experience.

Before a triathlon everyone is pissing themselves.  (Everyone's standing in, or floating in the water, mind you, or dashing off into the woods, but, yes, sometimes on the bike, too...anyway).  It’s one of the most liberating moments in a triathlete’s life I think – the moment you just let it ride because you feel, you understand on a bodily level, that it will only weigh you down - your body is engaging with full flight mode and there are much more serious effin' issues at hand.  THAT is fear.  You’ve peed 12 times that morning already!  But, 30 seconds before the gun goes off, you’ve got to go again.  The liberation felt here is not from breaking any social taboo, but the understanding of an animalistic reality, that, because of circumstances being nonconventional, can be experienced by your everyday 9 to 5er in a socially acceptable manner.

THAT is animal fear.  And that is why I love racing.

0006 - On Philosophy

When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire.
- The Stars, Your Ex Lover is Dead [1]

Philosophy is an act, a behavioral tendency of a self to interpret the reality he/she/it finds itself in.  Philosophy has a history but it is not a history lesson.  

Or shouldn't be, anyway.  Books on philosophy are like books on yoga—helpful, but yoga is something other than any one author's rendering at a particular time in a particular way.  Philosophers jack 'philosophy', just like yogis jack 'yoga'.  

I'll name drop philosophers, but only as a courtesy, and will try to keep historical attribution and further analysis of ideas regarding specific thinkers to endnotes.[2]

Philosophy is open sourced code that, in some circles, might be considered a virus.  Especially if you don't like to have your current world view spun out of control, like internet browser tabs endlessly opening because you clicked the wrong link.   

As always, beware of self replicating questions (programs) that deviate and distract from the current programs that you want, or were told, to have rendering your reality.  Just like Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Chrome present you different versions of 'the internet', your worldview, your philosophy creates different versions of reality.

A philosophical incite, the work of philosophy, is a spark of ignition that is first fueled with doubt, and then nourished with ideas brought about by assuming the new perceptions brought on by the incite, and then, consequently rendered into paradigms shifts regarding of how the universe is fundamentally ordered.

Geometry worked fine with Euclid's 5 axioms for geometry.  It worked better when Reimann told us we only needed 4.[3] 


When inferior interpretations of reality are rendered through logical analysis available of sense data, your best move, particularly in a darwinian sense, is to adapt.  In other words, if you are standing in front of an oncoming train, step out of the way.

You step have to step into the water yourself, and there, you can't even step into the same river twice.  You have to be in a river in order to begin the analysis or a river.  You must, first step into the stream of data, so to speak, in order to render your understanding of data, and then realize that the notion of a 'data' as something permanent, not ever changing.  That you are, in fact, not in a 'river' but having an experience of a piece of something you are calling a river. 

Your world is a stream where the only unchanging thing is that it is always changing.  This was told to us clearly by the who I affectionately refer to the Buddha who Never Heard Of Buddha.****

David Hume argued that if Adam (of the biblical account) was born with perfectly rational faculties could not discern from any empirical observations that he would drown if he put his face underwater, until he put his face under water.[5]

I think this culminates in the work of Bertrand Russell who allows us to imagine a universe that is 8 seconds old.  For, all we can know about the universe is our current, uninterrupted conception of it.  Given that psychologists argue that our undivided attention span are about 8 seconds, Russell, argued rightfully that, epistemologically speaking - meaning as to how we understand knowledge - that there can be a whole new universe might have just happened, with all it's physics and stories, and all it's billions of books and super computers - just happened 8 seconds ago, and will only be there as is, during this unified thought.  Everything might be different the second you break your attention and wake up in a 'new' unified moment with it's own physics and stories and libraries.

If you had a book with a Theory of Everything...best to try and make it boil down to a Tweet...[6]

My advice on how to use this worldview of infinite universes of possibilities every 8 seconds as an article of faith?  

I say embrace it.

Maybe you want to call it forgiveness, or rebirth, or awakening, or idea enema, or a next breath free of any expectation.   Call it philosophy.

You can name it because it is yours and no one else's and can never be.  It will be with you at that undetermined moment where you step out of this universe.

The power to create your universe is in how you render the reality you find the next time you open your eyes.

The Stoics mastered this.  (Name drop warning).  When one reads the two most prominent authors of this school one finds as authors an Emperor of the Known World and a slave of that world.  They both strove with all their philosophical might, and, interestingly came the same understandings of the reality around them, generally speaking.  

It's hard to play the victim when you know you are the creator.

Instead of fighting the world as you know it, breath in, look at the world before you (not the one in your head) and interpret as best you can so you are ready for the next 8 seconds that are about to smack you in the face.

If that is not practical I don't know what is.

