Jack LaLanne Challenge

Jack LaLanne week, as it should, culminated with a challenge. On Thursday night I got to meet Jack at a party thrown in his honor. As I told Denis, I don’t care one bit about meeting celebrities but, to me, Jack’s not a celebrity but a hero. I was pretty excited.

Jack LaLanne’s Birthday Bash

On Saturday, I got to do my own little Jack impression. Someday maybe I’ll muster up the motivation to attempt one of his actually challenges. For now, I’ll continue with my own personal multi-sport themes where I try and combine power and endurance sports.

I began the morning of Jack’s actual 95th birthday by doing 95 Jumping Jacks, After his signature move, I continued the warm-up with some Jack LaLanne yoga, which is more functional than traditional. For example, down dog and up dog are described as thus (from memory, so this quote won’t be accurate),

“This is what Happy (his white German Shepard) does before he chases a ball or runs around in the yard. C’mon, show us Happy…”

I’ve never heard Jack use the word yoga, but his old TV shows are rife with yoga poses turned into exercises. Then I did 95 reps of 9 of his more famous movements, including finger tip push-ups and chin ups. These seems so good to warm-up for climbing that I only did 70 reps before jumping on my bike for 95 minutes (which I spent doing climbing intervals to try and get my climbing totals for the day close to 9,500’). Post ride, I finished the exercises and heading up to a V9 traverse to attempt 95 moves with 9.5lbs strapped to my back.

En route I spent some time helping someone whose car was broken down. This resulted in that my objective had already gone into the sun. So I turned around to try another traverse, Merrill’s 5.14 (no name that I know of), that had been shaded when I drove by. But I was too late. As I began climbing the sun hit it. 95 moves at my limit, in the sun, with a 10 pound ball on my back, was more than a little tedious. I wasn’t very familiar with this route (though I am now). This caused more failure on the moves than I was hoping for (meaning lots of re-dos). Still, I was able to get all the moves but three or four (or five) of the 30-some move route. Not bad.

I was now hot, sweaty, and my fingers could barely grip the steering wheel. But that was okay because all I had to do was to run for 9.5 miles over two mountains. Romney dropped me off in my heat resistant garb (she was laughing at me and saying that I looked like a pirate) and I headed up Grandeur Peak in the afternoon sun.

Grandeur climbs over 3,000 feet in less than two miles and has almost no shade. We’d been having perfect air quality but a fire from somewhere had sullied the air. The combo had me pretty cooked near the top, when Mick called to fill me in on my proposed second half of the run. When I told him where I was he groaned and asked, “is it hot?” When I filled him in on my objective he said, “Wow, you’re having a big day.” Then I told him what I’d already done, and he just laughed.

Having Mick laugh is a little daunting. He gets up a four am most days and usually has a peak or two in the bag before I’m awake. We’ll often go climbing on these days and he’s never seems to be any worse for wear. And he’d just won a rugged 50 mile trail race in Moab. Yet, to him, what I was doing sounded “grim”. Awesome. Jack would love it.

I recovered somewhat on the descent into Mill Creek Canyon where Romney met me with a salad. The last part of my challenge was to eat 95 fruits, veggies, and legumes (Jack eats 10 different veggies every day). I’d knocked off a bunch with my morning Shakeology and a veggie sandwich. My next meal with a small box filled with everything in the salad bar at Whole Foods. Now, in no way, is this a normal sports food diet, but it worked just fine. My energy was good all day.

As it turns out, my next objective was a wee bit longer than I’d planned—like twice as far. So I was hoping for a good landmark to shoot for that would get me closer to the goal. Also, Romney and Beata would be joining me, and we weren’t geared up for 8 miles of game trails, so almost certainly we’d be turning around at some point. As serendipity would have it, we made a wrong turn that led us to an overlook. It was 2 miles (and 2,000-some-odd feet) to reach it. Perfect.

