I can't decide what to do about the blog-- let's be real, my time commitments have changed dramatically and blogging takes a lot of work.
I need to rethink how I can do it while still keeping up with life. I am back to traveling every other week and about to become every week. It's a challenge to keep the koolaid on the road. Between challenges with time, challenges with gyms and challenges where I get stuck in a place that makes following Paleo hard, its just been a bit of a shitstorm of late.
I did finally get into the habit of taking a pullup bar with me when I travel. You heard me right-- I travel with a pull up bar. Fortunately I've been going back and forth to Washington and getting that on the train is easy-- pretty soon I am back to flying the not so friendly skies, and I am not sure I am ready to deal with checking luggage each week-- but you never know. It took me so long to get pull ups, that if I don't keep working on them, they go to hell. (Here's a fun action shot from a few weeks ago)
Anyway, yes I am still here. Yes, I am still drinking the koolaid- I am still running (when I have time to run) in my vibrams, still eating like I live in a cave (except when trapped in a week long training in an industrial park when all food is brought in because we can't leave), and most of all yes, I am still crossfitting. One of these days I'll be back to the blogging thing too. I swear. Read more!
It's taken me a bit to get to this. After two back to back weeks on the road (with a 36 hour home layover), I am finally back to my normal routine back here in good old Brooklyn. Some fun stuff to report from travel, so here it goes.
I left you promising I'd give you an update on my first real running barefoot attempt, so let's start there. My first week on the road was in Denver. I landed very late Sunday night and had to be up and running on Monday morning, so by the time Monday night rolled around, I crashed. I planned for my barefoot run to go down Tuesday morning. I decided to do my run on the treadmill because it would afford me a far more pliable surface than the road would. I also knew I had to keep the miles slow and short because this would be a very different experience than my body was used to. So off I went at 5am Tuesday morning.
Let me first start with the observation that altitude really does have on athleticism. Having been to Denver before, but never as an athlete, I felt a little less prepared for this-- I mean, you hear it, but its another thing to experience it. It didn't take me long to feel that impact rather acutely as my pace was naturally slowed by a sense that I couldn't get nearly enough air in me. The run itself felt a little strange at first. I'm getting more used to a ball-of-foot strike using my newtons, but what I hadn't expected is how jarring that impact can feel with nothing at all there. It took me a few steps before I noticed I was totally changing up my land to something a lot smoother and lighter. I'm not sure the entire explanation for how that happened because it wasn't conscious, but I was definitely aware that almost right away my body was conditioned to do something, it did it, it hurt, it modified. Much unlike being in my newtons, I didn't have to think about foot placement-- my body just sort of did it because of comfort. I don't think I appreciated how far off of normal biomechanics shoes really make things until that moment. It was eye opening.
I ran about 2 miles. Slowly. I was thinking I wanted to do more because it was feeling good except that there was a small spot on the inside of my right arch just behind the ball of my foot that could feel a rub from the seam of the vibram itself. I didn't want to rub that spot raw and realized I would need to get my feet used to a lot of time in the shoes first, but ultimately thats what made me stop. At no point in my run did my knees hurt. At no point did I knick the inside of my ankle bone with my opposite foot as I often do in shoes. It felt good and easy.
While in Denver I decided to check out my local Crossfit affiliate-- I am learning that this is critical to my keeping my sense of sanity on the road. So I wound up at Front Range Crossfit, the site of the Rocky Mountain Qualifiers for the Crossfit games. It was great to do a workout with a group of people that really brought their game-- and despite the incredible challenge the altitude was giving me, I hit a new PR in a lift that has stymied me for a while. So after 2 days of working with the crew there, I was beyond thrilled.
From there I headed home for a mere 36 hours which was mostly laundry, restocking cat food and some quiet time before I was on a train to Virginia (this had all unfolded on Monday in Denver). I figured I'd try out my luck there too and wound up at another Crossfit affiliate-- Crossfit Fairfax where the workout was equally challenging, but I loved it. This affiliate will likely be a frequent stop for me going forward if I spend time in Virginia.
My week at home has been good-- I am finally hitting my groove again and have really enjoyed coming back to my own box and working out again with the crew. It's nice to have everyone tell me how much I have been missed-- my affiliate really does feel like a bit of family.