When racing, when in the depths agonizing fatigue, I breath deep and just say, hold on, just hold on 8 more seconds.

When running it's 'that next telephone pole'.  You don't know what you'll find there.  Maybe it's an incite that will get you to the next 10,000 telephone poles while running; maybe it's just another chance to put your head down and charge.

You are at once the emperor and slave; you are not the victim.  You are the artist of you own reality when one paints with the proper brush.

So what next.  Where's my paint brush?  Close your eyes, forget everything (and most important forget can't), breath, stay with the breath, and then begin again.  Everything starts there.

Or maybe with 'yes'.

It's the responsible thing to do.  Not bow down but to look at the stars if they've got something to say to you.


[1]  The quote is spoken by an unknown speaker, could be a sample.
[2]  Wittgenstein nailed this with his introduction to the Tractatus:

How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another 


I hope that all name drops are checked and rechecked by each reader to benefit their reading of this blog as needed.  I welcome any interpretations of my use of assigning a particular idea to a particular author.  We are all, indeed, as much thieves as blues musicians.

[3]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemannian_geometry

[4] Heraclitus - 'You can't step into the same river twice', and, 'Change alone is unchanging' seems to suit this theme well in his work.

[5]  David Hume, from http://www.uwplatt.edu/~drefcins/humeencyclopediaentry.html

[6]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

0005 - The Yoga Bus

The Yoga Bus left Pittsfield at 8.37 AM, facing south on rt-100, engine revved for a rapid ascent of Killington's foothills on the way to Pico and Mendon Pass.  The vehicle, a black Jeep Wrangler, took the s-turns with a seasoned maximal velocity - the pilot a local for 7 years now – that never could have occurred if some transient Saab or BMW from Massachusetts created for the driver and sole passenger a one-lane no-passing-zone hell.  

Today the Yoga Bus is a black Jeep Wrangler with a cracked LCD stereo that makes sense immediately upon glancing backwards and taking in the child seats.  The driver is an unshaven, man in his thirties wearing a 'Sub - Pop' t-shirt and slim designer jeans - a 6 foot 4 inch yogi, with too much centeredness to be deemed lanky, while possibly having lanky arms and legs.  Sometimes the Yoga Bus is a black Saturn piloted by me, a shaven headed, square faced fellow in MMA shorts and a three quarter sleeved workout apparel top made by Reebok from the mid 90’s – almost all the logo washed off at this point.

Hitting Killington, and other traffic (and, thankfully, a passing lane) at the Route 4 junction, the Yoga Bus faced westward, and barreled up over Mendon Pass before careening straight down into the plains of southwestern Vermont. 

The moment one passes McGraw's Tavern at The Inn at Long Trail, the highest road around, you know it's all down hill from here.  Your stomach drops as if your car where on roller coaster tracks, pulling you down faster than your body wants to fall.  It is at this point that you know you are leaving the valley.  Here one is outside the caress of the Green Mountains - one is descending into a new climate.  Mendon sits poised as the first town before 'town' - 'town' meaning Rutland.

The entire ride to Mendon, off to one's right, one can peer into the Green Mountain National Forest, a blanket of wildlife that is supposedly forever set aside by Congress.  This swath of trees covers multiple peaks.  One of the smaller of them with an undistiguishing and uncleared summit at 2600', lies before Lower Michigan road, immediately before rt-100 swings east with the White River into Stockbridge, and is called Hedgehog Knoll - the mountain I mean when I say 'my mountain', as in, the mountain I live upon.  

Everyone is welcome to board the bus provided that there is room.  Or room will be made.  We are those kind of folks here in Pittsfield.

Danny got on the Yoga Bus the other day, when it was a Black Saturn.  It would have been a good day for the Jeep, but never underestimate a Saturn, it bore Danny's 400+ lbs bulk easily.  Well, easily enough for me - he did look rather cramped, his sumo-esque frame filling my entire passenger window view, but he didn't complain.  For a man who spends all of his time eating only raw foods and training, he complains rather little, in my opinion.  Sometimes I'll go find him on a 10 mile loop, as he trudges slowly for hours carrying a sandbag.  

He only looks good, he's smiling.  95% of the elite athletes I know won't put out the power he'll emit today in energy expenditure.  

I can't count how many people are too self conscious to go to a Bikram Yoga class because of their weight, fearing to show a little skin and get sweaty with a room full of people.  They must be too fat, in their minds.

Danny didn't have that hang-up, and that lead him to having an amazing class, doing every posture in the sauna like environment.  Danny did what so many can't - let themselves do what they want to do.

The Yoga Bus don't care about your yogi status.  It cares about as much as yoga cares about your yogi status.  Yoga is an activity, not a thing - and all participants are equally engaged, that is, when they are fully engaged.

