Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Last week I got a bit sidetracked with the main focus of Sunday musings. Nuclear attacks will do that to a body. I’d run across an article on WSJ.com in which a fascinating hypothetical was proposed: If you could stop the aging process at a particular point in time, at what age would you do that? At what age do you feel that you are close enough to your physical peak that you are comfortable balancing that against your intellectual capacities and maturity? Great question, that.

My physical fitness has been slipping for at least several years. Despite this I remain generally stronger than I was at any time other than my years as a college football player. When did I peak? At what time was my overall physical fitness, when my capabilities across the 10 general characteristics of fitness at its highest level? Although I didn’t know it at the time I probably peaked somewhere in medical school. My buddies and I managed to cram in marathon hoops sessions, round robin squash fests, and an admittedly conflict of interest laden exploration of 1980’s aerobics classes (most of my friends were single) while we finished up school. I supplemented this with pretty standard issue weight training (Mrs. bingo like lifting, even back then). Make that peak age 25 or 26.

Believe it or not, from there the slow age and career inflicted decline began in earnest. Had it not been for that Men’s Journal article in December 2005 I’d likely be a typical 58 year old desk jockey, broken by my job and the various and sundry weekend warrior injuries I would have doubtless suffered. Ah, but this CrossFit thing not only saved me from that but also gave me another peak somewhere around age 48. To be truthful I’m back on the descent now, but at least summited another (slightly lower) peak before starting the slide.

How about the other half of the equation? The part where you have a certain amount of intelligence, experience, and maturity? Well, for sure I was whip smart at 26. Every doctor is simply brilliant on med school graduation day; we have no idea what we don’t know, and no idea how to actually be a doctor, but hey, we just crammed for 4 straight years and our brains are busting at the seems with, you know, smart stuff. You know where this part is going, of course. At 26 I’d yet to acquire the maturity and experience that is necessary to create what I’d like to call “actionable intellect”. Such a thing could also be called “judgment”, and in short the ingredients you add to the mix are mileage and the accumulated humility that one acquires “on the road”. Like every other 26 year old I was pretty sure I knew it all already, but we all know how much longer the story is at that point, don’t we.

So it must be age 48 then. Another physical peak achieved. lost of miles under my belt including the humility of a struggling business and the grounding effect of nearly losing a child. Must be 48, right? Well, to be quite honest, I would really love to return to age 48 in a physical sense. My 58 year old bones are more than weary, and I’ll admit right now that I’m slow-rolling writing this because I’m dreading the WOD that’s gonna happen right after I hit “comment”. A funny thing happened on the way to my “final answer” though: I realized that my non-physical growth over the last 10 years has been extraordinary.

It’s not that you have to forgo all of the wonderful things in life at your chosen “stop age”, but the proposal in the exercise is to choose an intersection where the combined peaks were some kind of best. The truth is that my non-physical fitness has continued to grow at a rate which is far, far greater than the rate at which my physical prowess has declined. I have learned, and become so much better at things like empathy, acceptance, caring and the like that there are times that I wonder how anyone ever put up with my younger version. 10 more years of loving and being loved by Mrs. bingo. Of learning how to continue to love other people in my life despite their (or my) faults.

And joy. Oh my, learning that there is joy to be had out there if you can spend just a moment and let it come to you. My little Man Cub has taught me that. At 48 I really had no idea just how much joy there could be. No, for me at least I don’t think I’ve hit that magical intersection of mental growth and physical decline at which I can say I’m at the optimal point. So it’s off to the gym for me so that I can stave off decrepitude just a little bit longer, to give myself a chance to enjoy whatever non-physical growth I have in me yet.

The Man Cub is bringing his family over to play later on and I’ve gotta be ready.

(Surely you knew this was coming) This weekend begins the Royal Hawaiian Eye Meeting, an annual gathering of eye surgeons that I have thus far managed to avoid attending every year of my career. Why, you ask? Meh. 6 time zones for 3 days of work is the best answer. If that doesn’t do it I’ll add that Mrs. bingo won’t join me for the trip, and I really dislike most travel without the company of Mrs. bingo.

As you may have heard there was a bit of excitement in Hawaii yesterday. Seems a rather fumble-fingered employee jabbed the “alert all” button when taking his turn at the helm of the Emergency Response Center and sent off a 1960’s style, death from the air is coming, curl up under your desk kids and kiss your ass goodbye nuclear attack warning. Funny (funnier?), the doof figured out what happened when he got a text on his own cellphone.

