Wave Theory

My father is a lung doctor, but his sub-specialty is diving medicine; if you get the bends while Scuba-diving in much of the Pacific, you’ll get medevaced to Stanford so you can see him.  So, while I was growing up, we spent nearly every summer venturing out to various islands, and I spent a large part of my youth floating and swimming in tropical waters.  (Rough, I know.)  Anyway, one of the main things I learned from that, early on, is that you can’t really fight the surf.  If you want to swim to shore, and there’s a decent swell, it’s nearly pointless to paddle while the water is pulling against you.  Instead, to make it in, you need to calmly tread while a wave draws you towards its face, and then paddle like hell as soon as it reaches you, so you can ride the wave’s momentum toward the shore.

And, in a lot of ways, I’ve found that’s how life works, too.  Sometimes, the waves are pulling against you, and you just need to tread.  But that’s also when you’d best get ready, so you can get as much forward motion as possible out of the paddling once the time is right.  It’s a cycle I’ve lived through countless times.  And yet, even so, each time I’m stuck treading, I feel like maybe I’m stuck for good.

In a lot of ways 2018 has been a treading year.  Or, at least, it has been in terms of external productivity.  From an inside perspective, it’s been perhaps the most meaningful year of my life – a chance to take a hard look at myself, and to really figure out who I am and who I want to be.  But what it hasn’t been is a year of doing, a year of making things, or of making things happen, in the broader world.

In the last few days, however, it feels like all of that self-excavation, and a ton of concurrent plan-laying, is now finally coming to its natural conclusion.  It feels like maybe the wave is just starting to pull me up its face.  It feels like 2019 is going be a big year of forward momentum, a year of happily and productively paddling like hell.

Surf’s up.

December 19, 2018

Steel Trap, Rusted Shut

Recently, Jess has been reading Julia Cameron’s classic The Artist’s Way, and doing the twelve-week program of self-reflection and artistic exploration that it contains.  I had read the book myself, and done the program, back in 2001 or 2002.  But listening to Jess discuss her current experience with it, I realized that I no longer really remembered any of the book, at all.  I knew that I had picked up my longstanding Morning Pages habit from the program – three daily pages of free-write brain-dump journaling (though I’d since given up on the hand-written approach Cameron prescribes, defaulting to 750 typed words daily instead, for the sake of time).  Otherwise, though, not a clue.  So, I started re-reading the book myself.  And, honestly, I haven’t even really felt glimmers of remembrance or recognition; it’s like I’d never even read the book at all.

Recently, I was revising my long-term goals (including creating new 25-year ones that will carry me all the way to 65), and I spent some time thinking about books, along with plays and movies.  I first came up with some ways of trying to keep up with the best of the new releases in the years to come.  But then I decided I should maybe try to pull together a ‘cultural literacy list’ of all the older books and plays and movies that I’d never read but long meant to.  Starting with a slew of critics’ picks, the winners of various awards, and other people’s attempts at the same kind of list-making, I was able to concatenate a list I can then try to chip away at in the years ahead.

The resultant catalog is excellent for soothing the completist, OCD part of my brain: if I can just read and watch my way through, I’ll be ‘done!’  But my experience with The Artist’s Way, and several similar ones of late, has given me pause.  Recent conversations about movies I watched decades back, like Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones, made clear that I now only remember random snippets and iconic scenes, without more than a vague sense of their plots overall.  Or earlier this year, I re-read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and though there I did at least have rough memories of most of the anecdotes, it turned out I remembered only the contours (something with a racially-motivated police shooting in the Bronx?) and almost none of the useful detail or lessons Gladwell drew from them.

All of which is to say, even if I do manage to slog my way through my entire cultural literacy list, I’m not sure that will be much of an achievement.  Instead, I’ll just have to head back to the start, and begin going through it all again, as by then I’m sure I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything from my first pass.

December 15, 2018

Chestnuts Roasting

When I was in seventh grade, playing in the Jordan Middle School jazz band’s winter concert, I had my very first trumpet solo: eight bars, in the middle of “(Have Yourself a) Merry Little Christmas.”

Last year, a few months into learning to play the piano, December rolled around.  And though I was only about a third of the way through my method book, I paged to the back, and discovered an arrangement of the same song.  It was still well above my level, but, for a week or two, I puzzled it out, one bar at a time.  After which, though still a bit halting and uneven, I could actually play a version roughly good enough to serve as background holiday music in a restaurant or bar.

So, at least for that song, I have a reasonable basis for attachment.  But, despite being Jewish, it turns out I just really love Christmas music in general.  Admittedly, I don’t really have much choice when it comes to holiday listening – the limited array of Chanukah tunes doesn’t really measure up.  And I take some solace in the fact that the large majority of Christmas hits were actually penned by Jewish songwriters.