And on that note, I am going to stop with a notation that I will need to explain in more detail, but...
This weekend we have a big event at the box. Jacinto turns 70. Jacinto is one of the Crossfit trainers and a bit of a legend, truth be told. We call him the Warrior and there are tee-shirts many of us sport with his picture on the front. Here is a picture I took of him at the recent Northeast Qualifier Games where Jacinto went toe to toe with all the far younger male competitors. He is our hero, to say the least.
In honor of Jacinto's 70th birthday, we do the workout of Jacinto's choice, and this annual event has become known as Jacintostorm. So tomorrow, I will be executing the following workout:
Run 620 meters 70 Squats 70 Push-ups 70 Pull-ups or Jumping Pull-Ups 70 Wall Ball Shots with a weighted medicine ball 70 Kettlebell Swings 70 Deadlifts 65lbs Run 620 meters
Yeah, looks painful huh? So tomorrow we get our asses kicked for and with Jacinto, who proves to us year after year that you are never too old to throw down.
I gave this topic some brief mention back on the old blog, but after some time, I need to come back to it, cause this week it's gonna be big... I'm learning to run barefoot.
Yep. You heard me. And here's how I am gonna do it.
That, my friends, is my leg and foot (you can tell by the pasty, glow-in-the-dark pallor) ... sporting my new pair of (drumroll, please...) Vibram Five Fingers.
So these are my new shoes. Are they dorky? You better believe it. Will I look silly wearing them? Absa-smurfly. Will they allow me to run injury free while improving the biomechanics of my run? I believe they will. So I'm willing to look the part of the tool if it gets me where I need to be.
Back in October I tried a pair of these bad boys on, only to walk away in disappointment because the muscles in my feet did not have the flexibility and the give to articulate my toes enough to separate them into the toes of these shoes. I set out on a mission at that point to be able to strengthen my feet to help achieve that goal. Last week, I tried on a pair again and my work has paid off.
Since October I have been working on separating my toes as much as I could, using toe spreaders and toe spreading sandals. I also bought pairs of wicking socks that kept my toes separated so that I could keep wearing my sandals in the house when it was cold.
For 9 months I just sort of tried this out. What I noticed in the meantime was that my balance improved. My feet widened-- I always joked about my "ski feet," but the truth is that I struggled to find shoes in a AA width because they were so narrow. My overall flexibility improved and in small increments, the muscles that articulate my toes began to work. As of last week, my feet finally, comfortably, went into the Vibrams so I could walk around.
It's hard to describe how these things feel. I wore them for a workout at Crossfit last week-- we were doing powercleans and box jumps, so there was a fair amount of jumping involved. First thing I noticed was the extent to which my feet were it-- there isn't really a sole on these things so much as a thin layer of countoured rubber. The arch of the foot is left to do what it wants, and every place your foot wants to touch the floor, it will. My work over these past few months in yoga has been to pull up my arches and begin to stand on the outer parts of my feet while trying to engage that arch up off the floor. This will become more important as the process to running barefoot begins to take off. When jumping, the second thing I noticed is the inclination to hit on my heal and then let the rest of my feet sort of find their way to the ground. Doing this without the luxury of padding hurt. I had to begin to think about landing from a jump onto as much of my feet as I could... toes, ball, outside edge and heel, to disperse the jolt. Lastly, I needed to land lighter and more controlled. My first few powercleans were ugly and wobbly but eventually it felt good. My later box jumps felt the same way and in time I actually felt more stable doing this.
I decided as well that day to walk home in my shoes. Imagine walking for half an hour, on concrete and asphalt, totally barefoot. I've spent 36 years walking in shoes-- its rare for us all to walk around the world without them, so my first attempt at this was very strange. I could literally feel everything... every crack, every textured surface, every pebble. I noticed the extent to which my heel strike was very pronounced and hard. My inclination was to always keep my ankle at this 90 degree angle and just sort of plant my foot and roll over it and back up never allowing my ankle to release that angle. Remember back when I got my bike fitting and the fitter noted the degree to which my ankle was not flexing in either direction (the plantar flexion vs. dorsiflexion angles)-- it became pretty apparent where that behavior gets solidified-- basic walking in shoes. It felt so strange that within my first few paces, my heel strike had to adjust more forward to my midfoot and everything had to compensate. It's hard to describe this except to say that walking started taking place behind me instead of in front of me. Maybe if you have a long hallway or a yard or something you can experience this too-- when you walk in shoes, your land is forward of your hips. When you walk barefoot, your land is about equal with your hips. It's less about pulling up to where you foot landed and more about pushing back from where you currently are. It's a strange shift and hard to describe, but it became very apparent to me walking home that night.
