Remember those Marathon Monks I was talking about? Well I'm still thinking about them, and why we endurance athletes are drawn to stories of extreme endurance over long periods. Why did Dean Karnazes's 50/50 stunt capture the imagination of so many? Why do the 50 state marathoners feel the need to add coherence or a pattern to their marathons? Why not just run 50 marathons in the 6 states that border your own?
One recurring theme that I see in many of these endurance epics, whether they are blogs or books is the idea of meditation or zen. You set out to complete a task and cover a certain distance that will take all day and a great deal of physical and mental energy. You might think that you're going to get a whole lot of thinking done, but it rarely works out that way. Instead, the universal experience seems to be that your mind stops following a single line and eventually hits a meditative state where thoughts come and go with the same detachment and vividness as that period between sleep and wakefulness. On long runs and rides, I have had the same bar of one song stuck in my head for 10 hours, or have relived a forgotten experience from my past with such vividness that it's almost as if I'm back there again. When your mind is relaxed, that's when you are able to think along different lines and you can think outside your normal constraints and see windows where you only saw walls before. I usually say I do my best thinking with my pants off because all my best ideas come when I'm in the shower or on the toilet -- when I take a break. I've had those thoughts on runs too. This feeling of meditation must be what the monks are after when they give up their lives to run thousands and thousands of miles over 8 years. The more entrenched you are in your usual thought patterns, the more you wish for enlightenment, the more you must need to break out of them through hours of repetitive stepping and breathing, I guess. If one day of running can cause you to think deep thoughts, what must 8 years of ultra running every day do to your mind? No wonder they say they achieve sainthood in life!
There is another thing that draws me to their story. It is the fact that they cannot quit. If they quit, or if they can't run one day, then they commit to kill themselves. One thing that I think about a lot with my clients is how to override the instinct to stay within your comfort zone at all times. If I held a gun to my clients' head, they would surely not need that extra 10s of rest. But obviously I can't walk around holding a gun to someone's head for an hour a day and get away with it. But if your life depends on completing the task you set for yourself, failure is not an option. You stop thinking about how you CAN'T and instead the brain and body work on the question of "how can I go on?" There is always a way to go on. Find a way to continue, or die. As someone who has suffered from burn-out in the past, and who is always battling the urge to make excuses to take the easy road, I'm intrigued by situations where failure truly isn't an option.
One thing that the successful monks have described about their experience is that they learn that their own suffering is insignificant in the face of everything in the Universe. If you are tired, sore, or bored, the world doesn't care. If you quit and kill yourself, the world doesn't care. No one cares if you fail but you. So those who achieve great things in life; the Steve Jobses, Nelson Mandellas, Lance Armstrongs (drugs or no, he just wanted it more), Mohamed Alis of the world are simply those who recognize that for them to achieve greatness, they simply cannot make excuses, so they make the hard decisions that no one else will make. You can always quit, but for those who don't quit, there is greatness waiting at the end of it.
I recently finished "Running with the Kenyans" about another group of people who just run, forget the limitations. Unlike the Japanese monks that go for unbroken streaks unheard-of distances, the Kenyans defy all known speed limits; starting out too fast and only getting faster. The Kenyans have rewritten the record book and completely dominated in a sport that is everyone who is a citizen of the world has access to. And yet the Kenyans dominate to a point where it doesn't seem fair.
The author goes to live and train in Kenya for 6 months to discover the "secret" of the Kenyan runners (as if there were one that had been eluding every western scientist for so long). In the end he concludes it is the confluence of location, culture, and opportunity that means being Kenyan that also produces great runners. One of the factors that he identifies that I haven't heard before was that Kenyans grow up living a Hard Knock life, where making it big by winning an international road race is the only way to get out of spending your life doing hard labor. The style of training that he discovers is primitive in the same way that saving your money in your mattress is to advanced prospecting and investing. The Kenyan runners run fast when they feel good, and don't when they don't. Coaches (often Europeans) don't share the training plans with the Kenyan athletes, who just turn up to run and then run "fast" or "slow" based on feel, not splits. Finn describes one fartlek workout, attended by hundreds of elite runners where the workout was 25x1 min on/1 min off. Regardless of pace or ability, these 200+ runners all set out at the same time, and when their watches beeped, they ran fast, when they beeped again, the athletes all slowed down. When they had run for 50 minutes, they walked the rest of the way back home. Not measuring your training is another way that developing a keen sense of self and the body can lead to results far better than those that you could imagine through a structured training program.
Remember that itch that I was talking about; the itch to do something greater than? Well, I've been marinating on this idea for long enough that I think that I'm ready to commit to it. I want to try a new challenge; something to make me better. I have an idea, but what if I fail? What if I'm not strong enough to take failure off the table. Then what?
Slop, slop, slop. That's the noise that my feet made as I ran up the trail that had been rained on all morning. It was that slippery, clay-ey stuff that turns into a slip-n-slide when it gets wet. And now it was wet enough that my foot prints were about an inch deep and smeared.
If I were a better photographer you could see that the mud was sticking out the side of my shoe.
The bottom of my shoe
I had just been listening to a section in the audiobook Running with the Kenyans where he describes how it's the weight of our shoes that messes us up, and now here I am with my shoes so heavy with stuck mud that I could actually feel the gravity of my shoe laces as my shoes tried to fall off my feet with each step. There was mud stuck to mud stuck to mud on my shoes so thick that there was mud sticking out an inch in all directions from the sole and you couldn't see any of the treads on the bottom. The mud would stick to my shoes, but my shoes couldn't get purchase in the mud. My legs had better look so buff after this! Every few steps I shook my feet and huge clods of mud came up and smacked me in the ass and the back of the head.
