Rubber Match

Here's an example of a really simple but effective conditioning workout that can be done with just a beat-up old tractor tire.  These aren't hard to find.  I picked mine up for $50 on Kijiji.  If you have farms anywhere in your vicinity, I bet they have old tires that they'd be willing to part with quite cheaply.  Mine weighs about 350 pounds.  My sledgehammer weighs 12 pounds but you can experiment with different sizes.  Again...very cheap...maybe $10-15 the hardware store, and of course will actually work as a legit sledgehammer too if you need it for such.  This stuff will last forever.  I've used this tire a lot and it still has that new tire smell (well not really, but it looks pretty good still)


"Tire 300" workout:

10 rounds for time of:

10 x tire flips (bend down and "sumo" deadlift/clean the tire to chest level and then push it over on itself)
10 x sledgehammer smashes (pretty self explanatory...just hammer that big rubbery bitch!)
10 x box (tire) jumps (i.e. jump with two feet onto the rim of the tire and then off again)


Therefore, each round is 30 reps in total.  10 rounds of 30 reps is therefore a total of 300 repetitions.  Complete one round nonstop and then take as little rest as possible before moving onto the second round, etc.  I find the flips the hardest, so I start each round with them.  The order of the box jumps and smashes could of course be reversed.

It's a quick but challenging full-body workout.  And it's a damn lot of fun.  There's no science behind the 300 rep total.  It's kind of a rip-off of the GymJones benchmark workout for the film 300, and also mimics the kind of rep ranges you'd see in a CrossFit Fight Gone Bad-style WOD.  Something that most relatively fit people are going to be able to do in under 30 minutes, and that you can gauge improvement by shaving time of your last attempt of the same workout.

One tip: do the flips on a soft surface like grass (or shallow snow in the winter).  It helps in allowing you to get your fingers underneath to clean the tire from ground to chest level.  Concrete\asphalt makes it more difficult to get the initial grip...though not impossible.

Happy flipping!

Move and Stick, and other reversals

Today I ‘discovered’ a new type of exercise.  New for me at least.  It’s hitting a heavy bag while walking uphill on a treadmill.  What kind of newfangled bullshit is this you ask?  Let me explain.  I have head cold and I was home today getting some rest.  I thought that maybe getting a bit of cardio in would help clear my head, but I didn’t want to leave the house or do anything too strenuous – just enough to sweat a bit and help get my body temp up in an attempt to nip the cold in the bud.  So I loaded up a Joe Rogan Experience podcast, hopped on the treadmill and set the controls for a brisk uphill walk.  At about 10 minutes in, my phone froze and, because it was over on the charger I didn’t want to stop and go fix whatever was wrong, so I just left it.  Not feeling all that great, I didn’t figure I’d last all that long anyway.  But once I got about 20 minutes in, the boredom set in a bit...that is until I caught a glimpse of my heavy bag hanging within arm’s reach.

Suffice it to say everything in my gym is pretty much within arm’s reach.  My current set-up shares space with the laundry room, furnace and workshop, so space is at a premium.  I do have other random implements in the garage and outdoors, but my main ‘gym’ is downstairs, consisting of a homemade squat cage, treadmill and heavy bag.  You can see in the pic below that it’s fairly tight quarters.  I don’t mind – I kinda like it that way, as I wrote in a previous post.  And yes, that black ABS pipe running down the wall in front of my squat rack is indeed the drain pipe for the toilets upstairs.  It helps when you’re struggling at the bottom position of a set of heavy squats to be reminded that instead of this you could be literally crawling through shit, Shawshank style, rather than just feeling that way!