The last several months I have been playing with a biomechanical style of running called POSE. In order to begin to adopt Pose, until I could run barefoot, I needed to cut back on my running and begin to train my body to run with a midfoot strike-- and one of the things that helped me to develop that while still providing me the cushioning of allowing my feet to strengthen, were some shoes called Newtons. Between the Newton-forced midfoot strike, and the migration towards Pose using some of the strengthening exercises they recommend, my body has finally reached a point of being ready to try barefoot running.
This week I am on the road in Denver, Colorado. I am looking forward to finding the local Crossfit affiliate and trying my first official short run in my vibrams-- in fact, I haven't packed any other shoes, so I'm backing myself into the proverbial corner of trying this out. What's the worst that can happen right?
Stay tuned for details-- this could get interesting.
I end you today on what I like to call Workout Porn (sorry Mom, but having tried Crossfit yourself you should appreciate this even more now)-- my all-time favorite Crossfit workout: The Bear. The picture of me in my profile is from doing this very workout.
I haven't really delved much into Crossfit since starting up this new blog, but this weekend gives me a good reason to finally do so. We took on a well known workout this weekend called Murph that has a really powerful story behind it.
I mentioned in the old blog, if you followed it, that there are several different kinds of workouts we do at Crossfit. Some are just your basic WOD (workout of the day) that are combinations of exercises designed to develop Crossfitters towards a primary goal-- functional fitness. While I promise to spend some time writing about functional fitness (its a fascinating topic), Crossfit sums up the goal of functional fitness as being able to "move large loads over long distances quickly." Under that overarching goal and objective, some workouts stand out as particularly noteworthy, and many fall under one of 2 noteworthy groups-- "Hero Workouts" and "The Girls." Hero workouts are named for people who were killed in the line of duty, either in Iraq or Afghanistan or even a few in service back here in the US for the police, etc. The Girls are workouts that are named for the many notable women that have been influential in the creation of Crossfit over the many years. People typically use The Girls as benchmarks ("whats your Fran time?") and the Hero Workouts as rally points where you know you are going to have to put it all out there to get through.
This weekend, my Crossfit affiliate took on Murph, a Hero Workout named in honor of Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy of Patchogue, NY who was killed in Afghanistan in June 2005. Murph, as he was known to his fellow Seals, received several honors including the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor for his service and the story of his death is an amazing one. One of his favorite workouts, that he called "Body Armor" became one of the most popular Crossfit workouts to date, and is one that most affiliates do at least annually, if not twice in a year. Murph apparently did this workout wearing his 20lbs of body armor, thus giving it the name he used until it was memorialized by a crossfit workout in his honor in August 2005.
Murph consists of a 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats and another 1 mile run. Many people do it wearing a weight vest of 20 lbs. This past weekend, I got my first taste of Murph.
As with any high-rep pull-up workout, you expect your hands will rip open. Callouses are one thing we get used to, but high rep pull up workouts inevitably mean your callouses will tear off. I had this happen to me several weeks ago, right in the very center of my hand and boy did it hurt (I included a fun pic I took after cleaning it all up a little, just so you can see what I mean). I discovered since the wonders of gymnastics grips and managed to spare my hands this weekend, but I was in a very small minority. This weekend we bled.
As this was my first time taking on Murph, I opted to do a half-Murph, dropping the volume of all the requirements by half. I ran 1/2 a mile, did 50 pull ups, 100 push ups, 150 squats, ran a half a mile. It took me 29:52 to complete. It was an ass kicker. I reached a point several weeks ago that I no longer need assistance for pull-ups, but this high a volume I went for the slightest bit of support (a long white rubberband) that would offset just a little of my weight. In order to make it more challenging and to compensate for that rubberband, I worked my pull-ups to the Chest-to-Bar standard, instead of the Chin-to-Bar that is acceptable in this kind of volume. The rest was as strict as it comes... it took me a long time to be able to manage chest-to-deck strict push-ups at that volume, but I did well with it and in the end, I am really pleased with my time.
