Happy Birthday to Me

At one point in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell notes that regrets are simply illuminations that arrive too late. In the past few years, I’ve had some ups and downs. And, in the wake of that, I’ve had countless illuminations, as well as more insights and moments of growth than in entire decades prior. But, happily, I don’t think those are arriving too late.

Today, I turned 39. And, at least based on good family genes and the best estimates of actuarial tables, I’m hoping to have a whole second half of my life ahead of me. Which is why I’m feeling particularly optimistic this birthday. I’ve been considering today a pivot, the point after which the years ahead are open vistas of possibility. And I’m looking forward to decades of putting those new-found, hard-won insights and illuminations to good use.

July 17, 2018

Mail Calling

“What can you learn from working in the mail room? You won’t learn humility. You won’t learn respect. You won’t learn the company inside out or from the bottom up. What you will learn is something very important, and perhaps a bit frightening, about yourself.

The people who get ahead have a need, are driven to perform a task well, no matter what the task is or how mundane it may actually be. They bring to any job an attitude which actually transforms the job into something greater. Carpenters who become contractors at one time had a need to drive a nail straighter and truer than anyone else. Waiters who end up owning restaurants were at one time very good waiters.

Some executives, had they started in the mail room, would still be sorting mail – and misrouting most of it.”

Mark McCormack, founder, IMG

July 12, 2018

In the Wee Small Hours

For the last year or two, I’ve been starting each quarter with five days of Fast-Mimicking Diet, a low calorie (1000C on the first day, 700C each on days two-five), low protein quasi-fast that research is increasingly backing as a great tool for cancer prevention, longevity, and general health.  This quarter, I started the FMD a few days early, at the end of June, so I’d be done in time to BBQ binge on the 4th.  And, as per usual, I also used the FMD as a chance to take a week off from the gym, both because I think an intermittent complete break from training is wise in general, and because it’s almost a necessity for me given the week’s calorie restriction versus my normal, fast-metabolism-driven ‘human garbage disposal’ eating style.

Most quarters, however, I still do a bunch of walking during my FMD-ing.  But as my previously-mentioned knee tweak is still on the mend, without really meaning to, I’d also temporarily dropped from my usual daily 10-15k steps to just whatever bare minimum of limpy walking was required to get to work or meals or move around indoors.  Thus, for the final days of last week I was barely moving, and over the weekend, I pretty much wasn’t moving at all.

Early this year, when I started having back pain, I traced it to a similar walking fall-off, and ‘miraculously’ cured myself just by starting doing sufficient daily walking again.  But, apparently, I’m a slow learner.  Or, conversely, maybe I didn’t realize how quickly the absence of walking could be felt—especially if I’m also not pushing myself in the gym.

Indeed, by Saturday night, I got in bed, and spent several hours staring at the ceiling before I was finally able to fall asleep.  And then, on Sunday, despite being super tired all day, I again got in bed and couldn’t fall asleep, this time for pretty much the entire night, watching the time slowly tick by in fifteen minute increments until I gave up and groggily got out of bed at 5am.

By Monday, I felt terrible.  But I was also at least just smart enough to have identified potential cause and effect.  So, I got in at least 7500 steps, tweaky knee be damned.  And I made it to the gym for a short workout, easing back into light squats, presses, and deadlifts.

Monday evening, I was out cold almost before my head hit the pillow.  And then slept like a log for eight and a half hours straight.

So, if your own sleep is less stellar than you might hope, consider adding some movement into your day.  Even thirty minutes of fast walking makes a big difference for me, and that’s a small amount of time to invest for seven or eight far-more-pleasant hours of snoozing in exchange.

July 5, 2018

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.”

 

June 26, 2018

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]

June 19, 2018

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.

June 9, 2018

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.

June 4, 2018

Break it Down

When I was a kid, my parents splurged, and bought the (at the time, rather expensive) Encyclopedia Britannica.  My father had wanted to own it himself as a child, though the purchase was clearly mostly for my benefit, as the heavy volumes lived in my room, taking up the entire bottom rows of my three bookshelves.  And, frankly, I loved it.  As anyone who, in the years since, has fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole can attest, it’s remarkably easy to get engrossed in random encyclopedia entries, whether on how the Tower of Pisa got its famous lean, or on the mechanics required for a snake to swallow and digest animals (including whole people) wildly larger than itself.

