Don't Make Your Hard Days Too Hard

A common refrain in the running and cycling communities these days is, "Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy." Is that good advice? It depends.

It's good advice if you're prone to making the mistake a lot of (especially young) athletes make: keeping too high a pace on your easy days. If, for example, you're supposed to do an easy run on Wednesday between speed and tempo days on Tuesday and Thursday, then that easy run should be kept at a low and very comfortable pace to avoid over-working your muscles. The two risks here are 1) injury from over-training, and 2) tiring your muscles out so much that you can't capitalize on the benefits of your harder training days. 

Point 2) is especially important, because getting faster or better at running or cycling depends on your ability to push really hard during your most difficult training sessions. You're less likely to improve your top speed if you're only ever giving it 75% of your effort. When training, you have to go into the red sometimes. What happens with some athletes is that they don't give themselves ample recovery on their easy days, so their muscles are still tired on Thursday from what they did on Tuesday, and thus they can't push themselves as hard on Thursday as they need to in order to improve.

That's the idea. Unfortunately these days, the "keep your hard days hard" crowd has taken that even further in saying that we should do our hard workouts and our strength training all on our hard days, and do only easy runs and yoga on our easy days. 

The problem with this new point of view is that the human body only has so much energy and ATP and all the rest of it; trying to pack seven different workouts into a single day is still going to subject your body to the same problem described in my Point 2) above. If you blast all your muscles with a hard weight training workout, you won't have as much energy to push hard during your sprint workout or tempo intervals. Also, vice-versa: it's hard to get much hypertrophy going on in your strength workout if you've already tapped your muscles with a hard workout on the bicycle. 

The solution is simple and obvious: weight train on easy days. The reason this works is because your easy run or ride will not really tax your muscles much, so you can afford to push during your strength training, knowing that it won't compromise the integrity of your run (and vice-versa). Moreover, working your core and/or your upper body on today's off day will still give your muscles ample recovery time for tomorrow's speed workout. You'll have about 24 hours to replenish your muscular glycogen, and your core and upper body are primarily playing supporting roles in your running and cycling training.

Naturally, this all assumes that you're training all things on an ongoing basis. As a middle-aged man, that works for me. I'm not training to win anything. If you're training to win something, though, then you're likely better off following a more traditional training cycle, in which you spend some time building muscle mass, then build your endurance base, then do some targeted speed work in support of your goal event, and then go through a period of rest and cross-training. But this is a full year-long training cycle, and if you're the kind of person who needs to do that, you probably already know and didn't need to read it on my blog. 😉

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.

Get In Shape / Help Me Get Points

Tony Horton is creating a new workout program along the lines of his previous programs, the world-famous P90X series (X1, X2, and X3). I've been doing the various X programs for years now, and I find them the perfect compliment to running. Running rapidly depletes upper-body mass, which can result in weak back and core muscles. That, in turn, can create the kinds of muscle imbalances that lead to running-related injury. I started doing Tony Horton's workouts after suffering a pretty big back injury, and simply stated, they nursed me back to health. I haven't been significantly injured since.

So, needless to say, I'm a huge fan of Tony Horton's workout philosophy, and his programs, and I'm a passionate believer in his training approach. Am I interested in the new program he's developing? You bet I am!

Somehow I ended up with a referral link that gives me "points" if people click on it and sign up. If you're looking for a new workout program, why not be part of Tony Horton's beta testing group for his new program? If you're interested, and don't mind giving me a few "points," whatever they're worth, click here right now and sign up for the email list.

Thanks!

The Fountain Of Youth

It's hard to write a post like this without either bragging or sneering, but I assure you, I am doing neither.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the grocery store. I opted to use the self checkout kiosks, but because I was buying wine, a store clerk had to come check my ID. When she saw my date of birth, she said, "Oh my god!" I asked her what was the problem, and she said, nothing, only that she was surprised that I was as old as I was. "I would have believed '89." In truth, she had thought that was more than ten years younger than I really am. In other words, she thought I was in my twenties.

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon in a local park. The park has a short trail down to what passes for a "waterfall" in flat Texas prairie country. It's a nice, short hike, and somewhat steep in parts. My GPS watch had it that the whole thing was 0.88 miles round trip. I checked it when we arrived at the waterfall itself, and it read 0.36. As you can see, this is not much of a "hike," but much more of a short walk down the hill and back up.

To be sure, it was hot outside, and the path is steep in some places, requiring us to choose our steps carefully in order to make it back up. But a 0.4 mile walk up the hill can only be so gruelling. I'd call it pretty much nothing.

So, I was surprised when I noticed that a solid majority of the other people in the park that day came up the hill panting and gasping for air, plopping themselves down in the nearest shady spot to catch some oxygen. I mean, they were really out of it. By all appearances, they looked as though they had just finished an 8-mile tempo run or something.

Later in the day, I went for a run. It was very hot outside, so I was running shirtless, with my hair pulled back under a bandana, and a pair of sunglasses on. As I crossed the street at one busy intersection, someone from a passing car called out a question to me: "Hey! How old are you?" I didn't have the impression that they thought I was extremely old. I didn't have a chance to answer, because I was running fast and in the opposite direction of the passing car, but I smiled to myself as I thought about what that person would think if they knew I was 40 years old.

A few years back, I was doing box jumps at the gym. A twenty-something fellow gym-goer came up to me between sets and told me, "I hope I can do stuff like that when I'm your age!"

"It's use it or lose it," I told him. "The only reason I can do this is because I won't stop."

Like I said at the outset of this post, I'm not saying this to brag about myself or to criticize other people. I take all of these situations -- and the many more I could list -- not as evidence of my great fittness, but rather evidence of how far people will let themselves go.

Ten years ago, I used to be amazed by the fact that most people my age had no idea what their own bodies were capable of; that most of them had no idea what their own bodies were supposed to look like, because they had never taken the time to get in really good shape. The human body performs differently, and of course looks differently, when it's fit. Overweight people, people with "dad bods," skeletal waifs, and the like have really never experienced things like agility, being sure on their feet, being able to lift heavy things with confidence and carry them across the room or something. And they don't know what their own bodies would look like if they did.

But nowadays, I don't really think about that anymore. Nowadays, I am struck by how much faster most people are aging than I am. I watch as friends and acquaintences slowly put on more and more weight, unable to tame their cravings or counteract them with physical activity. I watch as even young people give up on sports and fitness, except the few who go to the gym, mostly to look sexy, attract a mate, get married, and then ultimately do what they had planned on doing all along: let themselves go. I hear people talk about their aches and pains, their inability or unwillingness to walk any short distance, their struggle with having to climb a few flights of stairs.

It's the practical problems they all have that make the biggest impression on me. The atrophy of their bodies has made even the simplest aspects of life difficult. Small wonder so many of them drive their cars even when they're only going to the park a block away. Small wonder they all seem to be aging so much faster than me.

I spend a lot of time in the sun, and I have a chronic disease that is aging my body at an accelerated rate. It should be I who looks older than others. But I don't, and my best guess is because I have always adhered to the adage of "use it or lose it."

The fountain of youth is real. It is simply the act of sticking with a good diet and a high level of physical activity throughout your life. Don't stop. Don't let yourself go. Don't put on 15, 20, 50, 100... pounds and then turn around one day and realize that you look 40 or older when you're really 30 or younger. Keep yourself healthy, well into old age. Use it or lose it.

The Incrementalist's Mannifesto

Last night, I bought a book that I hope to review on this blog sometime soon. It's called Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code, and its author is Zed A. Shaw.

I didn't go into the bookstore looking for a book on Python. I went because we found a bunch of gift cards lying around that we wanted to use up before they expired. When I got to the bookstore, I decided that what I wanted was a book that taught me some kind of practical skill. I seldom have time to read these days, and if I'm going to read anything at all, I'd like it to be something useful, rather than just some excuse to pass the time. (I have many other, more interesting ways to pass my time than reading.) Maybe I could learn how to draw, I thought to myself, as I perused the arts section. Maybe I could find a book on classical or flamenco guitar technique, I thought to myself, as I perused the music section. Maybe I could find a cookbook that could teach me to expand my cooking repertoire, I thought, as I perused the food section...

I found no such books in any section, because all of the books that potentially could teach me such things are written all wrong. I don't want to sit and read for two hours, taking notes, studying supplemental information, and committing concepts to memory. If I were going to do all that, I'd just enroll in a class. I don't have time for all of that. What I need is a way to learn a new skill through short, concentrated, daily practice. That's how we learn musical instruments. That's how we learn languages. That's how we train our bodies. New skills should work the same way.

