21st Century Breakdown

21st Century Breakdown

I once was lost but never was found

I think I am losing

What's left of my mind

To the 20th century deadline

                    - Billie Joe Armstrong

What if everything you've been told about nutrition, health, and fitness was wrong? And not just marginally wrong, but almost the polar opposite of what was right? Spoiler alert: maybe it's not. But what if it is?  Hear me out.

The goal I undertook just over 2 years ago was to stop being a sod and get myself into shape, not just for me and not just for my amazing wife (who had already successfully unsodden herself).  I wanted to set a proper example for my then-infant girls. I wanted to set an example of being healthy and active with the hope that they might avoid the plight of the average American who finds themselves inactive, overweight, and unhealthy.

At the time the conventional wisdom was that I needed whip myself into shape with cardio, crank out hours in the gym every week, and support that activity with a whole-grain fueled low-fat diet.  As is the case for many (but certainly not all and many not even most), when I stuck to that plan, I saw pretty solid results. I was blessed with something genetically that kept me from getting fat, so I didn't have weight to lose, but I was certainly not in shape; I had a little belly an even less muscle tone.

I started running because it was "cheap cardio" and it was something where I could see weekly progress in both my speed and distance.  About 7 months after I started running, I ran a half-marathon in 1:40. 7 months after that I was training very well toward a 3:30 marathon and, despite blowing up on race day, I ran a sub-4:00 race. I believed that the faster I could run or the more weight I could lift (which has never been that much) had a direct correlation to how HEALTHY a human being I was. As of today, I'm not sure I'll go the grave believing that and that's not my belief as I'm writing today.

I've been bitten (and some would probably say infected) by the Paleo/Primal bug.  There are varying flavors of the concept, but the version I'm embracing is that we (human beings) have deviated too far from our very-recent ancestry in both lifestyle and diet.  As brief lesson in human pre-history, consider that the split in the genetic code we carry (vs. either extinct lineages or apes) occurred about 2 million years ago and the principles of natural selection (evolution) gave us a pretty rockin' person heading out of the Paleolithic into the Meso/Neolithic about 10,000 years ago.

Some anthropologists argue that this was the pinnacle of human health. Few anthropologists disagree that the health of the average human took a nose-dive in the Neolithic. Current studies are projecting that for the first time in recorded history the current generations of Americans are likely to have a shorter average life expectancy than subsequent generations.

I have always been a staunch believer in Science and logic as being able to provide answers to problems. As I have continued to read more about the status quo of our society and compare it to what we know (and in some cases what we presume to know) about what Humans are truly evolved to be/eat/do, I have started taking a hard look at how I'm going to choose to live my life and, with my own personal exceptions that come from living a 21st century life, I'm choosing to pursue a more ancestral path.  My hope is that I can find the time I've had today (yay vacation day!) to go more in-depth about what I'm doing and, more importantly, why I think it's right.

Happy Belated Birthday, Deb!

"TRAINING" LOG:

I'm still here, but without the consistency of that [damn] marathon training, the motivational opportunities to write are few & far between.  My friend Deb has been needling me to start posting again and since yesterday was her birthday (and since I'm a cheap SOB), this is her present.

So what's happened in the past 4+ months?

In a nutshell, it took about 6 weeks to lose the big toenail on my left foot.  It only hurt for a few days after the marathon in May, but running with it was pretty uncomfortable, even when wrapped/taped.  Simultaneously, work ramped up which broke up the solid consistency of training I'd become accustomed to.  I also took a more relaxed approach to my diet and, while I didn't abandon the habits I'd spent the past year forming, I definitely did allow for more indulgences.

The net result of a more careless diet and a less-than-consistent training plan had very predictable results -- loss of conditioning, strength, and what little physique it appeared that I had developed.  The last month before the marathon, I started having a "bulletproof" feeling in my workouts -- I could push hard and recover quickly.  A month ago I started tracking my diet again and started getting some focus back in the gym.

Only in the past week have I started to get inklings of that "bulletproof" feeling again.  My running pace is still at least a minute a mile off what it was a year ago at this time and at least a minute:30 off what it was in May.  That's what happens when you go from running 3x and 25 miles a week to 3x a month with the same total mileage.  Despite the abysmal running mileage, I'm running a Half-Marathon in a few weeks with my wife (my 3rd, her 1st) and there is certainly not going to a PR in the books for me. Anything under 1:50 will be a miracle.

Once that's over I have something ELSE to look forward to.  My jack-ass sister in law had the bright idea of doing the Tough Mudder obstacle course event in Mt. Snow next May, so we all signed up for that.  That pretty much means that once this race is complete in November, it's back into the gym to finally start working on building strength while maintaining some reasonable level of conditioning.

I did run the Race to the Top of Vermont again this year and cut about 10 minutes off my time from last year (which was more of a scouting "run" compared to this year's race effort).  That'll be a topic for another post though.

What a lovely day to mow the lawn!

TRAINING REPORT:

In the span of a day, Vermont went from experiencing the 5th snowiest winter on record to the 3rd.  This most recent storm was severe enough that the state was pretty much shut down.  Our office barely had enough people make it in to warrant turning on the heat & lights (most worked from home), classes were canceled at the gym, and shortly after that announcement came a follow-up that the gym was closing at 3PM (I guess they had the same feeling about heat & lights I did).

