Pacing - Hiking with kids

Having the day off work, I took both of my kids hiking last Monday.  My daughter has been obsessed with waterfalls lately, so we drove about 40 minutes out of the city to the Eardley escarpment of Gatineau Park, to do one of my favourite local hikes at Luskville Falls.  I love the scenery out there – for some reason it always reminds me of the mountains in South Korea and brings back a lot of good memories of hiking around the forests there.  

The last time I had done the trail was in the Fall and I had been able to get away and do it alone, without the kids.  I had taken them before, but they had been young enough to ride in those backpack kid-carrier devices.  This was the first time that I figured they were both mobile enough to hike on their own.  There are some pretty steep sections and I had pretty low expectations about how far we would get.

Was I ever pleasantly surprised!  We managed to hike probably 2-3 kilometres up and back, with much of that steep enough that the kids had to scamper over rocks on all fours.  I don’t think I heard a complaint the entire time.  We usually go for hikes on trails that are much flatter and easier for little feet to navigate, but still I’m usually well prepared for a chorus of “My legs are tired”, etc.  It didn’t happen this time.  I don’t know exactly what it was but they really rose to the challenge.  No complaints at all.  My only guess is that beforehand I had talked it up to them as a bit of a challenge and that it was okay if we didn’t get very far because it was a pretty steep climb – I think that element of a challenge really made them want to do it even more.  Goal-setting starts by age 3 apparently!

Of course, we kept a pretty slow pace, but it turned out to be a nice change.  Like I said, the last time I did the trail I had done so alone and I recall it was in the Fall and I had stopped in just before dusk on a road trip up to the Ottawa Valley.  I had set a pretty quick pace that time because I had wanted to get up and back before the mountain got really dark and I’d end up tripping and falling on the way down.  While that was great too, this time the slow pace set by the kids really forced me to relax and appreciate the beautiful day, the scenery, the smells and the small details.

Once the first acorn was found, the hike turned into a roving quest to find others.  We’d take 10 steps, scamper over a few rocks and then find another.  Each one had to be carefully examined for quality and either kept or discarded.  Despite my reassurances that only white oak acorns were usually palatable enough to eat, after boiling away the bitter tannins, we collected pocketfuls of the things, with my assurances that we’d try boiling these ones when we got home…just to see.

We took frequent breaks.  In addition to giving little legs a chance to rest, these opened my eyes to a few things I might have otherwise missed.  As the kids sipped their water bottles on one rocky outcropping, I caught the scent of sweetfern and noticed some clumps growing nearby.  I picked a bit, mentioning to my daughter that it made good tea.  To which she responded, “Is there anything on this mountain that we can just eat without cooking it first?”  I told her, a bit optimistically, that we might find some berries, but I’m not sure she was convinced.

Lo and behold, another 10-15 minutes up the trail, there was a little narrow, overgrown side-trail that led down to the stream atop the waterfall.  In August, it wasn’t much more than a trickle but the kids wanted to go see it.  Initially I said no, as I was a little worried about them making it down the steep footing, but I reconsidered and, holding my youngest really closely, we made our way slowly down to the water.  There was a little pool of water where they could take off their shoes and cool their feet.  We saw a little frog perched on the moss and watched him for a while.  And then, as they were splashing around a bit, I spotted a few small blueberry bushes along the water’s edge.  There were only about 10 small berries on the bushes but it was enough to mean I hadn’t been a liar earlier on.  I divided them (equally of course or it would have been tragic!) between both kids.  I thought to myself that, had I pushed on as I initially wanted to (and most certainly would have if I had been solo), I would never have gone down this little trail and would have never found the blueberries.  It was the slow, meandering pace, set by my kids that had led us to them.