So, I was slightly encouraged when I arrived at the Technology section and found a variety of programming books in which coding is taught through the use of short projects and case studies. That seemed like something I could work with. Python is also heavily utilized in my career industry, so this wouldn't merely be a practical skill, but also a professional one. I was narrowing down my search.

What sold me on Learn Python the Hard Way was looking at the Table of Contents: The book is organized into a series of coding exercises. I browsed the book's Introduction, and was pleased to discover that the book was written using the Direction Instruction teaching method. Direct Instruction is the method we used to teach our daughter how to read, and it's the preferred teaching method in all the best schools. The reason is because it really works. It breaks a subject down into small sequential lessons in which each lesson builds incrementally upon the one preceding it. By the end of a full set of lessons, students tend to absorb material better and retain it for longer than any other teaching method. Direct Instruction can be a little boring, and the first lessons are often the most difficult -- hence the name "...the Hard Way." But if one persists in this kind of instruction, one stands to gain more than any other competing instructional technique.

So here we have small, incremental changes that add up to major successes in the long run. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because I've blogged about it before. In fact, I write about it all the time. The other day, I wrote about how I was using this approach to modify my current running regimen. More to the point, I wrote a blog post six years ago entitled "Incremental Fitness," that quickly laid out the general idea. The truth is, over the years, I've discovered that the absolute best way to improve your fitness is to stick to a fundamentally sound routine while making small changes to it week-by-week or month-by-month. This ensures that the body has enough time to adapt to new exercises and improve upon them, without ever gaining so much efficiency that fitness improvement is sacrificed to mastery of technique.

Then there's music. I've been keen to improve my guitar technique. I'm pretty fast, but I'm not the kind of player I'd like to be. I'm not the kind of player who can take an interesting passage or lick and play it comfortably with tone and feeling as soon as I think it up. I stumble through a lot of what I want to play. I play well enough to impress laypeople, but not enough to impress fellow players. I want to change that. To that end, I picked up a book recommended by Dweezil Zappa (I think), called Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson. Again, the idea here is very simple: One lick per day, every day, for 365 consecutive days. The licks increase in difficulty week by week until, by the end of a year's time, one will have hopefully improved his playing dramatically. Best of all, the time commitment to these practice sessions is minimal. I can work my way through each lick a number of times and still have a little time left over to practice or write my own material. All the while, I'm becoming a better player, day by day.

I've applied the incremental approach to personal finance, stowing away daily, weekly, and monthly amounts of money, based on certain criteria, and funnelling that money into a diversified set of savings and investment instruments. I also stopped buying things that I wanted outright, and instead created a dedicated account for my own personal entertainment expenses. This account grows by a miniscule amount, but it grows every day, and within just a few short weeks it was easy to learn the fundamental lesson here: It doesn't take very much money to add up quickly if you save it consistently.

You don't have to clean every room in your house on "chore day." All you really need to do is commit to spending just five minutes cleaning the house each day. That will add up, and if it doesn't solve your clutter problem, add a sixth minute. Big deal. I don't know what the magic number is for you; maybe it's seven, eight, ten, or fifteen minutes. Whatever it is, it's a small and doable number for you to use to incrementally clean your home, rather than relying on a large and unpleasant house-cleaning project.

Again and again, the lesson presents itself in every conceivable context. If you want your life to get a lot better, don't try to work through a major catharsis. Forget about "new year, new you" and all such nonsense. What works better than anything is to simply identify one small thing that can be slightly improved, make a tiny (but permanent) change to that one thing, and then continue on about your day. Changes like this, made consistently over time, will eventually result in your whole life being better.

I call this approach Incrementalism. It's not a revolutionary idea, and I'm not the first person to have thought of it. But it does have the power to revolutionize your life, and if reading about it here gives you an idea to improve your situation in some small way, that's a good thing. 

Training Changes: Start Small

As I wrote last time, I'm in need of some changes to my exercise regimen.

One thing that has helped me a lot in other aspects of my life is, once having identified a problem, to make small and incremental changes, one by one, until I arrive at a desired result. I find it easier to adjust to new things if I don't have a lot to adjust to. That is, it's much easier to turn your life around one step at a time than it is to become a completely different person overnight. At least, it's easier for me.

With that in mind, I started thinking about what kind of changes I wanted to make to my exercise regimen, and what kind of goals I wanted to pursue. Regarding goals, I arrived at the following:

• I want to condition my body to run at faster paces. Over the past three months or so, it's become obvious that running under 6:00/mile pace during interval training -- and probably also shorter races -- is not just feasible, but entirely appropriate. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to cranking out 400's in 75 seconds maximum again, but doing so in under 90 seconds has not been that big a deal for me lately. So, I should embrace that. And, in time, I should seek to dial it down to as fast as possible. With fitness, it's use-it-or-lose-it, and I'm not ready to accept an average pace of 7:00/mile for the rest of my life. I still have a little speed left in me.
• I do not want to fixate on long races. Marathons and half marathons are fun, no doubt about it. But they also involve a lot of running-for-the-sake-of-running (during training runs) that starts to feel a little mindless to me after a while. I want all of my workouts to serve a productive purpose, I want to dedicate my concentration to that purpose, and I want to achieve that purpose as I run. Then I want to take a shower and go on about my day. Realistically speaking, it's not hard for me to go out and run 13.1 miles whenever I want to. So I don't really need to train for that.
• I want enough flexibility in my training that I don't feel FOMO for missing a day of running. As I've started to ramp-up my miles, I've noticed a tendency to feel really bad if I miss a day. Not guilty, just... bad. Bad, as though if I don't do at least 8 miles in a day, then I'm going to lose all of my fitness. That's obviously nonsense, but it's hard not to feel that way when you run 8 miles or more every single day and then have to miss a day or two because you're traveling. I can fix this problem by planning a training regimen that is less tied to daily mileage and more focused on -- as I mentioned about -- purpose.

With these goals in mind, I think I am going to return to a training plan that worked well for me during my last year or so in Ottawa. Lately I've been running two fast days per week (T and Th), a long run (S), and a lot of long, slow miles. Instead of that, I'll run two fast days per week (M and W), plus one plyometric workout per week (F), plus recovery days and a long day if I feel like it.

This arrangement will satisfy my first goal by maintaining my current speed workout regimen, while adding a day dedicated to explosive power, which is also a way to increase footspeed.

I'll satisfy my second goal by giving the long, slow miles a bit of a rest. I anticipate that I'll still be doing a lot of those 8-9 mile recovery runs, but with an added plyometrics day, that will be at least one fewer of these runs, and may require a shorter recovery run on Saturday.

I'll satisfy my third goal by dedicating one day per week to a non-running workout, plus potentially allowing myself to cross-train on the various recovery days. I'd rather run than do something else, but by formally giving myself permission to not run, I'll hopefully avoid the pitfalls of feeling as though my fitness is decreasing if my recovery run is 6 miles instead of 8 or, god forbid, it's a bicycle workout instead of a run.

It's a small change, but one that I think will make a good difference for me as I head into the last two months of winter training. Wish me luck.

A Year In Training

This past year, I have trained harder as a runner than I have in years. Part of this was because I wanted to try out the training features of my GPS watch, but once I started training as hard as the schedule was asking me to, I found that I wanted to keep up with it. I started hitting sub-6:00/mile pace work, got back to running long-runs in distances exceeding 15 miles, and easily achieved my mileage goal for the year (1,600 miles) with months to spare.

When December rolled around, as I was trying to push my mileage ever-upward and perhaps do a 20-mile long run for the first time in over a decade, I started feeling some aches and pains in my legs and feet that wouldn't go away. So, I made the decision to rest for a full week. No running, minimal anything else. I did do some strength training to manage my blood sugar, but I concentrated solely on my upper body to ensure that my leg muscles were fully rested.

When I got back to running the following week, I still felt good, but my desire to keep driving myself so hard started to wane. Part of this is natural -- it's getting cold out there, and I hate running in very cold weather. But most of it is, I suspect, a challenge associated with training hard. Unless you have a reason (e.g. a professional reason) to train like a college athlete, it's hard to keep yourself motivated to do that kind of training for twelve solid months (or more).

I love to train. I love it more than racing. I like doing challenging interval workouts, I like pushing myself to see how hard I can go. Training is "my jam." Training is also repetitive, difficult, and physically uncomfortable. It's natural that, after a solid year of pushing, one would start to lose some intrinsic motivation to push, push, push.