Romney was a trooper in support. She claimed to not feel good but didn’t complain much, except that she was very quiet. She made it through the run, and then began vomiting on our way to the taqueria, where she still managed to be good company as I polished off the rest of my veggies, which mainly consisted of various types of chili. My wife rocks.
pic: nothing at all to do with jack lalanne, romney hits one of the crux moves on her first 5.12
Back home, I drank a glass of red wine. Jack drinks red wine daily (“because the French outlive everyone”) and finished Jack week with some restorative yoga. The next day I actually felt decent. I learned that I was accepted into a race where I’d be running with the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, the famous Raramuri (running people), so I went for a long run on a perfect trail that I just happened to find, and spotted a cliff so large and steep that it could be the version of my own Echo Wall that I’ve been looking for. But these are other stories.

Feeling Old?

Check out this 74-year old. Apparently there are over 40,000 people in Japan that are over 100 years old, and I'm sure this has much more to do with lifestyle than genetics (do we even have an over 75 bodybuilding category, because this guy is nervous about moving up because the competition is so stiff?!). Culturally they eat a plant-based diet and a lot of fish. Plus, their snacks are so weird that it must self limit overindulgence. Regardless, this guy is an inspiration and a perfect fit for Jack LaLanne week.

Another perfect fit, as to just why Jack week is so important, is the ad before the vid, brought to us by Jimmy Dean sausage. Yahoo also released this and one-upped the Brits with an ad from Dunkin Donuts. How dare another country try and usurp our obesity title!

Preaching The Here And Now

On Thursday I'll be attending Jack LaLanne's birthday party. On Sat, I'll be doing a fitness challenge in honor of his birthday. I guess that makes this officially Jack LaLanne week. I'm still not sure what my challenge is going to be yet. 95 is a pretty big number to play with. In the mean time, I've stumbled on another great article on LaLanne. You know, the guy who claims he "spent a lot of time on the floor with your mother." This one is from Sam McManis at the SF Chronicle.

Raising the bar
At 88, fitness guru Jack LaLanne can run circles around those half his age

It may even top the article I posted last week for its entertainment value. LaLanne's story is inspiring. His personality is amusing. Here we get a glimpse of the catalyst the got him into exercise in the first place:

"I'd eat a quart of ice cream in one sitting, shove my finger down my throat, heave it up and have another quart," LaLanne said. "There's nothing more addictive on this earth than sugar. Not heroin, booze, whatever. It's much worse than smoking. Boy, I tell you, I had blinding headaches every day. I was mentally screwed up by sugar. I was psychotic. I was malnourished. I was always getting sick. I got kicked out of school. I wanted to die."

And on what it was like to eat healthy as teenager in a world where humans are like "walking garbage cans."

"They thought I was crazy," he said. "I had to take my lunch alone to the football field to eat so no one would see me eat my raw veggies, whole bread, raisins and nuts. You don't know the crap I went through, boy."

LaLanne invented a lot of fitness gear, exercise regimens, dietary practices, and opened one of the first fitness chains in the USA, which caused a lot of people to eye him suspiciously.

LaLanne said Bay Area newspapers, except for The Chronicle's Herb Caen, treated him like a "crackpot who doesn't eat meat and wants everybody to rupture something lifting weights." Few people joined at first, but one who did, restaurateur Vic ("Trader Vic") Bergeron, gave LaLanne some advice one day while getting a massage from him: Wear a tight T-shirt and strut your stuff on high school campuses.

Eventually people sought him out, apparently even Clint Eastwood as a 16 year old. This led to a career in TV, the place I first saw him as a kid. This appears to not have been exactly smooth sailing for him either.

A TV novice, LaLanne's initial reviews were not great. He heard those same old "crackpot" epithets, this time from newspapers back east: Women will look like men if they work out. That health food is bad for the body. On his very first show, Jack looked into the camera earnestly and said, "If man makes it, don't eat it." Then he took a loaf of Langendorf white bread, smashed it into a tight ball and flung it to the floor with a thud. "See," he said, "that's what it does in your stomach, too."

Langendorf, it turned out, was one of the show's sponsors.

It goes on from there, all the while referencing LaLanne's famous cultural diatribes, such as:

On the evils of sugar and junk food: "It destroys the B vitamins. It destroys your mind, affects your memory, your concentration. Why do you think so many of these kids today are screwed up? It's what they're eating. You know how much sugar Americans consume today in white flour, cakes, pies, candy and ice cream? Would you get your dog up in the morning and give him a cigarette, cup of coffee and a doughnut? How many millions of Americans got up this morning with a breakfast like that? And you wonder why people are sick and obese."