But I made it up that 1300 foot hill. I made it up, and then I ran back down it, and not once did I slip and fall on my ass, and THAT is a victory I can be proud of!
The last time I climbed this hill, I hiked it with my girlfriend. One thing you should know about me is that I am a very slow walker. Normally, she is very patient with me and my little legs, but that day I had sat on my ass shopping online while she did the dishes (my job). So when we went hiking, we hiked at HER pace. Me hiking at her pace meant every 10th of a mile or so I had to break into a run to catch up.
Even with an extra pound of mud on each foot, even climbing the hill the opposite way in the steeper direction, running it was still easier than hiking it. When I hiked it, my ass was sore. And that, my friends, is ALMOST as much of a victory as not falling on your ass in mud that looks like a 1300ft mountain of shit. I'm pretty sure that there's a million-dollar idea for a Nike or Gatorade commercial in here somewhere. Talk to my agent...
As far as I can tell I'm standing at the corner of the Valley View Trail, the Valley View Trail, the Valley View Trail, and if I go down that way, the sign says I will meet up with the Valley View Trail in .2 miles. I mapped out this route before I left on Map My Run, but right now all I can see on my phone is a red line that is my intended route and the glowing blue dot that is me leaving a blue slug trail that vaguely resembles the planned route...sometimes... To within half a mile. Other than that, this lovely single track that just dumped me out of the redwoods into a meadow where the Valley View Trail crosses itself 5 different ways has been reduced to a grey grid on my phone with no other clues. I don't even know which way I'm facing. I have run twice down every single variation of the Valley View Trail, and I'm still circling the crossroads.
To make matters worse, there is a class of about 25 middle school students gathered at the crossroads. I feel like if I walk past them one more time, one will start shouting "Stranger Danger!" and then I will be arrested. I hate children. I can feel their judgement on me.
I go off trail in the direction that this imaginary trail might be, seeing as it is the only direction that I have not yet explored, but only make it about ten paces before I have to admit that there's no trail here. Instead, I hide in a bush and hope the teenagers will go away. They don't.
I crash out of the woods (a spot where you would really have to be crazy to think there was a trail) and run past the kids as fast as I can and just run back the way I came. Fuck this place.
This is the second time this has happened to me in the same spot. The last time the sun set on me and I wound up running until I found a road, the running on the road till I had a signal and sending 2 text messages:
(To girlfriend) I'm running north on this road. Please come pick me up (with location pin included).
(To client) I'm lost in the woods and don't think I'll be back in the next hour for our appointment.
It's time to dust off the old blog. Whenever I'm posting regularly on this blog, it helps me to transform and become a better version of myself. In 2008 I left a failed life behind and became the person I will be for the rest of my life by racing my ass off. In 2010 I stumbled, and had to work out the bugs and reinvented myself again. When I stop writing, I seem to lose myself. Blogging has changed since I started in 2007, and I'm going to attempt to change with it. Longwinded posts lose readers, and if it doesn't fit into 140 characters and a pithy photo, then it's not worth reading or sharing. So I'm going to use some self-control to sweep the curser over large blocks of type and keep it short.
But not today.
My life is in order in a way that it never has been before. I live in a place that I love. I have a job that I'm good at and earns me enough money to support the lifestyle that I want to live. I'm in a great relationship with a woman that I adore who accepts me for who I am, and makes every day happier. I've achieved things that I'm proud of and don't feel like I have to prove anything anymore. And for the first time in 3 years I have the time and energy to turn back to goals. But what goals do you set when you don't really care about the results anymore?
Because of my 12- to 14-hour work days, I haven't been able to ride my bike much for over a year, but that's okay. When I hung my bike up, I was so burnt out on riding that I was ready to pardon myself for expectations that I didn't have the gumption to live up to anymore. The other day I rode my bike for the first time in forever, climbing up a one-hour hill, and realized that in my heyday, every ride was full of self-loathing. When I rode with self-acceptance I didn't know what to think about and kind of got bored. Bored and cold.
Instead I've been doing a lot of trail running. The Bay Area has to have the best trail running in the country, and lately my training plan is to find the green spaces on Google maps and explore a different one every day that I have time. I like trail running, because when you're climbing a 1000' hill or finding your footing at 8 min miles over flowing single-track you can't concentrate on a clock, just staying upright. Just getting up the hill is accomplishment enough, and who cares how long it takes and if I walk a bit along the way?
Yet I'm itching to test myself again. When I think back over the accomplishments that I'm most proud of, it's not the ones I trained for that I'm the most fond of. It's the ones where I came in with no expectations, and the results were secondary. I miss the days where I had a greater purpose, and adventures were just a way to keep it interesting. In 2008, I had no expectations and did whatever race sounded like it would create the best race report, and I had a blast. In 2009 I fancied myself competitive, and set success/fail goals; then I didn't meet any of them. In 2010, all I had to do was survive, and while there were extreme lows, loneliness and desperation also led to experiences that I never would have thought of otherwise. 2011 and 2012 were about balancing out my life, and my interests lay more in business than in sport.
Now I have the itch again. I'm itching, but I have no clear goals, and nothing to run away from. I don't know where to scratch.
What fires me up these days?