Usually, this calls for something new. Time to take on another round of P90X? Time to train for a different kind of race? Time to try to do X, Y, or Z? I definitely need to freshen up my fitness routine, but none of the usual options seem very appealing to me right now. I've enjoyed become a lot more of a runner again. I've enjoyed slimming down, doing form exercises and speed work, hitting fast paces, and looking and feeling like my old distance-running self. I've also enjoyed the increased blood sugar control that comes with that.

It's hard to keep pushing toward the same thing, but I also have a low level of interest in the other stuff. I need something new, something interesting, something motivating.

Suggestions welcome.

The Old Days Versus These Days

Running in the Icelandic summer weather was almost pure bliss. This summer's exceptionally high humidity and seasonal heat made training in Texas a real struggle. My pace times decreased by a minute per mile, speed work was practically out of the question, and anything longer than a five-mile run was a chore. By the time I hit the roads and walking paths around the suburbs of Reykjavik, I was ready for anything cooler than 95 degrees. The pleasant high-60s, combined with the coastal winds and the cool cloud cover, were like a barrier had been lifted from in front of me. Quite literally overnight, I was running ten or more miles at per-mile paces in the low 6:30s.

In was not particularly surprising, then, that when cooler weather finally found its way to Texas in the Fall, my paces and distances improved accordingly. For example, I went for a 13-mile long run and very nearly set a new personal best half-marathon time. I built my long runs up to 14, 15, 16... even 18 miles. (No 20-mile long runs yet, but it's not a fitness challenge so much as it is a diabetic-logistic challenge.) This was very encouraging.

So encouraging was it that I soon found myself running as much as ten miles during a weekday run and up to eighteen miles on the weekend. That included two speed workouts per week. And recently, I even add form drills to my repertoire. It felt great.

Still, one can only train so hard for so long. I started training for a half marathon in February, and without exception I have been training like a relatively serious runner every week since then, taking time off only for illness or heavily extenuating circumstances. Now heading into December and my tenth consecutive month of hard training, my body is starting to feel the strain, in the form of little aches and pains, whispers of shin splints, muscle shortening, sore feet, and an overall lack of confidence during movements that require balance.

In the old days, I would have simply powered through all this. The pain means the training is doing its job. I would have doubled-down, running perhaps more miles and looking for ways to add even more time to my workouts. That was then, this is now.

Today, I need to figure out how to become a stronger runner without compromising a pretty good running streak. Not only that, I've discovered that no other activity gives me better control of my blood glucose levels than running, which means that whatever time I spend on other activities may ultimately come at the cost of better blood sugar control. Even so, what I'm doing isn't sustainable. My body is getting tired, and I'm starting to detect evidence of muscle imbalances which could cause injuries if they're not corrected.

As much as it disappoints me to have to say so, I might need to replace some of this running with strength training, to rehabilitate my muscle imbalances and allow my running muscles to rest and reset. 

On Not Going Through The Motions

Here's a comment I left at Marginal Revolution: 

Right, just like reading a book confers no knowledge. You have to do more than just get through the book. You have to pay attention to what it says and think about it. Same deal with exercise. I know people who have been running 10-minute miles for 30 years. Imagine running for 30 years and never once breaking a 6-minute mile. They're putting in the time, but not mindfully. 

Now, the wrong conclusion to draw from that is "Exercise doesn't help most people." The right conclusion to draw is, "Don't just go through the motions when you're living your life. Do things deliberately." But do you think the average person even wants to become aware of the difference? Inevitability is the mental inertia that drives all other psychological defense mechanisms.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to re-blog this comment... 

If I had a nickel for every time someone said to be, "But Ryan, not everyone wants to be a fast runner!" I would be a multi-millionaire. This level of whining has always missed the point. I'd like to take a moment to explain why.

I know people who have cooked almost every single day of their adult lives, but who have never put forth any effort into becoming a better cook. On one level, I understand this, because I usually have to cook dinner for everyone in my house, and that daily task quite often becomes a chore and a time-suck that I'd rather trade for the chance to practice my guitar for an hour or get a bonus workout in.

But on another level, I think it's crazy. How can you do something that you have to do pretty much every day of your life, and not make some minimal effort to turn it into a more pleasant task? How can you steam vegetables every day of your life, and never wonder what it might be like to saute something in garlic and olive oil for a change? One does not require a cooking class to sprinkle some rosemary on a sprig of broccoli.

It's not from a lack of talent, skill, or knowledge that people wind up in a situation in which they are completely incapable of substantive life-improvements. It's a mental block preventing them from making a change, and most likely a defense mechanism belying an unwillingness to change.

In order to make your life better -- better in any way whatsoever -- you have to identify a problem that needs to be solved, along with specific steps that will solve the problem.

If you date someone for another year and don't end up getting any closer to marrying that person, you're not dating them correctly. If you dedicate yourself to diet and exercise for a year and don't feel healthier, then you're not working out correctly, or you're not eating correctly. If you run every day and never get any faster, then you're not running correctly. If you study Spanish for a year and can't carry on a simple conversation with a Spanish-speaker, then you're not studying Spanish correctly.

This is not an attack on you. This is not my proclamation of moral or didactic superiority. This is a simple set of facts. If you engage in a skill that never improves, then you are not building that skill the right way. You are merely going through the motions.

But, you protest, why does it have to be about improvement? Why can't I just be happy with where I am? The simple answer is this: You can be, but you're just going through the motions.

Imagine being married for twenty years and you never get any better at pleasing your partner in bed. Wouldn't your partner have a legitimate grievance? Couldn't he or she say that you just go through the motions and never spend time on your partner's needs? Well, I'm here to tell you that everything is like that. Running, cooking, learning, parenting, being a better friend, whatever it is. Any skill that can be honed must be honed, and if you're not honing it, then you're going through the motions.

Is it bad to just go through the motions? Not necessarily. I'm not very good when it comes to playing Settlers of Catan, and I don't have any desire to be very good at it. When we play that game, I go through the motions, I enjoy it for what it is, and I leave it at that. One cannot hone every imaginable skill. One must prioritize.

But, if you're not prioritizing some of your skills, chores, relationships, or etc., then you're living your entire life by going through the motions. That's your right, but it won't make you happy in the long run.

Calisthenics At Work

Because I've been keener to run and bike lately, I haven't made time for P90X. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I have started to feel a little nostalgic for my P90X physique. I also follow Indian actor/former model/fitness ambassador Milind Soman on social media, and he is always doing some kind of calisthenics exercise. His fitness is readily apparent when you see his physique, too.

I'm in a really good place with my running and cycling right now, and I don't want to stop. It took me a good six months to get to where I am, and I don't want that to wither away as I change moods, switch gears, and go on another P90X binge. Now is not the time to get bored and start something new.

Instead, now is the time to learn from what I have done in the past and successfully incorporate it into my current training. This, after all, is the key to moving forward, rather than endlessly "beginning." P90X isn't the final word in fitness; after all, Tony Horton himself has come up with several programs since releasing P90X, and judging by his social media posts, it's unlikely that he follows any of his programs on a daily basis. Instead, he applies his knowledge to his own particular situation, and works progressively toward something based on that. This is also something that I've learned by reading Meb Keflizighi's book, 26 Marathons. After each major race, Keflizighi took a little time off to rest, and then jumped into a training again; not the same old thing, right where he left off, and certainly not something brand new. In fact, he cautions against completely revamping one's training regimen and suggests instead to stick to what works.

So, in the spirit of those examples and that advice, it's time to keep doing what's working for me in terms of running and cycling, while incorporating knowledge that I've acquired elsewhere. I've settled on what I think will be an interesting "fitness experiment."

I'm going to dedicate each weekday to a particular kind of calisthenic exercise. I started on Wednesday with "pushups day." I set a one-hour timer on my computer at work, and every time it gave me a notification, I dropped and did a set of pushups. It was great. I got a good pump and landed on something discreet and repeatable that will help me build muscle without taking too much of my time. Thursday is "wall press day," Friday is "pull-ups day" (I don't have a pull-up bar in the office, of course, but I can do pull-ups underneath a table. Ash Ravens suggested I dedicate a day to squats, so Monday is "squat day."

The only day I don't have something for is Tuesday. I don't want to have three leg days, so I'm looking for an arm or ab-based day. I suppose I could make it a plank day, but to be perfectly honest, running is such good ab exercise that it's almost unnecessary for me to do dedicated ab work, especially considering that push-ups are basically a plank combined with a chest-and-arms workout. One option is for Tuesday to be an anything-goes calisthenics day, where I mix it up and do as I feel. Wildcard day, perhaps. Arm circles day would be nice, but it's not very strenuous.