But, even so, it’s not really my music.  And yet, each year, I feel like it is.  By now, much as twinkle lights (which I also kind of love) feel to me far divorced from any religious origins or undertones, most Christmas music seems to me just sort of free-standing, end-of-year, dark-days-of-winter music.  Which, Jewish or not, seems perfectly fine for me to enjoy.  Or maybe that’s just a rationalization I’m selling myself.  Still, I’m selling it to myself either way.  Because, as I do every December, I’ll be spending the next month playing the grooves off of the Charlie Brown Christmas Album, any number of Canadian Brass albums of carols, and pretty much every cheesy pop Christmas playlist I can find.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, indeed.

December 11, 2018

About Time

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been trying to take a hard look at myself of late. And though that’s mostly been diving into some of the bigger issues that I’ve identified in myself, I also keep stumbling across small, strange weaknesses that I’ve never really considered before. For example, it turns out I’m absolutely crap at remembering exactly when in the past things happened in my life.

Here’s a good, recent illustration: when designing workouts, it’s usually wise to do a ‘deload’ every four to six weeks – essentially, after beating yourself down with increasingly heavy weights and increasing intensity, week after week, for a subsequent week you step the intensity way back, often literally halving the weights used, to give your body a chance to recover. Recently, I’ve been playing around with daily and weekly workout structures in my own workouts, but I haven’t been paying close attention to the multi-week cycles that would include a deload. But, this week, feeling pretty run down, I commented to a friend at the gym that I thought I could probably use one. I just felt like I needed a break. Which was weird, I told him, as I’d just taken time off, during a week when the gym happened to be closed. My friend looked at me funny, and then reminded me that the gym was actually closed at the end of August, almost three months back.

Similarly, if you asked me in what year I did certain things – when I moved to a given apartment, started a company, worked on some project, headed off on a big trip—I’d have pretty much zero idea. Which is weird, because I actually tend to have very vivid and detailed memories of all of the individual episodes; I just can’t really order them, or place them specifically in time.

Fortunately, unlike any number of other things I’m working through, this one doesn’t seem to cause problems in my life, at least so far as I can tell. But, it’s an interesting quirk of my brain to consider going forward. And I suspect ‘consider’ is about the best I can do. Because, though I’m finding ways to work through and resolve a bunch of my other stuff, this is one I’m not even vaguely sure how to debug.

November 15, 2018

Everything is Scoliosis

As is inevitable over the years of athletic life, I’ve had my share of back, or hip, or even knee, shoulder, and ankle tweaks.  And, if I were looking at myself from a rational, outside perspective, I would probably think that the unaddressed scoliosis might at least conceivably be part of the underlying cause of any of those.  But, as ever, I simply ignored the possibility, working on all kinds of other stretches and mobility drills and pre-hab exercises, skipping anything that dealt specifically with the slight spinal curve.

In the last month or two, however, I finally realized that’s kind of ridiculous.  So I started thinking and researching and self-programming to address the scoliosis head on.  It’s early, still, but even in that short amount of time, I’ve made a real impact.  Which leads to a reasonable question: why hadn’t I done this before?

I’ve thought about that a bunch, and I think the answer is simple: I just didn’t like the idea that I had an inherent structural flaw.  So, instead of facing up to the problem and trying to solve it, it was psychologically easier to ignore it and to route around it and just to try to power ahead.

Maybe it’s age or wisdom, or a year-early onset of a 40-year-old midlife crisis.  But, for the past few months, I seem to be having a ton of similarly obvious ‘revelations.’  Because it turns out there are all kinds of things I do, all kinds of behaviors and beliefs and patterns and habits that haven’t served me particularly well, that I’ve similarly spent decades studiously ignoring.  Most, similarly, aren’t even that big.  But by not addressing them, by trying to just plow past them, I’ve tripped over them repeatedly, in ways big and small over the course of my life.  And it’s only in the last little bit that I’ve been willing to say: if I have flaws or shortcomings, certainly it’s better for me to own them and try to face them head on, rather than pushing them into the back of my mental closet, shutting the door, and trying to pretend that not seeing them means they don’t exist.

Anyway, I realize this sounds so patently obvious when I put it down in words.  Which makes me further wonder how I managed to make myself willfully blind to so many issues for so long, rather than simply sucking it up and trying to solve them.  I definitely feel like the guy who’s walked for miles with rocks in his shoe, ignoring the pain, taking aspirin, coming up with different ways to walk that don’t hurt.  When, instead, it would be so much more effective to just stop for a minute, to take off the shoe, and to dump out the rocks.

