Dogfooding

As research for Composite, I’ve been reading like a madman of late: physical therapy textbooks, Eastern Bloc Olympic weightlifting research, NFL team training manuals, behavioral medicine medical journal articles, etc.  And, from it all, I’ve been generating reams of notes, studded with an almost endless list of ideas to test out.  Because, as I’ve learned the hard way over the years in the fitness space, there’s often a gap between what works on paper, and what’s actually successful (or even implementable) in the real world.  No matter how much intellectual sense a training concept makes, you still won’t know if it’s an excellent or terrible idea until you actually try it out.

Fortunately, I have two crews of brave and enthusiastic Composite alpha-release guinea pigs, on whom I’ve been able to test things out, with great results. And even before new ideas make it to those two groups, they first get filtered by testing on Jess.  As she’s still obligated to like me even if the workouts I give her suck, and as she’s most definitely not afraid to express her strong opinions to me (on Composite or anything else), she’s ideally suited to the job.  But even before Jess, the first wave of trials happen in my own workouts, using myself as patient zero.  I’d like to think I’m sort of like Salk or Curie, albeit with lower odds of a Nobel prize, but possibly with better abs.

Surprisingly, most of the ideas I’ve been testing out have turned out better than expected.  But every so often, one goes quite wrong indeed.  Which is how I ended up on crutches today, with a sprained left knee.  (Lesson learned: depth jump sprint reaction drills = no.)  Frankly, it’s a pretty minor sprain, so I can make do without the crutches.  But based on the amount of walking in my schedule this week, and the ‘pimp walk’ I was unintentionally doing when crutch-less, it seemed taking weight off the joint for a couple of days might be wise.  Still, I don’t imagine I’ll be on crutches for more than another day or two, and by the end of next week I’m hoping to be back to full health.  And, therefore, back to self-testing further crazy Composite ideas.

Generally speaking, I tell people “no pain, no gain’” is a terrible piece of fitness advice.  But, I guess, at least for my specific purpose here, it seems to be the cost of doing business.  As the inimitable Twain once put it, “you can learn certain things holding a cat by its tail that you can’t learn any other way.”

 

Sweet Honey

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error! –
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

– Antonio Machado [translated by Robert Bly]

Getting Hairy

All through college, and when I first moved to NYC, I kept clean-shaven.  But when I was 22 or 23, initially for the convenience during a period of frequent travel, I decided to try growing a beard.  Quickly, I realized that anything over two or three weeks of growth looked pretty terrible—overly patchy, like a mangy dog.  But with a trimmer, I could hold at one or two weeks of scruff, which I liked.  Every month or two, I’d shave it off completely.  And once or twice a year, I’d do a few weeks of 70’s porn ‘stache, until mounting protest would get me to shave that, too.  But otherwise, for the last decade and a half, short beard has been pretty much my default setting.

Over the years, as I’ve gotten older, my facial hair has also gotten thicker and heavier.  I first noticed the increase of heft during those mustached stretches, as in recent years I could get a surprisingly Tom Selleck/Sam Elliott thing going if I gave it time.  Which made me think: if I had vetoed the grown-out full beard on account of thinness, perhaps that would no longer be an issue.  So I resolved I’d let my beard grow for at least a month or two past my normal 3-week cap, and see what happened.

And, indeed, it did grow in, quickly and remarkably thickly, auburn red (the color of my mother’s hair, and, according to 23&me, the remnant of a Scandinavian streak in my otherwise solely Ashkenazi Jewish Eastern European Mutt ethnicity) with the occasional speckle of gray for a touch of gravitas.  But, as it grew for month after month, I also began to realize it wasn’t really veering towards mountain man/special forces/polar explorer in the way I had hoped.  Instead, I looked, in a word, rabbinical.  All I was missing was payis (the sideburn curls), a long black coat, and a black felt hat.

So, after four solid months, I eventually shaved back to ground zero.  And, based on the immediate feedback, I dropped about a decade of perceived age in the process.  Thus, it appears the answer remains: a week or two of scruff or less.  Any more and it’s oy gevalt indeed.

Hit the Road Jack

A couple of months ago, I started having pain in my right hip and far-right lower back when I would do heavy back squats.  Then, a few weeks later, it started to happen during deadlifts, too.  Soon, even running was causing hip pain, light cleans or box jumps would send stabs of pain through my back.

I tried stretches, foam rolling, dynamic mobility warm-ups.  I did pre-hab and re-hab progressions.  I focused even harder on my exercise form.  All of which helped a bit.  But not much, and not in a lasting way.

Throughout, I was mystified.  I couldn’t find anything that had changed in my workout, couldn’t point to a traumatic injury, couldn’t spot a movement dysfunction that could have chipped away at me over time.  I started to think perhaps I’d just never figure it out.

But, after another month of puzzling, I realized something had changed.  Due to a shift in schedule, I was suddenly walking much, much less than I had been before.  And I was wearing shoes – less flexible, heeled, toe-smushing work shoes – vastly more often.

So, with nothing else to lose, I started increasing my steps.  Thanks to my schedule, they were almost all indoor steps, often multi-tasking while walking a figure-eight around a room.  (Lesson learned the hard way: if I just walk around a room in a circle, I end up dizzy and nauseous enough after ten or twenty loops that I need to sit down; a figure-eight turns in opposite directions at either end, so I can loop indefinitely without falling over / throwing up.)  But indoor stepping did allow me to take off my shoes, so I walked the majority of those steps barefoot (or, rather, in sock feet).

I determined that I’d fallen to only walking 3,000-4,000 daily steps, so I inched that up by 500 a day, first to 10,000, then (as I was enjoying it) all the way to a daily 15,000.  And, lo and behold, even before I hit that 15k step count, my back and hip pain had completely and permanently disappeared.

Previously, I could have told you about the importance of daily movement, and of walking in particular.  Looking at our ancestors and current hunter-gatherer tribes, I would have said, it’s pretty clear that we evolved to walk 3-5 miles (or, funny enough, 10-15k steps) every single day.  And I would have theorized that not getting that amount of daily walking was one of the underlying drivers of pain and dysfunction in modern life.

But this was the first time in my adult life that I’d fallen to such a low level of daily movement myself, and had directly paid the price.  Which highlighted the big difference between knowing something intellectually, and really understanding it at a visceral level.  I now know, first-hand, what happens if you don’t stay active.  And I can definitively say: the truth hurts.