Shared Suffering

Type 2 Fun

Reflecting

What is fitness for?  A while back Alli Covington asked me this question and I answered here.  If you achieved all you’re working towards… then what?  For me, in short:

• Family -- I want to be able to play with my kids and someday grandkids and great grandkids.  Not just boardgames but also heli-skiing.  When I’m 100.

• Fighting -- I want to be hard to kill. I don’t like violence but like being good at it.

• Fun -- I love adventures and want to be a hard “yes” when adventure awaits.

• Functionality – I want to be as capable and functional as possible at every age.  I want to go hard until the end.  I want to be able to take care of myself by myself.  I want a 500 lbs. squat today so I can still have at least a 200 lbs. squat on my last day.   I want to get up from the toilet without a nurse’s help.

• Last and least, if you set up a polygraph in the gym, no one would get away with claiming that they don’t want to look better.  So I’ll say it: vanity.

For my kids, it has another purpose: to grow up.  Today, school – all the way through college – serves as an extended nursery, allowing men and women to remain children well past an age when prior generations would have married, bought a home, built a business and grown a family. 

That was not always the way.  The Spartan agōgē had the opposite role: to turn boys into men.  We will never be satisfied with endless idle comfort.  We want a purpose.  We want to grow up.  Not only does shared suffering serve this important role, but at the same time it is fucking fun.  Type 2 fun (not in the moment but later) perhaps, but fun. 

This weekend, my thoughts are with my friends near and far who are engaging in some shared suffering and type 2 fun, running the 50k Fahnestock and 100k Jigger Johnson as well as the 3,540k Appalachian Trail.  Weather is a bit dicey in the White Mountains – cold and wet enough to virtually assure stories of triumph and/or disaster.

Training

This bench is a gorgeously over engineered piece of equipment.  I have two perfectly adequate benches and am struggling to justify this but… I really want it.

This morning’s white board –

EMOM until finished:

1. 6 Burpees, 6 TTB, + 6 165 lb Front Squats

2. Row for Cals

3. Rest

 *Repeat as many rounds as needed to hit 150 Cals

Then an hour of weightlifting with my coach and a half hour in the sauna at 175 degrees in a sweat suit. 

Fueling

They have these little yellow watermelons at our farmers’ market; apparently they’re hard to grow to full size because the bears and other wild animals love eating them before they’re ready to harvest.  While I mostly like drinking water or black coffee, once a week I like blending these melons with ice in the Vitamix as a post-run recovery drink. 

Supplementing

Day one on 800 mgs of testosterone undecanoate Kyzatrex.  Excited to see where this takes me.

Measuring

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Recovering

Signed up for my first acupuncture and cupping sesh.  It is right on the same block as my office so I can easily pop in and out; not sure how covered in dots and spots I’ll be for subsequent meetings!

Closing

Today, the average American consumes as much sugar in a day as his ancestors consumed in a year just a few hundred years ago.  Except for wartime shortages it has gone up unabated over the past few centuries and each decade of my lifetime.  Sugar kills.  Or rather, sugar causes obesity and obesity kills.

Hold the line.  If you’re on track, don’t throw it away on the weekends and holidays.  Between the two, that’s about a third of your year; you could lose your progress if you let yourself go when you’re away from your work and home.  Have a great weekend but stay disciplined and be your best self when the alarm rings Monday morning.