There is no position outside yourself by which you can judge 'your yoga' versus 'yoga'.  In fact, there is no 'yoga' outside of you.

Yoga is wave, not particle.  We can ride it like S turns, in the Yoga Bus.

0004 - Finishing at the Start

Roadside - training break to contemplate clouds. 

Gratitude and Thanks 

All the training ends that moment you're treading water with 3000 other athletes, trying to keep you heart rate down, waiting for the canon to fire, sending smoke over the morning mist, that will be sending off a fury of thrashing arms and feat towards one finish line.

That's wear the fun starts for me.  Right now, the real race is on.

At last check-in I've raised $2306 of $4000 for the MMRF - what I feels is a premier cancer research charity, that deserves all the help I can lend them.  

This outpouring of support and love from you all has created such a positive energy in my heart, and I thank each of you for your gifts, deeply - sincerely, thank you.  Nahmaste.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to finish the Ironman on Sunday.  Honestly, that tangible quantity doesn't matter.  The only particular number on my mind is $4000.  Once I get there, I can just enjoy the sun (or rain), free food, and safe and marshalled roads (and a lake) during a swimming, biking, and running workout.

All the work is done, I think, once I've made the difference that will carry on and outlive my own personal sphere.

9:59:00 or 16:59:00 - Doesn't really matter so much, as making sure I've got the next $1694 - at last check in- accomplished.

If you are able to help, the next day is crucial in my effort to raise $4000 for cancer research through the MMRF - any contribution is greatly appreciated.  Click here.

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.

Arvo's Tempo

I was introduced to Arvo Pärt in 2001 by one of my philosophy mentors, Dr. Daniel Kolak. 

I would do research with Dr. Kolak on lucid dreaming.  I’d sleep at night with this fucked up face mask that flashed red LED lights into my eye sockets when I was in REM sleep. 

Blasting through my eyelids and into my visual cortex shit would get mixed up.  A traffic light in my dream would go crazy and I’d have a ‘cue’ that I was dreaming.

Let the lucid dreaming experience begin!

(But this will be another post.)

One day when talking about Wittgenstein, Dr. Kolak name drops this cat Arvo. 

I now use Pärt’s music during many routines.  Mostly for strength and balance routines.  Always when stretching.

Pärt goes into a tempo few can listen to.  Particularly in Für Alina, a masterpiece of an album. 

Essentially 3-4 arpeggios are dissected at an absurdly slow tempo for 45 minutes or so.  Part plays with your sense of reality and calls into question the scary question our perceptual time, our spectrum of awareness, is really that significant.

How do things sound to Mercury in her orbit compared to Pluto shambling along.  We hear things in as humans on Earth in BPM:

Beats Per Minute.

But what if it were beats per million years?

What if a song, a series of numerical values, was at relayed at such a tempo that it took centuries to wrap out the Morse code equivalent of “a”? 

And then imagine this signal had to be broadcast 10’s of millions of light years to find a listening ear.

I’m sure the music is out there.  I’m sure we are surrounded in it right now.  I’m certain of it.

We are saturated in celestial strains beyond our Beat Per Minute mind. 

Maybe a phrase get’s transcribe in history every few centuries.?  We can hope.

Arvo Part taps into this slowed world, this stretched out yawn of a sentence.  It borders being nonexistent.  It’s a white noise of space. 

The same kind of sound you find when you let sand fall across glass:  a drumbeat of 10 million beats per millisecond. 

I just soak it in and stretch.  And breath. 

Thank you Arvo.  Thank Dr. Kolak.

I’ll be snowshoeing 100 miles steep mountain gradients in less than two weeks.  I can’t wait, but I’m not in any hurry.

Today's 2nd workout of the day:

Ready For Bed:

20 minutes yoga

50 burpees

200 squats

20 minutes jump rope

Stretch

You missed some fun out there at 4am this morning. 

The Drop

By 4.15 Skrillex is raging throughout my secluded home in Pittsfield, VT.

The juxtaposition of pastoral landscapes cast in mountains against  the dubstep heavy thumpings from a cabin is never lost on me but I find it rather uninteresting.  (I think that's why I fail to blog much.) 

I bought www.confusedhipster.com.  I think it might describe this post emo-boy musician syndrome of being an urban dropout.  I never managed well as a cool kid.

*

I'm shy and passive.  Confrontation with people scares the crap out of me.  No man, I'm not going to 'throw down' with you. 

But a mountain?  An event designed to break me?  I've been throwing myself into brutality week in and week out for 6 years now.  I'm confrontational every fucking day - it's just on my own time where I can't bother anyone else.

And every time I say, "Damn, I must look fucking insane to the world" I think instead:  "I have arrived.  This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing at exactly this time."