On whether people should consume dairy products: "Are you a suckling calf? No. Do you have two stomachs? No. Name me one creature on this earth, except for man, who uses milk after they wean. Why do you think so many people are fat and have heart attacks? Cholesterol! Butter, cream, cheese, ice cream, whole milk. They got these athletes prostituting their souls by posing with milk mustaches. Those guys ought to be thrown in jail."

On celebrity: "I hated it. I was just doing my job. Celebrities give me a pain in the butt. Some of the biggest bums in this world are Hollywood people. They're drunkards, do dope, don't exercise."

And finally, on life:

"Billy Graham preaches the hereafter. I preach the here-and-now."

the challenge of challenges: pulling 70 boats and people across Long Beach harbor with his hands and feet shackled, at age 70.

Join The Jack LaLanne Challenge

I started the feats because everyone said I was just a muscle-bound charlatan. I had to show them I was an athlete.

"Maybe you don't believe in Jesus," Jack continued, looking me up and down. "But was Jesus a showman? Why did he go around making the blind see and the lame walk and those kinds of things? He did it to call attention to his philosophy."

On September 26th, next Saturday, Jack turns 95. Instead of doing my own birthday challenge this year I'll be doing one in honor of the man who started all this, Jack LaLanne (here's the history of how I began doing challenges). Why not join me?

Someone has actually started a site to help you organize a Jack LaLanne challenge on "Jack LaLanne Day". If you do something cool, make sure and record it and we'll post it on Birthdaychallenge.com.

I'm not sure what it's going to be just yet, but the number 95 (Jack's age next Sat) will be in the mix. It's going to be epic but, mostly, it's going to be fun. I don't think it'll be epic in Jack-ian terms, exactly. Check out his list. Or even in mine (2007, 2003, 2000), but it will be hard for me in my current state of recovery. A challenge is anything that challenges you personally. If you think that you can't do it but also think that, maybe, just maybe, if you do everything right that you might be able to, then you're in the ballpark. If this goal is something you've always wondered about, then your golden. I'll announce the exact plan next week.

In the mean time, here's one of my favorite Jack LaLanne articles, courtesy of Outside Magazine.

There are so many gems in this article that it's almost a training bible. Here are a few:

Think you're training too hard?

After he opened the Jack Lalanne Physical Culture Studio in 1936, Jack got clients by going around to the homes of overweight and underweight adolescents. He sold their concerned parents on memberships as a way to save their children's lives. "I checked daily on their nutritional habits and their grades in school," he said. "If they didn't show up, I'd know why. Only mistake I made was I might have worked the kids too hard."

"How did you know you'd gone too far?" I asked.

"They'd heave and pass out," he said with a nostalgic smile.

Why do I always recommend changing your routine every three weeks?

Out near the pool, as three dogs lapped at the water, Jack pointed to a pile of neoprene straps tied to a chrome railing. "I change my program every three weeks," he said. "Out here, I've been strapping myself to the side of the pool lately and butterflying for at least an hour. You oughta try it."

On snacking before bed and other bad habits:

Then--thoughtlessly, perhaps, and only because I do it myself--I asked Jack LaLanne if he ever snacks before bedtime.

"Never!" he snarled. "You don't get it. I am one runaway son of a bitch! I am an animal! I want to eat everything! I want to get drunk every single night! I want to screw every woman there is! We are all wild animals. But we must learn to use our minds. We must learn to control the bestial and sensual sides of ourselves!"

On supplementing your diet:

After his dawn-to-dark workouts, Jack will pour several hundred different vitamin supplements into a blender along with great handfuls of yeast and liver tablets, a pile of kelp, some carrot and celery juice, a few pieces of fruit, some egg whites, and a splash of half-and-half. He says it's the worst-tasting stuff in the whole world, but he drinks it down every day. He says that the secret of his endurance swims through cold and treacherous waters is a massive infusion of "B complex, liver, and defatted government-inspected yeast."