October 19, 2018

It’s Always Sunny

So here’s a fun fact about me: my skin is impervious to suntan lotion.  Well, not exactly impervious.  But when I put it on, five or ten minutes after it absorbs into my skin, about 25% of the suntan lotion reappears: a layer of white streaks and patches that needs to be rubbed in a second time.  It’s happened since I was a kid, and apparently it’s a genetic trait, as my mother has the exact same issue.  Still, it’s not something I think about frequently when I’m not at the beach, which is how today’s adventure unfolded.

As I’ve mentioned previously, these days I’m neck-deep in research for Composite, trying to compile the largest possible list of evidence-based health and fitness habits for our algorithm.  To that, with end-of-August vacation time upon us, I recently dove into some papers around sun exposure, trying to tease out the balance between skin cancer safety and the importance of vitamin D, along with a bunch of other similar questions.

Somewhere along the way, I found a study about the impact of suntan lotion use frequency.  Essentially, it tracked two groups: one who used suntan lotion every day, regardless of weather, and another who used suntan lotion only when they thought it was needed.  After a couple of years, the daily use group had dramatically fewer new wrinkles, brown spots, and fine lines than the as-needed suntan lotioners.

As I’m on the verge of 40, and old enough to start worrying about such things as wrinkling (and, based on some of my grandparents, I’m pretty sure I’m en route to full prune), the study struck a chord.  I decided switching to a daily moisturizer with some SPF protection in it would be cheap insurance.  So, I picked some up.  And, this morning, I applied it before heading out the door.

Sadly, in standard style, somewhere en route to work, it seems a good portion of the suntan/moisturizer then reappeared.  Which I didn’t realize, despite the puzzling ten minutes of people either averting their eyes or staring at me confusedly as they passed.  It wasn’t until I arrived at work, and headed to the bathroom to pee, that I discovered I was mangy with strange white patches.  The anti-suntan lotion superpower strikes again!

So it seems I’m back to the drawing board on this one.  Perhaps, with the right kind of suntan lotion, I’d have less of an issue; I know from beach use that the spray-on kind doesn’t tend to reappear, but it does leave me looking more glossy and shellacked than is probably suitable for daily use.  For the moment, it seems I’ll just have to risk the wrinkles.

September 4, 2018

Captain Jack

Back when I was a kid, I was lucky enough to learn how to surf from Richard Schmidt, a legendary big-wave surfer, and one of the first two or three people to surf the infamous breaks at Mavericks.

We’d paddle out, ride waves until my lips turned blue in the freezing Santa Cruz water, then come back in to bullshit with the local surfers and rising pros who knew Richard. Often, there was a familiar-looking homeless guy there named Jack, a tremendously friendly guy with a scruffy beard, layered sweaters, and an eyepatch:

One day, as we headed back to Richard’s van, Jack walked along with us.

“It’s great seeing you as always,” said Jack, once we reached the van. And then he opened the door of a $200,000 1950’s Jaguar XK 140 parked next to the van, hopped in, and drove off.

It was then that I realized why Jack looked so familiar. I saw his face every time I put on my wetsuit:

Jack O’Neill, inventor of the wetsuit, passed away this Friday at the age of 94. He was a fixture of the Santa Cruz surf scene, a tremendously nice guy, and a brilliant businessman.

I wear O’Neill wetsuits to this day, and I silently give him thanks each time I’m out in the water, my lips still turning blue, but not nearly as quickly as they otherwise would.

RIP, Jack. You’ll be missed.

June 5, 2017

Hit the Road

Almost exactly a year ago, I blogged about how much I hate running. But also about how, precisely because it’s my biggest athletic weakness, I was focusing on running more, and on running better.

I ran through last summer, and into the fall. But by the time winter rolled around, I scaled back. I still hopped on the treadmill a few times a week to warm up before lifting, and tried to include 400m and 800m repeats in at least one metabolic conditioning session each week. But, all in, I could still count my total weekly mileage on one hand.

Now, warm weather is upon us again. This year, I no longer dread running, could lace up my sneakers and bang out a 10k at a moments notice. But I’d also be lapped on that 10k by many octogenarians. So I’m focusing this summer on not just surviving runs, but on actually doing them fast.

For the second day in a row, Jess and I are off to the Hudson Greenway, to get back in the swing of things with some long, slow distance. After that, it’s weeks of tempo runs and long and short intervals for me. I may still not be winning races, but I can at least move up to the front of the over-80 crowd.

May 28, 2017

Senescence

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a dark bar, trying to read the menu. Without thinking, I lifted my glasses to my forehead, and was suddenly able to read the menu without them.

Then, yesterday, I noticed a handful of grey hairs growing, salt-and-pepper, in my beard.

Apparently, it’s just a long, slide to death from here on out.

August 19, 2015