I have a half ton of weights in my basement and yet I sometimes wonder if these simple tools (a PVC roller, lacrosse ball and band) don’t cause me ten times more agony. Darn mobility problems…
Competition with Balance
I am, by nature, a somewhat competitive person. I don’t care too much for losing (few do), but I find that where I care more is about the showing up and actually competing. If I go out and give my best or if my team goes out and leaves it all out on the field, then I’m good no matter the final result… but I would surely prefer the win over that ugly and often nagging feeling of defeat.
My competitive drive also varies based on the activity at hand. I’m not going to get some kind of red-eyed rage if I’m playing Blokus with my family during Thanksgiving… and obviously, they would seem to share my view as this picture so perfectly illustrates:
Now, when I did that strongman competition last year, I was really and truly competitive. Oh sure, I wanted the learning experience of it… to better understand what it’s like to be in the strongman arena… and that’s all true… but damn it, I wanted to do well. Really well. I did ehh and not much better than that. It still bothers me a bit to this day because I know I could have and should have done better. I view the experience as an overall positive… but damn it, I wanted a lot more out of myself that cold December day.
Of late I have been giving more and more thought on what it means to compete… the value of competition… when competition is more of a negative than a positive… and how important it is to win. I touched on this a bit in my post on greatness a few years back.
I believe this is, in part, driven by what has been going on in the news with the sex abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse… although really more by the Penn State situation where it seems painfully clear that a culture was created where as long as football wins (and the dollars associated with such wins) were coming fast and furious, then even the horrific could somehow be acceptable. It all just left me feeling disgusted, as should surprise no one.
It then got me thinking about how I treat competition in my own life. I remember one of my teammates on my soccer team saying that his high school coach would tell them, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”
In the most charitable of interpretations, that quote could mean that you have to go out, play hard, push the boundaries to the utmost and leave it up to the refs to make the foul calls.
But there’s such a fine line between playing a very physical brand of soccer and take a lunge at someone’s knee during a slide tackle from behind. And regardless, the quote is just an utterly horrible thing to say as a leader to a group of teenagers. Nothing good can come of it.
My take on competition and winning has changed over the years and now that I stand with 39 years on Earth, I think I have it sorted out in a way that is philosophically consistent with my principles:
Outside of things done strictly for fun, I enjoy the act of competing and competing hard. To quote Vince Lombardi from his “What It Takes to Be Number 1” speech, “The object is to win fairly, squarely, by the rules – but to win.” I enjoy giving my all until the buzzer sounds, the bell rings or the whistle blows, regardless of the score.
Because in the end… my ultimate opponent… the one I try to best each and every time… is who I was yesterday.
Completely Shameless Plug
For those who have not seen it, I have an article published over at EliteFTS.com entitled “The Battle to Take Back Awesome”. Just went up on Friday and I am both proud and humbled by the whole thing. I had a few pieces over at T-Nation from a few years ago, but this is my first one for EliteFTS and it’s a pretty big moment for me. It seems to be well-received thus far and I am planning on submitting more going forward.
Please give it a read and comment on it if the mood strikes you. Also, I do have a Facebook page for this blog, so feel free to follow along there as well. You can find that here.
What I Learned at My Obstacular Trail Race
I’m someone who likes finding some new challenges for myself every now and again. I like new stimuli since I can otherwise stagnate, so when my friend, Jason, let me know he was putting together an obstacle trail race to benefit The Wounded Warrior Project, I was 100% game on. OK, maybe more like 99% game on. I was there in attitude for sure… but I suppose actually doing a whole bunch of running BEFORE the race probably would have been a good idea and a finer example of 100% game on.
But I was able to recruit my brother (the gentleman with his eyes closed below) and our friend Tom (who ran a half marathon the day before this) to venture forth for 5 miles and 15 obstacles worth of mayhem-filled fun a few weeks ago.
And I even learned a few things along the way. What, pray tell? So glad you (and by you, I mean me) asked!
1) Keep your head down.
I’m not great at endurance style exercise. This is a combination of not really training that way and not being terribly well-built for it. Both of these things can be overcome (the first by different training and the second through not letting this become an excuse). So when I was in the midst of this race, there were a lot of moments that were difficult for me. If there was one pretty useful trick I used to keep myself moving, it was to keep my head down. This is actually a big part of why I wore my baseball hat and pulled that sucker nice and low.
If my head was down, I was only focusing on what I could control at that very moment: my next few steps. Looking ahead to see how much was left to run did me absolutely no good. Heck, it would have probably discouraged me if I thought about it all that long. But those next few steps? I could do those and I could do those every single time until I was done with the 5 miles.