Today the cramped quarters were particularly advantageous.  Just as boredom was setting in on the treadmill, I took a few random jabs at the heavy bag, soon realizing that it was a cool sensation.  Usually, when I do rounds on the bag, I’m working from a stable position of power.  I move the other equipment out of the way and can really unload with punches, knees and kicks from the strong foundation of being on the ground.  This was different in the sense that I was walking on the treadmill at a quick pace, trying to throw punches while off balance.  Right jabs were easy enough but hard to generate much power at first.  Left crosses, across the body were even trickier.  This struck me as useful.  How often, in an actual fight, are you swinging from a stable position?  More likely you’re off balance, backing up perhaps.  Of course, ideally you train for this type of situation by sparring with actual opponents who are firing back and trying to knock you off your game.  However, from a solo training perspective, this type of off-balance punching seems to be a worthwhile compliment to the more traditional heavy bag work.  After all, knockouts aren’t always produced when the striker is in a stable attacking position, as evidenced by the infamous Anderson Silva KO of Forrest Griffin.

So, speaking of backing the fuck up, why on earth am I doing long, slow, boring cardio on the treadmill in the first place?  I virtually never do slow, steady-state cardio.  I much prefer getting it in through playing basketball, running sprints, flipping tires, etc.  The trend in the fitness ‘industry’ over the past decade or so I would say, largely influenced by CrossFit and so called functional fitness, has been toward HIIT-style cardio, intervals and the like.  Works for me!  That kind of stuff is way more fun than hopping on an elliptical machine for an hour and sweating to the oldies.  But I remember back in the 90s (holy shit I’m old!) and early 2000s, the holy grail of fat loss was always long, slow cardio.  All self respecting bodybuilders did that shit, preferably in the AM on an empty stomach (or post weight training).  I remember being constantly told in muscle magazines to do lengthy cardio in the 60-70% max heart rate zone to oxidize fat.  Keep it moderate, as anything more strenuous would shift the metabolism over to burning carbs/glycogen. 

What’s funny is that, back then, I virtually never followed that advice.  I just could never persuade myself to devote that much time to long, boring cardio.  So, aside from sporadic attempts, I never did.  But perhaps my physique suffered for that stubbornness.  When the trend in the mid-2000s seemed to switch over to high-intensity, interval-style cardio, I jumped on that bandwagon whole-hog....because that’s what I’d been doing all along anyway - talk about the easy route!  You know the story...someone throws up a picture of a world class sprinter and marathoner side by side with the caption, “Which one would you rather look like?” The mesomorphic Greek god or the emaciated Kenyan?  Of course, everyone chooses the sprinter, so the implication is to train like a sprinter...lots of speed, intervals, high-intensity stuff.  Long slow cardio just wrecks your hormones and makes you, well...slow.

There’s probably some truth in all of that.  No one is going to get fast and athletic from doing slow cardio for 60 minutes each morning on an elliptical.  Fast and athletic comes from doing fast and athletic stuff (as well as good genetics).  But what about body composition?  That’s where I’m not so sure.  I’m not entirely convinced that high-intensity, interval-based sprint training is the best recipe for body recomposition.  Or at least, maybe not in isolation.

So, not at the expense of, but rather as an addendum to the fun, high-intensity stuff, I’m going to give slow, monotonous cardio a solid try.  I’d say an old fashioned college try, except for the fact that, as I said, when I was actually in college I never gave it the time of day (despite it being de rigeur back then).  So far it’s been four sessions of AM cardio, on the treadmill – between 45 and 60 minutes each, and with HR around 65% or so (easy peasy lemon squeezy, as my 3-year-old would say).  We’ll see how it goes.  Despite the fact that there’s still a mountain of snow on the ground here, I’m motivated by the vanity of summer (even if far-off still) and trying to drop a bit of bodyfat before the season when it becomes more socially acceptable to walk around with your shirt off.  The impetus for trying this came from two sources.  Firstly, following Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on Twitter in preparation for his Hercules role, it seemed he was doing a lot of steady-state morning cardio.  Lots of tweets about lengthy 5:00am elliptical sessions (or course in addition to gruelling strength training).  Dude has always been huge of course but he looks absolutely shredded for that role.  The other inspiration is that I’ve been reading Joe Manganiello’s Evolution book.  It’s a pretty solid and sensible read, but one of the quotes that particularly stuck with me was:

“I don’t care how much you hate cardio or think that weights and diet alone will do the job.  They won’t.”