We shall see. 

Unhealthy Lifestyles Are Not A Matter Of Education

I recently read a click-baity article about the "top X number" healthiest vegetables. The main surprise about this list, other than the fact that I clicked on a such a time-waster in the first place, was that all of the vegetables listed were pretty much what everyone already buys at the grocery store. This wasn't a list comprised of kohlrabi and cactus pears. It was a list of carrots, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, and so on.

This raises the question of why we need an article that tells us to keep eating what we already eat. The cynical answer is, of course, "Har har, Ryan, the article wasn't meant to inform you about vegetables, but to keep you on the page long enough to increase the probability of generating ad revenue." Touche.

The less cynical answer is that most people - meaning, most Americans who eat food - already know how to eat a healthy diet, but fail to do it anyway. For a long time, we've been told by health educators that education is the key to getting Americans to improve their diets and their lifestyle. Articles like the one I read, paired with mere observation of Americans in their natural habitat, would seem to suggest otherwise. The so-called "fitness industry," too, is big on education. Read my free e-book, subscribe to my newsletter, watch my YouTube channel, see my tips for a healthier diet, etc., etc.

No, I don't think like of knowledge is the real problem here. Really, what we're talking about is a lack of self-control. Eventually, we all reach adulthood, obtain a disposable income, and come face-to-face with a doughnut shop. A few of us can ward-off temptation by eating a nutritious breakfast before we head out the door, but the majority of us - a statistical majority of Americans are obese - are simply left to wonder, "Why not?" Why shouldn't they spend their money on a doughnut? Why should they deprive themselves of something they genuinely enjoy, if they can afford to buy it, it tastes good, it makes them happy, and so on.

Only after confronting the reality of their own reflection  in the mirror, after years of not saying no, does anyone realize that there is a very good answer to the question of "why not." The answer is that years of acquiescence yields obesity, premature aging, and with them, a variety of other health problems.

I know many people, friends of mine, who are my age and who express envy of my position as a fit and healthy guy pushing forty. I'm a normal weight. My bio-markers are normal (well, except for the type 1 diabetes thing, but that's not a lifestyle choice). My energy levels are generally high. I look about ten years younger than I am, and I perform athletically much the same as my friends performed twenty years ago.

I'm not boasting, this is the physiological truth. And the best part is that it feels great being fit and healthy. All those who once boasted of the importance of living life to the fullest in their twenties, complete with all the boozing and drug use that entails, are now a little jealous that they feel so old. They take stock of their joint pains, their muscle aches, their sluggishness, the lack of "spring" in their steps, and they credit old age. But old age didn't get them here; poor diet and lifestyle choices did.

At forty, there is still plenty of time to reverse most of the negatives. With strict and deliberate diet and lifestyle changes, most people can recapture their energy levels and their good biomarkers, and many can also regain their youthful figures. A good diet can improve your complexion and the strength and sheen in your hair. Spending more time being active in the sunshine can give your hair great highlights, make your skin look better (but do use sunscreen), and give your body a much-needed boost of Vitamin D. Some people can even work themselves up to a level of athletic performance that far exceeds my own. All it takes is diet and exercise.

I'm not saying anything anyone doesn't already know, though. Everyone knows that skipping the burger, staying home and grilling some fish, eschewing the doughnuts, getting out for an hour or two of exercise ever single day, and so on, can drastically improve their lives for the better. But still, they don't do it. Just like they know eating broccoli will make them better off and they don't do it.

Ultimately, it all comes down to self-control, to the willingness to forego instant gratification for the sake of a better future. I have called this temperance across an extended cognitive time-horizon. You have to be the kind of person who is willing to get by with less. That's less doughnuts, less treats, less alcohol, less partying, less lying around, less TV. You have to be the kind of person who knows that less today means more tomorrow.

And it's interesting to me that this is a lesson that extends into so many different areas of life. As with health, so with financial gain. To be a millionaire in today's world really just means living well below your means and saving consistently. One doesn't really even have to save aggressively. Being a great musician means putting in 30 minutes of deliberate practice per day. Having a great yard really just means setting aside an hour a week to pull weeds and move a garden hose around. Having a great marriage means taking the time to make interactions with your partner positive rather than negative. Writing a book or two per year means writing a page or two per day. Think about it, that's nothing!

Ultimately, it's rather stunning what most people fail to accomplish in their lives when we consider that all any accomplishment really requires is small but consistent daily effort. So, no, it's not that we don't know how to accomplish any of this. It's that we know, and we still don't do it.

Tiny Steps Forward, Huge Steps Back?

For some people, I think there is value in completely eschewing alcohol. For most people, I think alcohol generally contributes positively to a person's quality of life. Social atmospheres and celebrations that involve alcohol consumption with food tend to bring people closer together, in my experience. It's not merely that alcohol is a "social lubricant." It's a social lubricant that tastes good and can enhance the sensory quality of a meal. Physiologically, alcohol can improve digestion and reduce the risk of certain kinds of cancer when it is consumed with meat, especially red meat. So it's natural that alcohol would enjoy its special place in the human social experience.

In terms of overall human health, however, alcohol does vastly more harm than good. Even as the aforementioned digestive aid, alcohol can be replaced by a vinegar-based marinade, and all of the benefits can be had without alcohol itself. As for resveratrol, the supposed miracle compound in red wine, the best research indicates that it is basically a placebo pill. Meanwhile, alcohol increases the risk of all sorts of cancers, most notably mouth and stomach cancers; it kills brain cells, dehydrates the drinker, promotes obesity, and increases triglycerides in the bloodstream, which then go on to further promote high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and obesity.

In short, alcohol is a slow poison whose only real benefits are social, not physical. And if I really wanted to make the case against alcohol, I'd dedicate this paragraph to discussing all the social detriments caused by alcohol, including death and maiming on the roadways, workplace accidents, rapes, assaults, addictions, domestic abuse, and so on.

The simple fact of the matter is, in light of objective cost-benefit analysis, the case against alcohol consumption is much stronger than the case for alcohol consumption.

Of course, one could easily say the same thing about french fries. Well, aside from the physical impairment alcohol causes, anyway, french fries do just as much physical damage, and their only redeeming qualities involve the decadent pleasure of consuming food that tastes good despite universally understood health detriments.

I bring up french fries here because I don't want the reader to make the mistake of believing that I'm against alcohol consumption. I'm not, nor am I against the consumption of french fries. Hilariously enough, I grew up in conservative Utah, where the consumption of alcohol was considered verboten and sinful, and yet giving oneself organ failure via frosting and bacon was not frowned upon at all. It's very interesting, the social mores that surround what is "acceptable" poison and what is "unacceptable poison."

As for most sane people with a modicum of self-regulation, there is no harm in drinking alcohol or eating french fries occasionally.

Yet, once again, I repeat: whether or not we're religious teetotallers, the case for drinking alcohol is extremely weak, objectively speaking.

So, if you're a person like me, always making micro-adjustments to your personal health regimen, experimenting with supplements and fine-tuning the fitness process in an effort to optimize your physical health to the greatest extent possible, eventually you have to ask yourself a question. If you're willing to spend $40 per month on nicotinamide riboside supplements because they might improve cellular health, if you're willing to subscribe to Strava Summit in order to gain access to deeper analytics on your athletic performance, if you're willing to spend hundreds of dollars on fancy shoes and workout clothes, subscribe to Beachbody On Demand, wake up early to cook a highly nutritious breakfast garnished with seeds and spices curated to optimize dietary health, if you're willing to switch from inexpensive turkey sausage to gourmet smoked salmon for breakfast because it's healthier, if you almost religiously consume fruits and vegetables at every meal, count calories to determine the ideal daily distribution, monitor your blood sugar virtually in real time, take brisk walks on your coffee breaks at work, time your water consumption, and so on, and so forth, et cetera, ad infinitum...

...If you're willing to do all of that, and yet still persist in drinking alcohol regularly, counteracting many of the benefits that drive all of your other health and fitness decisions, then that's a contradiction. It's an untenable contradiction. Alcohol is much more harmful than the marginal benefits of each of the other decisions I make about my own health every minute of every day.

And for that reason, I've reduced my alcohol consumption to a decided minimum. Why would I make a point to live so clean and so healthy, and then reverse all those positive decisions with beer?

For me, it makes little sense. Your life may be a little different, and so you might come to a different conclusion.

Creatine Update

A short while back, I posted briefly on creatine. Just to recap, my thinking was that most of the benefits that can be gained from creatine supplementation can be gained merely by increasing one's water consumption without taking creatine.

