Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings (from the tundra)…

1) Climate. Why is it no longer called “Global Warming”?

2) Stroll. I could walk to Toronto in a straight line. 57 miles, direct. Except for the fact that it’s presently -3 degrees.

See #2.

3) Godwink. Someone who comes into a place or a life at exactly the time their arrival was needed and makes everything better. First encountered in reference to Joe Madden, new manager of the Cubs.

I like that. Gonna ponder it a bit while I stay on the lookout for Godwinks in the wild.

4) Paleo. “I’m on a low duck-fat diet.” –Kim Gordon

Now that’s just funny. It reminds me of a line in “The House of God” when the street savvy intern who saved the life of a chocking patient by removing the foodstuff obstructing the airway. When asked by his supervisor how he would treat the patient going forward:

“Well darling, that’s easy. I’m putting her on a low broccoli diet.”

Sonic Youth in the gym for me today.

5) Culture. “When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.” –Leigh Alexander

Nature abhors a vacuum. In all ways and in all places. While I have never seen this immutable law applied to group culture that only speaks to my own lack of imagination and insight, and by extension Alexander’s surfeit of both. I use “spaces” a bit differently, preferring the term as a reference to internal or personal geography (timespace, brainspace, emotionalspace). Alexander’s choice of “space” rather than “place” adds to the brilliance, the “aha”-ness of the insight in that it specifically includes the virtual as well as the physical.

Some people exert, or could exert, enormous influence over very large spaces by either actively tending to the culture or by standing aside and simply observing what fills the vacuum. The CEO of our local medical behemoth has imposed his will at a very granular level on an organization that employs 10’s of thousands. Rules and regulations abound there. Here, chez CrossFit, the culture arose primarily from the founder’s philosophy and worldview. Pretty freewheeling, rough and tumble, then and now.

Think for a moment about your own spaces, maybe looking initially at the ones over which you might have a bit of control or influence. Work. Home. Box, whether owner or member. What has your role been in the creation and ongoing curation of the culture of those spaces? It’s a rather Taoist proposition, I think: to act is precisely equal to not acting, because one or the other course must be chosen. At my day job we actually did go about the task of creating a culture (A Tribe of Adults), and we knowingly curate that space by culling the tribe of those who don’t, won’t, or can’t acculturate.

In the end this is probably just another entreaty to consciously examine your own spaces, your world, and seek to exert whatever control you can wherever you can in order to live well. Whatever “well” means to you. Again, the Tao te Ching gives us some useful vocabulary, imagery we might reference. In the end we are all more like the pebble in the stream than the reed in the field. We may aspire to live as the reed, flexible and ever able to flow with whatever breeze may blow through. The reality is that an untended culture surrounding us flows so powerfully that it, like the water in a stream, eventually reshapes us as it inevitably sculpts the stone in the stream.

The difference, as both Lao-tse and Leigh Alexander teach us, is that you have the ability to control the flow.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at February 15, 2015 6:50 AM

Sunday musings (dogs up early)…

1) James Baldwin. “You have to go the way your blood beats.”

2) Charlie. “[F]ree countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them.”

3) Open. The CrossFit Open is now taking registrations. The Judges Course is available to all L1’s. Are you in? Of course you are! I sure am.

The Open serves multiple purposes, first among which is to identify those athletes who will compete to become the “Fittest on the Planet.” You and I are not in that group. Not even close. Should we bail on this incredible experience because we will not make Regionals? No way. The second reason to be in this game is to measure yourself against a couple hundred thousand like-minded souls across the planet. Take your fitness pulse, as it were.

To that end I for one am beyond pumped to see the Scaled Division announced this year. Frankly, the whole “get one rep” thing so you aren’t knocked out was/is less fun, at least for me. I’m old, skinny, and slow, but I’m in the game, even more so with the scaled division. And that’s the third reason to register. For a few bucks you get to be part of the conversation, joined for 5 weeks with maybe a million us enjoying the challenge. Raise a glass with us after the 15.X every Friday.

See you on the Leader Board!

4) Expectation. I have fought the beast that is expectation my entire life. As a father and a spouse I have tried my very best to teach my family the dangers inherent in having expectations. They can be small and trivial (a special flavor will be available at the Scoop), or so meaningful that they approach the existential (a best friend will honor a commitment). Writ large or small, expectation is inextricably tethered to its alter ego, disappointment.