He talks quite a bit about formerly hating long, boring cardio, but that finally buckling down and adding it in made a huge difference in his physique.  Joe’s attitude is basically that you may hate it at first but nevertheless just suck it up and get it done.  That resonates.  One of his recommendations is to set the treadmill to a 12 degree incline and do a brisk 3.5mph walk for about 30-45 minutes.  I love to walk so that works for me.  Sure it’s boring at first.  But it’s a good opportunity to listen to podcasts, audiobooks or whatever you like...or just zone out with your thoughts.  Moving meditation.  It’s actually kind of enjoyable.

It’s led me to reassess the whole concept of boredom.  I’ve always hated the idea of boredom.  It annoys me when people say they’re bored.  I mean, the world’s a fascinating place, there’s so much to see and learn...how the hell can you say you’re bored?  Read a new book, paint something, learn a new skill on Youtube...whatever!  We’re so programmed to be constantly stimulated nowadays.  It’s a constant digital amusement park out there.  I think we’ve been cultured to expect that we don’t deserve to ever be bored.  What an insult to think that I should ever have to hunker down and do something that’s menial and unstimulating.

The thing is, life is often menial and unstimulating.  Probably always has been and probably always will be.  Until very recently, people seemed okay with that, or at least didn’t really question the concept.  Sure, it’s not good if things are always boring...nobody wants that.  But I think the whole idea that we’re somehow entitled to be constantly entertained, constantly stimulated, is a relatively new idea.  It seems kind of part and parcel to the whole ‘me generation’ mentality.  People assume that they should be perennially entertained by their career, their relationships, their surroundings.  If you were to ask someone in the 1930s if they felt stimulated in their job, they probably would have looked at you like you had three fucking heads.  It wasn’t even a question – you just go to work and do your job.  I suspect that this is also quite a foreign concept in any kind of traditional/indigenous cultures that still exist (and would be a good proxy for the bulk of human history).  Think of subsistence hunting.  Most of that shit is incredibly dull.  Trust me, I’m a hunter.  Most of hunting is sitting still and trying to be very quiet.  It’s dull – not unenjoyable, but dull.  It’s punctuated by moments of extreme excitement or course, but those are the exception, not the rule.  I don’t have to spend hours on end digging up tubers with a stick, tanning animal hides or braiding rope but I imagine those get a bit dull too.  But no one in those cultures sat around wondering if they felt fulfilled or self actualized.  You just picked up your stick and dug.

This concept of boredom is at the heart of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished masterpiece, The Pale King, which I’ve been reading lately.  The book fictionalizes, among many other things, a group of IRS employees and their menial tasks, and contains passages such as this:

“I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

I like that whole idea of becoming ‘unborable’.  It seems to me to have something to do with realizing that we are not our external environment, no matter how sterile or mundane.  But it’s not avoidance either, or retreat into some sort of internalized ‘happy place’.  It’s somehow the sense that our humanity becomes most evident when juxtaposed with the most torturously robotic and inhumane of contexts.  To talk about it is to trip over words, at least for me.

Elsewhere in the novel, DFW writes: “Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.”  This is of course what every unique little snowflake these days is raised to believe.  I can’t deny that at times, especially when I was younger, I’ve felt pangs like this too...the idea that I’m somehow above all the menial and monotonous chaff of everyday existence.  Which of course is bullshit.

I’ve repeated the DT Suzuki quoke here before: “Nirvana is to be sought in the midst of Samsara.”  Or perhaps more tangibly it’s expressed in the proverb, “Zen is not about thinking of spiritual matters while peeling the potatoes, Zen is simply to peel the potatoes.”  That is, real enlightenment or liberation is to be found in the most mundane of things.  Something to keep in mind the next time you’re copying formulae in an Excel spreadsheet, or plodding away on the treadmill.  I know I will.

