Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Salubrious. Healthy or health-giving. Always thought it kinda meant the opposite, actually. That middle “loo” make me think of lubricated. Gonna add this to my working vocabulary.

2) Botulism. A disease in which there is an infestation of bots (HT Joseph Epstein). Given our success in preventing the original I see no reason why we shouldn’t re-purpose this perfectly appropriate word for our modern world.

3) Pronk. A vertical leap without a running start. Associated with the African gazelle-like Blackbuck which is capable of clearing a 6 foot fence by springing straight up from all fours, making them terrifically difficult to keep them contained.

Should be re-purposed as a description of a far-fetched statement or other declarative over-reach. “Ivermectin as a cancer cure? What a pronk!”

4) Bland. Scrolling while riding shotgun (Beth does a super-majority of the driving when we are out of town) I came across something about the de-colorization of the Western World. Probably on Xter. Pretty funny that it happened while we were driving in South Florida, too. When I was a young boy visiting my grandparents in Miami I was always amazed and delighted by how colorful everything was compared with the rather drab tableau of the dying mill town where I grew up. Pastels were the thing, but here and there you’d find a grand slash of bright primary colors as well.

And the cars! The post I read had a graph of the decline in the number of colors we now see on the roads. Back in the ’60’s and 70’s it seemed as if every third car was some outlandish orange or green. And not just in Miami but everywhere, even in Southbridge. Now? White, black, and grey lead the way. Even the reds, blues, and greens are muted, as if grey or black was mixed in with the primary colors resulting in something which is less, you know, colorful.

It made for a fun little driving game over the last couple of days in Florida. We pointed out each joyously, outrageously colored vehicle. Each time we saw one we described a car from our past. Parking lots were just a big blank canvas of dull with only the very occasional spark of color. Where did this come from? Where did all of the colors go? And it seems to be price and scarcity agnostic; the Ferraris and Bentleys were just as bland as the Hondas and the Hyundais. As if adopting the colors of the herd somehow concealed the fact that you were in a Maybach.

Thank Heavens for the dune buggies, the last vestiges of color on the road.

5) Healthspan 4: Fitness. Not gonna lie, when I embarked on this Healthspan series I envisioned consecutive weeks of posts culminating in a nice, tidy progression and conclusion. Funny, stuff just kinda got away from me along the way. For those who wish to have things a bit more organized and accessible, and for both of you who miss my long-form posts, at some point after I finish I will put them all together in what I hope will be a more cohesive, coherent manner. For the moment, on to fitness.

Those of you who’ve been hanging around here and the CrossFit.com site of years past are probably slightly surprised and perhaps amused that it’s taken the poet laureate of fitness so long to address the physical aspects of prolonging lifespan in this series. Count me as both. Still, if you read parts 1-3 you will see a very clear and strong influence from some of the earliest foundational writing about what it is that made (and perhaps still might make) CrossFit a touchstone for the kind of physical attributes one might seek to enhance in order to push the inevitable ravages of age and chronic disease further into one’s future. While a super-majority of those who seek to guide us to a longer life lived better put the biggest premium on aerobic fitness/VO2 Max kinda stuff, if you read all the way through you eventually find an admission that one must also be strong, at least adequately strong, in order to continue to move through the paces of aging.

Indeed, they almost sound like CrossFit adherents: work capacity across broad time and modal domains.

In reality only two discrete fitness metrics have been adequately studied by researchers who study aging, aerobic fitness and strength, and so I will limit my advice accordingly. The first of these is rather easily addressed because the bar is actually quite low: get off the couch. Peter Attia has called exercise the most powerful anti-aging drug yet discovered. Countless studies have found that rather low levels of activity lead to significant increases in longevity and decreases in the effects of chronic disease.