The expectation that others will share your beliefs is particularly dangerous, especially if doing a right or good thing is part of your very DNA. The more common manifestation of this trap is expecting another to work as hard as you do, or care as much about the quality of an outcome in a shared endeavor. It doesn’t matter whether you are north or south on the org chart, either.

Try as one might, we all have expectations of others, even if they are buried so deeply in our subconscious we are barely aware of them. When these expectations are not met the disappointment is all the more powerful for the ambush involved. The action of the other is typically so far beyond the reach of expectation that it shakes your belief system.

Sitting quietly last night I contemplated just such an ambush and the need to be in the company of one for whom I had one of those deep, hidden expectations. Sadly and completely unexpectedly, unmet. My disappointment is like a bruise on my soul. How, if at all, should I respond?

After all, I am aware that people have expectations of me as well.

I’ll see you next week…

Why do I coach? I mean, I already have a day job, and 24 hours in a day is a lie. Why do I care about CrossFit coaching that occurs, or as the case may be doesn’t occur, in other Boxes? Heck, I’m fortunate in that I have personal access to our CrossFit Subject Matter Experts (great video by Coach Burgener on CrossFit.com. Keep ’em coming!), and one of my favorite places–CrossFit.com–has no real coaching to speak of. There are lots of demonstrations but no real feedback, and you need both for true coaching.

I coach for rather selfish reasons. It’s unbelievably satisfying to see someone achieve a goal they could barely even imagine, even more satisfying to have that athlete give thanks for whatever small contribution I might have made. I enjoy it so much that I took a huge bite of humble pie and went to a clinic where better coaches dissected all aspects of my coaching in order that I might be better. My son Randy  and wife Beth came for the same reasons. I coach for the pure enjoyment of helping people get better, and I coach CrossFit because it’s simply the the best way I’ve found to achieve that.

Why, then, would I care about coaching anywhere else by anyone else? Greg Glassman has not only given us the CrossFit system of creating fitness, he has offered a clear path to a greater role for a coach in the production of not only fitness but also health. I am part of that coaching lineage. What am I to make then of the athlete who comes to my gym with 2 years of membership in a CrossFit Affiliate who cannot perform an air squat? What is the appropriate reaction when I see athletes from other Boxes participating in fitness competitions who perform basic lifts at opening weights with grossly dangerous form? It makes me wonder if they were ever coached at all.

If you are a CrossFit athlete at an Affiliate gym you should demand coaching. More than that, you should demand coaching excellence. You’ve chosen to join a gym and you’ve put yourself in the hands of a coach who should be teaching you CrossFit and teaching it well. Otherwise you might just as well hang out on CrossFit.com. Perhaps you would be better off.

For CrossFit coaches out there I’m throwing down the gauntlet. It’s no longer enough to just roll out some rubber flooring and hang a few pull-up bars, if it ever was. You’ve been hired to coach athletes and make them better. Do it. You are trained to coach CrossFit, so for the love of God coach CrossFit. Teach mechanics, then consistency, then and only then intensity. Seek for them and on their behalf virtuosity in both your coaching and their CrossFit. You, too, are part of that same coaching lineage as I, one that began with Coach Glassman and includes thousands of others. How you coach reflects on each of us, and frankly it reflects on CrossFit itself.

That, my friend, is why I care.

Every couple or three years comes a slew of articles on friendship, specifically friendships in adults. Thus it is that I find myself returning to the topic for the first time in awhile, having been bombarded of late with articles, books, and movies on the subject (“Of Mice and Men” is being staged on Broadway, for example). That, and my brother’s rather humorous story of having bumped into a fellow Eph with whom I was friendly in college (more on that in a bit). Much has been written on the subject, almost all of it a re-hash except one little gem, a tiny bit of research that suggests that friendship in mid-life is the strongest predictor of longevity of all.

Weird, huh? And not too positive a finding either, what with my oft-told and hard-earned experiences with how difficult it is for men to create new friendships after the age of 30. The magic number is 3. Three close friends predicts a longer life, especially for men. Sadly this usually does NOT include your wife; the overwhelming percentage of wives drifted AWAY from the men in favor of younger women, usually daughters, as they moved through adulthood. As an aside I’m now desperately hoping that Beth will have some room left over from “Lovely Daughter” Megan. (Actually, getting Beth hooked on CrossFit might be my ace in the hole)

Interesting, huh? Three close friends and you live longer. Very few folks had more than 4 or 5, an incredibly tight range when you think about it.