On fad fitness equipment:

"Have you seen some of the crap they're selling as exercise equipment now?" Jack wondered. "How about that Suzanne Somers? She should have been thrown in jail for selling the piece-of-crap Thigh Master. It just develops a little muscle on the inner thigh. What good is that? And have you seen Tony Little, the guy who screams on TV? He's like an imbecile. He says you need this little thing to hold you while you do a sit-up. Why does the government let him get away with it?"

On age:

"Don't talk age!" he interrupted. "Age has nothing to do with it. One of my guys who started out at my gym is 87 now, and he still does ten bench-press reps with a hundred-pound dumbbell in each hand. He's training to set a leg-pressing record. I put things in the guy's brain way back when, and now he'll never get away from it."

And, now that I think personally about my life, on why I train the way I do:

"I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest." Then he segued into a mantra I'm sure I heard dozens of times as a very young boy: "How many healthy people do you know? How many happy people do you know? Think about it. People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years."

Inspired yet?

Yoga

I suck at yoga but that hasn’t stopped me from trying to get better each day over the last couple of months. Today, while trying to follow Gillian Clark during Pure & Simple Yoga I was again reminded of how bad I am at it. The upside is that in yoga it just doesn’t matter one bit. Ego aside, yoga makes me feel good and that’s all that matters.

While I’m bad at it, I’m definitely progressing. I’ve been asked to list just what I’ve been doing, so here you go. I should qualify this with the back story. I have a ruptured L5S1 disc, which caused sciatic nerve damage. From Jan-June, I could do very little stretching and no forward bending. When I began doing yoga in July, it had to start slow and easy.

I began with Rodney Yee’s Back Care Yoga. This is a one hour session that is broken down into three sections: flexibility, strengthening, and restorative poses. Restorative poses, essentially, use gravity to slowly stretch muscles. These are EASY. So I began using this 20 minute segment as my default practice, while pushing a little harder on days I felt good.

Once I assessed that I could do this without damaging my back, I began starting each day with one of Rodney Yee’s 20 minute sessions from AM Yoga. Yee is one of the old guard of the video yoga movement. He’s an excellent teacher and these videos are perfect for anyone looking to begin with gentle yoga.

Next, Romney bought me (well, us) the Athlete’s Guide To Yoga. This is also a gentle practice that assumes most of your training is done elsewhere. Since most of mine is, it’s great. The instructor, Sage Roundtree, is a little Berkeley-esque for my tastes but she’s thorough and I’ve come to really like this video. The many short routines are programmable for a myriad of workout options.

A mixture of these three videos has been the cornerstone of my practice, which until recently had been entirely focused on rehabilitation.

The progress I’ve made has caused me to move yoga up on my workout priorities. Now I often replace other workouts, even riding or running, with yoga. I figure that I can get that fitness back quickly anyway, so I should focus on the thing that will increase my ability in those areas to improve beyond where they were when I get back to them. This has necessitated a need to increase the intensity of my yoga practice.

For more workout oriented yoga, I’ve been using Clark’s Pure & Simple Yoga (part of the Yoga Booty Ballet series), Chalene Johnson’s Dynamic Flow Yoga (part of the Chalene Extreme series), and Tony Horton’s One on One yogas and recovery workouts. None of these are 90X-ian in their severity but more balanced practices and much better suited to my days where there will almost always be another workout outside. I am about to start adding Yoga X into the schedule, even if just to gauge how I’ve improved, since for years that was the only yoga workout I did. For me, however, the strength aspects of yoga are not my goals. I’m much better at these anyway. My goals are range of motion increase, improved balance and body awareness.

Neither Chalene or Tony are yoga instructors. While this probably makes their style hard for traditional yoga-ites to stomach, it’s likely very appealing to many who are turned off by the historical mumbo-jumbo and just want a workout. They both have a comical style, which you can see here if this link is still working for "Patience Hummingbird." Gillian’s approach is far more traditional. Her knowledge and passion for yoga is unbridled. She makes me want to get better at yoga.

So far, I think the adding daily yoga has been one of my better athletic decisions. It may not help my ability to suffer through the night on some endurance quest (though it may and certainly won’t hurt), but it’s definitely going to help me age with less pain, and it will help my climbing. As my friend Micah, an avid yoga practitioner, said, “for climbing, yoga is like cheating.”

pic: from sonnietrotter.com

The Anti-Inflammatory Myth

“There is no indication or rationale for the current prophylactic use of NSAIDs by athletes, and such ritual use represents misuse.”

