Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Babies 2. Not gonna lie, still on a huge high from babies on the beach for the first time in 15 years. To top it off our last ‘baby” Ryan visited for a couple of days as he prepares for his senior year in high school.

All 6’5″ of him!

2) Highway. At the moment we are steaming along I-90 headed west to Casa Blanco, Beth at the helm. It never gets old, that feeling of awe that I can be connected to you all while I speed through the countryside of Western NY. I think this cellphone/internet thing is gonna make it, ya know?

This trip is often filled with hours of debriefing the events of extended White family’s week together crammed in our rented house on Cape Cod. Not this year, though. Nothing but a quiet, warm feeling as we work through the math necessary to accommodate what is likely to be a bigger crew next year as word gets out about how much fun we had.

3) Games.  This is the first year that CrossFit, Inc. has included sessions and events targeted specifically toward physicians who do CrossFit. It’s a good idea, albeit one that is rather late to the gate given Coach Glassman’s interest in the intersection of fitness and health. Still, better late than never. One of the best parts of the enterprise is the involvement of Dr. Julie Foucher. Waiting until now means that she is available to participate in the growth of the CrossFit MD movement as she, herself, grows as a physician.

Occasionally I stumble upon a post in the CF MD page on FB. Without meaning to offend, CF is so new to the majority of the MD’s participating that the space looks less like a collection of docs and more like some of the threads we all used to participate in back in the days of CrossFit.com v1.o and 2.0. This is not surprising, nor is it a knock on my medical colleagues. CF is exhilarating in the early stages; the newness of CF is the same for every new adherent. I feel like I am re-reading some of the best threads on the CrossFit Forum ca. 2010 or so.

Which makes me wonder: wouldn’t it be possible to accelerate the indoc (see what I did there?) if either the MDL1 course or the prep work included a review of some of those classic Forum threads? Think Eugene Allen on programming or Larry Lindenman on planned/cycled recovery. Robb Wolfe on Zone/Paleo nutrition. I remember one on scaling the load in a WOD based on your CrossFit Total (back for the first time since the very first Games in Aromas) rather than sex, height, or weight. Pretty sophisticated analyses from some of the OGs we no longer see anywhere around CF, but relevant and on point today as much as they were back in the day. You could accelerate the impact of having doctors engaged in functional fitness by leapfrogging them through the stages of self-discovery.

My take: make healthcare more like fitness rather than making fitness more like healthcare.

4) Reunion. Our return to Ohio is a day or two later than usual because we attended the 40th Reunion of one of my high schools (I moved after freshman year). Not a typo. 40 years. Doesn’t seem like yesterday; more like last week! One funny quirk: we all referred to each other as “kids”, as in “who’s that kid over there in the green shirt?” Every one of us did it. Attending was easy since it was my turn to bring my Mom home from the Cape and she still lives in the house I grew up in.

So? How was it? Was the Reunion a meaningful milepost? An event that will in some way alter the trajectory of any of us who attended? Probably not, but then again, is any Reunion really supposed to do that? No, what happened was a group of really nice people, many of whom still live in or around town, got together and spent a few hours being genuinely nice to one another. Oh sure, Tim (our Valedictorian) made fun of my senior picture outfit (definitely deserved), and some of the goofy stuff we wrote in each other’s yearbooks got a re-reading, but all in all everyone was quite gentle with one another. Heck, we could have spent all night ragging on me after Jane pulled out a pic I signed, but she was too kind to let it go down that way (for which I will be forever grateful!).

Heck, I’ll bet Dianne only got positive responses when she got folks to play the “who has changed the most” game (I wimped out and didn’t play).

No, Reunions are for remembering as many smiles as possible from days gone by, and for enjoying whatever threads there may be that tie us together, still. There were some crazy “it’s a small world” connections that were just a hoot to discover (like the Needham connection, right Lori?!) It was fun, and flattering as hell, to discover that some of my classmates have discovered my ramblings here and elsewhere and liked them. For the record they all seem to agree that Beth is AT LEAST my Better 95%! Tim and Tom came from California to RI and got trumped by Yukio who surprised us from Tokyo. That’s just cool. No revelations, no epiphanies, just a few hours to remember that we were privileged to have known each other in whatever small way, then and now.

I had so much more fun than I expected to, from the first hugs (thanks Kit, Jackie, and Sue) to the last handshake (great party Steve), I’m so very happy to have been a part. Think “yes” the next time you get an invitation.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

The CrossFit Games Regionals were on ESPN yesterday afternoon. What? Wait. No? No, I guess you’re right. It wasn’t ESPN, was it. As it turns out the Games have shifted over to CBS Sports. Totally missed that memo. Of course, I only surf to the Games site once or twice a week anymore so I can be forgiven. Thankfully I was marooned at home with nothing left on either my Honey-Do list or my own Wish List, and ESPNU was all kinds of messed up so I couldn’t watch the D1 Lacrosse quarterfinals. Surfboring around cable I stumbled on the Regionals and received my annual reminder about what CrossFit is and who is supposed to do it.

