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.
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.
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.
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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."
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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.
“And you can’t break through with the one that you want.”
Maritime ~ Parade of the Punk Rock T-Shirts
Wading onto the shores of the over-trained is common enough as to evoke no screams from the lifeguards. And we’ll all, at some point in time, wash up unconscious and shaking on the rocks.
How many times can you go to the well? When does evoked distress usurp your body’s ability to battle back? When is bruised battered? When is battered broken?
It’s different for everyone. And I can’t even begin to figure it out for myself. As much time as I spend with my own body the more of a strange guest I appear when I try and speak open and intimately.
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If burnout were purely a physical phenomenon, a concoction of muscles and tendons refusing to respond, a platter of strains and limbs polluted with lactic, then we could at least chart the problem with medical journal explicitness.
Personally, I’ve found, burnout takes on a more manipulative role as it firmly embeds itself into my psychic regions and encamps before unfurling itself outward, systematically shutting down one system after another.
Parasitic.
Burnout germinates as a repetitive Fuck My Life that accompanies all usual activities. Some invisible element materializes from the atmosphere and settles upon every object - a patina of misery you can’t brush away.
Burnout affixes itself within the deployment of hormones and serotonin, making sure it disrupts any standard operating procedure with outbursts and emotional conflagrations.
Burnout disembowels your favorite songs. It weakens the syntax of language. Burnout doesn’t wash off no matter how long you stand in the shower.
Burnout injects those established race goals with doubt and gags and binds all core beliefs regarding the timeless question: Why should I wake up today?
Burnout then complicates recovery on a cellular level. You’ve been stripped of any motivation to workout first, and then your immune system starts operating like a that frenetic vacuum cleaner in your basement closet you refuse to throw out.
I’ve been known to fall over rather embarrassingly, the composition resulting from my balance and leg musculature a knocked over Scrabble Board of confusion.
But this is not the trying part. Crying on the ground inexplicably trumps all in terms of embarrassment.
Burnout sutures shut within you an amnesia of all your accomplishments to date along with a conviction that all is lost if you don’t get right back on the fucking track.
And then you do. And prolong the misery.
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In readying for Kona in 2006, I didn’t trust the fitness that got me there. I went skeletal and near anemic. I remember crawling from my bed to the kitchen, propping myself against the cabinets trying to climb up to the Keurig.
Battered into broken.
It took me two years to battle back.
I did in 2010 when I broke my hip while overtraining. Broken into shattered.
This time I ran away to a Swaziland hut for 5 weeks…before absconding to Vermont after finding Joe Desena’s passport on my return trip.
And now, during the last three days I’ve imbibed the compounded misery of those previous episodes before I finally recognized what was going on. Again.
Has anyone ever learned his or her lesson the first time? Can I have your autograph? Saint. Bodhisattva.
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I hadn’t worked out in three days and the guilt was coiling like a stiff mattress spring.
Internal pressure has internal cause. “Remember that”, I kept reminding myself as I lambasted myself with accusations of dogging it.
But finally I stood firm and refused to elevate the damage and prolong the illness. I went so far as accompanying my workout partner to the lake…
…and watched her swim while I was sprawled along the shoreline, too tired to stand.
And finally, as strangely as the untimely cold front blew in, it started to dissipate. The fatigue dusting every action was beginning to catch in the wind.
This morning I woke up to a whole new Vermont. Clean and crisp lines of thought caught at the fog covering the valley.
I could taste my coffee. Music took on its original tonality. Words fell into place, syntax restored and semantics returned to boot.
Fuck My Life translated into Hello My Life (Damned As You May Be).
At least you’re interesting. At least there are explosions in the distance to investigate.
Once I’m strong enough to get there.
And then you go to your one shot to where you are.
I've done this before and I'm going to do it again. But this time with more discipline, rigor, and overall dispassionate intelligence.
To race a Ironman fast I was doing 20-30 hours of training a week. That is NOT including time getting your gear together or breaking it down. It doesn't include stretching or showering. It does not include eating.
That's 20-30 hours of straight aerobic and anaerobic conditioning on the clock.
Mileage is something most athletes dispense in an effort sound impressive. But where are you doing your mileage? Florida athletes can't talk to Vermont athletes about mileage.
Two different languages there.
But we all can comprehend 25 hours of quality lactic threshold enhancing swimming, biking, and running.
5 hours a day - 6 days a week. 30 hours blocked off on my calendar.