It was amazing to watch some of the activity around this workout. The box (what we call affiliates) was buzzing with excitement for this WOD and in the end we had 36 total competitors for the event. One of our strongest competitors did it with the weight vest and finished the whole thing in 45:45. It was awe inspiring. And an ass kicker.
A workout like this needs a strategy. Turns out that the 3 middle components (the pull-ups, push-ups and squats) did not need to be done in sequential order, so I decided to shoot for 10 rounds of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 squats. This would allow me to let each component rest for a little while without slowing me down. I never thought I'd live for the squats, but those to me were my saving grace-- if there's one thing I have in spades, its leg strength, so doing 15 squats, while strenuous, was nothing in comparison to the push-ups. The runs felt awesome-- I think I made most of my time up in those runs, despite being very measured in my approach to them-- I didn't go out full throttle on the first run which I think caused a lot of people to gas out in the rest of the workout. In general I felt like I kept a nice consistent pace throughout the whole thing and wound up getting one of the better half Murph times.
I am looking forward to the next time we take on Murph being able to do it as prescribed (as RXed, in Crossfit lingo), but in the meantime, I gotta say, Murph is gonna be a special workout for me for a long time.
I'm all about teaser introductions to the kinds of things I need to begin blogging about. So let's call some of this pre-requisite reading, shall we? It seems that some of the directions I have begun to poke my way into have started gaining a lot of traction in the media as well--
The biomechanics of running and correlations to injury is yet one more topic I need to discuss. In the meantime, again, because it's so relevant-- a news story from last week's Boston.com.
Lots and lots more on this topic forthcoming. Read more!
I coined the term "adult onset athlete" a couple of years ago as my way of describing the stumble I took into the world of fitness. It was literally a day when I picked myself up off the couch and put out a cigarette and decided to try my hand at running. Chapter 2 starts out with yours truly now fully what one would describe as an athlete... post marathon, day 1.
Here's me on the morning of the marathon, trying to stay warm in the athletes village. This photo was taken about an hour before the race. What do you notice. Marathoner? Fancy utility belt? Goofy anticipatory smirk? Randomly stretching her shoulders when her legs are gonna be getting the workout? Check. Contributing factor to the obesity epidemic? Um, notsomuch. And yet...
See that number I am wearing? On the back of it you are supposed to write down all your emergency information should something happen to you out on the course... you know, like keeling over from the exhaustion. One of the pieces of information they encourage you to put on there is the weight on the morning of the race-- the thought being that if you gain weight while running its likely due to excessive consumption of water and therefore related to hyponatremia-- where your blood becomes thinned and has too few electrolytes. It's a bad condition, so people are highly encouraged to track that information. Me being the generally law abiding citizen that I am, I wrote it down. And that's where things got weird.
See, as I started debating health and wellness and knowing I wasn't feeling optimally well, I started looking at how other well respected people and organizations define fitness, and I stumbled into the American Council on Exercise. There are a lot of organizations that profess to be the authority on fitness, but these guys are one of the most prevalent and well respected and many a trainer carries an ACE certification proving a certain standard depth of knowledge in the field of fitness and training. And when I stumbled into one of their articles I found a notation on what is considered a healthy body composition. Thinking not much of it, I proceeded to compute my own Body Mass Index. Imagine my surprise when it came back that I had a BMI score of ..33-- I had a 33.05% body fat composition, in the day that I ran the marathon, and anything above a 30 is considered obese. Yep, you heard me right, or I guess read me right... on the day in question I was obese.
Now before you start thinking I am slipping into some crazy body dismorphic disorder, rest assured, I find this as crazy as anyone. I wore a size 4 when I was running the marathon. Sure there had been times in my life where that label was appropriate... but clearly not at this point in my life. I mean, come on!
Imagine.
So I learned about the phenomena of being "skinny fat." Yep, its a real thing. With a name. And there are a lot of people out there who are skinny fat. It's even made it into the Urban Dictionary. We've jumped the shark before I even knew what was going on.