It’s become a kind of psychological dogma that men and women make friends in very different ways. Women, it is said, make friends through the sharing of feelings. In person two women who are friends are said to be most often facing one another, talking. Maintaining this kind of friendship is structurally rather easy in our modern age of communication. Feelings can be shared in any number of ways that do not require the friends to actually be in the same room together. Phone, text, Facebook and Twitter are but a few of the tactical and mechanical advantages to a friendship built on an exchange of feelings, and the currency required for the ongoing investment is simply time.

Men on the other hand make friendship a much more arduous affair. Many women would opine that this could actually describe many, if not most things that men do, but that’s a topic for a different Sunday. The picture most often used to illustrate men in the company of friends has them standing shoulder to shoulder, in the act of sharing an experience but not necessarily sharing any internal reaction to that experience. It makes me chuckle to think that a video of the same scene would probably also look like a portrait, nothing moving, certainly not their lips. For men the basis of friendship is the experience and the fact that both were physically present for it. Whether sitting at a Bulls game in Row J seats 11 and 12 , or working up a sweat at the Loyola Prep gym playing pick-up hoops, the friendship blooms only from the seed of the experience which is fertilized by proximity. At some point the memories of those experiences, stories re-told dozens, hundreds of times, fail to prompt growth in the friendship without the Miracle-Gro of presence. Eventually even shared “experiences by proxy”, raising similar aged children for example, fails to prevent slack from growing in those friendship ties if you aren’t physically there to tighten them.

In my mind the universe is divided into a very few groups of varying sizes. Think of your life as kind of like a bulls-eye floating through a vast space. The center of that bulls-eye comprises that small group of true friends, men and women who would drop everything should you have need, and for whom you would do the same. Friends are people you miss if you haven’t had contact for a matter of days, people whose company you actively seek. These are people you go out of your way to see and never try to avoid. Man or woman, they know how you feel. Again, an aside, happy is the couple who have overlap in this innermost circle of the bulls-eye.

The next circle is filled with friendly acquaintances, people who make you smile. When you have an opportunity to be with them in person or in spirit it makes you happy. There’s no limit on these, and a reasonably friendly character could have dozens of friendly acquaintances scattered throughout a life. This is the group from which most friends are created, and if you are fortunate someone who is no longer really in that bulls-eye drifts no further out from center than this inner ring. Just outside the circle of friendly acquaintances is the ring containing acquaintances, people you’ve met and remember but either don’t ever really spend time with or never have the chance to explore a move toward the center. My brother met a someone who has always been here, the humor in wistful remembrance notwithstanding. Your circles of friends and acquaintances drifts through a vast space filled with folks yet unmet, a (hopefully) few enemies orbiting in there somewhere as well.

We float through the universe in our circles, people drifting in toward the center (perhaps my Brother’s encounter will drive my acquaintance inward) and sadly on occasion out and away. In CrossFit we know both a definition of fitness and a way to measure it. Indeed, Coach Glassman has opined that not only is fitness the most important part of health, but in his opinion it is a precise measurement of the same. He and I disagree around the margins of that position, at least in part because of friendship and what it does for us. We may not be able to define friendship in quite as absolute terms as those we use for fitness, but I’m reasonably sure we all know what it means to be and to have a real friend. Read or watch “Of Mice and Men” if you are unsure. It’s likely that friendship itself, unlike fitness, does not have a precise metric, a measurement of volume or degree. No “friendship across broad time and modal domains” if you will. Though I continue to hold this truth, that you can never have enough friends, there is apparently a number that does have some significance. Three. Three friends, real friends, lead to a longer life. Side by side or face to face, the tipping point is 3.

No amount of time spent or distance traveled is too much for them.

One of the reasons CrossFit HQ finds itself in the crosshairs of so many folks of such varied persuasions is that the folks speaking on behalf of the company mince no words. Speaking thusly has become so rare that this, in and of itself, has earned CrossFit (and its founder Greg Glassman) the enmity of people all across every spectrum, people in any and all categories. Standards are set and rules enunciated in plain English. Answers to questions or responses to attack are given quickly, directly, and without artifice.

This makes lots of folks uncomfortable.