Pain and Gain

“The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. 

You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain.  And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain”

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.  I was reading it this past week while relaxing on a beach in Mexico, pretty much as far as humanly possible from any sort of pain or displeasure.  It made me reflect on why we, as athletes or regular exercisers, routinely subject ourselves to activities that open the door to pain and discomfort.  Why am I motivated to do something that will hurt and leave me in a crumpled, sweaty mess on a gym floor, when the option is there instead  to recline on a beach lounger with a cool drink in hand (or at the very least, when not on vacation, on the couch with a cup of tea)?  Why is it that, despite being a nice break in the middle of winter, sitting around all comfortable on a beach gets reeeeaaalllly fucking boring!  Quickly.

The fact is that most of us, in the middle-class ‘developed’ world lead lives that are, for the most part, fairly free from pain.  Despite the constant bitching about how busy or stressful our jobs or lives are, a thorough self-examination surely leads to the conclusion that compared to the vast swath of human history, we have it pretty sweet.  I’m not denying that bad things happen, often to good people, but in the broad context we’ve crafted a society that by and large allows a good deal of comfort and freedom from genuine misery.

Many of us work jobs that have become fairly second-nature and are not overly demanding, certainly from a physical perspective at least.  We don’t have to hunt, gather and toil for our food.  Entertainment is plentiful – we’re awash is the proverbial ‘bread and circuses.’  Creature comforts are everywhere.  You deserve that Starbucks latte, you really do.  Put your feet up on that new Ottoman, you’ve had a long day....

Intense physical exertion, the kind that temporarily makes a person wish that they had never been born, seems to be an antidote to the kind of ennui that accompanies such a well-fed and well-cared for state of being.  The fact is that running a 6 minute mile, hurts.  Loading up a barbell, laying it across your shoulders and squatting down ass-to-grass, hurts.  Flipping a tractor tire in the snow, sucking cold air into your lungs, hurts.  I know, however, that by subjecting myself to that pain, hopefully I’ll learn something about myself that I didn’t know before.  I’ll know a little bit more what I’m capable of enduring.  Few things in life give you that.  And it’s a gift.

It’s a gift that’s available to all. But herein lies the trouble in convincing non-exercisers to ‘get off the couch’, so to speak.  From the perspective of someone on that side of the fence, who’s never come through and seen the benefits, exercise (at least the strenuous kind that actually pays dividends) just looks like a lot of pain.  They don’t see yet that, when that temporary pain has passed (as it always does), one emerges on the other side with a completely transformed sense of self.  It’s not invincibility or arrogance or complete fearlessness.  But perhaps it’s a little bit of fearlessness.  It’s the sense that someday, something will certainly take me down and beat me.  But it won’t be that thing.  It won’t be that weight I just lifted.  It won’t be that time I just beat.  It won’t be that pain that I just endured.

What’s great too about that Vonnegut quote is that it comes from a letter that the character, Unk, has written to himself.  He’s had his memories erased several times and is writing the message to his future self as a means of instruction and encouragement.  When the character first reads those lines he weeps because he thinks that the letter has been written by someone else who clearly has a greater pain tolerance.  He imagines someone heroic and fearless, far more so than himself.  It’s not until later that he realizes that he himself is the author, and the one that has already been capable of enduring such intense pain in the quest for truth and knowledge...a realization that makes him “courageous, watchful, and secretly free.”  I think that that’s a telling metaphor, in the sense that most people are capable of far more than they give themselves credit for.  The gym is a great place to discover that.

For the science-y among you, there’s even some data to suggest that regular exercisers show greater levels of pain tolerance than other people, even without recent exercise: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1295850/?page=5

That’s significant in my mind, because it implies that once you’ve been baptized in the fire, it’s a permanent adaptation...  Something you’ve earned that can’t be taken away from you.