This happens in life all the time. If you have a daunting task in front of you… especially one that could take quite some time to address… it will never help you to look too far ahead because the only thing you have some semblance of control over is the here and now. So crush the here and now and move onto the next step. Keep… your head… DOWN.
2) Stronger teammates = stronger you.
Unless you are some kind of Shaolin monk with keenly-honed powers of self-mastery, the environment around us has a big a effect, both for good and ill. If you work in an office full of people who are horribly negative and whose chief hobby is complaining about anything and everything… I have a hard time believing you will be all that productive (at least not without listening to your iPod all day long to drown them out). If you lifts weights consistently with people a lot stronger than you are… lo and behold, you will get a lot stronger too. I would contend you will also get a lot stronger than you ever would have on your own.
On our team of 3, Tom was the strongest on the endurance front BY FAR. It wasn’t even close. He could have left my brother and I in the dust multiple times, except many obstacles required a team effort to complete. That being said, Tom was still at the lead of our little pack at all times… and he ran a freaking half-marathon the day before. I kid you not.
The big positive is that Tom always being there pushed me and Chris to keep running just a little bit more and pressing just a little bit harder. If Tom could keep running, so could we, damn it. And ran we did… for 5 miles and for a total of 1 hour, 11 minutes. I have never run that far or long in my life and if Tom wasn’t there, I cannot really say I would have done all of that.
3) It takes all kinds.
I cannot imagine why anyone would have run this in purple short-shorts… shirtless… and with double pierced nipples. I kept imagining the potential to be hurling yourself through an obstacle in the woods and there being that one branch sticking out juuuuust the right way. *shudder* But hey, he was probably through that course in half the time I was, so who am I to judge?
4) I want more.
It’s sometimes the things you least expect that can interest you the most. I finished this race, felt like my legs had been beaten severely by a gang of Muay Thai fighters… and yet I wanted to do another one. As I noted above, I am in no way well-suited (at least not currently) for this kind of activity… but if there is one thing I know about myself, it’s that I need challenges to bring out my best. This was something new… something hard… yet something ultimately fun that I can do with a team (and I like team stuff quite a bit). I am already looking up 2012 events for things like Tough Mudder, Spartan Race, Warrior Dash and so on. I know I will need to rearrange how I train, but I enjoy the chance to do so. Sometimes a little forced evolution is good for the soul anyway.
In the end, the entire event reproved something I’ve long known to be true: competitive sporting events are never just a moment of physical activity, but are often very pure opportunities for learning a lot more about yourself. I would definitely encourage you to give it a try. You don’t need to be a hyper-competitive monster to enjoy these kinds of things, but until you’ve pushed yourself past a moment after moment where you wanted so badly to quit, I don’t think you will truly know yourself.
Keep your head down.
I Got 99 Problems and They’re High Class Ones
All of this storm stuff got me to thinking. I know, I know… every time that happens I tread into dangerous, uncharted territory, but I’ve also got a lot of time on my hands, so these things will just happen. I was having a conversation with a friend recently where we were talking about various problems we face and the one thing I told her was, “Remember… these are high class problems… the kind that are almost nice to have.”
So what do I mean by a high class problem? Well, not really the Jay-Z style problem:
Although I suspect the problems Mr. Sean Carter faces these days are much more high class than he dealt with growing up.
I define a high class problem as the kind of problem that may seem like an issue… but really isn’t in the grand scheme of things. An illustration in thinking of myself since the “winter” storm Alfred hit. I lost power and was without TV, computer and heat. I also had to lift in my basement by candlelight. High class problems all. No one should shed tears for me since I have a HDTV, MacBook Pro and am fortunate enough to even have a gym in my basement to begin with. Or even the fact that my weightlifting of late has been pretty flat and I feel all banged up. High class problem. You get the picture.
There are 2 big challenges of the high class problem, as I see it.
First, even when you identify them, that doesn’t mean you instantly realize you shouldn’t be so concerned about them. We don’t always instantly shift into a state of epiphany. Well, at least I don’t. If you do… damn… please write a book on it. I’ll buy it.
Second, the realization of problems as high class can sometimes send us into a full-on state of guilt. Why? Because it’s easy to realize there will always be people out there worse off than us… so even having a moment to complain about a high class problem seems incredibly shallow. I think that’s being overly hard on yourself since we are just human after all… but at least taking the time to reflect on why your problem should not cause undue grief is probably the better path to walk.
If I seem a little fixated on the perspective thing of late, I probably am. Travel always does that to me, but the next would be down time without competing priorities. And that’s me right now. Fear not – I have an idea for another blog post to do in the next day or so. I might even be able to do it from my house without 15 layers of wool, fleece and blankets.