Say what? If you’re like a lot of my friends you might want to re-think your use of vitamin I. NSAIDs might be the most commonly-used “supplement” in the sports world. The latest research indicates this should change. Check out this article from Gretchen Reynolds (who has been on a roll with cutting edge advice lately):

Phys Ed: Does Ibuprofen Help or Hurt During Exercise?

Essentially, a bevy of studies have shown that using anti-inflammatory medication to reduce exercise-induced inflammation and, hence, protect ourselves against injury doesn’t work. As the article states, this is a very common practice (A study of professional Italian soccer players found that 86 percent used anti-inflammatories during the 2002-2003 season).

In the sports world jargon, up may as well be down. Here’s an explanation:

“ Warden and other researchers have found that, in laboratory experiments on animal tissues, NSAIDs actually slowed the healing of injured muscles, tendons, ligament, and bones. “NSAIDs work by inhibiting the production of prostaglandins,”substances that are involved in pain and also in the creation of collagen, Warden says.”

I’ve always tried to limit my NSAID intake to when necessary. All drugs are hard on one human system or another, so there’s always a trade off to consider. This, however, has not meant that I used them sparingly. Like most athletes, I suffer from a lot of aches, pains, and inflammation. However I never took these to mask pain. I took them because I thought keeping inflammation at bay would reduce the odds of injury. Apparently this is false. In a study done at the Western States 100:

Those runners who’d popped over-the-counter ibuprofen pills before and during the race displayed significantly more inflammation and other markers of high immune system response afterward than the runners who hadn’t taken anti-inflammatories.

I guess this puts us right back in the no pain, no gain school of training. Next time things start to hurt a little consider this:

If “you’re taking ibuprofen before every workout, you lessen this training response,” Warden says. Your bones don’t thicken and your tissues don’t strengthen as they should. They may be less able to withstand the next workout. In essence, the pills athletes take to reduce the chances that they’ll feel sore may increase the odds that they’ll wind up injured — and sore.

Now we just need to interpret which is the good pain that we should push through, and which is the bad pain that’s hurting us.

My Profile

A lot of people ask what I do for Beachbody. This should give you some idea. I had no idea BNN was doing this. I get interviewed about a lot of topics, but those never include myself. Makes me think I'd better get back to my coursework.

9-9-09

"Pythagoras most of all seems to have honored and advanced the study concerned with numbers, having taken it away from the use of merchants and likening all things to numbers."
- Aristoxenus, Greek dude

Hans called last week to see what we'd be doing for 9-9-09. On 8-8-08, we inaugurated the Olympics with a crazy 8s workout. This year, as we look for inspiration we again see that the Chinese hold a high value on the number 9:

The Chinese pulled out all the stops to celebrate their lucky number eight during last year's Summer Olympics, ringing the games in at 8 p.m. on 08/08/08. What many might not realize is that nine comes in second on their list of auspicious digits and is associated with long life, due to how similar its pronunciation is to the local word for long-lasting (eight sounds like wealth).

So how does any of thing correlate into a workout plan? Well, it doesn't. But who are we to let that stop us? Anything can be a good excuse for a hard workout. And it says, right up there in the previous paragraph, that nine is similar to the Chinese word for long-lasting. So tomorrow here's a long-lasting workout that will help our bodies last longer. It will be comprised of:

9 activities all targeting the number 9
be the 9th hard test on my back since its injury (Sports Day, G-Spot, Riding Cobbles, Virtual Giro, Grandeur Fun Run, Rainbow Wall, Ronde van Salt Lake, and 45 miles of singletrack)
will target my nine goals, even if I don't know what these are
will begin at 9:09 am

1 complete all 9 traverses in Deaf Smith Canyon (4 X 5.10, 2 X 5.11, 3 X 5.12)
2 9 yoga poses for 99 seconds each
3 hold 9 core movements for 99 seconds each
4 do my 9 rehab movements for 99 seconds each (45 seconds is the longest I've done any ONE)
5 do 99 moves on the systems wall using 9 different grip positions
6 do 99 one-legged reps on each leg
7 run 9 miles
8 ride 9 miles on road bike
9 ride 9 miles on the mtn bike

pic: 1 away from 10 equals 9. Beata just thinks I'm ridiculous

Hubble

Steve McClure - Hubble 8c+ from ben pritchard on Vimeo.