The Britannica was divided into three parts: the Macropaedia, which had long-form articles on major subjects; the Micropaedia, which had shorter entries on a far wider array of topics; and, my favorite, the Propaedia, a single, relatively slim volume.

Let’s say you wanted to construct an encyclopedia.  Where would you start?  How would you decide which topics to include?  Britannica’s answer was the Propaedia, a taxonomy of all the world’s knowledge.  Like the phylogenic tree of life, it started from a single root, and sub-divided endlessly: ‘Matter & Energy’ split to ‘The Universe’ then to ‘Galaxies & Stars’ to ‘Extragalactic Radio Sources’ to ‘Quasars.’  ‘History of Mankind’ broke into ‘The Modern World’ then to ‘Western Europe 1500-1789′ to “The European States’ to ‘France’ to ‘The Age of Louis XIV.’  I spent almost as much time poring over that single volume as all the others combined. I loved the structure, the organization.  I loved the way it linked across seemingly disparate fields and bodies of knowledge. I intuited, even at a young age, that the better my framework for the big picture, the more easily I would be able to understand, retain, and connect all the details.

These days, I’ve been thinking about the Propaedia a lot, as I’ve been spending much of my time working on the algorithm for Composite.  The idea is simple: if you’re a professional athlete, or a movie star prepping for a role, you have an excellent, experienced, and educated coach who designs a workout plan, a nutrition plan, a set of lifestyle changes, etc., all tailored specifically to you and your goals.  And those plans, plus accountability to the coach to help you actually stick to them, tend to yield extremely impressive results, as a trip to the ballpark or cinema illustrates.

The rest of us, however, just go for a run, copy workouts from fitness magazines, or hire trainers at local gyms whose primary credentials usually include having played D3 football and being great at yelling “it’s all you, bro, it’s all you!”  None of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, work quite as well.  So, fundamentally, Composite is about leveraging the power of AI (as well as technology in general, plus recent research in sport science and behavioral medicine) to let everyone get the pro athlete/movie star custom treatment—and results.

Composite’s algorithm is a neural network, so it will evolve over time, continuously improving its prescriptions as it learns from members’ results (as measured on things like blood panels, body composition, and benchmark workout times).  But, to set the algorithm up, we had a sort of Catch-22: you can’t train a neural net without a ton of data, but because there’s never previously been a use for that kind of data in the fitness world, it doesn’t really exist (at least not in a central, digital way).

To get around the chicken and egg problem, we’ve had to do some heavy lifting, initially building the algorithm using GOFAI (“good ol’ fashioned AI”), setting the symbol weights entirely by hand.  Doing that, in turn, has meant coming up with taxonomy after taxonomy after taxonomy.  We’ve had to reduce all possible, beneficial exercises, all possible nutritional approaches, all training periodization structures, all healthful lifestyle changes, all stretches and mobilizations and pre-hab movements, etc., into meaningfully structured trees.

Which, on the one hand, is kind of bananas.  But, on the other, has been absolutely the best part of the job.  All of those taxonomies have gone through a crazy number of iterations already, and I still regularly jump out of bed at 3 AM to scribble down an epiphany that sends at least one of them straight back to the drawing board.

Each time I work on those taxonomies, I think back to the Propaedia.  And I’m still not sure: did all that time perusing it change my brain and how I look at the world?  Or did it just so perfectly fit the way I already saw things, and gave me a master class in structured thinking, done rigorously and at scale?

Either way, that book was the best thing I could have had sitting on my bedroom shelf.  And I wonder if my own future kids, skipping around Wikipedia, but unable to hold in their own hands a single, unifying big picture, won’t be missing something beautiful and important as a result.

May 21, 2018

One is Silver

Early last year, I read that Kushner’s Angels in America would be coming back to Broadway, and realized I’d never actually seen either half of the play (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, staged separately but part of a single whole), on stage or even on TV (via Mike Nichol’s famed HBO adaptation).  Nor had I even read the play.  So, I got a copy, and banged through it in a single evening.  And while, in some ways, it felt totally dated—an artifact of an earlier NYC where AIDS was a new and ascendant threat and being gay and out meant something very different than it does today; in others, it was totally prescient—in its choice of villain, for example: the closeted yet AIDS-stricken New York attorney Roy Cohen, who famously mentored the (rather constitutionally similar) Donald Trump.