I had posted that I intended to stop taking creatine and just drink more water instead. So I did. For the past few weeks, I've been drinking no less than a liter of water between 7:00 AM and 11:00 AM, every day. (That's roughly between the time I arrive at work in the morning until the time I go to lunch.) In addition to that, I drink approximately 16 ounces of water at breakfast, along with another 16 ounces of water + milk in the form of two homemade cafe lattes. At lunch, I drink about 30 more ounces of water (just shy of another liter). I'll drink perhaps 12-24 ounces of water at dinner, and then throughout the evening, I'll have a cup of tea and another glass of water.

As you consider the above, please keep in mind that I live in a very hot and humid climate, and I work out 1-2 times per day. If a sedentary person in a more temperate climate were drinking this much water, I think it would make them sick. But for an active person living in Texas during the summertime, I believe this represents heightened, but reasonable, water intake.

Another thing I should mention is that I have significantly reduced the amount of alcohol I drink. Until recently, I've been having wine with dinner, and beer occasionally. Recently, I've eschewed alcohol unless I'm out socializing with friends. Reducing the amount of alcohol I drink also reduces the dehydrating effects of alcohol, therefore improving my body's overall hydration.

The result of all this additional hydration cannot be measured by "increased muscle mass," as is typically advertised on the label of a bottle of creatine, because I'm not a bodybuilder, and I'm not trying to increase my muscle mass. As a distance runner, however, my experience with creatine was that it helped my muscles feel fresh when it came time to do fast runs and speed workouts. (They felt fresh before any workout, really, but it was most noticeable during the most strenuous workouts.)

With that in mind, I'm pleased to report that my subjective experience with hydration in lieu of creatine supplementation is that, so long as I drink enough water, I can enjoy all the benefits of creatine without the actual creatine.

So, drink up, folks. All that additional water will likely help you feel every bit as good as you feel after a couple of weeks of creatine supplementation.

Creatine Versus Mere Hydration

Here's a quick post about creatine.

Last year, after reading about some studies that found creatine consumption to be safe for diabetics, I decided to give it a try. Long story short, I subjectively determined that creatine helped me feel fresher and better-able to do my workouts. So, I stuck with it.

What does creatine do? Well, in so many words, it helps muscles retain water so that they have more ready access to ATP, i.e. energy during exercise. Because these muscles have more energy at-the-ready, every time a person exercises, each round of exercise does more good than it would under a status quo scenario. How much more good? Well, studies tend to show that body-builders who use creatine are able to build about 6% more lean muscle mass than non-users, and that the gains are real. That is, the 6% more mass doesn't go away when you stop using creatine, it appears to be a real gain.

On the label of every package of creatine, you'll see that the directions indicate that anyone taking creatine should drink extra water. That got me thinking, "Drink extra water and take this harmless substance, and you will retain more water" sure sounds a lot like, "Combine this placebo with a diet and exercise regimen to lose weight." In the latter case, the placebo obviously isn't doing the work, it's the diet and exercise that is helping a person lose weight. So, what if the former case is analogous? That is, what if creatine is a harmless placebo that evinces users to drink more water? What if you can obtain the same benefits of creatine merely by drinking more water?

I put the question to my social circle, and no one seems to be aware of any creatine studies that specifically controlled for water consumption. Never mind the fact that such a study would be extremely difficult -- every two human bodies are different and thus have different hydration requirements, so how exactly could water consumption be held constant for the purposes of the study?

If my reasoning is correct, then, at least on a personal level, athletes interested in creatine supplementation should start by increasing their water consumption and testing whether this gives them 6% more gains, plus-or-minus an acceptable error rate. If so, there is no point to taking additional creatine.

Of course, since creatine is cheap and virtually harmless, there will always be a "what if." What if good hydration improves athletic performance by a full 6%... And then creatine supplementation could increase it another 6%? Athletes who are interested in such things will always be keen on experimenting to see whether they can squeeze out a little better performance. And there are almost no downsides to using creatine.

Still, this line of thinking was enough to convince me to stop using it.

The End, Plus Epilogue

As I mentioned last time, I've come down with another cold, and that makes three colds in five months. Because I have diabetes, it takes me a little extra time to get over these things, and they tax my body a little more heavily than they might tax yours. My half marathon being two and a half weeks away, one week of which will be a taper week to rest my muscles for the main event, this effectively ends my training schedule here and now.

I'll still run the race, of course, but I won't push for my goal time. I'll run relaxed and just try to have some fun. I am disappointed that my months of training fell far short of my expectations, of course; first because I sunk two months into an ineffective heart-rate based training regimen, and second because I managed to avoid injury only to fall victim to virus after virus. I wanted to get my body back into some serious running shape after a long time, and I had some good early indicators that it was working. But that's bad luck for you. Some years, you get lots of colds; other years, you don't get any. It was my turn to draw the short straw, and my bad luck that I drew it while attempting to train for a race.

Any undertaking like this, no matter how unsuccessful, is bound to teach you something, and indeed I learned. Let's review a few important things I learned this year so far.

First, I learned that using heart rate as the primary driver of training is not a good idea. I think it's okay to reference heart rate as one data point among many while you train. But to force yourself into a particular pace - especially a slower pace - merely to adhere to heart rate guidelines is, I think, very foolish. The result of this kind of thing can only ever be slower pace times.

Second, I learned the value of making hard days hard and easy days easy. In part, I stumbled upon this accidentally. My training schedule, like many I've used throughout the years, made interval and fartlek days "two-a-days." That is, I had to go for an easy run in the morning on those days, and a faster/harder workout in the afternoons. That was okay, but I think in the future I'll modify my training so that I run two-a-days on easy days. That way, I'll get the benefit of higher mileage without taxing my muscles overmuch; and meanwhile, I'll be able to dedicate all of the day's energy to my speed workout on a proper speed day. (If you look at the space between workouts as a span of hours, rather than a span of days, this isn't even that large of a change. It just amounts to a little extra recovery time prior to the more difficult workout, which is precisely what I'd want.)

Third, I learned how to run very long runs again. My training schedule required me to go for runs up to two hours long. That's a long time, and I haven't gone running like that really since my diabetes diagnosis. This year, I finally worked up the fitness level and the guts to give it a try, and I discovered that if I take glucose tablets at the right intervals, and also take them when I start to experience certain physical sensations, I can usually last the whole duration of the long run. This is a huge victory and it actually opens up the possibility that maybe, perhaps, some day, I'll be able to run a full marathon. For me, that's huge.

Fourth, I rediscovered that running ten miles at a time, and more than ten miles in a given day, is relatively easy for me. This is another one of those things that was true prior to my diabetes diagnosis, but which I hadn't really tested since then. I like running ten miles at a time. Ten miles is more than just a nice, round number. It's a distance that feels good to me, one that I've always had an affinity for, at least as long as I've been capable of running ten miles at a time.

Fifth, I learned something about my body composition. Going into this training program, I had been doing a lot of P90X, and I eventually ditched that because I wanted to shed some pounds so that I could run faster. I successfully shed those pounds, and I think losing that weight really did help me run faster. But it was a few pounds of muscle mass, not a few pounds of fat, so it did come at the cost of some "all-around fitness." I am not so interested in proclaiming which kind of fitness is "better" here. In the past, I've spent a lot of time discussing the fact that people who never get in amazing shape have no idea what their bodies are supposed to really look like, much less how they're actually supposed to feel. Even among those who have been in great shape, most of them only know the difference between being in shape and being out of shape. Not very many people know what it feels like to be in different kinds of being in shape. What is it like to be in great shape for distance-running? What is it like being in shape with more muscle mass? How does your body respond to the various tasks of physical exercise under different "shape conditions?" This is invaluable insight into my own body.

Sixth, I learned the variety of cross-training. I haven't done much of that lately, and I miss it. I miss the refreshing fun of going out for a bike ride instead of a run; it might not be as good for the body as a running workout, but it's great for the mind, and that's actually worth something, too. I think people also feel a little better when they train with the objective of having lots of fun at the possible expense of a superior workout. I don't mean that people should switch out hard or annoying workouts in favor of having lots of fun, of course. I just mean that, especially as we age, it becomes more important to foster an all-around, always-exercising, joy-of-motion mentality - what I have called "fostering a culture of activity" - than it is to ensure that each workout inches you closer to a personal record. Put another way, if you always have something to look forward to in working out, you'll work out a lot more effectively than you would if you just mindlessly cranked through a schedule of workouts.