We went a little bit further and then I made an executive decision to start heading back.  Again, it was me, thinking about the steep descent, that spurred this, not any complaints from the kids. They wanted to keep going.  We had a few minor slips on the way down, but overall they were very sturdy and cautious and we got back down with minimal scrapes and injury.  I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day if I tried.  And a big part of that was because I had to slow down and adapt to a child’s pace.  There’s a broader lesson in there somewhere…assuming I can remember to apply it.

Spartan Beast

I spent five and a half hours last Sunday running up and down ski hills and through swamps, climbing under and over all sorts of obstacles, and generally getting beat up – all in the name of completing my first Spartan Beast race.  And what’s more, I actually paid someone about $80 for the privilege of doing all of that shit!  So what gives?  Why would a cheap bastard like me pay money for an organized form of exercise (torture) like this?  And actually be planning on doing it again?  Well, since you’re reading this anyway, I’m going to tell you.

For someone who’s always trying to find cheap or no-cost ways to stay in shape, paying money for an event like this seems a bit antithetical.  But for me, even though I aim to do most of my exercise regimen at little or no cost, there are times when a person needs a sort of goal or benchmark to evaluate one’s progress.  This race was one of those benchmarks for me.  I’m not an endurance guy really.  I don’t log countless miles of running each week.  I don’t run marathons.  For the most part I subscribe to the less is more, short but intense school of thought surrounding exercise.  Practically, that means a lot of weightlifting, sprinting, met-cons, tabatas, explosive movement-oriented sports – that sort of stuff, with a few middle distance runs and swims thrown in for good measure. 

This race, pardon the pun, was a different beast altogether.  24 kilometers long (most of those at significant elevation).  Not at all like my regular training.  But I’m an advocate of well-roundedness (or at least I’d like to think so) in fitness as well as life in general.  Excessive specialization in any field has never really appealed to me (perhaps a little bit of ADD…).  So this was a new challenge.  At the end of the day, I really just wanted to see if I could do it, in the absence of any real distance training.  Prior to Sunday, the last time I’ve run any distance much greater than about 7 or 8kms was at least 5 years ago (prior to my daughter being born).

In the lead up to Sunday, I have to say I was pretty nervous, which is unusual because I’m quite calm by nature.  Like I said, I hadn’t done any long runs leading up to the event.  Hell, I hadn’t even run a 5k in about 3 weeks.  My last workout beforehand was on Tuesday and consisted of a few sets of muscle-ups on rings.  After that, I figured a few days off would be good in order to come into Sunday totally fresh.  I was genuinely scared of failing at this thing, especially since I had mentioned it to a few people and would have been pretty embarrassed if I wasn’t able to complete it.

I had been pretty casual about the whole thing in the weeks prior.  A friend of mine, who was also planning to do the race (and who has a lot more experience with distance events), was really concerned about issues like food and water, talking to me about all manner of energy gels, camelback packs for water, electrolytes, etc.  In hindsight, I was a bit cocky and flippant about all of that stuff.  Food, I thought, ha!  I already fast for sometimes 20 hours each day.  What do I need food for in a 4-5 hour race!  Water, ha! I’ve heard there are some water stations throughout the course, and in the 7km Spartan Sprint earlier in June I had skipped past the only water station on the course without even stopping!  I didn’t like the idea of spending 50 bucks on a bulky camelback and getting it caught on the barbed wire and other obstacles.  My ego and my desire to be tough and minimalist was getting in the way.  In the end I acquiesced a bit and the day before the race I went out to Canadian Tire and spent 12 dollars on a little 1 litre leather wineskin thing.  I hung it from my belt with a climbing carabiner, with the thought that if it started to get in the way, I could simply ditch it somewhere and only be out $12.  I also stuck a handful of my kids’ dried Fruitsource bars and a granola bar in the cargo pockets of my shorts.

