Breathe In, Breathe Out

I’ve been saying this for a while, as Jess and I have been seeing a lot of valved masks when we head outside, but there hasn’t been much coverage of the issue in the press. Therefore:

If your face mask has an exhaust valve (a little square on the front, or quarter-sized circle[s] on the side), it doesn’t filter particles when you exhale, even if it’s an N95 mask.

While part of the reason to wear a face mask is to protect yourself from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the bigger reason is to keep you from spreading it to other people.

Therefore, either stop wearing valved masks, tape over the valve(s), or wear another unvalved mask over the valved one (per the video below).

Otherwise, you’re not helping. In fact, as some research points to valves concentrating and further accelerating particles exhaled (or coughed or sneezed) through them, you may even be making things worse.

TLDR: VALVED MASK = NO GOOD. 

Hoofing It

Before today, the last time I headed out for a run was precisely seven weeks ago. Even then, it seemed a fairly risky proposition. But as things here in NYC devolved in the days and weeks after, I was even less willing to push my luck. Ever since, all of my workouts have been entirely indoors – indeed, entirely in our apartment.

Until, that is, today. As the number of new cases has continued to drop, and as we collectively begin to puzzle through what a safe and gradual reopening might look like, heading out for a jog – albeit a masked one, and still steering clear of the more crowded running paths in Central or Riverside Parks – had started to seem like it wasn’t completely nuts.

So, this afternoon, I went for a short jaunt. Though I clocked just two miles, at a glacial 10-minute mile pace, I was still pretty beat up by the end. Despite hard indoor workouts in the intervening two-ish months, it seems there’s no substitute for actually hitting the pavement.

And though it was strange indeed to run while wearing a mask, and I had to follow a convoluted path to steer far clear of other pedestrians without getting flattened by oncoming cars, I was still glad to have done it. Going forward, I’ll be heading out again, at least a handful of times a week. It may take me a while to inch towards any semblance of my former 5k pace. But it seems I won’t be back in a real gym for at least another month or so, even in the most optimistic case, and I might as well put the intervening time to good use.

May 5, 2020

Now What?

After a first month and change of blazing lockdown productivity, this past week I went a bit off the rails. I didn’t make any real progress on work, dropped the ball on most of my side-projects and habits, and generally just listlessly pissed away my days. Today, I regrouped, and am ready to get back to it full bore in the week ahead. But, at the same time, the huge amount of uncertainty continues to weigh on me.

Outside, the weather is amazingly beautiful, and New Yorkers seem to be heading in droves to the two parks (Central and Riverside) right by my apartment. Yet, at the same time, one of the restaurants across from my window just emptied out their tables and chairs yesterday, and papered over their windows this morning, apparently closing for good.

In theory, New York’s stay-at-home order expires at the end of next week. But Cuomo has already suggested he’s likely to extend that, at least in hard-hit part of the state like NYC. And, as I’ve written before, I’m not entirely sure how much the city is likely to bounce back even once those orders lift.

Recently, I’ve been puzzling through what COVID means for the specific logistics of gyms, in-person training, and therefore the ongoing Composite beta test. How, exactly, is a busy gym supposed to operate under the constraints of social distancing? Sure, you can rope off every other cardio machine, but how do you handle barbells and dumbbells and kettlebells and everything else? Mark out 10’x10′ individual zones with tape on the floor? If so, where do trainers go? And how do you deal with the vastly reduced total occupancy that entails? Pre-COVID, at peak times, attendance was probably two to threefold greater than social distanced layouts would allow. So even if you strictly enforce capacity limits by allowing members to sign up for slots, you’ll still wildly piss off the 50-65% of them who are paying for monthly memberships but being told they can’t actually use the gym. And all of that doesn’t begin to account for the likely far greater droplet ‘blast radius’ when people are huffing and puffing mid-workout; based on research I’ve seen, there’s good reason to believe six feet of separation may not be nearly enough.

During odd moments of the day, I’ve therefore been running napkin numbers in my head for what an extremely scaled back version of things might look like. What if my ‘gym’ was a small 500 sqft space, where I just trained one person at a time? Would people be more likely to return to something like that? And, even if so, how quickly could I get things set up and outfitted? In Midtown Manhattan, for example, it would be tough to run even a tiny boutique without showers and similar amenities.

So, lots to puzzle through. Though all of it still rather abstract. At this point, I have no idea what, exactly, comes next – the timing, the regulations, the attitudes of my fellow New Yorkers. I’ll be doing my best to keep pushing forward day by day, to lay groundwork as effectively as I can. But, in the end, I suspect I won’t have much choice but to wait for it all to actually play out.

May 3, 2020