And speaking of Stoicism, old Marcus Aurelius has some advice in this regard:

Be like the promontory against which waves break. Am I unhappy because this happened - not a bit, rather happy am I though this has happened because I continue free from pain, neither crushed in the present nor fearing the future. Such a thing could have happened to any man, but not every man could have continued free. There is no misfortune, only the course of nature and our adaptation. What event can prevent you from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent, secure against opinions and falsehood? Remember when vexed that to bear misfortune nobly is good fortune.
M.A. IV.49.

That is, we might to not be able to control the things that happen to us, which are just part of nature.  What we do have the power to control however is our reaction to those events, how we respond, and our resiliency toward them.  Furthermore, Cicero writes, “For what shame, what degradation will a man not submit to in order to avoid pain, if he has once decided it to be the highest evil?”

Decided – that’s the key word.  Pain is just pain.  It’s neutral.  We choose to place either a positive or negative value on it through our interpretation.  Is this an invitation toward unbridled masochism?  I don’t think so.  But it might be a hint that pain has more to teach us about ourselves than does the siren song of perpetual comfort.

Errr'day

This is gonna be a short post.  I just wanted to mention something that probably seems almost intuitive in most every field of human endeavour but perhaps get brushed aside as relates to exercise and fitness.  That is, if you want to get good at something, do that something every day.  Every. Single. Day.    

 

Like I said, this seems almost too simple and obvious.  If a person wants to get good at playing a musical instrument, they practice it every single day.  If you want to be a great painter, you’d better be painting some shit every day.  Wanna be in the NBA?  You’d better be working on your jump shot daily.  Oh and by the way, you still won’t be in the NBA, you pygmy, but at least you’ll have a good jumper. 

 

As an example, when I was in high school, I played guitar for at least an hour or two each and every day.  It wasn’t out of some grand desire to be a great guitarist.  I just really liked it, so I got in the habit of doing it regularly.  If I walked by the guitar, I would inevitably pick it up and play for a bit.  And I got quite good (not amazing, but pretty decent) in a relatively short amount of time.  These days, I might pick up my guitar once or twice a week.  And you know what…I’m no better than I was back in high school. 

 

Again, this all seems quite obvious.  But translated into the arena of fitness, the waters get all muddied.  People (myself included) get so focused on training splits, periodization schemes, fear of ‘overtraining’, etc. that it’s very easy to forget this most basic fact.  If you want to get excellent at something…do a lot of that thing.  So much of the dialogue around training and muscle-building talks about the ideal ratio of rest days to work days, the number of times you should train a body part or full body per week…push/pull, training/not-training through soreness, blah, blah, blah

 

And a lot of this makes sense.  In no way am I advocating that a person can be in the gym squatting 1RMs each and every single day…there’s a logical limit to this.  But one thing’s for sure, if you want to improve your squat, you damn well be doing a lot of squatting - as much as your body’s recovery abilities will allow. 

 

The best example I’ll use is with chin-ups.  For years I was stuck in the 12-18 sort of range for max number of strict chin-ups (no kipping).  On a good day, I could get into the upper teens but was never able to push past that.  I did all sorts of things…adding weights, longer rests, etc….but nothing gave me any indication that I was likely to push much past that threshold.  During this whole time, however, I was operating under that pervasive bodybuilding dogma that you don’t want to train body parts too often.  I.e., I would at most train pulling exercises like chin-ups maybe twice per week, sometimes only once, thinking that anything more would lead to overtraining. 

 

However, for the past month or so, I’ve been making sure to do chin-ups every single day.  Not a lot of them.  Just one set to (or almost to) failure.  Every. Single. Day.  I set a reminder in my Outlook calendar.  It prompts me to get up from my desk and go find a bar or overhang nearby (stairwells often work well) and crank out a set.  And you know what….it works.  Today I hammered out 26 straight.  Not an amazing number, but at 240lbs bodyweight it’s not bad either.  I’ve got 30 in my sights now. 