My Monday workout ended up being a bit of a hodge-podge -- some running, some kettlebell work (get-ups, snatches, swings, rows, deadlifts, weighted crunches and mason twists), bosu squats (flat-side up, squat down, then push down with one foot, tilting the bosu until it hits the floor, then come back to center and do the same with the other leg, come back to center and stand upright -- that's one rep), and some deep squats with a kettlebell using a balance ball against the wall for stability/support.  I also started playing around a bit with doing get-ups with a barbell -- it uses some different control muscles than the kettlebell and gives me a few more weight options between the 16, 24, and 32 kg weights.

The workout served its purpose which was to make body parts sore.  My quads complained for the rest of the day and my abs made their presence known with each shovelful of the ~20" deep snow that evening.  I spent about 90 minutes after work snowblowing our steep, wide driveway and shoveling the areas I couldn't get with the snowblower.  MyFitnessPal has exercise categories for shoveling snow, but nothing for muscling a walk-behind snowblower up & down a steep, wide driveway.  The closest activity I could find was lawn-mowing.  There is something very, VERY wrong about entering in 80 minutes of Lawn Mowing after having been out in the cold, blowing snow.

2011-MAR-07 Diet Log

MUSINGS:

Monday also started my "Bonus 500" diet week.  My starting point is in the ballpark of 161 pounds (I wrote it down, but don't have the number handy).  The "lawn mowing" activity is almost certainly going to throw some amount of guesswork into the equation, but there's no way either the diet tracking or exercise logging is 100% accurate.  The idea is to be close enough that the margin of error zeros out over the course of a week (i.e. somedays will be high, some will be low).  

I manually upped the MyFitnessPal daily goal by 500, so if you're looking for a big, red -500  in the daily calorie goal, you won't see it.  Ideally, I'll be in the ballpark of 0 calories remaining each day this week and, if everything goes to plan, I'll be up a pound next Monday.

My point for doing this is to try to better understand how the human body works (or at least my body).  I do have some people who ask me for diet advice and I always try to give the "big picture" view that even though little cheats add up throughout the day, over-eating by a few hundred calories a day for a week isn't what lead to a 5lb weight gain in seven days.  I won't presume to understand nutrition and the human metabolic cycle well enough to have all the answers, but there is way more to weight management than simple calorie counting and I'm hopeful that I've got enough of a baseline established with my own diet that I can experiment a little bit and learn something new.

RAMBO RUN!

TRAINING REPORT:

Get in wayback machine!  Quick catch-up post for Friday (and Saturday), a cross-training day.  It was CHISL'D day (their name, not mine) which meant lots of cardio.  Today's class was done in a style affectionately dubbed "Rambo Run."  This means jump-roping.  Lots of jump-roping.  

It starts out easy enough.  10 seconds of jump-rope, followed by a strength exercise (e.g. dumbbell curls, presses, rows, arm raises, push-ups, and lots of weighted lunges). Without breaking, increase to 20 seconds of jump-rope followed immediately by a different strength exercise.  Same sequence repeated for jumps of 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, and 60 seconds before decreasing the times by 10 seconds per sequence until you're back down to zero (total of 6 minutes jumping rope).  Not all of the non-jump-roping interludes were strength exercises.  Toward the end, there was a set of 10 "all out sprints" back & forth in the studio.  That. Sucked!

Once the Rambo Run was concluded, core exercises commenced (crunches, bicycle crunches, hip-ups, 'windshield wipers,' and Supermans).  The last brutalization after all of that was "7 up, 7 down pushups" with a partner.  Both start in push-up plank position and hold (or try; it gets tough toward the end) to hold that position when not doing push-ups.  First person does one push-up, then the other person does one.  The First person does two push-ups, then the other person does two.  Then 3, 4, 5, 6, on to 7 before going back down (6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1) the same way.  49 push-ups.  This was one of those workouts I needed an extra towel to clean up the floor when I was done.  Great class!

2011-FEB-25 Diet Log

2011-FEB-26 Diet Log (CHEAT DAY!)

MUSINGS:

As I mentioned above, this is "catch-up" day and Saturday is/was my off-day for the week.  We had some good friends over for dinner and ignored common sense in terms of diet (it was "cheat day").  There are some weeks where I really need the cheat day and others where I take it, but don't really go hog-wild with it.  Saturday was a hog-wild day.  Chips, oodles of honey roasted peanuts, Chicken-bacon-garlic pizza and pepperoni-mushroom-onion pizza, garlic bread, two bottles of fine wine (2007 Little Vineyards Petite Sirah - the only winery where we maintain a Wine Club membership, and 2000 Casanova di Neri Brunello di Montalcino), several samplings of home brew from the Uberbrau Kegerator, and the grande finale of Peanut Butter Pound cake with chocolate frosting.  

The day tipped in at just under 5000 Kcal including 209g (almost 1900 Kcal) of succulent, delicious fat (for reference, that's about 3 "normal" days' worth on my 3000 Kcal per day diet).  With 17 miles on the schedule for Sunday, I'll find something to do with it!  When I did my half marathon training, I used to try to have cheat day be on my long run day, but I was only burning around 1000 Kcal per run (or about double a normal workout).  With the full marathon training, my shortest long run burns over 1500 Kcal and my longest will approach 2500 Kcal.  I almost need both weekend days to pre-load and recover-eat from runs that long.  

The problem is getting "healthy" calories in the tank.  Wine & beer (and junky food) are part of cheat day, but they are certainly not the best thing to fuel your body for distance running!  I can definitely see how pro athletes can have weight problems when they retire.  When you're extremely active, it takes so much food to maintain your current level that you end up resetting your baseline for what's an acceptable amount to eat.  My plan for my training continues to be to have an "eat anything and everything" dietary cheat day once per week and then balance intake to output for the remainder of the week, always trying to err slightly on the side of over-fueling.  So far, so good!