If you want to be more analytical about this than simply counting your daily steps start with determining your max heart rate (HRM). Unless you have done VO2 Max testing or had a recent cardiac stress test you can do a quick and dirty calculation by subtracting your age from 220. There are five HR “Zones” or target levels, but it looks like only two of them really matter: Zone 2 (60-70% HRM) and Zone 5 (90-100% HRM). Sure, you can geek out on the subtleties of the other three, and good on ya if you’re going to exercise enough to do so, but you don’t really have to. 75-100 minutes of Zone 2 exercise each week, with 2 sessions lasting 10-15:00 in Zone 5 and you are likely to garner more than 90% of the possible healthspan benefits in the kitty. Walk, jog, bike, row swim, dance, it doesn’t matter. You’re off the couch.

But of course, if your skeleton and your muscles can’t cart cart around your crazy strong heart and bellows-like lungs your endgame is still gonna be lousy. The goal is to be able to lift your caboose off the loo when you are 92. To do so you will have to channel your inner Arnold and “pick things up and put them dowwwwn.” In some way, shape or form you need to incorporate resistance exercise along with your aerobic efforts. Want a fancy body post-50? Go for it. Judgement-free zone here on the blog. Be a body builder and lift weights (with proper form) to your heart’s delight.

Just never, ever skip leg day!

Classic calisthenics (pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, air squats), power-lifting (especially squats and deadlifts), or a well-rounded program using resistance bands (check out the program on billrussell.com for a joint-friendly, mature athlete-friendly program) are all options. The bottom line is that it makes no sense to be able to run an 8:00 mile at age 70 but be too weak to pick up a case of beer to celebrate. 3 sessions per week is probably an optimal schedule, neither so much that you risk injury nor too little that you risk becoming delicate.

No one should expect to pronk at 80, but getting your butt off the couch and doing both strength and aerobic exercise is a salubrious endeavor. While you’re at it, why not exercise in bright red or iridescent green kit. You know, like the bathing suit you wore while driving your baby blue VW Beetle to Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale back in the day.

I’ll see you next week…

“Quitting on top is not the same as quitting.” Bob Myers, former Golden State Warriors GM to Adrian Wojnarowski, St. Bonaventure Basketball GM and former ESPN NBA analyst.

Media of all shapes and sizes is simply filled to the brim this weekend with questions about what will become of the players, coaches, and other various “names” if the Kansas City Chiefs win an unprecedented third Super Bowl in a row. Will Travis Kelce drop to a knee at midfield and deliver a diamond to the left hand of his girlfriend, sending them off on the next phase of their fairy tale? Or how about Andy Reid, the storied coach who brought the trophy to both Philadelphia and KC? I mean, no one, not even Don Shula or Chuck Noll pulled off three in a row. Dropping the mike and exiting stage left at that point would be the epitome of “quitting on top”.

And yet, neither is likely to happen.

Who among us is not familiar with the saying “winners never quit; quitters never win”? You don’t have to come from a sports-crazy family to have heard that at least once from your parents. Heck, even my in-laws, two educators who were raising three daughters, with only a passing interest in sport of any kind, and that only as spectators, almost certainly used that exact phrase when it was time for one of the girls to suck it up and carry on. But the reality is that everything eventually has a logical conclusion, a time when being done is simply the only conclusion, that is not really quitting at all.

Think of a pair of wrestling shoes left as the retiring wrestler leaves the ring one final time.

Wojnarowski, Woj to millions, had reached a kind of peak in the world of basketball commentary. This had been his stated goal since early in college, and he spent nearly a decade at the top. Unlike the athletes who provided the fodder for his missives, Woj left his shoes in the ring while still performing as well, or better than his earlier years, and showed no signs of having lost a step on the competition. Why did he leave the arena while still at the top of his game? It seems that his particular “top” was a plateau rather than a peak, and it took just as much time and effort to remain on that flat as it had taken to arrive there. Time he’d not given to family or friends. A plateau that, however wide, still had little room for anything or anyone else if one was to stay. Having given what it took to get there he looked around and saw other places to put that time, other places to be that had room for others to join him, and he climbed down.

Does that mean he quit? I admit that I have never experienced the kind of peak that Woj reached. Certainly not as an athlete or in the professional world of my day job. Never a valedictorian or MVP, busiest, richest, or firstest. And yet I get everything about both what it was that Woj set out to achieve, how he pursued it, what it took to get there, and why and when he decided that he was, indeed, on top, could stop and move on.