*

I don't know why the hell you are reading this.  In the back of my mind I write assuming that obligatory readings are probably the norm so I want to make the experience as painless as possible, and therefore brief.

There is a story I think I've felt that I've needed to be telling and have, just not been ready. Start exhaling.  I think my training really suffered because of this reality. What is training but an expression of our internal honesty?

I don't know what that narrative is but I'm grateful I realize it doesn't have to fit neatly into a category or pre-fab module.  Thank you for having it unfold by reading my posts.  Please share them if you'd like.  I'd like that.

And somehow we all will get from introverted musician to alter ego rock n'roll singer to Barn Beast of Vermont to a man just laughing at it all and hoping for a modicum of wisdom.

I Shit Sunshine

I shit sunshine because I eat sunshine.  I don't see an artichoke.  I see some sunlight that crash landed 93 million miles from where it was born.


The End

Working Stiff

I have a 168-hour work week.

So do you, actually.  Yes.

Are you working on your sleep so that you can be a happier person?

Are you working on organizing your closet 10 minutes today so it could give you 1 minute more time with your family for the next 20 years as you get to the breakfast table faster?  That's over 6 hours a year...and you are no longer a slob.

People say I have OCD or I'm like that guy Monk on TV.

I just think things are beautiful the way I see them in my head.  And, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, I'm going to try and make the world match up with what's in my head.

Letter to (X, Y, & Z) & ~ (X, Y, & Z)

Dear (X, Y, & Z),

Sometime something inside you melts and then you understand. I just wrote the following in the last hour. I'm so exhausted I'm not going to look at it again. It might be nonsense but it was like taking a great dump, I feel better. Constipation is an attachment disorder.

        How I Understand Understanding
        by me

        (A): "You CAN do it."
        (B): ""YOU, can do you it".

        (The punctuation of (A) is only a fraction of the picture. I can't post on Facebook the linguistic and logical notation that will reflect the discussion to follow.)

        Spoken, there can be an emphasis on "can", as is the case with (A), and there is a case when you put the emphasis on "you", as is the case with (B).

        In (A) we are doing something analogous to: "I'm supposed to encourage you now, but I'm really thinking about myself."

        In (B) we are saying something analogous to: "I believe in you."

        However, on the meta level the whole thing functions around a person's mind set.

        Say (A) is said while the person is aware of the difference of (A) and (B):

        This speaker is also aware of the difference while he is saying it, he is aware of: "the awareness of the awareness of the difference." It can be expressed mathematically as a repeating decimal, maybe?. This is the mental repeating decimal of the mystical.

        This is the crux. 'Being' a repeating decimal is profound while .333333333 is less so. This is what understanding understanding is.

        It is understanding a paradox.

        It is understanding when "A & ~A" can be understood. The place of the excluded middle is perceptual?

        That is what I'm going with here. We can have empirical knowledge of a paradox but we lack the tools to express it.

        To demonstrate:
        If you are feeling what I am saying, if I have transferred understanding of my understanding, then there is objective proof that we are feeling the objective feeling of the intangible.

        How? Because you believe in me.

        You are going to speak (B) when you speak to me. So we must have a mutual understanding on some level.

        That is what I'm reaching towards. That objective subjectivity.

Governing Principles: Quality Time

It is interesting for me to think that 'mileage' was once the title of this blog in light of the circumstances that I am planning on banishing that concept from my mind space.

I'm guilty of mileage obsession: an unhealthy fascination with the distance I move my body in the semi-forward direction.

To be clear:  my goal in 2012 is to race better, NOT log  extreme miles.

To be clear:  I'll probably log extreme miles, but this is only a consequence of a paradigm shift from distance to time.  Mileage happens as a product of concentrated will.

Quality time:  this is my sole concern.

The most successful hours logged in a week can be spent on bike performance, sometimes on lactate threshold work, and sometimes on long slow, miles.  Notice, only two out of the three deal with logging actual miles.

So the first step in banishing this mis-step in my self evaluation is to fess up and acknowledge that I am a mileage junky.

I develop a sense of self worth from bragging about high numbers of miles.

There I said it.  And it sounds f@cking even more crazy out loud.  Try it.  Are you a mileage junky?

Did you forget what training is about in your perspective, too?

It's about spending quality time with your body and self as you ready yourself for a specific event.  Or not even for an event.  It's about the workout, start to finish -- one workout at a time. 

Miles are a subset...the event the super set of your 'being' while training.  Period.

Of course I will go on 18 or 42 mile runs, but I will not log every single mile on it as if that guaranteed my success.

Concentrated Efforts of Will. CEW.  That is the unit I'll be measuring 2012.

CEW = are periods of time where my body and mind are fully focused on co-development.