In the Western world we’ve become inured to the way the majority of the world talks or writes. The standard operating procedure is now to bend words in such a way that they appeal to a belief system rather than reference a collection of facts. Strong, substantive words like “cause” become hostages to this new feelspeak when they are joined with a qualifier such as “may”. So, too, the verb “to be” in all its splendor is slimed by the addition of “might” or “could”. You’ve seen this: “Experts say that CrossFit may cause injuries when it becomes a sport,” or some such nonsense.

The slimy words, the qualifiers and the hedges, remove all need for honesty. They provide cover for agendas unencumbered by  reality. These words speak not for the facts but for the beliefs, the feelings of the speaker. Likewise, they appeal not to the individual who seeks knowledge or understanding but to one who seeks to have his own belief system validated. I feel, therefore I am.

It is in this world that the plain speakers stand out. It’s not necessary to have a large vocabulary, only that a truth be plainly spoken or a position be firmly taken. No hedge. No qualifier. Nothing slimy. No question about where you stand. In “The Deer Hunter” DeNiro’s character didn’t say “this may be this,” did he? Uh uh. “This is this. This ain’t something else. This is this.” Clear, without qualifier, free of slime.

From now on, you’re on your own.

The CrossFit Open 2014. Are you in? Of course you are! It’s a few bucks, sure, and you aren’t gonna make it to Regionals, but you’re in anyway. Right?

Of course you are!

The CrossFit Open is the ultimate participatory athletic event. It’s as if the USGA or the Royal and Ancient ran a tournament for every golfer who wanted to take a shot at the U.S. Open or British Open. $20 and you get to play a round on the same golf course as everyone else, even Tiger. Not only that, but in OUR version you get to play 5 times. Who cares if the chances that you will make it to the Big Show are pretty much exactly the same in the CrossFit Open as they are in my hypothetical USGA Open? Like golf (or tennis, or tennis, or Triathlon, etc.) we play the same sport as the pros.

You know, more or less…

How will I approach The Open this year? For people who are new to my bloviations I am at best a middle-of-the-Bell-Curve CrossFitter for my age and I have exactly zero chance of winning local Masters competitions, let alone make it through the Open. At 54 I am in the oldest group of my Masters division, but for the Open I will try the “As Rx’d” WOD each week, try to get a score that I can submit. It’s fun just to be a part of the conversation. You know, the anticipation all day every Thursday. What’s it gonna be this week. Watching the Leader Board is a hoot, even when your name doesn’t show up until page 14 or so (at least for me). Someone should come up with a “Fantasy Football-like” game we could play during the Open!

Or a drinking game. Yeah, THAT’S the ticket! A CrossFit Open drinking game.

Too heavy and too technical is what I expect to see, at least for me, so after my (likely feeble) “As Rx’d” attempt I will then either move to the 55+ group and do that level, or simply scale and do the Open WOD as my Workout Of The Day, my training. Throwing it in there, not knowing what it will be or how it will jive with the day before or the day after, it’s a little like the “Unknown and Unknowable” for which we train, right? In the end that’s the most important thing for me–the training I get from CrossFit.

Got a legit chance to break through and make it to Regionals? Very cool! Good on ya, and good luck! For the rest of us let’s try our best, give it our all, but let’s also remember that we do CrossFit for health, fitness and fun. Keep your wits about you.

As Sarge used to say on Hill Street Blues: let’s be careful out there.

Registration for the CrossFit Open, the largest simultaneous participatory athletic event in the world, begins January 15th. Are you in? Of course you are! It only costs a few bucks (sorry Dave Castro, I haven’t actually been to the Games site yet so I don’t know the actual entry fee!), and you get to take part right alongside everyone. Even Rich, Annie, Julie, Sam, Jason, and, you know, EVERYONE.

Competing in CrossFit, CrossFit as a sport, is not really my thing. I have too many old injuries that take all of the fun out of “unknown and unknowable” as a game, but I totally get the whole “it’s fun to compete at my thing” aspect of CrossFitters competing . The Open is one cool way to compete, and for me it’s the only one that is enough fun for me to throw my hat into the ring, too. Even at that I will approach each event with safety as my priority. I want to be a part of the whole Open experience, but at the same time I don’t want to get injured and miss any training time in the gym because, let’s face it, I really like begin in the Box.