The day of the race was absolutely beautiful.  The week leading up to the race had seen humidex values in the 40 degree Celsius range, but Sunday was low twenties, sunny and breezy.  Absolutely perfect.  I had run a 5km Spartan Sprint 3 years previously in 30+ degree heat and it had been brutal.  Once I started, I realized that the wineskin flopping around at my waist wasn’t going to be a huge burden.  I had been worried that it’d interfere with my ‘speed’, but the first massively-steep ascent convinced me that that likely wouldn’t be a huge issue!  Some of the downhills saw it knocked around a bit but not a real problem.  On obstacles such as the barbed wire crawls and monkey bars, I just pitched it down to the other end and then picked it up later.  The fruit bars and granola bar came in handy too.

The first third (roughly of the race) posed no real problems.  I knew what to expect from the Sprint distances I had done before.  I was trying to be proactive with my water consumption to avoid cramping and dehydration and I wasn’t pushing myself to the max (hell, I knew I wasn’t winning this thing and I just wanted to finish and place somewhat respectably).  It wasn’t until I got to, I’m guessing, the 10km mark and we had to stop and do a set of 20 wheelbarrow-style deadlifts (really light weight) when I started to get some cramps in my inner quads.  I kind of pushed past them, scarfed down a fruit bar and few sips of water and kept on trucking.  But they didn’t get better.  For the whole remainder of the race my quads kept cramping – then it moved on to the calves and hamstrings.  It was a learning experience for me because I’ve never experienced this kind of muscle cramping in the past.  After briefly stopping a few times to stretch them out for a few seconds, I quickly realized that my best defence was to keep moving (and to massage them a little bit when possible to get the knots out).  Strangely the worst cramps came at sections of the race that were really upper body dominant, such as having to stop and do chin-ups.  That was when the legs cramped up the most and I ended up doing chin-ups in an L-sit position because it seemed to help with the leg cramps.  Strange!

The other, somewhat unexpected (although shouldn’t have been) thing that got me were the blisters.  At about the halfway point, I could really feel a huge one forming on the inside of my right foot.  I put up with it for a while but then decided to take a short break on the side of the trail during one of the forested sections.  I had stashed a few band-aids in a ziplock bag, so I quickly covered it up and kept going.  In hindsight, it was a total waste of time, since it only provided a bit of relief, and pretty soon I had one on the same spot on my left foot anyway.  Your feet get so wet during these races, running through streams, mud, etc. – this one even had an open water swimming portion – that it’s impossible to do much once the blisters start.  Next time, I know where I’m susceptible to getting them, so I’ll try preventatively wrapping those parts of my feet in moleskin or tape.  For this race, it just got to a point where you just had to try and ignore them.  My attitude was basically to just deal with the discomfort and worry about it later.  It certainly did slow me down in parts, because it’s hard to resist being more tentative when something hurts.  Oh well, next time I’ll have to try the whole  “ounce of prevention…” strategy.

Aside from the cramps and blisters, I was pretty pleasantly surprised that cardio wasn’t a limiting factor.  I had thought that I might have a problem with such a long distance, never having trained much for longer runs.  For most of the second half of the race, I could have pushed harder, if it hadn’t been for the leg cramps and blisters.  Live and learn I suppose – and good info to have for next year.

All in all it was a great event.  Tonnes of variation and some really spectacular mountaintop views of the lake country all around Mont Ste. Marie – the only bad part was that I was reluctant to stop even for a minute to savour those views for fear of cramping up worse.  The best tactic was to keep moving.  The final uphill section, following the swim, was so steep in parts that you were scrambling on all fours over fallen tree branches and rock faces just to get up, but it helped to just keep moving, however slowly, one foot in front of the other.