Seventh, speaking of a schedule of workouts, I learned the benefit of actually scheduling workouts, rather than flying by the seat of your pants. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn't actually work against the previous point. It's nice to know what's coming. It's nice to know what you're doing, not just today or tomorrow, but next Thursday. It helps you plan activities around your workouts; it helps you keep your diet and your bedtime on track. It also helps you add more variety to your training. Humans are creatures of habit and if we don't make a deliberate attempt to break out of our ruts, we will tend to stay within them. Planning on breaking your rut is a great way to succeed in breaking it.

Well, I probably learned a bit more than all of this, too, but I think the list is long enough for one day. Looking back over it, I am feeling pretty good about my year thus far, even if I'm not necessarily in a position to improve my half marathon PR. I feel well prepared for my fitness future, whether or not that includes a great race next month. In the end, I'm quite happy about it.

Nita Strauss And Hard Questions About Sexism

Blabbermouth.net is an online tabloid that covers heavy metal and hard rock music, musicians, and their attendant muckraking. It is essentially a clickbait platform that uses out-of-context quotations and sensational headlines to drive ad revenue though clicks and other such dirty tricks. It has a negative reputation, but despite that fact can be entertaining thanks to the heavy metal community itself, which is comprised of many people who like to joke around.

The typical Blabbermouth news cycle goes something like this: First, some legitimate news outlet reports on something happening in the music world. Second, Blabbermouth re-blogs it on its own spammy website. Third, music fans on social media exchange funny and/or belligerent comments with each other under Blabbermouth's comments threads.

Recently, Blabbermouth reported on guitarist Nita Strauss' latest project, which is called "Body Shred." Although the promotional video (see below) doesn't explain how to "win" the challenge, based on what I can infer from the website, it appears to be somewhat of a cross between DietBet, PledgeMusic, and a private Nita Strauss social media fanclub.

I have nothing against Nita Strauss or this projects, and I wish her all the success she deserves.

Predictably, the Blabbermouth commentariat focused in on Nita Strauss' physical appearance, and not necessarily in a way that emphasized physical fitness, if you know what I mean. Many of the ensuing comments were vague or not-vague sexual references, approving comments on Strauss' worth as eye candy, suggestions that the promotional video looked like the opening scene of a pornographic sequence, and so on.

One can easily imagine that Nita Strauss, being an attractive woman in the music industry, has dealt with her fair share of objectification and harassment, but if these comments are any indication, she has had to deal with even more than I would have expected. Every time I start to gain the impression that society has for the  most part moved on from overt sexism, something like this proves me wrong.

Thus, my first impression of Nita Strauss' Body Shred was sympathy. I felt bad that she would go through the work of putting together what looks like an interesting and worthy project with her partners and sponsors, only to have to try to overcome a dark cloud of sexist mockery. She'll need to overcome that mockery in order for her project to be successful, because no heavy metal fan is going to sign up for "Nita Strauss' Body Shred" if all their friends are winking and nudging each other and making sexist jibes about the whole thing.

That was my first impression, but then I started thinking about it a little more carefully.

As you can see from the photo gallery on Nita Strauss' website, Ms. Strauss dresses pretty modestly compared to some women in the world of rock. She's also an excellent guitar player and performer. The point is, it would be incredibly wrong to suggest that Ms. Strauss has relied on her looks to establish herself and her career.

On the other hand, it would be downright foolish to assert that her looks have played no role in making her famous; after all, she is a beautiful woman in addition to being a good guitar player. Like it or not, "great guitar player who is also beautiful" is a much more marketable entertainment product than "just a great guitar player" is. Furthermore, a simple web search reveals that there are plenty of promotional photos of Nita Strauss that emphasize her physical appearance more than her guitar-playing. I don't fault her for this, and I would certainly do the same if I were in her position. Who knows, maybe I'd even go further. And maybe the fact that she hasn't gone further is one of the reasons she's had as successful a career as she's had. I don't know; I'm no expert here.

The fact remains, however, that Strauss' looks have played an important role in her music career. There's just no use denying it. The release of an exercise program, or fitness challenge, or whatever Body Shred actually is, certainly plays into that aspect of the Nita Strauss business entity. "Ugly Chick Fitness Challenge" would not be a particularly successful business venture; but I think "Nita Strauss' Body Shred" will be. That's an important attribute of the whole endeavor.

So, in light of all that, how do we grapple with this? What is the right way to conceive of a project that ought not become an excuse to objectify someone, and yet which relies on a certain level of objectification in order to be interesting in the first place?

By the way, this question is not unique to this particular fitness challenge. We can go all the way back to the Jane Fonda Workout program, if we want to. Heck, I'm told that my great-grandmother on my mother's side had a big crush on Jack LaLanne. Fitness programs offer us a chance to make ourselves look, not just healthy, but sexy. Fitness videos very often cast professional fitness models, people whose sole livelihood is working out and looking as sexy as possible. Part of the audience they're selling to is the kind of people who watch the jumping jacks in slow motion. If there weren't so many of those kinds of people, the fitness industry would be a lot smaller and less profitable than it is today.

To some extent, fitness is always about looks. But is that good, bad, or neutral? Is it shallow to be motivated by the prospect of looking sexy? Is it wrong to be motivated to get fit just so that you can gain access to videos of Nita Strauss doing jumping jacks in a sports bra? If that's your motivation, but you end up getting fit, winning the contest, meeting Nita Strauss, and being perfectly nice and polite to her, is what you've done still "problematic?" Is it wrong to want to work out at the gym just because a lot of the other gym patrons are good-looking?

All these questions should be relatively easy to answer. The reason they're not is because whenever people like Nita Strauss release fitness videos, people like the Blabbermouth readership post insane and hurtfully sexist comments. I don’t think it's morally wrong to have private, racy thoughts about famous people, and I'm not even sure that it's morally wrong to be motivated by such thoughts (even if it is odd). But there is a line we shouldn't cross. It's obvious when people cross it, but it's virtually impossible to explain in advance of crossing it. And if we only ever approach the line in our imagination, what does morality say then?

Or is everything fair game in the imagination?

Life On The Scene

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much influence our chosen social scenes affect our lives, often times in unexpected ways. For example, it’s well documented that former drug addicts usually have to stop hanging around their old, drug-using friends in order to avoid a relapse. It’s not that those friends deliberately try to sabotage the addict, it’s just that the social environment itself promotes drug use. Similarly, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, people whose friends are interested in eating right and working out tend to exercise more often and eat healthier food than other people. And again, it’s not that fitness enthusiasts pressure everyone else to live a healthy lifestyle, it’s just that the atmosphere they create when they socialize promotes physical fitness and a good diet.

Our malleable human minds seem to adapt to the social conditions we’re living in. What you see, hear, and experience becomes your version of normal. And while “being normal” is an individual choice, it seems as though normalcy itself is environmentally dependent.

Consider also, for example, the fact that everyone in every small town in America listens to country music. Everyone. Every small town. Why? It mostly comes down to the fact that country music is what gets played in small towns. These folks like to camp, and go fishing, and ride horses; it’s not because they’re genetically predisposed to enjoy these activities, but because the prevailing culture places a high value on them. We’re influenced by the people around us.

This is obvious enough at the cultural level, but less obvious at the friendship level. We’ll all readily admit to being influenced by our friends, but I think we tend to understate just how much the prevailing sense of normalcy among a group of friends defines what each individual sees as “normal.” I’ve known people who became drug users only because one or two people in their friends group became so; and soon enough, the entire group was using. It’s not all bad news, of course. I’ve known other groups of friends who all got interested in saving for retirement, and before they knew it, they were all exchanging tips and tricks to save the most possible.

Those are single-activity examples. What I’m really interested in is how choosing a particular social group for one reason influences several other, unanticipated aspects of life. For example, a lot of people get into the heavy metal scene because they love the music. There’s nothing about the music that demands that a person dye her hair or wear a metal-studded bracelet, get tattoos, and ride motorcycles. But, invariably, there’s a social culture surrounding the heavy metal music scene, and as one becomes more active in socializing over heavy metal, one becomes more interested in those other things, too.

Some of those things are fine, like riding motorcycles and dying your hair. Other things are not so good for us, such as staying out late, drinking heavily, smoking, vaping, and so on. 

Again, my interest is in how choosing one kind of scene influences other aspects of your life. Or, more specifically, my life. My social scene, when push comes to shove, is the distance-running scene. I never realized how much I identify with that social scene until much later in life, when I spent some years away from that scene and then entered a race one day. I showed up, and my friends all said, “Look, Ryan. Everyone looks like you!” They were right. Suddenly, I was surrounded by people who looked like me, dressed like me, spoke like me, and acted a bit like me. I was “home.” Weird.