 

This extra chin-up regimen has no effect on other aspects of my training.  I still do all of my other usual stuff and longer workouts on a more infrequent basis.  I even do weighted chins once a week or so as part of an upper body push/pull workout, as well as ring muscle-ups once or twice a week.  The extra ‘daily’ chins take all of 2-3 minutes – hardly an inconvenience to my day – yet they’ve made all the difference.  The volume is so low that they don’t cause any kind of issues with DOMS or ‘overtraining’.  The only noticeable side effect is being able to do more chin-ups. 

 

The same thing applies to push-ups.  A while back, I got into a rhythm of finishing every day with a set of push-ups to failure, just before bed.  That led to pretty steadily increasing push-up numbers, getting up to the mid seventies.  And again it took hardly any time and the volume was so low as not to affect other aspects of training.  I’m currently experimenting with sprints.  I’ve traditionally done a ‘long-ish’ sprint workout once every week or so.  The past week, I’ve been doing a quick series of between 5 and 10 roughly 100-yard repeats on my lunch break.  Again, this is not very scientific (I use a parking garage and don’t formally measure the course) and takes virtually no time (maybe 5 minutes, including rest breaks between).  It’s too early to tell if it’s made me faster, and difficult to gauge progress without someone there timing me, but I’m hoping to be able to feel the improvements to my quickness. 

 

So there you have it.  I feel as if I’m the purveyor of perfectly obvious advice.  Nothing groundbreaking here.  If you wanna get good at something, do it every day.  Now if I can only translate my own advice into my writing, these blog posts are gonna get a whole lot more frequent…and potentially a little bit better too. 

Watered down fitness advice

My new favourite lunchtime workout lately has been swimming in the river outside my office.  I used to occassionally swim at lunch at my old office (mostly to do with trying to pass random military swim tests), but it was a complicated affair of driving to the closest indoor city pool and then getting back in reasonable time.  At my new office, I step out the door and am faced with the glorious Ottawa River.  A few months ago, in the peak of summer, I couldn't resist any longer and decided to go for a dip.  Since then it's become a weekly habit to go at least once.  And despite the temperatures getting a bit cooler now, when I went last (earlier this week) the water was still quite pleasant.  

Each time is a little bit different.  There's a little rocky island about 150-200 metres offshore to which I often head.  There's nothing much on it but a few shrubs, seagull bones and shit.  There's a lot of wild purslane all over the place, which makes a nice lemony snack.  I usually am still fasting at that point in the day so it always feels like a treat.  I've even discovered two scraggly tomato plants, with some green tomatoes on them, which i can only figure grew from some seeds that wafted downstream in the breeze or from compost drifting ashore.  It doesn't look like another soul has been on the island for years, which is kind of nice because it gives a person that sort of Robinson Crusoe, 'undiscovered country' feeling when you step ashore, even though it's in the midst of the city.

Other times I just swim around randomly.  This past week, I swam out along some rocky bluffs that skirt the edge of the river and climbed up into some of the little overhangs and caverns that have been eroded by the river over the years.  Pretty neat area.  Even found some interesting patterns in the rocks that look like little fossilized worms or vegetation of some sort.  All in all much more interesting that a chlorinated indoor pool.