Inviolate times. Sacred intervals sequestered from the day's stuff.
This does not mean that I will train 30 hours a week every week. It means I can. And it's on me to follow through. No excuses but personal irresoluteness.
I made it available to myself: my goal.
I can choose to sleep in or eat donuts during said 30 hours.
I found this gem in the General Store here in Pittsfield.
With the huge workout weeks I need lots of calories. The problem is I often compromise on the quality of those calories. On a 8,000 calorie training day, I sometimes am forced to go to Ramen in mass quantities. And, yes, I've spent much of my life smearing Skippy in mass quantities on everything I eat.
To be honest, I can't afford to be picky on calories. I just need enough of them. If I was forced to go all organic I'd be broke in a week.
Peanut butter is an essential staple of my diet. I won't touch on any science or zen regarding this. I eat cases of it. During training and racing and recovery. Most athletes agree.
Vermont Peanut Butter has won the Peanut Butter War, in my brain. Folks, check out www.vtpeantubutter.com and order some. I already cleaned out the General Store in Pittsfield. Here quality of a product trumps any disparity in cost to the competition.
The known is our past. The known is nothing other than the prison of past conditioning. And when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy, disorder, and decay...Uncertainty, on the other hand, is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom. Uncertainty means stepping into the unknown in every moment of our existence. ...Without uncertainty and the unknown, life is just the stale repetition of outworn memories. You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday. -Deepak Chopra
Sometimes on the trails I get confused as the fatigue sets in. I get disoriented. I don't always know the answer to 'where am I'?
I, however, have unconditionally accepted one axiomatic expression of knowledge. And it is the answer to 'when am I'? Which is now. When now? Now now.
Snowshoeing slows you down. And like trail running you have to be attentive to each foot strike lest a miscalculation take you out of the racing equation.
All the mountain side contracts into one point of contact where you root yourself into the data stream beneath you. The contact point is now. You can't step into the same river twice. But who cares? I don't want to. I want my feet underwater, now. Once. And then again. Once again.
When? When I'm there.
I'm not by a river bed at the moment. I'll cross that bridge when I get there. When it's now time for stepping into streams.
The data feed of my consciousness is often riddled with sensory perceptions of extreme pain as the hours of training go on. In the midst of racing the last place you want to inhabit is the now. You stretch your mind to that cold beer after the race. Or, as things really begin to become agitated in my brainwaves I want to be anywhere, than 'here'. You want to be anywhen but now.
I'm coming to realize that you've stopped racing for intrinsic purposes at this moment, or should I say, this non-moment. You have been affected into a state of being other than what you are, which, in this case, is racing. What you are doing, then, at that time. That present.
If you are not inhabiting the race moment, what are you doing? I don't know. Probably whatever it was that I was doing for the last 7 years.
And that is striving for results. Calculating. Looking at things through a lens of pros and cons. Becoming benchmarks - not the transitions between them. In fact, I wasn't becoming because I wasn't even there. I wasn't.
It's all the past now, anyway. And I'll let the disillusionment slip aside when I side-step the obstacle of then and focus on now. Now now.
All the pain, and fire in my legs. The delirium of now in mile 50 or 50.01. The moment that I couldn't possibly want extended indefinitely in the present I hope to, one day, welcome as the manifestation of a goal that was never a goal. Something that was nothing but a signal that I was moving in the right direction.
Great, you started measuring your sweat rates and are running your long run impaled with a rectal thermometer that measures your core temperature. I’m very interested in hearing about the experience – just keep the data to yourself.
Let’s be honest. I don’t care about how many miles you ran today and what your heart rate was on the various gradients. Yes, you can link me on Facebook to your uploaded data from your Garman 405 and I can see a Google map with all your biological stats interwoven with your route’s topography. Exciting stuff!
But even as someone ‘really into’ what you’re doing, my eyes are glazing over. I actually skimmed the whole thing. OK, I’ll go a step further. I probably ignored it. So did all your friends and family. They’d rather you spend the time telling about your day. I promise.
Personally, I’m more interested in hearing about the thorn bush you fell into when you were in flight from a belligerent shih tzu. I’m more interested in hearing about your reflections upon the park benches reflecting in the river you ran beside.
I want to know why you were running. Maybe you were running your intervals at suicide intensity. Literally. That break-up you’re working your way through has been damaging and you thought if you ran hard enough your heart might explode. Take me there in your Tweets, status updates, and blog entrees. Don't give me time splits.