Many of the obstacles were similar to the Spartan Sprint races I’ve done in the past, just longer and more difficult, but there were some cool new ones.  My favorite was a progression of hanging boards, rings, chains and ropes, all at different levels, that you had to swing across like an orangutan.  Very reminiscent of some of the stuff on American Ninja Warrior!  I was pleased not to fall on that one.  Actually, I only had to do one set of 30 burpees (standard punishment for failing at an obstacle) the whole day – on the spear throw.  That’s been my nemesis for the Spartan Sprints.  I missed the spear throw in my first two Spartan Races.  I actually hit it for the first time this past June for the Ottawa Sprint, after taking the time to get it well balanced in my hand before the throw.  This time I did the same thing, took my time, and hit the target smack in the middle of the chest….but it didn’t stick.  The spear (well, shovel handle with a dull metal poker attached) hit and bounced right off.  Oh well, burpees it was for that one, but I felt pretty good about it still.  Most of the obstacles themselves are not really that difficult.  They don’t require a lot of brute strength.  But interspersed with the distance and the elevation, they take their toll.  I’m reminded of that great quote from Rocky, “it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”  The last quarter of the race at least is purely mental.

I set out basically to finish the thing, but secretly I was kind of thinking that 5 hours would have been a good goal.  I finished in 5 hours 38 minutes, so lots of room for improvement.  I have no illusions that I’ll ever match the top guys, some of who run this thing in just over 3 hours! (WTF).  One friend of a friend flew through it in just over 4 hours, and apparently had scouted out the course for 2 straight days ahead of time and had his wife strategically placed to offer food at different sections throughout the course!  Another guy I talked to (who beat my time by about 10 minutes) had trained 6 days/week in preparation for it.  My preparations (or lack thereof) pale in comparison.  But still, I’m happy.  If you would have asked me in the half hour following the race, as I lay on the ground stuffing a cheeseburger David Hasslehoff-style into my face (lovingly provided by my wife), if I wanted to do another Spartan Beast, the answer might have been no.  But, once that initial fatigue subsided, I can definitely say I’ll try it again and hopefully learn from some of the mistakes I made this year.

My five-year-old daughter ran her first Spartan Kids race this year and loved it, and my three-year-old son is chomping at the bit, so I’m looking forward to many more years of obstacle racing ahead!

Free Enlightenment

After hearing about it late last summer and missing out, I’ve been attending several of the 2013 sessions of free yoga on Parliament Hill.  This event is organized every Wednesday (noon-1pm) in the summer by Lululemon.  Apparently this has been happening for the past 5 years or so, starting out with only a handful of people and growing to a maximum turnout last August of over 2,000.  My very rough estimate would be that there have been about 300 or so people there on the really nice days, but still at least 100 last week when the weather was grey and rainy.  The first time I went was an absolutely beautiful sunny day, probably about 22 degrees or so, and I have to say that it was one of those events that reaffirms a person’s faith in humanity.  Perhaps that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it really felt that way.  It’s so easy to hear all the constant barrage of stats about how inactive we are as a society and how like 80% or people are obese (okay, so it’s probably not quite that bad…but it is some stupidly high number).  But to see hundreds of fit, healthy-looking people taking time out of there weekday schedules to enjoy some exercise in the middle of downtown Ottawa – just makes a person feel inspired.  

I would totally recommend anyone in the National Capital Region to try to check it out.  They seem to have a different instructor leading it each week.  Even if you only show up for a half hour, you just find some empty space on the lawn, toss down a mat and follow along.  They have speakers but sometimes it’s hard to hear.  It’s easy enough to follow those around you if you miss something.  I normally like a good strenuous workout at lunchtime, but this is a nice change of pace once a week.  It’s something I’m not really good at (I know, I know, yoga isn’t supposed to be competitive), but I think it helps with overall mood, stress levels and flexibility.  As I age, I notice that flexibility is the one fitness marker that atrophies the fastest, more so than strength, speed, endurance, etc.  Hopefully this helps in some small part.  And you can’t beat the price.

Resistance? - Training with your kids

You hear, a lot of the time, people using the fact that they have kids as an excuse for not working out.  I'll admit that there are some times when little kids can be a barrier to getting a solid, uninterrupted training session in - however, if you can find ways to involve them and make it fun for them, your kids can actually improve your training rather than detract from it.