But, in short, Angels blew my mind. And it led me to search out and try to fill other lacunae in my cultural literacy—first more plays (like the Shakespeare and Chekhov I’d missed; so many Richards, so many melancholy Russians shooting themselves), then onto novels (ones I truly loved, like Ishiguro’s perfect Remains of the Day and Proulx’s sly The Shipping News, as well as others, like Updike’s Rabbit Run, that I found easier to admire than enjoy).

In the process, I also stumbled across an original copy of Sartre’s What is Literature, a book both off-putting and deeply fascinating, which gave me a lot of food for thought in my fill-in-the-blanks reading quest.  Though it’s a meandering polemic, one of the points on which Sartre seems particularly insistent is that books are written from a cultural context to an audience that shares that same context.  And, therefore, that when we read things years down the line, from our new context, we invariably have a different, much paler experience than the author intended.  Or, in other words, that my catch-up reading is a waste of time.  Because, as Sartre at one point puts it, “bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked.  Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on the spot.”

On the one hand, I take Sartre’s point.  As I noted, my experience of reading Angels would have been quite different were I a young gay man in NYC in 1992.  And I’m sure, generally, that there’s something far more visceral, far more alive, about engaging with art that, in turn, engages the very world you inhabit.  Yet, on the other hand, I also suspect Sturgeon’s Law—”90% of everything is crap”—is optimistic.  And since, over time, a sort of Darwinian winnowing occurs, while what people still read from 5 or 50 (much less 500) years ago may indeed be dated, it’s also likely to be better than most of what you can pull off the ‘new and noteworthy’ table today.

So, for the time being, I’m trying to hoe a middle road: I’m still working through the endless list of all the great works I’ve somehow missed, but alternating them with the most promising of current releases.  Because, with apologies to Sartre, it seems to me that it’s choosing solely one or the other that would be bananas.

May 17, 2018

Plucked Chicken

When it comes to getting haircuts, I have a few simple rules: I look for barber shops, not salons. I don’t pay more than $20. And ideally, I choose places that have a revolving pole out front, straight razors on the wall, a pile of old Playboys in the corner, and a cadre of regulars who sit around for hours discussing the best boxing fight they ever saw.  (Cf., Coming to America.)  Ridiculously enough, I’ve discovered this almost always yields a better haircut than what I’ve received in fancy spots for literally ten times the price.

On the other hand, when things go wrong with this approach, they can go quite wrong indeed.  Like this past week, when I made an emergency stop at a new barber.  I had gone literally months since my last trim, and when the urge to have it sheared suddenly hit me, I couldn’t wait.

I sat down in the chair, and the barber asked me how long I wanted the sides.  Or, at least, that was my understanding.  But, as is often the case with my rules, there was a bit of a language barrier.  In fact, he was actually asking me how long I wanted the top.  I realized as much from his first trimmer swipe, which went not above my ear, but rather straight down the center of my head, leaving me with an inverted Mohawk.

Perhaps from my shocked expression, the barber appeared to suddenly realize the miscommunication, too.  “Oh,” he said somberly, “this isn’t what you wanted at all.”  Still, what was done was done, and there’s no use crying over spilled clippings. I laughed and told him, no, it wasn’t, but that he should nonetheless just buzz away.  It’s only hair, I told him.  It grows back.

So, now, my hair is very, very short.  Military short.  Went out yesterday and bought a lightweight baseball cap to run in because you can see my scalp and it’s definitely going to burn otherwise short.  And, more positively, so short that my already brief ‘styling routine’ – combing my hair after I shower – has now further reduced to doing absolutely nothing, because at this length even combing doesn’t matter.

I don’t suspect I’ll be going this short again any time soon.  Instead, I’m planning to wait a couple of months (until it reaches a point I’d previously have considered my “I just got a pretty short haircut” length), to get it shaped up a bit, and to roll forward per usual from there.

But I’m also kind of glad this happened.  Because, for years, I’d wondered what I would look like with a buzz, but had always been too much of a wuss to actually find out.  Now, I know.  And while, to be honest, it’s not what I’d call my best look, I can also say, modesty aside, that I still look pretty damn cute.

May 10, 2018