Here are some great words (and video) from Steve McClure. He succinctly sums up a lot of the reasons why we climb--and how routes can become an obsession for that matter. The story revolves around a route called Hubble that, for a short time, was the hardest bit of rock climbing on the planet.

Only 8c+ But Still The Big One

Somehow, even though it's rarely been repeated, Hubble fell off the world radar as a must-do hard route. McClure, however, had been inspired by its ascent and, even though he'd progressed to the much higher grades of modern world standards, an ascent of Hubble had alluded him. He states:

I was nowhere; an amateur, hoping to trick it into submission like I do with so many other hard routes, finding cunning sequences, holds and body positions that no one else has seen. I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, but I wanted it for myself. It would complete my graduation and be the culmination of everything I ever wanted or even imagined I could achieve. It wasn’t for the grade, a mere F8c+! These days it’s barely worth a mention. But these figures are irrelevant really, in this case it’s the route that is absolutely everything.

It's funny how we can get captivated by something so meaningless to the rest of the world. But that's what makes climbing, and life in general, so fun and interesting.

Does Exercise Matter For Weight Loss?

Here's my published rebuttal to Time Magazine's cover story from a few weeks ago:

Does Exercise Matter For Weight Loss?

I deconstruct the Time article piece by piece, like this:

"Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic psychology, but most of us won't be very successful. 'The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure,' says Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. 'If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more.'"

True, you will be hungry and might eat more. What he leaves out is that not only can you eat more, but at some point, you need to eat more to lose weight. At Beachbody, this is one of the most difficult principles we have to teach our customers. At the beginning of an exercise-induced weight loss program, we restrict calories. As a person's body composition changes, so does that person's need for caloric consumption. It's not uncommon for our customers to double the amount of food they need to eat to keep their weight loss moving once they get into good shape. This simple physiological fact renders Cloud's argument moot.

If you've found your way to my page it's likely this isn't shocking information. I'm still just soooo miffed at how such drivel made the cover of a magazine like Time.

Tale Of A Backcountry Accident

For your weekend entertainment, here's a fantastic account of the sort of thing that can happen when you're playing in the backcountry. As a warning, this is not pleasurable reading if you're squeamish. It bothered me, and I'd already heard the story from both parties. Beyond that and it's a great read from the author of Ocean's Eleven.

Micah And Bob Go Bouldering - A Quick Journey To Hell



If you'd like to follow Micah's recovery, befriend Micah ElLameleg on Facebook.

Has Been

With my usual menu of epic fare reduced to training and my comments on the latest health news being posted at The Nerd, there hasn’t been much to blog about here at The Straight Dope. To keep the entertainment coming, I’ve made a new silly video of yet another traverse.

It’s not like I only traverse. It’s generally saved for days when I don’t have much time or a partner. This traverse, which tackles the base of the Hell wall at American Fork, is unique because you can link it into a bunch of routes. A couple of these are projects for this fall, while a couple others are going to require me to get a lot fitter. But the first bit of business is wiring the base. Its tenuous movement featuring small, hard-to-use hand holds and slick tiny feet that Ben calls “don’t breathe” climbing. It’s also overhanging and pumpy. Currently, I can’t recover too well on the one flat jug, which is going to have to change if I want to complete any of the harder routes. As is the case with all the climbing in the Hell area, it’s not much to look at but the moves grow on you. The Ruckman guide calls this V8. It’s definitely harder than V5S1 in Deaf Smith and much easier than the G-Spot, giving me a perfect trifecta of traversing options for training near my home.

I’ve gotta say, despite being a self proclaimed has been, I don’t feel as though I’m fading into the sunset. I’m not as strong as I was 10 years ago, but I’m probably technically climbing as well as ever. Motivation is high and I’m finding that working through my injuries is rewarding in itself. While I’ll never be as prolific as I was when I was climbing full time, I still harbor thoughts of strategizing well enough to do the hardest climbs of my life.