Here's an example of what I mean.  This is a video of my two kids, ages 4 and 2, helping me with some chin-ups in our backyard this morning:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNQ4TvAPAwE

The best part is, I never have to do any persuading to get them to help me out. They love it - I think because they feel they've got an important job to do, and it's fun for them.  And in addition to helping me out (in the form of added resistance to make me stronger), it seems to foster their own interest in exercise.  My daughter now, when she sees a low tree branch or monkey bars, wants to try to do chin-ups herself.  At 4, she's not quite strong enough yet, but she tries damn hard and she'll get there sooner than later, I know it.  She also stoked that this year she'll be old enough to run in a mini-Spartan Race in June.  Those interests aren't from any direct influencing that I've done, but rather from the fact that she sees exercise like this as just a regular, fun part of daily life and not as a chore.  What you don't see in the video is that immediately afterwards, she wanted me to sit on her back while she did pushups!

Back to the video.  You can easily imagine how this type of thing could be adapted for almost any type of bodyweight exercise.  Thanks largely to writings from Martin Berkhan on the subject, I've been using a reverse pyramid approach to most of my lifts, from squats to deadlifts to weighted chins.  I spent a lot of my life doing the more traditional type of pyramid where you start off with higher rep lower weight sets, gradually increasing the weight up until a max weight low rep set and then (perhaps) pyramiding back down.  However, that entails expending a lot of energy on your lower weight sets - possibly negatively impacting the max set (i.e. the one that really counts).  After reading Berkhan and others, and experimenting on my own, it seems to me to make more sense to, after a few brief warm-up sets of low reps to get used to the movement, go directly into your heaviest set for the day (i.e. the one that you most hope to increase from your previous workout).  Following that (whether it be a single or in the 3-6 rep range), I drop the weight about 10% and then try for higher reps (maybe 6-8).  This can be done several times, dropping an additional 10% (of the new weight) each set and (hopefully) increasing rep ranges until you might be doing 15-25 on a final burn-out set.  I can only speak for myself, but this type of training set-up has led to quicker gains than most other methodologies I tried over the past 15 years or so.

When training with kids in tow, it's obviously not an exact science, and it's more important that they're engaged and having fun.  For instance, today I was doing my max set (with both kids as added weight) at almost exactly 300lbs (230[me] + 38[Violet] +32[Eli]).  For my first reverse pyramid set, her stepping off actually resulted in about a 13% total weight drop for the second set, and taking Eli off for the last set was actually another 12% drop, but it doesn't matter all that much.  Save the precision for your next uninterruped session with a barbell.  First and foremost, training with your kids should be about having fun and making sure they're having a good time too.

I would encourage anyone to give your kids the benefit of the doubt and try to engage them in your training.  I'm sure people can come up with all sorts of ideas that I've never even though of.  Whether it be sprints in a wheelbarrow, having a contest to toss them up as high as possible into the air (make sure to catch them at the bottom), or whatever else that they see as fun (usually they're the ones with the best ideas!) - go for it.  Where else can you find a set of weights that keeps getting heavier as you get stronger, while at the same time shouting encouragement at you and telling you hilarious knock knock jokes that make no sense?

the Haiku workout

I’ve been feeling quite poetic lately for some reason. For me, that impetus is always a bit sporadic and tends to ebb away into more staid and pedantic periods, so I’m going to seize this chance to draw some parallels between poetry and exercise. For the moment, I want to focus on the Haiku form (and related Japanese-derived short poetry like Senryu and Tanka), and what that particular aesthetic or impulse might have to teach us in the realm of fitness and physical expression. I’ve always really loved Haiku. The form sometimes gets disparaged a bit for being simplistic and childish (two things which I am, proudly), but the really great Haiku poems are something magical. On the surface they seem so simple – something that anyone could do – but they also somehow hint at the totality of existence within those 3 lines of text. It’s that universality that William Blake was talking about when he wrote “to see a world in a grain of sand.” I hate to over-intellectualize any of this, because Haiku is the complete opposite of that. At its heart, it pure, unprocessed, direct experience of a fleeting moment, before our brains have a chance to apply any critical or reflective lens. The idea really resists explanation, and is probably best conveyed through examples (of some of my favourites):