I have this friend Chris. When I met him in January 2012, he had started a 60-day challenge to work out every day and finish with a marathon. Every day Chris posted a picture from his workout on Facebook, and so part of the challenge became finding the best moment of the workout and sharing that moment with his friends. So hanging out with Chris feels like you're taking part in the most fun life ever.
Somewhere around day 65 of the 60-day challenge, Chris decided that he was going to run 60 marathons in 2012. People told him that he was going to burn out, he was going to get hurt, he was going to get slow. And around April, it seemed to be happening. Chris's knees were sore and his ankles were constantly giving him trouble. And just then, that was when things started to change. By May, Chris was getting faster with every marathon, and had decided to run not 1, but 2 100-mile races six weeks apart, and with a week of 7 consecutive marathons in between. (Did I mention he also had a few weeks that summer that he was shitting blood?). And it's not just the adventures that I see Chris having every day and the who's-who of ultrarunning that he tags in his Facebook photos that light a fire in the pit of my belly again. Something intrigues me about the "wall" of impossibility.
The human body has limits. I have found that from personal experience. But when there is a higher calling, those limits seem to fall away and there is something on the other side of overtraining. I've started thinking of it as "transcendence." Chris's story is not the only example I've found of it. On a smaller scale it's the "second wind" that we have all experienced in a tough workout. On a large scale, there are cases like Chris's. For example, in the book "Wild" Cheryl Strayed talks about how showing up on the Pacific Crest Trail she could barely walk under the weight of her 70+lb pack, but after a dark breaking-in period she reached a point where she could hike 20 miles per day for days at a time.
And then there is my newest obsession: The Marathon Monks of Mt. Hiei in Japan. These monks run 30-40K a day (depending on the course) for 100 consecutive days. After the first 100 days, they get the option to quit or to continue. If they continue, they commit to 7 more years, at the end of which they achieve living sainthood. But if they quit, then they must kill themselves. The remaining 7 years are as follows (according to Wikipedia):
Years 2&3: 30K a day for 100 days
Years 4&5: 30K a day for 200 days
Year 6: 60K a day for 100 days
Year 7: 84K a day for 100 days, followed by 30K a day for 100 days
Year 8: 30K a day for 100 days
There's something to be said for doing something extraordinary every day NO MATTER WHAT. Tired? Keep going. Bored? Keep going. Sick? Keep going. Injured? Keep going. Wild boar attack? You guessed it: Keep going!
How much more would we be capable of if our lives really did depend on it? (This is true of most things, not just sport.) By the end of the journey, the monks describe a feeling of oneness with nature and being able to know the exact moment when the birds will start singing, and being able to smell the weather days ahead of time. All that metaphysical stuff aside, they describe a feeling of understanding how small a role they play in the universe and the insignificance of their personal suffering. And THAT is what I'm after: the feeling that no matter what mini drama I'm going through ('I don't WANT to wake up at 4:00 every day this week!' 'I don't FEEL like doing the dishes!' 'I'm too TIRED to do 10 sessions today!' 'I had a rough day, I deserve to eat this!'), that none of it matters, and it's those who have the strength to transcend their melodramas are those who achieve extraordinary lives. I guess that's called self-discipline.
The question is what balance of challenge, expectations, and rest is the right combination to create discipline and not burn-out? I have no idea.
My readers are not idiots, so when I mentioned in my previous post about how I wanted abs like a male gymnast you may have thought, Ah, but I am no fool. I know that spot reducing doesn’t work. You can’t do lots of crunches and just expect your stomach fat to disappear and abs to pop out. Having a visible 6-pack is just about leanness, or having so little fat that you can see the muscle tone underneath. Readers, I am so glad that you’re not idiots and that I don’t have to go over all of that stuff yet again, because frankly I’m tired of having that conversation.
I’m talking about varsity-level training stuff here, though. Just like running a sub 15-minute 5K is a whole different animal than running your first 5K in under an hour, a lot of that kindergarten fitness knowledge gets flipped around when you look at more advanced stuff. Which is not to say that I’m the equivalent of a 15-minute 5K runner, oh god, I’m NOT saying that. I’m just saying that the rules change a bit when you move up from peewee to NCAA division one.
Yes, having a six-pack depends on how much belly fat you have, but it can also depend on how big your muscles are. Picture the bird-boned elite marathon runner such as Paula Radcliffe (left). You can see her abs because she is so lean, but they don’t look like the rippling things that you could wash your shirt on. They look more like the deflated plasticized jerkey that you see at the Bodies exibit when all adipose tissue has been stripped away. Now picture a sprinter’s abs, Marion Jones, for example (okay, I'm showing that I haven't paid attention to track and field in over a decade, but see the picture below anyway). Jones is an especially good example, because the dude hormones that she was taking at her peak made her build more muscle mass, making those abs pop even more. At her peak form, Jones probably had around 16% body fat, and yet you could see all six lumps of her abdominals poking through because they were big.
Think of it this way: take a pillow case and fold it up, then put it on your bed. Then take a pillow and put it on the bed. Then pull a big, fluffy comforter over both. Do you see the pillow case? How about the pillow? The larger your abdominal muscles are, the more you’ll be able to see them through your fluffly comforter of fat. I would rather build giant towering muscles than do what it takes to get rid of all the fat sitting on top of them. I just like cake too much. And while we're speaking of it, I will never have a waist because my obliques are too damned big. My challenge is staying lean enough that you can tell that my Ken doll muscle isn't all saddlebags. P!nk makes the Ken doll muscle sexy. I'm built more like a P!nk than a Heidi Klum.
