Captain Jack

Back when I was a kid, I was lucky enough to learn how to surf from Richard Schmidt, a legendary big-wave surfer, and one of the first two or three people to surf the infamous breaks at Mavericks.

We’d paddle out, ride waves until my lips turned blue in the freezing Santa Cruz water, then come back in to bullshit with the local surfers and rising pros who knew Richard. Often, there was a familiar-looking homeless guy there named Jack, a tremendously friendly guy with a scruffy beard, layered sweaters, and an eyepatch:

One day, as we headed back to Richard’s van, Jack walked along with us.

“It’s great seeing you as always,” said Jack, once we reached the van. And then he opened the door of a $200,000 1950’s Jaguar XK 140 parked next to the van, hopped in, and drove off.

It was then that I realized why Jack looked so familiar. I saw his face every time I put on my wetsuit:

Jack O’Neill, inventor of the wetsuit, passed away this Friday at the age of 94. He was a fixture of the Santa Cruz surf scene, a tremendously nice guy, and a brilliant businessman.

I wear O’Neill wetsuits to this day, and I silently give him thanks each time I’m out in the water, my lips still turning blue, but not nearly as quickly as they otherwise would.

RIP, Jack. You’ll be missed.

Single File

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s wonderful book on writing, she explains the title with a simple anecdote:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table, close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’

And, indeed, that works for nearly any kind of project. The whole might be overwhelming, but you can invariably break it down into a series of successive projects (and sub-projects and sub-sub-projects) each small enough that you can confidently take them on.

I’ve long taken that approach to goals, working backwards from five-year (or 25-year) endpoints, to one-year, one-quarter, and one-month waypoints. With that groundwork, I can then focus on just what’s in front of me today, yet know I’m still making progress on the big picture.

Yet I’ve also learned that there’s such a thing as too much sub-division.

Previously, I’d continued all the way back to one-week and one-day breakdowns, starting each day with a list of small tasks across a number of different projects. But because I’d chopped those tasks so fine, I ended up spending my day essentially serially multi-tasking. I never got to spend long Deep Work / Maker Time blocks on a single project.

Now, I stop my breakdown at the month level, then sort the resultant project list by urgency / importance. And each day, I focus only on one single project, the one at the top of the list, for at least the first few hours of the day, before dealing with daily habits (like blogging and emptying my inbox) or small one-off tasks.

Sometimes, it will be the same project for days on end. And though I initially had some anxiety about that – felt like I was leaving the rest of my projects unduly on the back burner – I can now empirically say, having just analyzed a year’s worth of my completion rates with both approaches, that I get waaaaaaaay more done when I take this single-file approach.

In other words, take it bird by bird. But take it by the whole bird, not by the beak and leg.

June 1, 2017

Sound of Silence

Today is the Jewish holiday Shavuot, the conclusion of a seven-week counting period from the start of Passover, the day on which tradition tells us God gave the Torah to the Jewish people.

Or, more accurately, the day on which tradition tells us that God gave them the ten commandments, speaking to them directly. Apparently overwhelmed by the experience, the Jewish people then beg Moses to act as an intermediary, leading Moses to head up the mountain for forty days, returning with the physical tablets of the ten commandments, and with an oral transmission of the rest of the Torah.

As with all of Judaism, the details of that story have been studied and debated over the millennia since.

According to some rabbis, God spoke only the first commandment to the people directly: “Anochi Adonai Elohecha, asher hotzeticha mei’eretz mitzrayim mi’bait”, “I am the Lord, your God, Who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

According to some others, God spoke only the first word of the first commandment, “Anochi”, a word of Egyptian origin meaning “I am.”

And still others say that God spoke only the first letter of that first word, the Hebrew letter aleph.  But aleph is a silent letter – neither vowel nor consonant.  It has no sound.  So what and how did God speak in that silence?  It’s an interesting question to ponder today, on Shavuot.

To that end, a poem I’ve long loved by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins, “Silence”:

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

Knock Your Socks Off

As I’ve written about before, the muscles in your feet are extremely important. When they’re engaged, your arch can absorb a huge amount of force, and the muscles further up the kinetic chain – in your legs and hips – work their best, too.

Whereas, when your arch collapses, every step smashes the small muscles and tendons in your feet. Worse, the navicular bone in your heel collapses inward, torquing your shin, and turning off muscles like your glute medius on the side of your hip. It’s a consistent cause of chronic pain in feet, knees, hips, and low-backs.

That’s why I’m a long-standing supporter of going barefoot: it allows you to use your feet (and, in turn, your legs) they way they’re meant to work.

Obviously, if you run along city streets (like I do here in NYC), you probably don’t want to go totally barefoot, should instead opt for some minimalist, zero-drop shoes. (I’m a big fan of Inov-8.) And if you’re working out in a commercial gym, even if you take off your shoes, you probably still want to keep on your socks, to avoid picking up infections like MRSA or ringworm from sweaty floors.

But when you’re padding around the house, you’re in the clear. And while you may already be taking off your shoes at the front door, there’s a big difference between going barefoot, and going sock-clad mostly barefoot.

First, though socks are more forgiving than shoes, they still squeeze your foot, preventing natural toe splay. Second, socks are slippery. Walking depends on friction – between your foot and the ground – to give you something to push against. Imagine walking on ice: with almost no friction between your shoes and the ground, you automatically start to take small, tentative, penguin-like steps, instead of natural human strides. Sure, socks on wood floor (or even carpet) aren’t nearly as slippery as shoes on ice. But they’re still slippery enough to change the way you walk, and to undercut the skill- and muscle-developing point of walking around barefoot in the first place.

So, in short, make a point to walk around your home without shoes – and without socks. It’s the healthiest thing to do.

Hit the Road

Almost exactly a year ago, I blogged about how much I hate running. But also about how, precisely because it’s my biggest athletic weakness, I was focusing on running more, and on running better.

I ran through last summer, and into the fall. But by the time winter rolled around, I scaled back. I still hopped on the treadmill a few times a week to warm up before lifting, and tried to include 400m and 800m repeats in at least one metabolic conditioning session each week. But, all in, I could still count my total weekly mileage on one hand.

Now, warm weather is upon us again. This year, I no longer dread running, could lace up my sneakers and bang out a 10k at a moments notice. But I’d also be lapped on that 10k by many octogenarians. So I’m focusing this summer on not just surviving runs, but on actually doing them fast.

For the second day in a row, Jess and I are off to the Hudson Greenway, to get back in the swing of things with some long, slow distance. After that, it’s weeks of tempo runs and long and short intervals for me. I may still not be winning races, but I can at least move up to the front of the over-80 crowd.

May 28, 2017