Sometimes It’s Just Play
As I start this post, I am already wondering whether it will be overly specific to a small group of people. I never like doing that, so I am going to do my best to rein this puppy in and bring it back around. We’ll see how that goes. And with that unbelievably awkward introduction, we begin.
There are a lot of people out there who love to get into details and plan. Depending on the situation, I can be one of them, but a lot of the time, I find it can turn into over-planning as well. But I do know quite a few folks who truly enjoy getting into the uber-specific details of any project to turn over each aspect, each step and carefully construct a borderline masterpiece of crafting. It’s actually pretty amazing to see the final result.
I see this with people in their training/exercise programs as well. If something is not built into the plan, then great googly-moogly! All hell breaks loose!
(Best use of “googly-moogly” ever. I will not debate this.)
It’s a little amusing to watch if, in some ways, it were not so darn sad. Oh don’t get me wrong – I’ve done the exact same thing where my plans have the inevitable wrench of doom thrust into them with nary an apology from Murphy, his law or anyone else. But by-and-large… especially when it comes to things lifting-related… I tend to roll with the punches.
This whole topic struck me yesterday when I snagged my nephews, ran to Toys ‘R Us, grabbed a few Nerf footballs and headed over to an open field at a local college. We weren’t there to improve our GPP (General Physical Preparedness). We weren’t looking to get in some extra NEPA (Non-Exercise Physical Activity). It wasn’t designed to be part of a structured anything.
It was just playing. Running around. Throwing the football. Those two little wild monkeys tackling each other repeatedly into the grass. It was just play in all of its beautiful, chaotic and unstructured glory.
It wasn’t my thinking of how this would so neatly improve my short burst acceleration or improve my total calorie burn for the day. I didn’t consider my mobility or even how the sunshine would increase my overall Vitamin D intake for the day.
It was possibly the last completely beautiful day we may get before the cold, overcast and rainy parts of Fall kick into high gear here in New England. And it felt great.
It’s just play and that is enough. If my deadlift session today were to somehow suffer because of this little excursion, so what? I cannot even begin to imagine it will, but so what? Was my plan so unbelievably valuable that I should pass up the chance to get outside and send my nephew on a few deep post patterns in the sun? Are your plans like that as well? They may be occasionally, but please, please, PLEASE don’t fall into the trap of your plans always trumping the chaotic little bumps that come up in life that you may miss and never get back.
Sometimes you need to be less afraid of diverting from your plan and utterly terrified of missing a magical random moment… because those are often the best of all.
Bed Blogging: Random Thoughts to Conclude the Weekend
The incredibly clever title of this post stems from the fact that it is a Sunday night and I am typing these words from bed. Sometimes I get creative and sometimes… well… it feels like enough to just state the obvious. Tonight is most assuredly the latter.
A few random items on my mind, none of which felt like I currently had enough mental horsepower to transform into full blog posts.
1) My first New Year’s Resolution for 2012 will be to completely avoid negative people as much as humanly possible. Honestly, I’m not really waiting for January 1st to kick this one into high gear. As a generally positive and optimistic character, my patience for the chronically negative is short and gets shorter every year. See yesterday’s post on “My Worst Day” to get an idea on why the eternally whiny cause me to spin on my heel and head in the opposite direction.
2) I always feel better when I blog consistently. Blogging is now being added to that slowly growing list of activities that I truly regret when not engaged in with regularity. This would include
– reading
– going to church
– cooking my own food
– going to museums (something I am really whiffing on big time and yet I ALWAYS enjoy them when I go… which immediately begs the question of why I don’t go more often and for which I have no good or rational answer).
I don’t include exercise on this list because I do that with regularity anyway. However, this list gives me an interesting view of where I need to spend more focus to reap more benefits.
3) At the end of many weekends when I’ve gone a few blissful days without a razor touching my face, I give thought to letting some matter of beard grow in. You know what stops me? It’s a combination of (a) pure vanity; (b) liking how I look clean-shaven (while hating the actual act of shaving); (c) itchiness; and (d) the fact that growing a beard has suddenly become a “thing” in the lifting community where you are somehow not fulfilling your manhood potential if up are not sporting a full-on Grizzly Adams special.
In the interest of full disclosure, rebelling against (d) should not be a very strong reason to avoid growing a beard, but it is shockingly compelling for me. I hate the idea of doing it because someone is basically challenging my manhood if I don’t.
But I do look ruggedly handsome when it starts to come in. I mean, that’s just objective fact. Like gravity… or the deliciousness of Chik-fil-A. Don’t question it.