On the fifteenth floor
the dog chews a bone-
Screech of taxicabs.
      -Alan Ginsberg


In my old home
which I forsook, the cherries
are in bloom.
     -Kobayashi Issa


Right at my feet
and when did you get here,
snail?
     -Kobayashi Issa

No one travels
Along this way but I,
This autumn evening.
     - Matsuo Basho


Because of the brevity, it’s important that every word has a purpose. There can be nothing extraneous. The purpose is not to reflect or deconstruct. Great haiku are those that just provide that spark, that instant of direct experience with the ineffable or sublime. They capture those moments when a person is just thunderstruck by the beauty of everything – sometimes a sad, melancholic sort, but beauty nonetheless. And hopefully, when done right, that spark triggers something in the reader almost as powerfully as in the perceiver himself, through some kind of shared cosmic consciousness or something.  So, you might ask, what bearing does this have on your next workout? Well, funny you should ask that grasshopper. I think that the ideal workout shares some commonalities with a great haiku poem. Such as:

1. It is brief. Now this isn’t to say that there’s no place for endurance work. There is (occasionally)…but I really feel that the majority of workouts should be short and intense. It’s pretty well documented that after about the 30 minute mark (of weightlifting for example) hormone levels take a rather nasty turn toward higher cortisol and lower testosterone production. Not good, not good. Few of my workouts last longer than 30 minutes. If it’s strictly weights, that means maybe 8x3 (Rookie Journal is a proponent of this and it’s really helped me increase poundages) of either squats or deadlifts, or perhaps 4-5 sets of reverse pyramid training, a la Leangains. Either way, the workout focuses on one big compound movement with minimal, if any, auxiliary work. You don’t need to do leg curls and lunges and extensions afterwards. Just squat (or deadlift, bench, etc.) and get out. With good chunks of rest between sets for recovery, that usually ends up at between 25-35 minutes per session. Structuring workouts around a single, comprehensive multi-joint movement like this allows, or rather forces me to focus on one thing and doing that one thing well. That’s the essence of haiku right there, I think. Removing distractions and focusing on only what the universe is doing right at the singular point where you are now. There’s nothing like a trying to force out a 20-rep final RPT set of back squats to remind a person of exactly where they are!

2. It’s intense – staggeringly so. Just like a great haiku leaves the reader almost breathless by the beauty and poignancy of the image, so to should a great workout leave a person breathless (and floored, quite literally). I know I’ve done my best when I literally collapse onto the cold concrete of my garage floor after the final set. That’s the sort of intensity I aim for. That’s not to say I’m successful every time, because I’m certainly not. But I attempt to bring that intensity every time. In my mind, one shouldn’t approach a workout in any sort of half-assed way. That’s when you’re liable to get hurt or, at the very least have your progress stalled.

Building on the brevity point above, some Crossfit-style workouts or other metabolic conditioning-type work is so intense that it must, by necessity, be brief. I did ‘Helen’ for the first time last weekend, which is one of the sort of benchmarking Crossfit workouts. It took me about 13 minutes (which sucks by the way!), and at the end of it there was no way I was doing anything else. For the highly skilled people who do that workout sub-10 minutes, the intensity is even higher. The point is, like the haiku, the intensity is such that nothing further is required. In the poem, the image and sentiment is conveyed, powerfully and succinctly. It requires nothing further. The intensity of a great workout demands that there is nothing further.