So my point here (and yes, I actually have one) is that skinny does not equal healthy. or fit. or well. it means skinny. And if you follow that chain of logic, it also means that size and weight isn't the right determinant at all. It's body composition. And mine put me solidly into the obesity category.
Adult Onset Athleticism, Chapter 2 for me really has been a trip down a rabbit hole. I mark a year later having radically altered that body composition. As of today, I am now well into the normal category, with a .22 BMI, or roughly 22% body fat. I can tell that that shift isn't complete and I still have some work to do, so I am thinking that healthy for me is going to be more along the 17-19% body fat ratio, but we'll see how that plays out. In the meantime, some numbers for comparison.
What A Difference A Year Makes
Month
April 2008
April 2009
Weight
133.4
123.6
Body Fat
33.05%
22.93%
Lean Mass
85.7 lbs
95.3 lbs
Fat Weight
43.7 lbs
28.3 lbs
I don't think that weight is a good measure of health, so thinking about body composition requires a few additional measures to really tease it all out. I thought these 4 really paint the best picture. So some definitions, again:
Lean Mass is basically the weight of the non-fat parts of your body. This includes muscle, bone and bone density, fluid, etc. It is one of a better series of measures of health. The higher your lean body mass, the healthier you are and the better you look.
Fat Weight. It's exactly what it sounds like-- the pounds of fat you have on your body. For women, in general, the essential fat weight is usually around 12%. This accounts for the basics... bone marrow, the fat necessary for proper organ function, female reproductive systems, etc. So keeping body fat above 12% is critical to keep the body running smoothly. Any my current weight, that's about 15 lbs of essential fat.
Given all these numbers you can see something fairly interesting-- while I have lost only about 6% of my overall weight, I've lost more than 10% body fat, gained more than 11% lean mass and lost more than 35% of my fat weight. That's big. So my 9.8 lbs lost may not seem like a very big deal until you account for the radical shift in my overall composition.
The process of creating that change has been multi-fold. It's meant radically altering my diet, radically altering my exercise methods, radically altering my thinking and learning and engaging in the world. It's still a work in progress, for sure-- I still have a long way to go, but I am sure you can see, I'm moving in the right direction.
Call this the framework for many an entry to come-- I promise to get into the details of how I've made some of these shifts. Like I said... make sure you are ready for a fall down the rabbit hole.
Sometimes it just makes more sense to throw out and begin anew. Let's call this that effort. A clean slate. While finding the time to blog has been difficult at best lately, a large part of the challenge has been that the things I was thinking about and changing in my world just no longer fit the "back of the pack" mentality anymore, so it was hard to fit it in. It needed an overhaul. So here we are.
I have a feeling this will take me a while and the groove will be very different than NSBotP, but so be it. Here's my best attempt at 'splaining the start of a very different chapter in my life.
When last I left off blogging (there were several draft entries that never got published) I had started on something called Crossfit. If you followed the old blog you know it a little. What you may not know is that Crossfit was a part of a much larger mental shift I was making. I realized right around the marathon last year that I had achieved a level of fitness to make running a marathon achievable, but that fitness wasn't really meshing with the wellness and real definition of health I wanted. In essence, something was missing and I had a sense that achieving that goal should have felt more epiphanous than it did. I was fit but I wasn't healthy and for the first moment in time I realized how wildly different those two things are, despite our culture thinking of them as synonymous.
Thinking about that was like pulling at a thread and next thing you knew, I was throwing out a lot of my world and reinventing it. I started challenging my reasoning, my habits, my diet, my very biomechanics. It's been very eye opening to say the least. The more I've poked, the more I've realized that our culture as a whole treats wellness in this largely reductionist and self-defeating way. It's like we've all forgotten the principles of equilibrium and live in some collective haze-- myself included. So without meaning to, I started pulling on that thread and things just started to go from there.
So I think this blog is going to be quite a hodgepog of thoughts... likely very different than my last blog (hopefully shorter), but more about the insights of the unravel and the connections I am starting to put together in my own head. I also realized I should start tagging this because it was going to cover a lot of different topics, so I'm tagging this with just some of the topics I know are going to come up... cause its sort of where my brain has been since June(ish). Call it a preview of the brain dump that is likely to ensue.