On Being Smart and Pacing Your Passion
So I am doing my utmost right now to actually be smart. I know, I know… why start something so radically different for myself now? Isn’t it a little late to show up to that party? Probably, but I’m also a crazy dreamer.
My decision to engage the rational and logical parts of my brain for a change (as opposed to the parts enamored with XBox, muscle cars and the supreme hilarity of Tosh.0) stems from a bit of a setback in my training program. A few weeks back I was absolutely ROLLING. Things seemed so free and easy and new records (at least on several on my important lifts) were coming almost every week.
Heck, I even was able to reach one of my all-time goals of hitting a 500 lb. squat. I have video of it, but I am debating about putting it up just yet. Why? Because once I finish the set and realize what I just accomplished, I lose my collective mind like an utter fool. In a positive way.
Ahh… but what cometh before the fall, my children? Pride, of course. I just hit a 500 lb squat! Who knows what mountain was there to conquer next and yield to my steely will and chiseled handsomeness? So I kept pushing at the same pace… umm… and I decided I should try to get ready for soccer… and I started sprinting a few times a week… and hey, wouldn’t it be great to be a little leaner too? Yeah, yeah… throw that into the mix… plus the utter hectic pace of work.
Whether you realize it or not, everything I just outlined is a recipe, but not a recipe for some kind of completely decadent pumpkin cheesecake of goodness. Oh, tut-tut my friends. That would be crazy talk. No, this recipe would be more like a steaming 5 lb. ball of rat poop. Deelish, n’est-ce pas?
That’s when my lifts were going down instead of up. And while I mean that in terms of overall performance, I also mean it like “I tried squatting that weight and on my 2nd rep, the weight went down but… uhh… it didn’t go back up. Yeah, not so much.”
And that’s when the conundrum of this site’s very motto… “Relentlessly push yourself forward”… found itself a wee bit out of sync with how I was feeling.
And therein lies the issue for so many people with passion for something: how do you sometimes pace your passion? This is a real sticky wicket for a lot of people who are all about weight training (especially guys who have an easy time letting ego, pride and machismo get in the way of using an ounce of simple common sense). We can be excellent at going at something full bore, but what about then easing off the throttle and collecting yourself for the next round of fun? Hmm. Maybe not my best quality for sure.
What it really got down to was a lack of listening to the signals my body was giving me loud and clear to chill the hell out.
Our passions move us. Drive us. Give us the chance to risk big, fail big and (hopefully) win bigger than we could ever imagine. They should… no… must be celebrated and cherished.
But it’s also OK to give them a few moments of respite so they can soak up their energy anew and burn oh-so-brightly again. They won’t hold it against you.
The Fine Line Between Possibility and Stupidity
People who lift weights… I mean really lift weights… tend to get viewed through a certain lens by a large bulk of society. Muscle = moron in a lot of contexts. You need look no further than your average Planet Fitness commercial. It’s as if there is an inversely proportionate relationship between size and smarts. It’s fairly ridiculous, but since it tends to make for an easier way to categorize or pigeonhole people, then hey… why the heck not? There are certainly people I’ve met who reinforce the view that weight trainers are not even as bright as the iron they throw around, however, there is also an inherent sense of wisdom in those who take their lifting seriously that I don’t think anyone outside of the lifting community ever really understand.
Let me see if I can illustrate a bit.
I stroll into my basement gym on the day I will be doing deadlifts. Now, the deadlift is a fairly straightforward exercise: the bar is on the ground and your job is to pick it up off the floor to a standing position. There is more technique to it than just that, but at the end of the day, that’s about it. Bar on floor. Bar being held in standing position. Ta da!
But the deadlift, like many big lifts in weight training, is also a greater truth serum that sodium pentothal. Either you can pick up the weight or you can’t. There is no debating with it. There’s no reasoning with it. And the beauty… perhaps the misery… of the deadlift is that when the weight is too much for you, it stays completely stuck to the floor. On a lot of other lifts, there can be a modicum of movement before you bomb out and sometimes you can pull the bar a few inches up in a deadlift before all hell breaks loose… but much of the time, there is absolutely nothing.
That’s humbling. It never feels good. You know what else it is? An incredible learning experience in the shape of steel and iron.
When you get pretty serious about weight training (as I believe I generally am), there is a pursuit of pushing yourself a little further all the time and over a period of time. You are continuously pushing the outer edge of what you believe to be possible for yourself. I could deadlift 405 lbs. before and suddenly… huh… I can lift 425 lbs… and now I can do 445 lbs… and I never thought I would get there. Then one day… BOOM! I’m stuck. I can’t get any more than 445 lbs. I know exactly where I stand at that moment – again, the weight simply does not lie.