Note to Expedia: this guy needs his own “Wanna get away” commercial.

What was your reaction? Mrs. bingo is away visiting her ailing Mom so I was alone chez bingo to contemplate what I would have done (interestingly, I would have been alone in Hawaii as noted above for real). The good folks of Hawaii and their 10’s of thousands of weekend guests were handed the dubious privilege of contemplating, if for just 30 minutes or so, how they would spend the last couple of hours of their lives knowing that they were about to spend the last couple hours of their lives. Did this occur to you, too?

Yesterday also brought me a couple of articles in a similar vein. One, from the WSJ, was not quite so stark. It asked when you would take a pill that arrested the aging process. At what age would you decide that the balance of physical prowess and age-begotten wisdom was optimized? (N.B. this was going to be the main topic of “musings”…) I also stumbled across a review of a book or a movie or something in which 3 siblings are told as young children the precise date of their deaths. What followed was the decisions these young children made based on that knowledge. Gotta admit, I went right to that place when I heard about the Hawaiian modern air-raid siren.

T’was a time when this type of inquiry was a rather commonplace occurrence. You could do worse than reading Neville Shute’s novel or the Stanley Kramer movie “On the Beach” based on it to get a sense of what a nuclear fraught world felt like. Both the novel and the movie depict a world destroyed by nuclear war, and life in Australia as the end-of-life nuclear cloud approaches the continent. How and what normal people decide to do in the face of an unavoidable expiration date some weeks ahead is central to the story. Yesterday’s equivalent would have been some hours ahead it seems.

What would you have done? Would you have sought shelter, as suggested, and hoped to somehow miraculously escape incineration if you were at ground zero? (As an aside, can you even imagine the horror of taking part in the effort to get off the islands to escape the radiation? We’d learn what savages we actually are, I fear) Would you go all Sartre or Beckett and choose an earlier “departure” of your own making as did so many in “On the Beach”? If it were real, what do you think you would have done?

As it turns out this kind of hypothetical is not solely the enterprise of the nuclear age. In fact a Parisian newspaper asked essentially the same question of its readers in 1922, long before the dawn of the nuclear age. Marcel Proust, the famous philosopher, offered perhaps the most lovely response I’ve heard before or since. “I think life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if www were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again!”

I surely know not what came before, as surely as none of us truly knows what, if anything, comes in the end. Questions that arise from the (usually) hypothetical “what if you knew when” scenarios lack the urgency to force an honest appraisal. Again, Proust: without the cataclysm “we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today.” It will be interesting for me to have a chance to chat with folks I know who are in Hawaii right now (a couple are close friends), but for now it was enough for me to have undergone this thought experiment for the umpteenth time and come to the same conclusion: I would have sought my people. Some how, in some way, with my last dwindling moments I would do whatever it took to be with my people.

Greater personal meaning will come from Proust: I will seek my people every day, for it is with them where lies joy. It is for others to seek the greater societal and geopolitical meaning and impact of yesterday’s blunder.

Sunday musings…

1) Chignon. American Pharoah. Still.

2) Kindness. “The world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.” –Mary Karr

3) Varied. It’s quite amazing to me, after all these years, that there still exists such a misunderstanding about the difference between variability, randomness, and frequency when it comes to CrossFit WOD programming. People both laud and criticize a program for having too little or too much of any of the three. Worse than that, all too typically an evaluation of one particular program usually follows at most a week or two of evaluation and inspection.

Look for instance at CrossFit.com. For 15+ years now we have before us the sine qua non of CrossFit programming, a bright shining beacon to constantly varied functional movement. Major exercises come up regularly, but they are presented in a dizzying array of formats. Peripheral, ancillary movements come up in general programming seldom, if at all. There is a form and there is a pattern here: 3 on/1 off, with variability in load, duration, and complexity. There is a style here: for example, mono-structural strength is presented as a stand alone WOD. After as little as a month of study you should be well aware of what type of CrossFit programming will be found here.

So, too, should it be at a CrossFit Affiliate. Constantly varied should be just that, but programming in this manner does not preclude the inclusion of a “bias” in the training. Whether it be strength, endurance, or competency in gymnastic maneuvers, it is perfectly OK to express this sort of tendency. Indeed, it may be a way for an Affiliate to differentiate itself in the ever-crowded space the commercial version of CrossFit has become.