Some people carry on because they simply can’t think about what else they might move on to. Doctors are notoriously like this. Come to think of it, so are lawyers and politicians. Athletics and athletes provide an excellent window through which to observe this. Why, for instance, does Lebron James still toil in the NBA? Near the top, but no longer truly there, player or team. For every Barry Sanders who walked away from the NFL when he was by far the best running back in the league, or Andrew Luck, the Colts quarterback who retired because he looked ahead and simply didn’t see enough added to his life by playing any longer, there are a dozen Brett Favre’s or Aaron Rogers who simple play on until their battered bodies are scraped off the field, legacies diminished by not quitting while on top.

One is left to wonder why as much about Tom Brady and his last few years as one wonders if, say, George Blanda would have mustered on for 26 years had he made Tom Brady money. Woj walked away from the money, too. Not Lebron James or Andrew Luck money, but Barry Sanders money for sure. Is it the fame? The rush of the bright lights? Of, I dunno, mattering? It brings to mind “Encore”, a lesser known song written by the great Stephen Stills: “Whatcha gonna do when the last show is over? And whatcha gonna do when you can’t touch base? And whatcha gonna do when the applause is all over, and you can’t turn your back on what you face?” I’d be willing to bet that the endorphin rush of seeing something you wrote being tagged a massive “Woj bomb” was comparable to nailing a 3-pointer at the buzzer in a mid-season NBA game or being summoned back to the stage for an encore.

So why now? There were surely more “bombs” to drop just as Mr. James will surely drop more game winners and Stephen stills will play one more song, before he leaves the arena. Adrian Wojanowski hasn’t reached out to let me know, and for sure Lebron James won’t be any more likely to take me into his confidence or take my advice than he did back in his first stop in Cleveland (search “Random Thoughts” for “It’s Not About the Money”). But still, I think Woj has shed enough light on his decision (written in places such as the NYT, WSJ and Sports Illustrated) to see that he might very well have been reading my drivel all along: Woj realized that he is more than what he does, and that reaching a summit that turned out to be a high plateau was enough. Especially one that only had room for one.

And so congratulations and good luck with your Bonnies, Woj. Someday you will quit that job, too, whether or not you make it to the top there, too. Who you are and what you do will continue to intersect over your lifetime. You know what else folks say about this kind of stuff? “It’s lonely at the top.” If you get to the top and discover that there isn’t room there for you and the people you love, well, quitting at the top might turn out to be the ultimate type of winning after all.

I’ll see you next week…

Thoughts while walking on a beach past the sandcastles of those who would be gods…

I try to live a life that others could emulate. It is not the only life worth emulation, but it is my hope that it is one that could be. After all, I have children. I have grandchildren. I often find myself at professional meetings among colleagues, many of whom are 5, 10, and 20 or more years my junior. I see in many of them the shadow of my younger self. Driven and focused, mostly in the pursuit of “more.”

It’s more than a little trite, but man, if only I knew then, when I was a child, when I was a younger professional, a younger parent, what I know now about “more”.

Don’t get me wrong, “more” is good. It is usually decidedly better than “less”. Having had both at various times in my life this is pretty clear. What I’ve learned, though, is the overarching value of “enough”. “Less” and “more” always come in the context of a comparison with some thing or some person, a time or place against which the you and the now are measured and compared. Under the microscope, always trying to measure up, both “more” and “less” can feel kinda lousy.

“Less” is obvious in the lousy feeling arena; no need to expand there. If you think about “more”, ever “more”, there is no end to it. It’s a hopeless chase, an endless endeavor, forever chasing “more”. You are Sisyphus; the boulder will never reach the summit.

“Enough”, though, is sublime. Personal. Poetic. “Enough” lives within you. It might mean more to someone and less to another, but in the end it is a wonderfully liberating concept. “Enough” is a one-word Emancipation Proclamation for a life.

“Enough” is a feast.

I’ll see you next week…