But what I am trying to do is move past that limit and see what else I can accomplish. At it’s most basic level, when I go down into my gym and lift weights, I am constantly looking to see what my limits are and how I can exceed them. It’s as if the entire activity has nothing to do with getting bigger or getting more muscle or any of that and everything to do with learning more about who I am, how I handle adversity and whether I can pick myself up when I get knocked down. It’s a constant learning and testing experience when done properly. In some ways, those who take this activity so seriously have a finer understanding of who they are than 99.9% of the people on the planet.
It’s certainly not just weightlifters either. Endurance athletes looking to run farther and faster or the Crossfit devotee who is looking to finish their WOD with more weight in less time fit the bill as well.
Everyone in this community who takes training (not just working out or going for a light jog or looking to “tone” up for Summer) seriously is always walking the fine line between find out what is possible and pushing themselves too hard to potentially get hurt, burned out or maybe just get funny looks from family and friends. To many, all of it looks more like stupidity than possibility. But sometimes you need to risk a bit in the search for greater self-knowledge. And trust me… I don’t want to get hurt (been there a bunch of times) or burn out (I am there right now because my ego outstripped my recovery ability)… but I must confess I do enjoy the funny looks from time to time. 🙂
So before you see someone who takes their weight training incredibly seriously as basically a semi-evolved primate… stop and ask yourself… when was the last time you put yourself in a situation where you were forced to figure out what was truly possible? And then think about what it would be like to do that 3… 4… 5… maybe even 6 times per week.
If you realize it’s been a while, then I would prescribe a little bit of iron therapy. You would be amazed at what you will discover about what is possible within you.
The Plank in My Eye
I think I’m like many people who can be a total ace at passing out advice that I then do a less-than-ideal job of following for myself. I don’t think there is anything remarkable about that in myself or in others – it’s just far easier to cast the penetrating light of truth upon a situation removed from myself than it is to see that same case in me.
Case in point. This past season of coaching baseball, one of the things we implored of our kids was to be aggressive and not fear the consequences that would follow. If they were going all out and made a mistake in the process, ehh… that’s fine. More often than not, their aggressive on the baseball diamond would be rewarded with something good than a mistake. Plus, we kept reminding them… this is baseball. A game. Something to have fun with and not something with the future of mankind perilously hanging in the balance. I think we made a bit of progress on this with a lot of the boys and I hope it sticks with them. If there is one HUGE thing I’ve noticed in youth sports, it’s that the kids who are either the most aggressive or the least concerned about making mistakes are the ones who do best (and also seem to have the most fun).
And God forbid it all be it about fun. I know… that’s a pretty nutty thing to say about youth sports. We’re supposed to be prepping every little Johnny and Jane to be Olympic-calibre athletes from the time they are 6 right? (I will now seek to turn down my sarcasm a shade).
Getting back to the notion of seeing the speck in your brother’s eye while missing the plank in your own. Yeah… that’s right… I just went Biblical.
A few weeks back I was playing a game in my basketball league and I was absolutely awful. I mean… just… wow… I was really bad. My time on the court seemed to serve little purpose outside spelling a teammate who needed to rest for a bit. I was tentative and second-guessing and awkward. It was probably one of the worst basketball experiences I’ve had in my life, outside of some bad Nerf hoop experiences when super young. You know those where you are just starting to learn to play, but have an older brother who just swats away every shot you put up with that puffy orange ball? So yeah, besides that, my worst outing ever.
Then it hit me loud and clear and with no small amount of force: I was exactly like one of the 10 to 12 year olds I had just finished coaching who didn’t seem to get out of his shell and just be aggressive. Boom – head shot. I sat there as a coach and felt I was so wise with all my perspective on the value of being aggressive and how you not only play better, but have more fun… and yet I never saw it in myself.
I played again last night, freshly self-chastised for coaching one way and playing another, and guess what? I played much better, was much more aggressive, had a blast and smiled throughout a lot of the game (even at some of the awful calls made by our fine officials). Heck, we won too.
The lesson in all of this for me is simple and direct: If I have an insight for someone else… whether while coaching or with someone coming to me for advice… I need to immediately take an opportunity to then look at myself in that same vein because chances are, I will need it as well to some extent or another. I hope to make this a habit and given the fact that my very job involves me giving guidance to people on a daily basis, I think I can get some mojo going on this point.
It’s time to get that plank out of my own eye and see things a little bit more clearly… at least when looking at myself.