But how do you get strong abs? Crunches? Fuck crunches, they’re overrated. You don’t even get close to your full range of motion and you’re only lifting a tiny fraction of your body weight. Any exercise that you can do for more than about 15 reps or 30 seconds isn’t going to make great big abs that erupt from your belly. To build a rack of tall boys instead of nips, to get abs on top of your abs, you will need to get a little more advanced than anything that you can do while lying on the floor.
Here’s a quick kinesiology lesson: the abs bring your hips closer to your ribs and vice-versa. Gravity only goes in one direction. When you’re lying on the floor twitching like you’ve been tazed, you’re working at an angle to gravity, so not only are you only lifting a small fraction of your body weight (your head and shoulder with a crunch, your legs and hips with a reverse crunch), but that resistance actually becomes less depending on what angle you’re at. That’s why the bottom 1/3 of a sit-up is so much harder than the top, because that’s the only section where you’re actually pulling directly into gravity. Mat work sucks for abs worthy of a men’s magazine. But we all knew from experience that that was true.
If you really want to build a washboard stomach that looks like a chocolate bar, you’ve got to go for the advanced shit that pits you against gravity, or loads your abs up with lactic acid like a squat or a bench press does. I’m talking hanging leg raises (where you’re changing the tilt of your pelvis, not just lifting and dropping your legs) aka “knees to elbows,” GHD sit-ups, and other advanced moves that you won’t find in most ab classes. These are things that you need pretty gnarly core strength to even be able to do one of them properly.
Now, before you think I’m an idiot again, I know that the abdominals’ (all of them: the rectus abs, transverse abs, and obliques inside and out) main function is to stabilize the body. Again, it depends what you are stabilizing against. If you put a relatively light load on your abs through activities such as running (Paula Radcliffe) or doing plank on a solid surface, your abs will quickly adjust to the load and won’t grow any further. Again, anything that you can do for more than about 30s isn’t going to put enough strain on your muscles to effect change. This is why you have to find ways to make your planks harder: do them with one arm and one leg, doing them on Bosus and with foam rollers under your elbows and toes, force yourself to hold the movement while your limbs are moving (i.e. spiderman plank or renegade rows), doing chest presses or playing catch with yourself while trying to stay horizontal on a decline ab bench, or put a freaking weight on your back. If you actually want to achieve anything with "ab" training, then it shouldn't be easy enough to be a cooldown. Otherwise you're doing about as much abdominal conditioning as a Zumba class, and having a lot less fun.
Another thing about stabilizers is that they are usually small movements or isometric (without movement) contractions, and it’s the eccentric or “down” phase of a movement that causes the muscles to grow. If muscles don’t go back “down” against resistance, then they won’t grow. This is when your $10 ab roller, medicine ball catches, and holding a partner’s ankles while they throw your legs toward the ground come in. You've got to move muscles to make them bigger. Sure, 5 minutes of plank will make them more resistant to fatigue and will make you damned sore, but it won't actually give you a 6-pack.
I've been at this core training thing for about 3 weeks. The first day I felt like the muscles weren't sore, but if you'd drawn a six-pack on me every line would have been sore through and through. Then again, I'd been down with strep the week before and was pretty damned weak. Since then, my core hasn't really been sore. What I can tell you is that whether it's the change in my training, because I've just been going through one of my phases where I'm eating better, or specifically because of the core work I've been doing, I saw my abs straining to poke through my fat on some kettlebell swings today. I'll keep you updated on their progress.
Friday, April 20, 2012
I've been gone for awhile. I'm saying this just in case you just woke up from a coma and don't know what year it is. If there's anyone left to read this, I'll be quite surprised. Why the long absence? Well, the usual excuses about being busy and boring and all that crap, but I've also slowly fallen out of endurance sports in the past couple of years. I've been fraught with quite a bit of frustration, and then depression, and then resignation with maybe a bit of shame that I didn't quite know how to reconcile. Who the hell am I if I don't spend my whole life going long and slow and racing on the weekends? Life was getting in the way of my training, but the truth was that I was so far beyond burnt out that my bike seat became a very tedious place to sit.
After a year of gradually quitting (without even really noticing), frenzied fits oftrying to care coupled with the disgruntled realization that when you don't train you can't expect to be as fit as you used to be, I finally gave up. I was no longer at the top of my sport, and I didn't like the feeling. I gave myself permission to hang up the bike, say no to running races, and try new things that there was no way I could be good at.
A thing that I'm really, really bad at: Brazilian jiu jitsu
I got into Brazilian jiu jitsu (BJJ) reluctantly. I was at the world's most boring staff meeting and while the HR director was going through a powerpoint presentation of all the emergency exits in the building, the guy sitting across from me wrote me a note that said, "What are you doing on Tuesday from 10-11?" Since my superpower is an inability to say no, even under the most extreme circumstances, I turned up the following Tuesday at an MMA gym across town without even the vaguest sense of what jiu jitsu is. I'll spare you the mystery, it's basically wrestling in a funny karate robe called a gi ("ghee").
It was only me and one other girl at that class, and at least she was kind of cute. I just thought I would be punching and chopping stuff. I did not yet know that I would be rolling around on the floor with this girl for the next hour in the most intimate of positions. "Today we're going to learn choke holds," my colleague/instructor said. Wha-whaaaaat?! "Claire, start lying down with your legs wrapped around her waist, Claudette, put your hands on her chest." So we got into this overtly sexual position and she laid her hands on my boobs. I could grow to like BJJ.