Remaking The Body

“You’re talkin’ about the Body, Jerry. That’s a fight you can’t win.”-Kramer

There are many clichés about how you’re not able to change the talent you’re born with but, in my latest round of self experimentation, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. With my epic endeavors on hold for a time, my focus is on attempting to extend my flexibility and range-of-motion beyond where they’ve ever been.

This isn’t exactly an attempt to discredit sports science. It’s not like I’m trying to increase my VO2/max from 60 to 80 or do any number of things that are, indeed, impossible. But there are those who believe that you can’t alter your body type at all, especially as you age. Since I’ve already trained people to do this (myself included) I know that they’re wrong. But I’ve never trained anyone my age or older to do it, so I’m using my forced down time to challenge another human performance theory.

It’s not exactly down time, mind you. I can do plenty of exercise. But with my back still recovering I can’t push my envelope the way in which I’m accustomed. In order to keep my body calm and under control I need a new test to focus on. Increasing flexibility requires elongating muscle fibers, pulling the actin and myosin filaments apart. Contracting the muscles, especially over the time it takes to cover ultra distances (my thing) bunches them together. With no (or at least less) mega distance endeavors on my plate it’s a good time to work on flexibility training to the point that I can finally push beyond the usual goal, which is just to get my muscles back to normal.

Increased range of motion is a whole different challenge because it requires some structural change and the patience to work through physical limitations that have come about through a lifetime of athletic injuries. I was born with poor range of motion, as was my entire family. Even my brother, who has been practicing yoga for more than 20 years, only has average range of motion. So my goal with this experiment isn’t to get on stage with Cirque du Soliel. It’s to increase my range of motion beyond what it’s ever been. This will allow increases in athletic performance and give me a larger buffer against injuries, allowing me to do deeper during my epic adventures.

Two weeks of morning yoga, which has been mainly focused on back recovery, has already seen my flexibility return to where it was pre-injury. Given that I haven’t been able to fully bend forward since December, that’s two weeks to make up for seven months. And since I’ve got to lay off mega challenges until, at minimum, early next year, it should be interesting to see what I’m able to accomplish by then.

Make Them Eat Cake!

With all the debates, er, squabbles, around health care you might get the impression that the public actually understands the difference between a capitalistic and socialistic state (and how we are neither). But, today I offer an example of how it doesn’t really matter how we label ourselves, it's the corporations that run our country.

TSD isn't turning political, this is a nutrition issue. The major food companies in the US have “issued a warning that we could ‘virtually run out of sugar’.’ I have no problem with this yet; it’s is perfectly reasonable thing to do. The problem lies in that they’ve followed this with a threat, telling the government to relax tariffs on foreign sugar or else they’ll raise food prices and fire thousands of US workers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125011957488227095.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

What they’ve done is, essentially, held the government hostage. Of course they’re going to give in, but how is this good for our country? Last time I checked, we have an unemployment problem and sugar is the main ingredient responsible for an obesity epidemic that’s the root of all of these health care fisticuffs. This will hurt both national issues.

One of the main debates in the food industry is how to get sugar out of foods. The companies who’ve levied this threat, Kraft, General Mills, Hershey et al, are those who are sneaking sugar into places where no sugars have gone before. Apparently they want to continue this practice and aren’t about to take no for an answer, even if it’s beyond what the market can bear. Capitalism, bah! This is an oligarchy.

Peruse the food aisles at your local market and you’ll find sugar, as expected, in nearly every cookie, cake, and other dessert item. But you’ll also find it in bread, crackers, “natural” juices and cereals, salad dressings, condiments, sauces, soups, processed fruits and veggies, dairy products, even meat. Yes, meat... now who would want sugar in their meat?

The answer is the food companies, who regularly sneak sweet items into non-sweet foods so that we develop a palate to crave un-naturally sweet foods. As such, instead of craving an apple for dessert we’ve learned to crave the junk they want us to buy, like an apple pie--and even then, unless it’s made with apples with added sugar, it won’t do so we heap on ice cream because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to want, doubling corporate profits, along with our waistlines and health care costs.