Well, distance-running is a fun sport that promotes good health; those are the good things that come with being part of that scene. What about the other things that go along with distance running, the unanticipated things, perhaps the negative things? 

Well, distance runners actually drink a lot of beer, and that’s not so healthy. They obsess over their sport a lot, are a little bit neurotic, and, because distance running is an individual sport involving a lot of time spent alone, they tend to be a bit self-absorbed. When I spend too much time in the distance running community, I, too, am susceptible to those things.

There is also a sense of style that goes with distance running. Short hair, t-shirts, running shoes on every occasion, hemp bracelets and necklaces, running watches. Truth be told, I love all these things, and the only reason I can make sense of is because that’s the style within my community. Still, it’s not always a positive. Among my non-running friends, I am perhaps the least stylish one. The only people who understand my sense of style at all are those who have seen me among my running community. That’s when it clicks and they realize that I’m not just an unstylish schmo. I’m just a distance runner.

I think it is an illuminating exercise to consider what community you belong to, what positive things come from being a member of that community, and also, what potentially negative things.

Against Steps

Tracking the number of steps you take in a given day is not a useful measure of anything. It doesn't serve as a proxy for overall activity level. It doesn't serve as a proxy for distance over time. It doesn't provide an estimate of calories burned. Two people with very different overall levels of health can take the same number of steps in a given day and cover very different distances. Walking 5,000 steps is not equivalent in any way to running 5,000 steps, except in mere step count. Two runners covering the same distance can and will have very different step counts, depending on their height and their running form and speed. Even two runners running the same speed and distance can have different step counts.

Step counting is, therefore, meaningless as a measure of activity or health. Luckily for all of us, there are plenty of alternative measurements we can use to estimate our activity level and to work toward a goal of bettering our health.

I suspect that the main reason step counting became so pervasive in the world of activity trackers and smart watches is because it is technologically easy to measure. The "problem" of pedometry, if indeed it ever was a real problem, was solved back in the 1970s or 1980s, when someone figured out how to put a little shaker inside a plastic doohickey and attach it to an LCD digital display. For all I know, there were already analog pedometers out there before then, but I never saw one. It's not clear to me that the people ever demanded such a contraption as a pedometer. My first encounter with them was when my friends' parents and grandparents received doctors' orders to start increasing their activity level for health reasons. Sometimes the reason was to lose weight, sometimes the reason was to rehabilitate an injury, sometimes the reason was to recover from surgery. These folks were given pedometers and told to take an arbitrary number of steps per day, with that number presumably increasing until some therapeutic goal had been achieved.

In this light, I can see the rationale behind step-counting. For a recovering heart surgery patient, I can see how taking first 2,000, and then 3,000, and then 5,000 steps per day could be an important path toward rehabilitation. I can see how this advice would be far more medically meaningful than telling the patient to "try to walk around the block tomorrow, but if you can only make it two mailboxes down the street before you have to come back, no big deal." Providing patients with a number that can be increased over time can provide them a means by which to track empirical improvements in their recovery while still ensuring that the recovery is more or less individualized to each patient. This is especially true for people who have never trained for any sort of competition, people who need easy exposure to the concept of training without having to feel overwhelmed by a "training regimen."

That, however, comprises the limits of my understanding of step-counting. Beyond this kind of medical scenario, there is no reason for anyone to count their own steps, to challenge each other to step-taking competitions, and to measure their daily health by the total number of steps they've taken.

To give you some level of how absurd this sort of thing is: two weeks ago, I placed 3rd in one of Garmin's step-taking competitions despite running more than 60 miles that week and putting in three days of more than 12 miles of running. While it is always possible that the two people who placed ahead of me in the step competition were training even harder than I am, it's highly unlikely, since I train harder than about 98% of the fitness-tracker-equipped population. Statistically speaking, I should win these competitions about 98% of the time, and place second in the competitions I don't win outright. But that is not the case. In reality, I often place below the top 5 out of 10 participants.

The reason I lose, of course, is because I take nice, long strides and go really fast; not just when I'm running, but also when I walk. Someone with a shorter stride length who covers the same distance will exert himself less while taking more steps and beat me in a step-counting challenge. But who is in better physical shape?

If counting steps is not indicative of anything useful for gauging fitness, what else can we do? Well, I happened to write about Training Load just the other day, and I think this is a pretty good measure of how much exercise a person gets. It's hard to argue with a linear combination of time spent exercising and relative heart rate increases. No wonder academic physiologists have been using measurements like these for half a century.

The downside to comparing a community of recreational activity tracker users by something precise and objective like Training Load is that those who don't get much exercise may start to feel discouraged. Why keep trying to beat last week's effort if you're in the fifteenth percentile of people who exercise? On the other hand, if you're in the fifteenth percentile, but you can win a bunch of step-counting competitions, that may provide you with better incentive to keep exercising. At the very least, it provides you with better incentive to keep paying for and using fitness trackers and apps. Thus, it comes as no real surprise that profit-maximizing fitness tracking firms would provide their customers with a measurement that has high motivational value despite its low physiological value.

Still, one of the unintended consequences of this approach to fitness tracking is that it draws a larger crowd of unserious athletes than it draws serious athletes. It's good that so many unfit people are motivated to go couch-to-5K using step-counting competitions to get them there, but ultimately races stop catering to good, competitive runners. In some cases, race organizers stage two separate events, one for competitive athletes and the other for fun-runners. The major commercial draw, of course, is the fun-runner race: the exact opposite of what the major draw ought to be.

We ought to live in a world in which seeing great marathoners edge ever closer to breaking the 2-hour marathon barrier is an exciting spectacle. We ought to live in a world in which fast runners awe us and inspire us. Instead, we live in a world in which the fifteenth percentile can regularly best the ninety-eighth percentile in a "step challenge," and nobody who enters the Boston Marathon actually cares who wins!

The Three-Thousand-Calorie Meal You Didn't Know You Ate

I recently had dinner at Chili's. (To steal a line from Bill Hicks, "I'm not proud of it, but I was hungry.")

Although it isn't the best restaurant in the world, there are many good things to say about Chili's. So, let me begin by listing a few qualities I genuinely appreciate as a Chili's customer. First, I almost never have to wait a long time to get a table, and it's not necessarily because Chili's is unpopular. More likely, there are enough Chili's restaurants, and their subsidiary restaurants, On the Border, in a given geographic region to service their clientele without making us wait. Second, Chili's restaurants aren't merely ubiquitous, they are often located in attractive locations within close proximity of other establishments I want to be near: movie theaters, shopping centers, and so on. I don't have to make two separate trips -- one to go shopping, and one to get dinner, for example -- because Chili's is always nearby wherever else I want to be. Third, their loyalty program regularly provides valuable coupons that help my family minimize costs and maximize value. Fourth, they are an unabashedly kid-friendly restaurant chain that has always been welcoming of my daughter, starting from infancy and continuing to the present day. Finally, there is enough variety on their menu that, no matter how I feel, I can almost always find something I want to eat at Chili's, and so can the rest of the family. I've been there for casual and impromptu outings, date nights, daddy-daughter dates, celebrations, happy hours, and so on.

Considering all of the above, it's no surprise that Chili's has been as commercially successful as it has been.

With that out of the way, let's make one thing absolutely clear: Chili's will never be a health food restaurant. During my most recent visit, I paid close attention to the calorie count on all the menu items. I have to do this in order to properly manage my blood sugar, because a meal's total calories is one of the things that plays a role in my blood glucose control. (All other things being equal, a higher calorie count means a higher postprandial blood glucose level.) With very few exceptions, all of the main menu items were more than 1,000 calories apiece. There is a calorie-conscious section of the menu, featuring items that are about 400 calories each, but 400 calories is a little on the low extreme for me.

It's not that Chili's coats all of their food in cheese, bacon, and/or barbecue sauce (although there sure is a lot of that going on at Chili's, too). Some of the calorie counts are downright inexplicable. I cannot understand how, for example, half a dozen buffalo wings could amount to 1,000 calories. I'm under no illusions about the health status of buffalo wings, but six pieces of bone-in wings involve a lot of inedible mass in the form of bone and cartilage, and less than a serving of real chicken meat. This would suggest that Chili's' chefs have somehow found a way to more than double the caloric content of chicken.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that Chili's' salads are over a thousand calories, too. A bowl of lettuce and vegetables, no matter how large, should never add up to 1,000 calories. That's just… odd. I understand that salad dressing is a calorie-dense food, but there is about 50 calories in an entire head of iceberg lettuce, which means that Chili's adds 950 calories' worth of condiments to their salads. Suppose, for the sake of argument, the salad comes with 400 calories' worth of chicken on top; then, that's 50 calories for the lettuce and a remainder of 550 calories of salad dressing. Compare this to a serving of a best-selling brand of ranch dressing here in America: two tablespoons of which amounts to 130 calories. This seems to suggest that Chili's uses half a cup of salad dressing on its salads.

