To Live Forever

I watched an interesting movie called "The Devil's Climb." In it, two professional rock climbers scale five impassable summits in twelve hours after completing a 2,000-mile bike ride to base camp. Are these guys badasses, or what. 

One of the climbers happened to be 45 years old. Guess who is also 45 years old. 

It goes without saying that I am nowhere near the athlete that these two guys are. That said, I have never really stopped pushing myself. I've lost a lot of running speed since my early twenties, but I've never stopped pushing. Every week, I get two tempo workouts in, or a tempo workout and a speed workout, in addition to a full week of endurance runs and a long run or a long bike ride. This is serious training for most people.

In fact, when I talk about training with most people my age, the way they speak about it is in terms of what they used to do. Back then, they would train hard. Now, they don't. The reasons are varied, but always unsatisfying. They don't have time. They just stopped doing it for a while and need to get back into it. And this is the minority of people who once trained like I do. The overwhelming majority of people my age never trained like this. At best, some of them want to lose weight and are thinking about going to the gym or getting out for a daily walk. 

I exist in what feels like a completely different world. Not only do I still run hard, and bike hard, daily, but I also do strength training, box jumps, hiking, take my kids on excursions that will build memories for them. There will come a day when I have to stop doing things like this, but I don't ever want that day to come. I love to move my body. I love experiencing the health that I have. I love being able to take my shirt off at the beach and not feel self-conscious. I love knowing that I will wake up tomorrow without a hangover, and without the aches and pains that plague so many of my peers. They laugh at how much time I spend exercising. They have always laughed at how much time I spend exercising. But look what it gets me.

In addition to looking and feeling good, I've seen some amazing places in nature, places that one can only ever see from the seat of a bicycle or from the vantage point of a pair of running shoes. I can't even really describe these sites; mountain peaks, hidden waterfalls, corners of the desert, hieroglyphics, ancient ruins, fossils, mountain springs, so many plants and animals. These are all things most people never get to see. I'm so fortunate to have seen them, and so happy that I had the good health and drive to be able to see them.

At 45 years old, people still refere to me as "young man." I show my I.D. card when buying alcohol, and the cashiers look at me with incredulity. They can't believe I'm as old as I am. Sometimes I can't believe it, either.

I'm realistic. Within a very short period of time, the grey will overtake my head of hair, the wrinkles will get so deep as to be impossible to ignore, my speed will evaporate, and I will become just one more uncool old man in spandex, a laughing stock for the younger generations who see an old fool experiencing a midlife crisis. 

I don't know what I'll feel on that day, but the closer it gets, the more I start to believe that I will feel the same happiness, satisfaction, and sense of fulfillment that I feel today. Good health and physical fitness is such a wonderful blessing. It's worth tenfold the effort you put into it. Beauty fades and coolness, if you ever get to experience it, is fleeting. But the strength of your own two feet driving you forward, or your own two hands driving you upward to the summit of a mountain is something that can never be taken away from you.

Go running, folks. Get a bike. Go to a climbing gym. Do your pull-ups and push-ups. Wake up early and eat your vegetables. It's worth it, I promise.

Blogging Is A Good Habit

Because I have comments enabled on my blog, and because no one actually communicates with each other as real people anymore, I occasionally receive emails notifying me that a spam bot has left a comment on my blog. I don't bother to delete these comments because, who knows, perhaps they somehow drive traffic to me on their way to driving traffic to whatever it is they're selling. (I have no idea what they're selling, because I don't click the links in their comments.)

Against my better judgement, I do still read all the comments I get here, so feel free to post one any time you're moved to communicate to a real person. I'm here, I'm paying attention. It seems crazy, I know, but it's true. 

I take that back. It doesn't seem crazy, it seems antiquated. Remember back at the Turn of the Century, when people wrote blog posts and others commented? Remember when communication was still relatively fun, still something people looked for opportunities to do? Remember when social media wasn't always some combination of broken and infuriating? Or do things just seem better in hindsight.

Anyway, when I receive these spam-bot comments, I sometimes click through to the old blog post upon which they appear and re-read what I wrote. It's a trip down memory lane. Sometimes I've written about something that was going on in my life; sometimes it's just a thought I had; sometimes it's a diatribe. In short, it's a collection of thoughts I really had on real days of my life that I really decided to write about. Reading it back again is actually quite nice. I seldom read a post and think to myself, "Oh God, I was such an asshole/idiot/whatever." It's encouraging to know that the things I spent some time thinking about in the past produced good thoughts that I generally still agree with. 

I'd say I've never kept a journal, but I suppose this is it. I've finally discovered what generations of my forefathers had known: journalling is a worthwhile activity. Indeed, blogging is a good habit. 

Over the years, I've fallen out of practice. Immersed in a daily commitment to blogging can be a little stressful, especially as it was in the early days, when people actually read my blog and responded. I felt a responsibility to write to my audience and provide them with something worth reading. But stress wasn't the only reason I stopped blogging. Like many other former bloggers, I sometimes had the sense that there wasn't any point, that I had "said it all before" and didn't want to repeat myself. And of course, all the other bloggers who actually made money doing this moved on to Medium and then to Substack and now, I can't believe it, people pay a monthly subscription to read stuff like this. And then they use AI graphics and post their stuff on X and it's this whole marketing thing for them. 

When I go back and read someone else's blog, I seldom feel as good about their old blog posts as I feel about mine. That's not a criticism; there's nothing wrong with their posts. I think it speaks to their motivation and authenticity, though. David Henderson's blog never gets old. He writes authentically. But Slate Star Codex guy's posts are stale within a week of having been written. Clearly these two example bloggers are writing different kinds of posts for different reasons.

And then there's me, writing for a third reason, which is mostly that I just like it. There are other potential benefits, such as having a record of my personality for posterity, assuming this blog doesn't end up getting deleted at some point. Writing advice to my kids for when they need to read it and I'm not there to say it to them. I've written about all that before.

Well, anyway, I hope I re-develop the blogging habit. It's good. It's productive for me. I think I'll try to keep it going. 

In closing, I'd like to set down a list of things that have happened to me that readers of this blog may not have been aware of, given that I've been quite out of touch for a while. Here it is:

• My band released an album. Listen to it here and elsewhere.
• I converted to Orthodox Christianity. Long story. Maybe I'll write about it some time.
• I started learning Greek - not really related to the Orthodox thing, but kind of.
• I'm still running and riding bikes like a fiend, so that's not really an update.
• For some reason, I can't think of anything else right now. I'll blog about things as I go.

Anyway, here's hoping I can reestablish this great habit.