3. It’s simple. I’ve made my best progress with routines of this sort. I made the mistake in my younger years of copying workouts out of muscle magazines and the like. I used to believe things such as needing to do multiple curl variations to target the different heads of my biceps. Those kinds of things might be necessary for elite level bodybuilders who are jammed full of chemical assistance and desperate to get one additional striation somewhere. For the rest of us, just do chin-ups! Your biceps will get enough work, along with your back, core, shoulders and even chest. Once that’s easy, strap on a weighted belt. No one who’s able to rep out chin-ups with 100lbs hanging off their waist is going to suffer from small biceps.

Movements like the squat, deadlift, muscle-up, rope climb, sprint, etc. are, like the haiku, almost perfect in their completeness. They’re a microcosm of human movement patterns in one package, just as the haiku is a microcosm of nature (or at least the human experience of it) in seventeen syllables. But simple doesn’t imply easy. Just as it’s extremely difficult to fully convey an experience through 3 lines of verse, these types of exercises are extremely difficult because they require the whole body working together in concert, rather than isolated muscles. And because they are so hard, many people avoid them and instead fall prey to the temptation (propagated by those wanting to sell magazines and training sessions) to do more, less-effective things. In my mind, for both exercise and poetry, improving should be about paring down and eliminating the non-essentials, rather than adding more complexity. There’s great beauty in economy, whether it be a perfect line of verse or a flawless heavy back squat.

4. It provides a new perspective. A good haiku changes the reader in the sense that it recalls some past experience and forces a new way of looking at it, or provides a glimpse into something universal. A great workout provides a new perspective in the sense that it changes the person doing it - Not only physically (hopefully, in terms of anabolic adaptation) but also mentally/psychologically. Moving a weight that you were unable to only a week or a month prior is transformational. It changes a person’s self-perception of what they’re capable, and that has reverberations in all other facets of life. Of course progress isn’t linear and there is always going to be failure. But as Henry Rollins made clear, sometimes the kindest thing that the iron can do for you is to not budge. Failure is a great teacher in the sense that it forces a reexamination of technique, preparation, mindset, etc. to ensure that it doesn’t happen the next time.

Transformational moments like these are memorable. I still can recall the exact time and place when, for whatever reason, a particular haiku has resonated with me. And of course, for the author, that instant of composition is supremely memorable. So to, I still remember certain transformational fitness milestones – first muscle-up, first time benching bodyweight, first handstand pushup, etc. Even seemingly small improvements are often transformatively significant. Today, for instance, I strung together 10 consecutive muscle-ups. Not exactly world-class and only a one-rep improvement from my previous max, but to me it’s significant. To me it matters because expands my view of what I’m capable of.

5. It’s frugal. There may be some great haiku poems about Maybachs and gold toilet seats, but I haven’t read any yet. Most of the ones that I love tend to eschew any kind of material concerns. They’re about simple scenes in nature, free to everyone. Or perhaps they incorporate some basic household scenes, objects or characters. Often, poverty is an undercurrent (not the abject kind but more of a simplicity associated by having only the essentially requisites of life and no more).

I got a great workout this past Saturday by doing sprints down at the local soccer field while pushing my kids in the wheelbarrow. There was another little girl there with her dad and once she got playing with my daughter she, of course, wanted to go for a wheelbarrow ride as well. With all three kids in there, it probably ended up being about 120lbs or so. And let me tell you that after about 8-10 sprints of roughly 100 yards, I was done like dinner! And all it required was a sunny day, an old rusty farming implement (which I originally found on the side of the road being thrown away), and three smiling kids yelling “One more time! Fastest ever!” No fancy equipment or expensive gear required. Actually, I was in jeans.

Perhaps that’s also why the most satisfying workouts are often those done outside, amongst the wilder elements of nature – a trail sprint up a mountainside or a swim through whitewater or the open ocean, for instance. Those ancient Greeks were onto something with their outdoor arenas and training grounds. Something about the minimalism of it all and the exposure to nature in all its wild vicissitudes.

above the moor
not attached to anything
a skylark singing
             -Basho

On one hand, these things make us feel small and humble, but also that we’re a not insignificant part of something larger.