I spent the rest of the hour alternately getting choked out and doing the choking. I was trying very, very hard to be professional about the whole thing, but I won't say the human contact didn't feel good... or the getting thrown around. It had been awhile. This only made me feel more like a sexual predator and made me more uncomfortable, but I've been going every Tuesday since.
Of all the new things that I've tried, I suck at BJJ the most. Memorizing complex sequences of movements and then applying them when someone is grunting and sweating on top of me comes to me about as easily as peeing standing up, but there's something so gratifying about using my hips and core muscles at 100% of their power in 360º. It is the most gratifying and stress-relieving activity that I've ever done. And I do feel the difference in core strength in my running.
Most of the time I'm the only girl in class, which leads to an interesting dynamic, not only because I'm rolling around for an hour with my head between some guy's legs. I'm also learning to throw guys around who are nearly twice my size. Or more accurately, I'm learning how I could throw those guys around if I didn't suck so horribly at it. And since it's a martial art, there are strict rules of conduct that prohibit any of the guys from getting all pervy about it. To be fair, I'm probably the most titillated in the class about acting out the karma sutra through violence, and I have a lot of trouble not giggling sometimes. For about a month I was a little skeeved out because I thought I felt the guys' erections every time we rolled, but then I figured out that what I was feeling was the knots on their belts and I chilled out.
Since most of the guys are Brazilian, they don't speak much English. I usually get paired up with a guy named Paolo who is one of the guys small enough for me to fit my legs around his waist. He is considerably more experienced than I am, has better-than-average English, and is very patient at explaining things to me. On Valentines day we were doing something where he was lying down while I had to put my hips next to his chest on my way to fucking his shit up. But I was bringing my hips too high, near his head so he offered me the helpful suggestion, "Don't come all over my face." Then he couldn't figure out why I spent the next 2 minutes rolling on the mat laughing.
After a few weeks I just started changing in the changing room with all the guys, taking off underpants and all. Hey, I'm usually in too much of a hurry to wait, and after you've spent an hour with your ass in someone's junk throwing them over your shoulder, who really cares if you show them your butt crack?
Another thing that I'm really bad at: Rock Climbing
My actual rock climbing gym
I first started rock climbing over a year ago, but since it's one of those things that is much better with a partner (or impossible without one in the case of top roping on the big wall), I hadn't done it much. I am deathly, not funny, "I can't get myself off the top of this building because I need to lie down on the floor and touch every inch of my frontal surface area to the ground to keep from falling off the edge which is 10 yards away" scared of heights. About a year ago my friend set me up with a girl who was a climber and she wanted to take me top roping on our first date. "I'm really afraid of heights," I told her, "like not funny for real afraid of heights."
"You'll get used to it," she told me.
"No, I'm really afraid of heights," I told her. "Can't we just go bouldering?" (Climbing without a rope on a wall that's only about 8 feet high).
"No! I'm going to teach you to top rope," she insisted. There's no motivation like trying to get laid to convince you to do something colossally stupid.
I went on said date the following week, and of course she took one look at my big and useless upper body muscles and put me on one of the tallest walls. I got about halfway up before my mouth went dry, I couldn't breathe, and every instinct I had said to hang onto the wall tight and cry for help. "C'mon, Claire! You can do it!" she said.
"I'm coming down," I said.
"No, you can reach, keep going!"
I climbed another 10 or 15 feet, hyperventilating, the wall feeling wavy, and every muscle in my body shaking from fear. As my arms got more and more tired, the terror of slipping off without any warning or control got even stronger. "I'm coming down."
"You can do it!"
"No, I'm coming the fuck down!" I screamed. Paradoxically, letting go is no problem at all, and she slowly lowered me down to the ground. When I got back onto solid (foam-padded) ground, I tried to say, hang on a sec, but when I opened my mouth I almost threw up. I thought I was going to cry and tried to walk away so I could compose myself in private, but I was still tied to the damned wall. It took me several minutes to pull myself together.
It didn't work out between that girl and me, but we remain friends and when she hears people telling me that top roping will help me overcome my fear of heights, she's quick to jump in and defend me. "No, I've NEVER seen someone as scared as she is. I don't know if you can get over that kind of thing."
So I boulder. Every week I spend an hour or two on the bouldering wall climbing 8 feet (often less if I can't complete the route) and then dropping happily back to the ground. It has massively improved my upper body strength. I can now do 4 strict pull-ups in a row (no swinging) which is more than 4 times what I used to be able to do when I first started.
Something I'm so-so at: Crossfit
Aaaaahhh, Crossfit. Crossfit is the new polarizing issue of the fitness industry. Is it the best thing to ever happen to sport, or dangerous and overstated? It is undeniably an ingenious business model... If given a scale of 1-5 where 1 is "Crossfit is evil" and 5 being "I drink the Kool-Aid before every WOD" I tend to be about a 2 on the Crossfit Kinsey scale. I believe it's got its place as part of a well-balanced fitness routine, just like Froot Loops are part of a well-balanced breakfast (just as long as you've got the turkey sausage links, nonfat milk, and a piece of fruit sitting alongside the bowl of sugar, processed carbs, and artificial colors and flavoring). Crossfit does teach excellent technique, when they take the time to do so, but they distill what should take years of establishing base strength and technique and boil it down to a handful of sessions that they call an "onramp program." Then they hand you your barbell and they say, "Here, perform these dangerous lifts, pick your own weight, and we're going to time you and pit you against everyone else in the room and hope that you don't lose your form or put on more weight than you can handle to try to impress the bro next to you."