Now, this is coming from a data junky. For a whole year I recorded my heart rate and time split for every mile I ran. Sweat rates, calories consumed, watts powered, laps swam: you name it, I wrote it down.
What did it result in? I’ve got a couple large computer files of stupid ass numbers. Really, that’s all I have. Yes, times and heart rates lowered while performance increased. Whoop-ti-freakin'-do.
But is this the narrative of my life? I hope not.
Now I write about how Death Cab For Cuties’ What Sara Said can move you to tears as you hit the two-hour mark in Jockey Hollow during a Morristown autumn. Now I record how my fatigue after a high volume workout made me put my hot cup of coffee into the refrigerator and take a gallon of milk to my office desk. Now I document the stranger I met on a trail who looked like what Emerson would look like if he wore short shorts and compression socks; or the collection of bucks I nearly crashed into at 50mph on a blind corner on a cycling descent where I was out too late because of a flat.
Now I write about my methodical deductions regarding as to if I prefer diet Pepsi or diet Coke or why I insist on using the phrase ‘soft drink’ to denote soda. I just note the setting such an internal dialogue. It was actually dominating my mind in 2003 during the 4 hours I was approaching Aberdeen, South Dakota while riding from Oregon to NJ. I wrote it all down in a post card in some crazy strange laundry mat with the worst off yellow colored machines.
My point is that our energy is on the wrong aspect of recording our training. If you are a busy athlete managing a job, family, chores, and basic life necessities on top of training, you don’t have time to write down methodical data after all your training.
Lance Armstrong has a nice GPS system on his bike that shoots all his vital stats of his ride to his coach Chris Carmichael. I’m pretty sure you don’t have that luxury.
So just keep a diary instead and focus on the things that make you love training. The numbers will work their way in, I promise.
The narrative of your journey is the essence of it. Every step of ‘now’ trumps the anxiety producing ‘what if’ or ‘when’.
Take it from someone who’s been there. I have a drawer full of awards of top finishes in triathlon and running. I never open it. I surely don’t go back and read my notebooks of data. You think certain friends' pictures of their trip to Disney World is boring? Imagine what you are doing in your discourse about the graphical representation of your lowering resting heart rate over a three month period.
I’m not paid enough to make winning my life. I’m not paid at all for racing, actually. And if you are reading this, neither are you, most likely. You’ve just fallen into the trap, maybe, that getting faster is a validation of becoming.
Instead now I’m opting to live my life through my training. I’m not training to invent my life. I promise you, if you don’t get your head straight, crossing that finish line in Kona might be your most hollow victory to date. It will just be another number in your notebook and another thing checked off on your way to the next unfulfilling conquest. Another life dampening been there, done that.
The essence of every finish line should be in each and every nowness of training and racing.
Destroy the duality of who you are and who you should be. Make a oneness of who you are and what you are doing. Continually find yourself where you happen to be.
I’m trying this. And, as a consequence I just might be getting faster and my fitness improving. But I’m not focusing on that. That’s ancillary to my focus.
When you lay off the science are you risking burnout and injury? Are you jeopardizing peak performance?
I’m sure you are. Frankly, I’ve forsaken peak performance for peak living. The burnout makes for a better plot! Maybe I’ll finally breakthrough what was unbreakable. Maybe I’ll just break. I’ll take that. Or maybe, I’ll just keep doing my think with ear-to-ear grin.
And this doesn’t mean you need a philosophical justification for your running or racing. Just keep doing what you are doing and loving it. Your justification is irrelevant. What is relevant is your story that I hope to hear sans heart rates and rectal thermometer readouts.
Don’t be afraid of losing or slowing down. You just might catch your breath enough to capture a glimpse of who the hell it is that is actually pushing forward at breakneck speed, leaving life in the wake of a distorted landscape. You’re so much more than numbers. Your friends and family know that. Do you? Better catch on before you alienate them even more.
This is coming from a man whose senior thesis in college was: The Quantitative Self: Its Relevance to a New Ethics.
I burned my training logs, so to speak. And I’m becoming more than an unopened drawer of finishing medals that will have stories to tell, now that I’m ready to listen.
I always get the same response when I describe to someone what I'm doing in Vermont.
"Ummm, you mean, uhh, like in Rocky IV?" (I'm from Jersey so please imagine the vocal inflections.)
