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Counting coup

Counting Coup on the Greasy Grass by Bud Bradshaw

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.  Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.  Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.  When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

- Chief Tecumseh

Reflecting

I have always loved the Plains Indian tradition of counting coup – an initiation ritual of riding up to an enemy and making contact with a coup stick.  Sometimes you need to fight, but you don’t need to scalp every enemy; sometimes you can just let them know that you could have. 

We should bring back rites of passage.  It steals something from young people to not have such benchmarks for their development.  This void might contribute to our era’s bizarre and distasteful habit of people extending childhood well into their 20s without setting up home or shop like previous generations.  Children should get to enjoy their childhoods and adults should get to enjoy their adulthoods but confusing the two doesn’t improve either phase of life.  The transition should be planned, tested, and celebrated so that full grown people can make their own mistakes and enjoy their own successes. 

Count coup with your fears.  Wake up and examine what you’re afraid of that day.  Then even if you can’t kill it, at least touch it.  The solution is almost never isolation or hiding.  Fears fester and grow there.  It is almost always to make contact.  I wasn’t sure if my joints were up to squatting this morning so my reaction was to load up the bar and explore squatting deeper. It worked.  Ruminating is unpleasant and ineffective.  Instead just expose yourself to any irrational fear so that you can reveal it for what it is before it has time to grow.  Oh and if the situation calls for scalping, Beaver Bill forges a great scalping knife.

Training

This morning’s white board – 6 Rounds not for time

• 3 Back Squats

• 12 Banded Russian kettlebell swings

• 50ft Reverse Sled Drag 315 lbs.

Next run:

Fueling

Bison used to be easy to find across the plains.  Hopefully they’ll make a comeback.  I get about 78 grams of protein for lunch from a rare bison tenderloin.

Supplementing

I’m dropping LMNT electrolyte supplements from my rotation.  They were marketed as clean electrolytes but failed to live up to their marketing.  While they pitched themselves as having no sugar, they have between 250-550 mgs of previously unreported maltodextrin.  This isn’t an ingredient I want in my diet.  Fortunately there are enough options that I can easily toss out this one after they violated my trust. 

Measuring

Fun to see readership grow around the world.  So far no overlap with my philanthropy.

Recovering

I’m anti-rest day.  I don’t trust myself to go a full day without lifting, concerned that I’ll just not go back.  But I unavoidably took the weekend off and felt quite refreshed in the gym this morning.  I won’t seek out rest days, but admit that the dozens of coaches and better athletes than me who I’ve ignored when they say “take rest days” just might be onto something. 

Closing

This is my favorite time of year so I’m trying to do as much fitness as possible outside including more rucking (50 lbs.) and stone lifting (190+ lbs.).