I have to admit I get some weird looks from passers-by on the shoreline.  There's a nice walking trail along the river so there's a lot of foot traffic during the lunch hour, especially on nice days.  I've never seen another person in the water here, or anywhere close by.  It strikes me as a bit strange. There's no beach or anything, but it's not like the water is hard to access.  It's rocky, yes, but you only have to get in about 10 feet or so and it drops off very deep and the water is clear and free from weeds.  I can't figure out what the reason is.  A lot of people I tell seem a bit shocked at first, i think because they think it must be dirty.  Admittedly, there have been a few cases where the city has allowed raw sewage to dump into the river during heavy storm overflows, but it doesn't seem to discourage people from the beaches in the summer.  And while I certainly would rather there was no untreated sewage going into the river ever, it's a big, deep river and I'm sure it's pretty diluted by the time it gets to me.  Besides, I fully agree with George Carlin's very Nietzschean bit about how swimming in raw sewage strengthens the immune system.  Same reason I get about 10-20% of my calories from food that's fallen on the ground (actually no, wait, that's because I have young kids).  Of course Carlin is dead....but so far I'm not. Part of me really wants to rebel against this whole notion that we can somehow wall ourselves off from pollution by avoiding the 'dirty' places.  If ecology teaches anything it's that there's no hope in that...everything is connected to everything else and the fences we try to put up just serve to make us feel better.  We need to take better care of the whole place, not just try to avoid the nasty stuff.  We're all downstream so to speak.

We're well into October now and I'm hoping I can at least make it into November.  I met a very cool Swedish guy when we were vacationing in Cuba last winter, and he was telling me about how he was on track to swim in the ocean every month of the year.  Now I think he was from the southern part of Sweden but that's still pretty bad-ass.  The river here freezes over by December/January so I think November is probably the best I can hope for, but you never know.

Speaking of Swedes, you know else was a fan of open water swimming - a dude named Beowulf:

Unferth spoke:  
"Are you that Beowulf
who struggled with Brecca
in the broad sea
in a swimming contest?
The one who, out of pride,
risked his life in the deep water
though both friends and enemies
told you it was too dangerous?
Are you the one who hugged
the sea, gliding through the boiling
waves of the winter's swell?
You and Brecca toiled
seven nights in the sea,
and he, with more strength,
overcame you."

Beowulf spoke:
"Well, my friend Unferth, you
have said a good many things
about Brecca and that trip,
drunk on beer as you are.
Truth to tell, I had more strength
but also more hardships in the waves.
He and I were both boys
and boasted out of our youth
that we two would risk
our lives in the sea.
And so we did.
With naked swords in hand,
to ward off whales,
we swam. Brecca could not
out-swim me, nor could I
out-distance him. And thus
we were, for five nights.
It was cold weather and
the waves surged, driving us
apart, and the North wind came
like a battle in the night.
Fierce were the waves
and the anger of the sea fish
stirred. My coat of mail,
adorned in gold
and locked hard by hand,
helped against those foes.
A hostile thing drew me
to the bottom in its grim grip,
but it was granted to me
to reach it with my sword's
point. The battle storm
destroyed that mighty
sea beast through my hand.
And on and on evil
things threatened me.
I served them with my sword
as it was right to do.
Those wicked things
had no joy of the feast,
did not sit at the sea's
bottom eating my bones." (translation by D.Breeden)

Now that's some really bad-ass shit.  Dude swam for 5 days in a full suit of armour and a carrying a sword, and killed a bunch of sea monsters at the same time.  The least I can do is go for a little dip on my lunch break and carry back some tomatoes and fossils!

Another swimming contest I like to think about is the one from the movie Gattaca.  It's a great scene from an ever greater movie.  Serves as a good bit of admonition for those times when a person feels like they're a slave to their genetic limitations or that somehow other people have it easier.  Goes to show that it's most often the people that work the hardest and want it the baddest that succeed, not necessarily the ones with the most natural talent or advantages.  A good reminder at all times, especially for those of us in the fitness realm.  And swimming always makes me think of this scene, and the message therein - a good mnemonic kick in the ass!

Well, that got a little more philological and philosophical than intended.... 

All I'm really trying to say is that I'd encourage anyone who has access to a river to ignore the strange stares you might get and just use it.  Swimming is killer exercise.  I'm not even that great at it but it always leaves me feeling like I had a good workout, especially in open water with a decent current (this spot is downstream from some crazy rapids at Chaudierre Falls).  I'm always starving afterwards, which to me is a good sign that I worked hard.  Plus, I used to pay 5 bucks a shot to swim in the public pool, plus gas to get there.  This is free for the taking.
So dive in.