And all I can respond is, "Kinda, yeah."
Every day now I'm training by moving piles of rocks around. I'm carrying backpacks of lumber up 1000' ft climbs to a mountain's summit. I'm running through waist deep snow. I chop wood with a big ax. I go running along frozen roads and rivers. I grew a beard. I LIVE IN A BARN.
I actually begin to question the impact Rocky IV must have had on my subconscious when I was growing up. I mean, I did watch it every time it was on TBS. In fact, I watched the whole marathon every time it was on. I had it on VHS, too.
I distinctly remember being 6 or 7 years old and taking a pair of old clunky roller skates that were the heaviest thing around and doing bicep curls with them. Afterwards, when my Mother asked if I wanted grilled cheese or Spaghetti O's for lunch I replied, "I'd like steak!"
(Aside: And does it mean that I'm old that I can remember a time when it was OK to hate Russians. You were supposed, too! I mean, Sly had to make Rambo IV all about Cambodia, leaving his Russian fetish aside after Rambo II and Rambo III.)
For those of you who are not a male between the ages of 20-65 this might help explain what I'm talking about. If you are a male between the ages of 20-65, enjoy!
Ok, now that we're all fired up, let me get to my point. I know, I know...at this moment you are downloading Hearts on Fire and are getting ready to go run...
Anyway, the juxtaposition of training methods is truly the embodiment of the difference between training for Ironman and training for Ultra Distance races. Particularly the Death Race which I'm signed up for in June.
I've done 5 Ironman competitions including Kona.
Now I will come out and say that in terms of functional fitness I was not the greatest as an Ironman. Many are, I'm sure, but I was not. I could swim, bike, and run like an animal. Ask me to move a couch or help you nail sheetrock to a ceiling and I was helpless. I wouldn't even try, actually, because I'd be risking injury. I'd be all, like, well if I didn't have to get to my masters swim class right now and eat my chia seeds I'd be there for you, but you know how Ironman training is...
Excelling at Ironman was about specificity. You had a rigid program and if you stuck to it you had a damn good chance of succeeding. Any of the 700 books on doing an Ironman will get you to the finish line. Be diligent and you'll crack 12 hrs. Train hard and you'll be under eleven. Make it a lifestyle and you might beat the 10 hr mark. (Full disclosure: I've never cracked 10.)
And with all these 700 said books there is one thing that is definitely out of the equation: guesswork.
When I was an Ironman I had every workout planned 6 months in advance and every race charted two years out. I counted calories burned and consumed. I engineered each workout in terms of duration, intensity, and frequency.
I love Ironman. I always will. It is the greatest popular endurance sport. Period! It's full of passion, glory, commitment, drama, and humanity. It's awesome.
But now I'm trying something different.
Training for things like 100 mile snowshoes and 100 mile trail runs don't fall into this guesswork-less category easily. The Spartan Death Race absolutely does not. In these you just need to be rugged strong, intense, determined, and crazy.
Yes, yes, yes, you have to be all those to be a great Ironman, too, I know.
My point is you have to throw out the old training manual with the crossover. This is what I found out. Being a pretty elite Ironman does not make me even an average ultra distance athlete. Folks, Ironman is short! I'm going to say it. People are out there running 250 miles at a clip. They ride their bikes across America in 8 days, on 90 minutes sleep a night! My boss snowshoed the Iditarod without tent of shelter in -30 degree weather. People die out there with freaking dog teams.
This doesn't mean it's tougher, it's just different. In all aspects.
And thus, we come to Rocky and Ivan. Here they went head to head and rocky came out on top.
Who would win between an Ironman and an ultra distance athlete or Death Racer?
Who knows, it be a disaster unless one of them knew how to box! The Ironman would win at Triathlon, the ultra runner would win the 100 milers, and the Death Racer would finish the Death Race. Not rocket science.
What will be interesting, tho, is how I perform at an Ironman this year while training for ultra distance and the Death Race.
Here we can return to Rocky IV. I'm using a 100 mile ultra run as prep for an Ironman two weeks prior to IM TX. Very non-traditional. Ballsy? Yes. Stupid? Probably. Fatal? But doesn't Rocky teach us to pull for the underdog, and that his 'heart on fire' will pull him through?
As an Ironman I used to try and be Ivan. Now I'm good old Sly each and every day.
Pittsfield, VT. You can count my sit-ups while I hang from the rafters!