And, hey, I am not making an argument for big government. They don’t exactly do a bang-up job with their antiquated administrative systems. But at least they’re beholden to the voter somewhat, and not a tiny group of overly rich investors who funnel their money into off-shore tax havens until they have enough to buy their own tropical island. But whether the issue is health care, food and drug safety, or Wall Street, at some point we need to create a system that at least allows the agencies the public creates to do their jobs.

What If Running Was Good For Your Knees?

Great article in the NY Times today on how running can actually strengthen your knees. It's need-to-know info for all athletes. Instead of posting it twice, I'll just send you to my blog over at The 'Nerd:

What If Running Was Good For Your Knees?

Time Magazine's Lame Excuse Not to Exercise

Denis over at the Fitness Nerd wrote some good commentary on an absurd article gracing the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine. And while he's promised a major diatribe from yours truly, I'm going to let him have the stage for a while as I calm down and regain my wits.

Time Magazine's Lame Excuse Not to Exercise

I'm not sure if there's a paragraph in John Cloud's article that I don't take issue with. The number of counter points that I could make off the top of my head to his hypothesis (that you don't need to exercise) could fill a book. But what I want to know, more than anything else, is how an article making such physiological inaccuracies like "converting fat to muscle" has made the cover of Time? Have times gotten so tough that they no longer employ editors and fact checkers?

A-laugh-a While You Can, Monkey Boy!

Who needs scientific training? This guy learned to do this by mimicking monkeys. These are some of the most impressive climbing moves I've ever seen by a human. You can get video commentary at the link below:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=14821847&ch=130510b

ps - to whomever guesses where the title of this post came from, beers on me next time.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

With no time to post on the blog this week I'll turn to what's nearly always the best plan B in a time of crisis: Shatner.

I would call Bill my favorite singer but it seems wrong to pigeon hole him like that. He's he's so much more. And even if he did steal my rockclimbing.com nickname for his last album, Has Been, he's appeared--if unwittingly--in a song so obviously written just for me.

Why do I climb the mountain? Because I'm in love.

Final Fantasy

You must excuse me for touting Romney’s Spain blog as the last of our trip. I’d forgotten there was another chapter; one that included castles, manors, and amazing food. How boy-ish of me! Enjoy the final installment of our holiday. Lisa is a great writer and this last report is my personal favorite.

Assault on Western Europe: Part VII. Final Fantasy

As this is a fitness blog, I’ll add that it’s been fun watching Romney turn into a climber. Until this trip, she just went climbing to tag along with me. Since returning, she’s flashed a bunch of 5.11s. She still doesn’t think she can climb because most of my friends are quite good (and have been climbing forever), but she’s stronger than most of the people who call themselves climbers ever will be. She seemed surprised when, yesterday, a woman saw her back and said “you must be a climber.” Her reply that she just gets dragged around by her husband is looking more like a rouse all the time. A couple more trips to Europe and she’s going to turn into my rope gun.

Climbing in four countries on one trip can do a lot for the psyche:

England

on the sea cliffs of swanage

Belgium
like all the climbing areas in belgium, next to a castle and over a river.

France
climbing at Amiel in southern France...
with majestic views of penne's amazing castle.

Spain
approach via an old roman road, climb perfect rock, finish the day with excellent local food and wine. so easy to be inspired!
there's even climbing ON the castles

Should We Tax Soda?

My health news posts are generally reserved for The Fitness Nerd but this one's too important not to use all viral means possible as it's the tip of what promises to be a high fructose corn syrup filled iceberg:

Food Companies Fight Soda Tax Proposal Despite Staggering Obesity Epidemic

On the heels of the Nerd's last post, where Denis stated "someone needs to seriously smack-down the American junk food industry", the smack-down has been proposed if form of a tax on soda.

To me is makes perfect sense. We tax alcohol. We tax cigarettes. Soda does more damage and costs society more than both of those things combined, so why not?



"Americans Against Food Taxes" present of few reasons in the above ad. It should be noted that these particular Americans work in the soda, sugar, and genetically modified food industries. Personally, I think we should de-classify soda and other junk foods as food. Beer has more food value than soda.

Here's my take on the subject in more depth:

The World's Worst Food

What we have brewing is a 50's era tobacco-esque showdown between Big Junk Food and the American public. Almost makes me want to sit in a board room clogged with smoke and contemplate the solution over cocktails... almost.