In short the CrossFit Games as exhibited in this year’s Regionals is to CrossFit as the Indy 500 is to your daily commute: almost everyone needs to do the latter, but almost no one can, or should, do the former.

You could certainly say that I am treading on thin ice by proclaiming that you and I have no business doing anything but gawking at Regionals athletes doing full-on Regionals WODs here on .com. Fine. Here is why I feel this way; the incessant urge to emulate Games-level athletes and to turn every CrossFit WOD into a training session for competition risks the undoing of what makes CrossFit (and other high-intensity offshoots) a potential solution (or integral part of an irreducible Rx, to coin a phrase) in solving the population health problem in Western societies. It really could be as easy as eating fewer processed carbohydrates, being stronger, and training at relatively high intensity for periods of time in the 8-20:00 range. Stronger and leaner with greater aerobic capacity is all pretty much any of us needs.

Everyone who has ever owned a Box or coached a CrossFit class has seen the danger of extending the “you vs. you” competition outward into the “Sport of Fitness (TM)”. Clients who leave a gym because the trainer refuses to teach them how to do a CTB butterfly PU when they can barely do a single dead hang PU. Fledgling CrossFitters who insist on rebounding box jumps instead of stepping down because their times suffer when they do. “Linda” or “Diane” done As Rx’d with rounded lower backs, chins held high because, you know, you gotta Rx the Open WODs if you want to go to the Games. It’s really hard to exaggerate how disheartening it is to listen to a client say they are leaving a gym because they don’t feel like you are the best fit for them. Then you look at their data and discover that they are down 15% BW fat, have doubled their 1RM Deadlift, can now do “Fran” Rx’d in half the time they first did it with an empty bar and a green band, all injury-free.

Form, then consistency, then and only then intensity. This is what you need for fitness. The siren song of competition is strong, especially during our Games season. Shout out to those trainers, both within the CrossFit business universe and out, who continue to hue to this orthodoxy. Functional movements, irreducible exercises performed properly at a level of intensity that is high for an individual, coupled with a diet that is designed to fuel performance in the gym and in life is what we 99.9%’ers need. Distilling this prescription into a measurable and repeatable program is the essential genius of CrossFit. That some of us get to do it as part of a community is that much better; friendships formed through shared experiences, especially shared strife (and what is “Fran” if not shared strife), are also an integral part of being healthy.

After my (ca. 2006) WOD I sat down with some left-over steak and a handful of nuts to see how Dani Horan was doing in the East. A little sore and energized, the only thing that was missing was another CrossFitter there to join me in watching the spectacle.

In my mind how I imagine pundits and talking heads of all ages speaking the famous Sound of Music lyrics: “So, a needle pulling thread…”

Lake Superior State has published its 41st annual list of forbidden words. Words that have been abused, misused, or simply overused to a breaking point. Number 1 on this year’s list? “So”.

Yup. “So” is the new “um”, “uh”, or “like”, as annoyingly overused as any of these, but all the more obnoxious because it is especially favored by the young talking heads of the consultative and pundit class. Seriously, whether I agree of disagree with an “expert’s” opinion I can hardly listen to NPR, CNN, FOX, or even the NFL Today. Every sentence begins with “so”. It’s as if there’s a clause in each speaker’s  contract mandating that you do so.

See what I did there? That’s part of what makes it all so frustrating (see, I did it again). “So” is a perfectly good word, one that has so many legitimate uses it’s nothing short of criminal that it has been captured and held hostage by an undisciplined intelligentsia and their associated wannabes. Just as you don’t hear truly gifted speakers pepper their spoken thoughts with “uhh” and “um”(I never found this particular POTUS to be all that impressive as a speaker because of this), so, too, should we be spared an assault by this more pretentious verbal tic.

Here’s a resolution (see what I DIDN’T do there): I am giving an instant downgrade to the value of whatever is begin spoken by whoever whenever and wherever if he or she insists on beginning the majority of sentences or new thought threads with “so”. Even more so (Huh? Huh?), I’m thinking that it’s perfectly appropriate to simply tune out or turn off anything and anyone who does that. They all tend to be uber-plugged in to screens and tech and such, and if I did I’d probably have a ton more time to do stuff like read a book, pet Abby the wonder dog, or get on the floor and build a wooden block castle with little Landon, my grandson.

Do, ray, me, fa…la, tee, dah. So there.