Also, since everything is timed, many of the exercises that form the basis of the WODs (workout of the day) are full of so many workarounds and cheats to increase the weight and number of reps that you can perform to exhaustion that they are barely related to the original motion. For example, a pull-up and a kipping pull-up place completely different demands on the body. While a pull-up is a fairly straight-forward (or straight up and down) and challenging exercise for the traps, rhomboids, lats, and biceps, the kipping pull-up uses more abs, hip flexors, and even some chest, adding the back muscles as nearly an afterthought (and mimicking the movement of a row much more than a pull-up). But no matter, kipping allows you to perform more repetitions, so Crossfitters will hang from a bar wriggling like fish on hooks to get through their WODs at lightning speed.
And dedicated Crossfitters are annoying, just like tri-geeks are annoying. The similarities are actually striking. Tri-geeks and Crossfitters both have an unhealthy attachment to compression socks, wear nothing but t-shirts and paraphernalia of their sport, have a cult-like mentality, and believe that they are the fittest people in the world. The fact that each does so much trash-talking of the other's style of fitness is another irony that I find delicious.
So why did I walk into the Crossfit gym in the first place? Because I was looking for the Froot Loops to add to the center of my strawberries, fakin' bacon, and low fat milk breakfast. It had something that I wanted. After several months off the bike, I turned around one day and my butt was gone, replaced by a deflated and planar thing restrained from falling to the backs of my knees only by the sausage casings that I called pants. This was definitely counterproductive to my life-long goal of achieving a Tour de France ass. I knew that if I wasn't going to be riding 15 hours per week, then I would need to do squats and deadlifts with some regularity. But knowing myself, I knew that I would never actually do squats and deadlifts with any regularity. I would need to increase the odds of deadlifts and squats finding their way into my life by leveraging myself with some accountability. At Crossfit I would have someone else writing my workouts, I would have other people in the room to feed off their energy, and most of all my best fuel: Competition! Crossfit would also develop an aspect of my fitness that I had never tried to improve before (strength, agility, fast-twitch fibers, and top-end aerobic capacity).
But there was another reason, too. Around the time that I started this whole new fitness project I had also decided that I no longer needed to be single, and I wanted to join Crossfit to meet chicks. I'd watched all the Crossfit ads on youtube with beautiful women in booty shorts and sports bras doing thrusters (a squat with an overhead press) in slow motion while their glutes and abs rippled under their 12% body fat. I wanted to meet those girls and sleep with them.
When I told my clients that I had joined a Crossfit gym one day a week, many of them were shocked. "It's like you're telling me that you're becoming a Muslim," one client said.
"But I'm doing it to meet chicks!" I told him. I felt that this was the best justification of my lame decision and would keep me from having to go back on all the trash talking of Crossfit I'd done over the years. "I want to meet girls like on Youtube."
"And do the girls there look like that?"
"Well, no. Most of them are kind of fleshy, dumpy, and not particularly good looking. They kind of look like the people you see walking around the 'hood."
"You fell for the 'light beer commercial' ploy!" he pointed out. "You bought the product because you thought it came with beautiful women!" True words.
How is the Crossfit going? Fairly well. I excel at some things like the squats and deadlifts, but I have surprisingly little upper body strength. I am the most uncoordinated human being on this earth as well, so while I can teach a snatch and a power clean I am having a lot of trouble actually doing them. When I am having a particularly bad day, I have them put a different name on the board next to my results, like Igor, Wilbur, or Petunia. For the time being nobody but the people who work there actually know that I work in fitness, and I appreciate that. Although some people give me dirty looks for insisting on being called Thaddeus or Norbert, I like being able to work out in a place where I don't work and nobody is going to ask me questions.
The most surprising part of Crossfit is that it has been a boon when I write the workouts for my own clients. While I don't train them in the traditional Crossfit style of warm-up, dynamic stretching, strength component, metabolic conditioning, Crossfit does have a wealth of sample couplings of full-body movements that fit well together and creative structures to their workouts. Every week when I have to come up with 25 unique and challenging workouts for my clients, I have Crossfit's WOD shop open in the background and I'll flick through until I find a workout that inspires me, and then I'll flesh it out (sometimes replacing every element in the workout) for that particular client's needs, abilities, goals, and personality.
My next goal: Men's gymnastics
I've been following my routine now for about 3 1/2 months, and I have become somewhat capable in each, but it's time to find a new challenge before things get stale. One of my clients (the same one who said I was becoming a Muslim because of the beer commercial trick) came to me a few months ago with the goal of doing a muscle-up on the bar (the bar is much more challenging than gymnastics rings). Since I cannot do a muscle-up myself, it has meant many hours of reading blogs and watching tutorials in order to be able to coach him. Once we achieved 3 bar muscle-ups in a row, he selected his next goal to be the human flag. Time for more tutorials.
