Survivors

From fantasy to reality

Comfort is the worst addiction.

- Marcus Aurelius

Reflecting

I’m watching the TV show Survivor for the first time because a friend is competing on it this season.  He’s doing great so far, but the competition is quite mixed.  They don’t strike me as people who would actually survive.  They’re mostly good at drama, whereas my friend is actually good at doing things.

The TV drama benefits from tossing in people with skills highly tailored to our precise moment in history – TikTok influencer, etc. – but useless to any other. Their skills and stuff that they rely on are tightly coupled — components are utterly dependent on each other. If it all works, great. If anything fails, then everything fails. On TV, such failures are entertaining but in life they’d be deadly.

In contrast, the people in the North Carolina mountains are actual survivors.  Many have repaired roads on their own initiative with local private heavy equipment.  Mule trains brought in lifesaving medicine.  Neighborhoods and churches coordinated.  People got what they needed.  Looters were enthusiastically discouraged. 

The North Carolinian mountain people have a good share of timeless skills.  A white collar big city profession might be a great fit for our current economic and technological moment, but everyone should have trade skills workable if our system regresses.  And everyone should have primitive skills if it regresses further.  Dual or multiuse skills such as the ability to hunt, fish, and grow food are ideal.  They can be fun and healthy in modernity, useful in a crisis, and a lifesaver in a collapse. 

One of my favorite knife and tool maker has had his shop devastated by the storm and will take a long time to fix.  So if you need a knife (or tomahawk), Winkler will be back up and running and could use the business.  Pay up front if you can, even though he normally gets paid at the end.  Everything he makes is the best, but I particularly like his WK Blue Ridge Hunter with a maple tribal handle.

Training

Tomorrow’s pre-CrossFit shakeout run:

I’m always looking for fairly compact ways to move at my standing desk.  This slack line  doesn’t work while typing, but it is a lot of fun while on calls.  It is a compromise, not as fun as a long one outside between trees, but gives a bit of the feel.  Core strength and balance exercise that teaches your brain to not over commit.  On the slack line and often in life you’re your own worst enemy, causing all of the problems that you then have to fix which causes more problems, etc.    

Fueling

I’m getting almost all of my food delivered from Whole Foods.  It is convenient and helps me stay dialed in on real food with a priority on protein.  Outside of meals, I’m trying to mostly stick with water and gum, but also have been loving Chameleon cold brew – a glass bottle of delicious espresso coffee with zero sugar and 10 calories per serving.  That tides me over until it is meal time. 

Supplementing

Caffeine has always been my drug of choice.  My practice is to only take it in the morning and to use it.  In theory, if I had a completely sedentary day, I’d avoid caffeine.  If I have activities that require energy, I drink coffee ahead of time and use that to ritually fire myself up.  I love the feeling of being rested and energized and ready to go.  I never want to show up yawning and looking half committed.  Caffeine helps. 

Measuring

I’m trying to get in 10k steps each day before the sun rises.  It is a good baseline for movement.  The earlier I start, the less good and bad excuses get a chance to interfere.  This morning I got in a quickie hour long five miles of verty trails and a bit of too thorny bushwhacking that worked out to 10k steps. 

Recovering

Want some fun on land, sea, and air?  I like to have some afternoon activities that aren’t necessarily hard but get me outside and make life worth living.  These are the most cost and space effective way to go fast.  In each case I have on good authority that these offer much of the exhilaration experienced by the people who get to use toys 10s or 100s of times the price and often unavailable for non-pros…

Land: a little British company makes some incredibly fun little cars to race on and offroad.  Prices are reasonable as far as such things go.  Your low enough to the ground that they feel quite fast –     

Track or traffic the Atom is ready. Over 500bhp per tonne in standard, unmodified form. Quicker than a Ferrari, more lateral G than a Porsche GT3. Giant killing performance for a fraction of the price. Race car territory with reliability. 

Sea: foils change everything from surfing to kiting and sailboats.  The Waszp is my favorite design for light sailboats.  Affordable, transportable, and faaaaast.  There are great sailing spots on the nearby Long Island Sound and this is the perfect way to go like the (actually quite a bit faster than the) wind.

Air: I just got off the phone with the CEO of a German company reproducing the P-51 Mustang that my grandfather flew in WWII.  It is a beauty and while not super fast in a straight line, it is sporty and agile.  They’re fitting them out with lasers in the machine gun tubes that can set off smoke in simulated dogfights.  In the wonderful Top Gun sequel, Tom Cruise flew his own personal P-51.  It is a beauty but the reproduction will be far lighter and more maneuverable. 

Closing

Sooner or later as you age you get confronted with three choices when your joints start to hurt enough – fix your biomechanics, stop moving, or surgery.  In my case, my shoulder has been grinding when I bench press, but I’m able to fix it with better posture.  I’ve been using Donnie Thompson’s Bowtie to fix my posture and it has been working.  It isn’t too uncomfortable and I can run with it on.