The point is this: it is pointless to make a statement about a particular version of CrossFit without examining it over many weeks. Once examined it is quite reasonable to state that the style of programming does not suit you, or does not fit your needs, but it is equally unreasonable to smear that programming because it does not match your personal desire regarding frequency or style. For example I find no use for WODs dedicated to movements seen in Strongman competitions, and yet you’ll not find me speaking poorly of either this type of programming or gyms that have this bias.

Heaven knows there are so many CF gyms in most locales that you should be able to find pretty much anything you need. If not, there’s always a return to our roots, a return to the days of the garage gym. You could do much worse than following Coach’s programming on CrossFit.com in your own little cave. Just remember, the proof of any program, at least a CrossFit program, is not in the process but in the results.

You can’t fake increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains.

4) Veteran’s Day. What do we owe the men and women who served our country? I guess more specifically, what do we owe those who served in a capacity in which their lives were threatened? This is a question that has meaning both as a society of citizens and also as a nation of individuals.

We will celebrate Veteran’s Day on Wednesday. I like to think that in my little corner of the world Clan bingo expresses a collective thanks in all walks of our lives. More importantly, though, is the fact that we all acknowledge that each of our service men and women had a uniquely personal experience, and we try very hard to respect that when we engage them as Veterans.

Perhaps it’s generational on the part of either the Vets or in general, but there is certainly a very different ethos surrounding each of the wars or conflicts they survived. This may say more about us, we who did not see conflict, than it does about them. My exposure as a physician to WWII, Korean, Viet Nam, and now Iraq/Afghanistan/Kuwait literally seems like 4 wholly different experiences. My reaction is simple and straightforward: I make no assumptions, and I offer goodwill and kindness.

One of my football coaches broke down and sobbed over what he’d seen and done in Viet Nam, and my Dad wouldn’t touch a gun, categorically refusing to speak about Korea. No matter. I, we, are indebted to both, and all who came before and after them. We are a stronger, richer society because men and women like them stepped forward and stood tall.

Happy Veteran’s Day to each of you who served, here chez CrossFit. Happy Veteran’s Day Cat. I owe you a call. Happy Veteran’s Day Pop. I owe you everything.

I’ll see you next week…

bingo

It’s the stories. The stories matter. Whether they died in the heat of battle or in the cold of infirmity, the warriors all have stories. The stories are all important.

It’s remarkable how difficult it is to get at those stories, though. The ones that were the most formative, the ones that turned that one soldier or that one sailor into who s/he became, they tend to be slow in coming, if they come at all. Yet those are the ones that matter most.

The warriors among us tend toward silence. It’s not so much a secret thing (although there is a small group who simply mustn’t tell their stories) I don’t think, as it is a continuation of the protector role our airmen, sailors, soldiers and marines assume. They don’t so much keep the stories secret as they shield us from the effects of the stories, so powerful were those effects on them when they happened. Yet again, to understand those who remain, and to try to know those who have departed, the stories matter.

I drive by a cemetery filled with the graves of those who fought, some who died while fighting, and I try to conjure their stories. It’s pure folly. Dead men tell no tales, eh? Humanity learns of conflict and war from the stories told about both, and humans learn about each other the same way. Asking to hear the stories is an act of respect. Listening to the stories can be an act of love. Telling the stories is a little of both.

The stories of the men and women who have fought our wars are important.

A friend from my youth, a coach not too very much older than I once broke down and cried over his story. A very junior officer, his story of leadership and loss comes to me every year on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. I know him so much better, understand who his is so much better because I heard his story. So, too, is my knowledge of the men and women younger than I who have served and fought and graced me with their stories.

Life is long unless you are unlucky, but even the lucky run out of time. We have no Civil War survivors, no one from WWI to tell their stories. Those few from WWII still here are reticent, and time grows short. Even Korea fades ever quickly to time’s passage. My Dad is marooned by his illness somewhere between 1947 and 1974; much of his “time” seems to be spent in Korea at the moment. The smallest of consolations for us, his progeny, is that we may learn his story.

This Memorial Day let us all remember not only those who served and those who died in that service, but let us all remember their stories as well. Let us ponder the lessons those stories teach about not only humanity but also about the warrior, the person we remember. Let us encourage those who still walk among us, especially those whose journeys have been long and must be soon ending, to tell us their stories while they still can. Let us listen to those who know the stories behind each headstone as we gather in their honor. We have much to learn from the stories, about war and conflict, about the people who fight, about ourselves.

The stories matter.