When you look these things up on YouTube, there are always half a dozen suggestions on the sidebar of videos by tattooed shirtless homies on playgrounds doing gymnastics over a gangster rap background. Every once in awhile when I needed a distraction from work (and when I had run out of Crossfit porn to watch) I would watch these homies on monkey bars or competitive men's gymnastics routines. But it was always, always, always dudes. Of course a chick could never do a Maltese or an iron cross on the rings like a world-class gymnast, but surely a girl could learn to do a muscle-up on the bar, a human flag, or a planche push-up. Women's gymnastics, pole dancing, and yoga all incorporated similar moves, so why weren't chicks out on the playgrounds too? And to be perfectly honest, I still wanted abs like those that popped out on those shirtless thugs as they did L-pull-ups.
So I have decided that my next project will be to follow my dream of becoming a male gymnast. It's actually not out of line from what I have already been doing with the upper body strength from rock climbing, the core strength and agility from jiu jitsu, and the brute strength of Crossfit, so the workouts will only be an extra 20 minutes or so a day to build up the specific strength for the movements I want to work on.
I have put together a base strength program and have selected 5 movements that I want to learn to do in the next year.
Muscle-up
Human flag
Planche push-up
Handstand push-up
Flare
I'm going to try to resurrect my blog as I work on these goals. It'll be the same Claire and the same writing that you know, and movements and skills that are probably totally foreign to you. I'll see you on the bar!
This week I came back to Boston for the first time since I moved to San Francisco about 16 months ago. In all that time I had never had the desire to visit, especially since I was afraid that seeing many of my old friends would reopen wounds that were still tender. But it had to happen eventually, and so last Friday night I boarded a plane to revisit the site of the worst 6 months of my adult life. I had mostly put the past out of my head (fresh starts are good for that), and it wasn't until the week before my flight that I even let my mind return to everything that's happened over the last 2 years. I hardly recognized myself in that confused, anxious, downtrodden version of Claire that suffered through January until June 2010. I was happier, optimistic, much more self-confident, and richer. I had also started wearing "girl bras" rather than walking around with the sports bra "boob loaf" all the time, which makes me feel like a lot more of a grown-up (even though the bras come from the girls' section of Target). Life was good and I had moved on.
One of the first things I did once I'd landed was to contact Michelle for a trail run. Talking to her and then Big Red the following morning gave me the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from hanging out with people who truly love you and bring out the best in you. Red, Michelle, and I had a synergistic summer in 2008 where we all pushed each other to the best fitness of our lives, and reliving those days was nothing but sweet. Once I saw Michelle and Big Red again, I couldn't believe how much I realized that I missed them.
That night I went out to dinner with the Rockstar Housemate who kept me from cracking up completely in those months after the break-up. It was an unseasonably warm night, and I was feeling all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that Rockstar Housemate was one of the people who had seen me at my worst and still seemed to enjoy hanging out with me. "How's the house?" I eventually ventured to ask. "Is it still a shithole, or have you guys done some work on it?" To be honest, I didn't even know if he still lived with Lindsey. Did I care?
"That ratty blue couch is still in the living room. With the third housemate came another dog, so there's room for two people in the middle of the couch with a dog on each side." It didn't take a genius to deduce that Lindsey's new girlfriend had moved in to the shithole house. I decided that what I was feeling was more than not caring. I really, really didn't want to hear anything about it. Not that I was jealous that her new girlfriend had slipped right into my spot in the shitty life that Lindsey was stuck in, but more that hearing anything about her filled me with so much revulsion that I wanted to run out of the restaurant screaming. I changed the subject.
But the flood gates had been opened. As I visited people over the next few days, everyone wanted to tell me about her, talk shit on her new girlfriend, and in general relive my former disgraces without my even asking. "Have you been seeing Lindsey since you've been back? Because if you have, I'm going to punch you in the face," said her former housemate (the one she lived with before we moved in with the Rockstar. I find it gratifying that people who lived with us in both houses all came down on my side.) "She really downgraded on her new girlfriend," he offered. "Have you ever seen Pink Floyd's The Wall? You know those people with no faces that they put into the meat grinder? She looks like one of those. NO! You know what she looks like? Did you ever watch the Muppets? You know that Muppet with the long blonde hair that sings in Animal's band? She looks like that!"
"I don't care, Rich," I told him (I don't remember what nickname I gave him in the past).
"Have you been to the shop yet?"
"I don't want to go to the shop. No one works there anymore that I can't see outside the shop." He paid me no mind and called. "Hey, is 'One-Bike Lindsey' working today? No? She's off till Tuesday? Great! Thanks."
So despite my protests, after pumpkin shopping Rich took a left out of the parking lot rather than going straight back to the house and dragged me to the shop. I hardly recognized anyone on staff other than twiggy and an annoying little compulsive liar that they called Gnome. Not to let things go by unnoticed, Rich gathered everyone around and said, "This is Lindsey's ex. Isn't she hotter than the new girl?"I wanted the earth to swallow me up.
"Yeah, her new girlfriend is weird. So you dated Linsey, huh? How did that go? I thought you moved out of state," said the new retail manager. Really? After all this time and all the hours in the saddle with all these people, this is who I am? Frankly, I was surprised that I'd come up at all. I was under the impression that I was a subject that just wasn't brought up around Her Royal Highness anymore.
"I came out ahead in that transaction," I said. "I got to move to California and be happy and she got to stay here with her shitty life." And then I refused to answer any more questions. It came out bitter, but sheesh, is there a way to come out of that situation sounding classy and gracious?