Injuries in competitions pitting CrossFitters against one another have been on my mind lately. Not crazy, freak injuries that are just bad luck, but injuries that appear to be predictable, at least to me. I’ve been a spectator at almost every CrossFit Games, multiple Regionals and Sectionals (when we had them), and many local competitions set up just for the fun of the competition and the gathering. I’ve been to a number of one’s locally very recently. There’s a trend in these non-HQ sanctioned events that I’ve noticed, and I think we need to talk about it. Now, with the Open almost upon us, is a really good time to do that.

The Open as you know, or are about to know, is one WOD per week posted each week for 5 consecutive weeks. That’s it. One WOD. Not 3 WODs with an hour between each, or a weekend’s worth of work that includes epics like “Elizabeth” followed by “Grace” followed by “Fran”, or a Sprint Tri followed by the BUDs obstacle course. One WOD per week. On top of that you will discover that the WODs chosen will allow for the maximum amount of participation; almost no one will be excluded by a movement or a load that is beyond them because of the structure of the WODs to come. This has been the signature of the Open and there is no reason to expect that the wide-open funnel at the entrance to the Games will be any narrower in 2014.

Yet, when I visit a Box or attend an event as a spectator, or even just look at the WODs posted for a competition, I invariably cringe at what I see. There might be enough volume to make even the hale and heartiest from the NC Lab blanch. The loads on familiar movements are so extreme that they are almost self-parody. To top it off there appears to be an “arms race” between competitions to see who can program the most obscure movements in our entire CrossFit quiver, stuff we do on only the rarest of occasions, and even then only for the unique training effects to be garnered more through mastering the movement than maximizing work with the exercise. Think heavy Turkish Get-Ups or ambushes with axel C&J. These competitions are supposed to be fun for Heaven’s sake!

The “Gamesification” of local competitions is a tragedy in the making. Looking at the events in some of them makes me think of some of the WODs I see posted in various places, long chippers with ever more clever names, each meant to out-do the last. These WODs as an Odyssey have been aptly called “Any Asshole” WODs, as in “any asshole” can put together a bunch of exercises and thrash a group of CrossFitters with them. Even worse is programming for regular CrossFitters that simply pounds away, day after day, with this kind of stuff, or pounds away at them in a local competition. People are getting hurt, missing work, missing time in the gym. It’s not OK.

I am confident that this year’s CrossFit Open will be like the last. It will include standard issue exercises and loads we can handle. Coach Glassman will see to that. For the rest of you who are holding “friendly” competitions around the world I am throwing down the gauntlet: stop hurting my people! Think CrossFit Open more than CrossFit Games when you program for your event. Be inclusive with movements and loads–you can very adequately test your competitors fitness with exercises and weights we use all the time. Save those weird and wacky events (100M backward sprints! One-arm barbell Cleans!) for the controlled setting of a training session under the direction of a trainer concentrating on technique.

It’s supposed to be fun, but as we say in my day job: it’s all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out.

Why is it that some folks, particularly younger people, succumb to peer pressure while others somehow find the will to resist? Why, for example, does one kid accept the offered illegal substance while another says ‘no thanks’? What is it that compels the group to pile on, but one outlier says ‘enough’?

Millions of words have been spilled on this topic of course, and I’m certainly not qualified to add to the psych canon, but I’ve noticed a couple of things in CrossFit Kids groups that remind me of how a certain guy I knew walked away from an entire peer group, twice, rather than cave to pressure.

It’s easy and simple, hard and complex all at once. It has to do with success and succeeding, and getting ‘caught’ in the act of that success. Kids who regularly and routinely succeed at difficult tasks of any kind start to have a stronger belief in themselves that transfers to other stuff. Kids who are held to standards that they must self-police tend to develop a stronger sense that they can make an ethical or moral call without the need for the external confirmation of the group. You count every rep; you move through a full Range Of Motion. You make the call, or if judged you accept the call of the judge. CrossFit Kids does not hold the sole franchise for this, of course. The “First Tee” golf program, school chess programs, lots of other places exist where this type of belief in self gained through achievement and accountability exist.

It’s never too late to start this process, of course, because the dangers of peer pressure, groupthink, and the psychology of the mob do not magically disappear when we reach the age of majority. Where do you fall on this continuum? Can you think for yourself in the face of peer pressure? Do you have that inner sense, that mental muscle memory that lets you be confident when you are sure that the group is wrong? When the time comes are you strong enough to stand alone?

CrossFit Kids programs are one way to provide youngsters with the inner strength necessary to stand up to peer pressure.