Mind-boggling.

Well, in light of all these 1,000-calorie foods, I opted for one of the lowest-calorie items on the standard menu: a 10-ounce sirloin steak. I repeat, ten ounces of pan-seared sirloin steak with an enormous pat of butter on top and a cup of cheese-and-bacon drenched mashed potatoes is one of the lowest-calorie items on the standard menu.

The truth is, my steak was tasty, even if it was slathered in garlic butter and pan-seared in probable vegetable oil. And I was able to find a menu option that worked for me both in terms of overall nutrition and blood-glucose control. So I really shouldn't be complaining.

Still, it's important to be aware of what we're putting into our bodies. I had to do some careful menu analysis to find something that worked for me. The average diner, especially in my area, will be more inclined to choose something that looks tasty and rich, add a beer or two, perhaps an appetizer, and finish it off with dessert. If so, that person could very easily consume more than 2,000 calories in a single sitting; perhaps even 3,000 calories.

When we talk about America's "obesity epidemic," it exists in the context of inexpensive, highly convenient, family-friendly restaurants that serve 3,000-calorie meals.

Comparing Garmin's Training Status And Strava's Fitness & Freshness

There is nothing new about using biometric data to estimate an athlete's level of "fitness." Researchers have been perfecting various measurements of fitness for over forty years. But it wasn't until the advent of the fitness tracker or GPS watch that the underlying equations behind these measurements could be applied to the average weekend warrior. You won't find this data in Samsung Health, and likely not in Apple Health either, because those companies are more interested in producing consumer products for people who like to count steps and receive phone calls through their wrists. The companies that are serious about competitive training, though, do provide us with this data.

Every company that is interested in providing this kind of data to users has their own preferred approach. It is all more or less based on upon the same underlying principles, but it's served up slightly differently. The numbers mean slightly different things, depending on how they've been calculated. For our purposes here, I'll compare Garmin's "Training Status" and Strava's "Fitness & Freshness" measurements.

Both Training Status and Fitness & Freshness are calculated based primarily on moving averages of "Training Load," and both approaches are pretty interesting based on what the teams who designed them wanted to accomplish.

To be brief, "training load" is a measurement of how much exercise you've done recently, and how vigorous that exercise has been. "How much" is easy to determine simply by adding up how many hours, minutes, and seconds you've spent exercising over a given calendar period. "How vigorous" is a question that ultimately comes down to a physiologist's preferred measurement of workout intensity. Strava's team prefers to analyze heart rate data during exercise. The higher your heart rate, the harder you're exercising. Garmin's team, by contrast, prefers to measure exercising intensity with a slightly more technical analysis: excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). To that end, my guess is that Garmin estimates EPOC by analyzing how long it takes the athlete to recovery from a given exercise session.

Both of these measurements have pros and cons. One mark in Strava's favor is the relative simplicity of the calculation. Time + heart rate = load. (That's not the exact calculation, but you get the idea.) But the drawback to a calculation this simple is that anaerobic activity can increase a person's heart rate without doing much in the way of training load for, say, cycling. A competitive cyclist can get her heart rate up during a 30-minute arms workout without impacting her overall "training load" for cycling. In fact, she might go out for a 30-mile ride immediately following the arms workout without feeling too much different than she would have otherwise. By contrast, Garmin's EPOC calculation will capture that level of nuance here. That same cyclist's post-weight-lifting EPOC will be quite short compared to her 30-mile ride, and her Garmin-calculated Training Load will adjust accordingly.

But a mark against Garmin's concept of Training Load is that it fails to account for real-world factors. What I mean is, Garmin can't measure EPOC directly through biometric testing, so they estimate it through heart rate measurements. If I go for a ten-mile run, and then get caught in bad traffic on the drive home, Garmin's calculations will erroneously assume that I'm having a hard time recovering from my run, and my Training Load number will rise. If I take a nap or sit in a hot tub immediately following my run, I'll have a much better EPOC profile, and my Training Load number will fall. So different non-exercise circumstances can impact Garmin's estimate of Training Load even when they probably shouldn't.

To complete things, Garmin outputs a "Training Status," based on a 7-day moving average of Training Load combined with the athlete's VO2 max data. That's not a bad estimate, but there is a problem in that VO2 max is a measurement that doesn't tend to move much. When it does, it moves steadily over time; it doesn't tend to fluctuate a lot over a 7-day period. It likely doesn't change much at all in a week. Some of the underlying data used to estimate VO2 max, however, can change: namely, if you have a birthday this week, your age will change; if your weight tends to fluctuate based on water weight, or diet, or menstruation, or any of the other things that make small impacts to a person's weight, the number you see on the scale will change. These things can have a statistically relevant impact on the output of the VO2 max estimation equation. But remember: it's just an equation. It aims to estimate VO2 max. If your estimate changes by a point here and there, it's unlikely that your VO2 max actually changed. It's far more likely that you had some slight weight fluctuation or something.

The result of all this is a "Training Load" and "Training Status" output that is roughly on point, but somewhat confusing. Take a look at mine:

Over this period, I inexplicably vacillated between "productive" and "maintaining" before finally ending up at "unproductive." Then I went back to vacillating during my recovery week. It wasn't until the last three days that Garmin recognized I was actually recovering. And, I hasten to add, I am training under a training plan supplied by Garmin through the Garmin Connect app itself.

That said, Garmin did get things right in general. At the end of my third week of training, I had run nine consecutive days and was feeling tired, so "unproductive" might not be linguistically accurate, but it was certainly true that I needed some rest. And Garmin did recognize the recovery week eventually.

Strava's "Fitness & Freshness" curves are based on what they call an "impulse response model." That sounds fancy, but all it really means is that Strava uses a weighted moving average of training load based on activity duration and heart rate. Precisely how they choose to weight the moving average is a mystery to me, but when compared to Garmin's data, Strava's seems to place slightly more weight on the past. While Garmin states with certainty that their output is based on a 7-day moving average, Strava does not state how long their time window is. I would venture to guess, though, that their time window is three weeks.

Why three weeks? Because when you access Strava's "weekly effort" graphs from their mobile app (these graphs are strangely unavailable in the browser portal), the area denoting "consistent training" on the graph adjusts based on the previous three weeks. I can see this by watching how it moves with my week-to-week effort.

The result of this longer time window provides what I believe to be a better overall measure of a person's fitness level. Here's a piece of my Fitness and Fatigue curves, covering my recent training regimen:

As you can see, Strava tracked my fitness level as increasing over the first three weeks of training; then, during my recovery week, my fitness curve stayed relatively flat, while my fatigue curve fell. This is, at the least, an accurate representation of what my training schedule was supposed to achieve.

On the other hand, take a look at the local maximum in that graph. On March 10, I went for a long run and in doing so achieved a fitness level of 81, and a fatigue level of 114. How should an athlete interpret that kind of information? Strava supplies a third number, called "Form," which is nothing more than the arithmetic difference between Fitness and Fatigue. This should correspond to how "fresh" I was feeling that day. Using this data, I can say that I was fit, but fatigued. Strava seems to have accurately assessed my feelings. What they didn't do was give me a direct recommendation, as Garmin did. Garmin told me right then and there that my training was getting unproductive and I needed rest.

There is no "right answer" here. I find both sets of data useful in their own way. But I am a very atypical athlete. Most people who use GPS watches aren't used to calculating various weighted averages and applying statistical models to time series. It just so happens that I do this for a living, and my great familiarity with data science puts me at an advantage for interpreting calculations like these.

The average athlete -- i.e., the average person who does not work in data science -- needs a little more help interpreting this information. To that end, I can tell you this: Garmin's Training Load and Training Status numbers jump around a bit, because they only look at your most recent training week; but they tend to get close to a good recommendation if you're seeing the same output two or three days in a row. Meanwhile, Strava's Fitness & Freshness gives you good perspective in your overall response to training, but you should probably not take the data too seriously if you are not actively engaged in an actual training plan of some kind.

Always take this data with a grain of salt. But if you can manage to think like a biostatistician, you can get some good information out of these numbers.