When you haven't seen someone in awhile, it turns out that they don't want to know about all the cool things that are going on in your life since you left, they want to fill you in on what's been going on in the place that you left in your absence. Piece by piece, people started telling me more and more about Lindsey. Slick told me that he had seen her at a cyclocross race and she was interested in buying a cross bike, but then had wandered off when he was trying to introduce her to reps. Typical, half-baked ideas and no fucking follow-through, my mind griped before I noticed how pissed I was getting and changed my mental subject. King of the Bike Geeks asked me if I'd seen her, and then told me it was probably a good idea that I'd called ahead to make sure that she wasn't working that day. Do you still believe the fucking ridiculous lies that she told about me? Do the years of riding next to you and chatting with you over a work bench mean nothing to you? You used to respect me and be one of the biggest advocates of my riding back in the day, I thought, and then made myself stop before I got too upset. Michelle told me that she'd named her new dog after Michelle's own dog. I don't know why this made me furious, but it did. Teen Idol told me that after his bike accident a year ago that put him in a wheelchair, she had basically dropped him. How can someone be such a fair weather friend that they can't even come see their best friend every once in awhile, just because he's in a wheelchair? She didn't even spend her dad's last Christmas with him! What kind of soul-less person does that? my mind screeched. Instead I gave him a hug and told him to keep on his physical therapy because the next time I was home, I wanted to go on a walk with him. And when Rockstar Housemate told me that her new girlfriend is a personal trainer I absolutely lost it. "Listen! I don't want to hear about her anymore! I don't want to hear that she's doing well, I don't want to hear that she's doing badly. I have moved on, and I just don't want to go there anymore!" It was true. I really, really didn't care what she was up to, but hearing that she was the same old flakey, lazy, condescending, unreliable, entitled, retarded douche that she'd always been just put me back into a head space that I never wanted to revisit. The thought actually crossed my mind to egg her house, although I knew it would be more fun to fantasize about than to actually do it. It just didn't seem fair that someone should be allowed to hurt another person so much and then have absolutely no repercussions on her life, and just replace me like an old iPod. I had to get out of here!
On my second-to-last night home it was all getting to be too much. I'd been hanging out with people nonstop since I landed and I just needed some quiet time. While we were visiting my grandmother, my mom must have asked me 5 times over the course of the afternoon whether I was coming home for dinner. "No, mom, I don't think so."
"Oh? Who are you going to see?"
"I don't know, Mom." Which she heard as, 'I'm still free, why don't you invite me for dinner again.' Finally I told her, "Tell you what, if I haven't called by the time you've made dinner, then just assume that I'm not coming." I'd hung out with her every day since I arrived, and my mom's not the kind of mom that you can be best friends with. You've always got to filter what you say to her so that she won't worry or pry.
I finally broke free from my mom, and ignored the 2 voicemails she left in quick succession, "So will you be coming home for dinner?" A few hours later drove to the Whole Foods to get a salad before I hunkered down in the hotel to watch some Netflix. It was 7:45, so I figured she would already be at home cooking or eating, so there was no chance I'd run into her. And then I looked up and... there were my mom and dad coming right for me. Are you serious?! I had to get out of this small town as fast as I could. "Hi hon," mom said. "What are you up to tonight?"
"Just chilling." Now this is the point where my mom should have figured out that I was here in Whole Foods getting food for myself because I would rather spend the night alone than come home and have an uncomfortable dinner with her and dad.
"Are you coming over for dinner?" she asked. Oh my god, I'm never coming home again! I thought.
After three days of revisiting my old life, it was time to check out of the hotel and spend my final day at my parents' house. The hotel was about 8 miles from my mom and dad's house and right smack in the middle were Lindsey's house and Lindsey's work. I couldn't avoid one without passing the other. My luck couldn't hold out. After checking out of the hotel I stopped by a Starbucks that I never go to. I swung into the parking space, and in the second before my car came to a complete stop, I looked into the car facing me, and there in the passenger seat not 10 feet away was fucking Lindsey with her girlfriend in the driver's seat. In a flash my eyes registered her smile and the familiar way that she sipped her coffee and then my fight or flight instinct kicked in.
Before my eyes even had much time to focus, I threw the car in reverse and gunned it out of the space and across the parking lot. I didn't know what to do, but priority number one was not having to see her or have her get a good look at me. I couldn't be trusted not to be a total bitch and my hands couldn't be trusted not to shake. In fact, they were already shaking like crazy as I threw the car into drive and floored it across the parking lot to where I hoped there was an exit. There was no exit, so I just parked in the far corner of the parking lot with my hands shaking until I was pretty sure they would have left. Who cared if she recognized me, who cared if she walked into work and said, "I think I just saw Claire," and someone said, "Yeah, she's been coming by all weekend." Had I run away because I was ashamed of anything that had happened over a year ago? Hell no, she was the one that owed me an apology.
The reason why I sat in the car behind the dumpster in that parking lot was because if we were face to face and she asked me, "How are you?" Or even if she saw me at a distance, there would be no way for me to express to her how well I'm doing and how much I now despise the despicable life that she's still stuck in. And I realized that until I can face her without shoving in her face what a loser she is, I wouldn't be fit to face her at all. So what if I make three times what she does? So what if I live in this beautiful place? So what if I'm out doing all the types of events she only talks about? There is absolutely no way to express all that stuff without undermining it by being obviously boastful and bitter.
Hiding out in the Starbucks parking lot made me realize another thing, too. That I still wasn't as confident as I would like to be. You can make all the money in the world and your phone can be ringing off the hook with people who want your time, but until you have the confidence to walk past your ex girlfriend and not even care if she's looking, then you've still got some work to do.
