More IAQs

How did you get into your fitness passion?

How did you get into your fitness passion? Always been there, or reformed 98 pound weakling?

Answering

Reforming 98 pound weakling.  The whole topic passed me by for decades.  Something that I didn’t really realize about myself until hindsight: I just didn’t care that much about ball sports.  Not that good at them nor that motivated to be.  I don’t think that I was ever coordinated enough to throw or catch beautifully.  Admired lacrosse, but even maximal effort would get me good but not great and I never really even hit maximal effort.  And school essentially equated fitness with ball sports.  Then once I graduated, I was mostly into work.  That cut into sleep (only now am I consistent about sleeping eight hours) and training (if I was awake I was mostly working) and diet (I lived on Shun Lee crispy beef delivered to my desk). 

So while many guys in their forties look to “back in the day”, today is “the day” for me.  Each part builds on the other parts and I’m discovering that they net little if any cost to my work productivity.  I sleep eight hours a night, so wake up excited to train.  I train each morning, either CrossFit or trail running, so I don’t want to throw away gains by not fueling properly.  I eat clean whole foods heavy on protein so I feel satisfied and alert.  Even if that “costs” ten hours before I do any work, I find that feeling 100% is worth it and that I can be more productive than when I have more hours but also more lethargy.  But that’s just logistics; you asked about passion.

My passion is for mountains, for rock, and ice.  It is to be mobile, to be an easy “yes” to go anywhere in the world anytime.  I want to climb to the top of anything I see.  All of my training in some way serves big mountain expeditions and specific skills that help rock and ice climbing.  I’m often impressed by how much my peers spend their lives spectating.  I have no interest.  None.  I just don’t want to spend my life watching other people living awesome lives; I want to be out there doing stuff.  I want to be ready for a long hard open water swim to hit the best DWS sites in Mallorca.  I want to ski Chamonix and Jackson — uphill and downhill.  I want to climb the seven summits.  And to be ready when surprise serendipitous opportunities arise. 

And newest adventure plan is to race the Marathon Des Sables in 2024.  A new trail running friend said he wanted to make a second attempt, so I said I’d join him.  And now that I’ve culled everything away from my daily schedule besides working and working out, it has raised the stakes as all of my friends are now CrossFit, trail running, jiu jitsu, or mountaineering friends and in each category that activity is their major focus.  So now I’m stuck!

Training

This morning was a 13-mile loop with 4,700 feet of vertical gain tackling five of the summits within Harriman State Park on the Hudson River. 

Fueling

My favorite food delivery is from Hudson Milk + Market which is essentially an online farmer’s market.  It is all incredibly good for whole foods from their meat to produce and dairy.  Old fashioned glass milk bottles arrive each week on the porch before sunrise along with steaks, fish, eggs, kefir, and veggies.  If you live in the area, you should definitely hit them up; I definitely recommend.  The price adds up, but it is worth it for avoiding a lot of the health problems with big food companies that sell processed foods into mass market grocery stores. 

For example, instead of a laundry list of seed oils that I try to avoid and chemicals to help shelf stability, their peanut butter is made out of… peanuts. I brought their dried mango on this morning’s run and that too had a single item on the ingredient list where grocery store food tends to have a long list of unpronouncable additives and preservatives that I’m happy skipping. 

Another big part of my diet is sardines -- Cleveland Clinic notes that their 2 grams of omega-3s per 3 ounce serving is one of the highest concentrations while being the lowest mercury level of any fish.  They taste good and their omega-3s are more bioavailable than omega-3 supplements (which also tend to smell gross because their fish oil has typically become rancid in the manufacturing process). 

Recovering

It is hard to avoid multiple showers each day depending on the training schedule and it is impossible to avoid on jiu jitsu days because you really need to clean up right before and after.  I have two favorite post-rolling soaps: Mentha Exfoliating Body Soap and Triumph & Disaster Shearer's Soap; they feel great and keep skin healthy that tends to get pretty scraped up in weird places.  Sure trail running can give you blisters on the bottoms of your feet, but let me tell you about jiu jitsu for blisters on the top of my feet from getting dragged around on the mats.

Reading

I’m flying through Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ The Elite – The Story of Special Forces From Ancient Sparta to the War on Terror.  This was a solid recommendation from a Vale Tudo reader.  His adventures overlap with my interests and he can write about them well.  As soon as I’m done this one I’m going to launch right into his autobiography, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.  Please keep the recs coming!