Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Red eye. Ugh. How do you road warriors do it?

2) Maui. OK. I get it now. Mahalo to everyone there who took such good care of us.

3) Snorkel. Ditto. Never did it before, at least not where/when it was worth doing. Imagine, 55 and never saw coral.

4) Companions. It’s always a bit of a risk when you travel with friends. Are your travel styles compatible? Do you eat the same stuff at the same time? Are you the type who worries about your funds running out the minute you land, or do you just go with it? Can you stand either the back seat or the driver’s seat for the whole trip? Will you still be friends at the end of the trip?

Mahalo to Kathi and Scot for being such wonderful travel partners as we shared Anniversaries and Birthdays 6 time zones from home. 8 days together and Frida made it out alive.

5) Bunk. “I’m giving you an inexpensive bed on the beach; what you do with it is up to you.” –Bob H.

My Father-in-law is a time share maven. I may have shared this before. Over the last 20 or 25 years he has accumulated 3, one for each of his daughters. Two are rather opulent, and one is in a rather opulent location. As with any place you visit when you don’t need to wake up and go to your job, each day is special kind of opportunity. Hang out at that inexpensive bed, or get outside the walls and explore?

Traditionally I’m a bit of a slug on vacation. Hang on the beach or by the pool, restaurant and bar near at hand. Mrs. bingo is much more like her Dad. No adventure, no opportunity to explore is too small to miss. On my Anniversary trip I channeled my wife’s philosophy so completely that I literally have no idea where the restaurant attached to that cheap bed is.

Great way to get to know someplace.

6) Surf. Live to work or work to live? Live where you find your dream job, or find your dream life and do whatever it takes to make enough money to stay? Tough call, that one. Happy are the few who pull off the double dream: job you love in the place you find your dream life.

Certain destinations always leave me with the same sense if I’ve been there long enough to get to know the locals: whatever it takes to stay. There are several activities that tend to produce this kind of mindset. I’m very familiar with the skiing version having spent some 20+ years living in, or routinely visiting snow-covered mountains. Everyone you meet has built a life around skiing or riding every possible minute; no job is too small or too hard if it produces enough income to live in the mountains and buy your season pass.

Any reader of Men’s Journal or Outside is familiar with the surfing version of this phenomenon, but this past week was my first real up close encounter with surfing culture. Everyone…and I do mean everyone…surfed. More so, everyone builds their lives around surfing. Jobs are chosen and days scheduled around the local break. There was no apparent conflict between various types of surfers; everyone was happy to be on the wave, and it seemed like everyone who demonstrated even a bit of ability was welcomed.

You need to know a bit about yourself to make this kind of call. You also need to have one or two things you do that fire such a deep passion that you are thinking about your next encounter immediately after finishing today’s. It doesn’t seem to matter all that much what it is that fires that passion, only that the result of that passion is a desire for more. FWIW I don’t have anything like that in my life, any activity that I burn to do to the degree that it would drive most of my key life decisions. The way I’m wired is to be more about who I’m with, my people, than where I am or what I’m doing.

I see it, though, that passion for some pursuit. I do see it in others and when I do I am filled with equal parts respect and jealousy. What a gift it must be to have that one thing you can point toward each day. It surely must simplify that core, question, the one about work to live or live to work, huh? Work to live seems to work, at least in the mountains and on the waves.

Imagine if you were doing exactly what you dreamed of doing in the perfect place to do it. What if you were all of that AND surrounded by people you were also passionate about?

Something to work on, that.

Sunday musings…

1) Iron. The iron is always hot. Be ever ready to strike.

2) Walker. “I’m a guy with a wife and two kids and a Harley. One could call me aggressively normal.”

I like that, but I’m also struggling with it a bit. I mean, do you have to have a Harley to be normal? And what about that two kids thing?

3) Navy. Rum, as you probably know, was the traditional spirit onboard ocean going vessels for at least a couple hundred years. Rum that is particularly strong, say 57% alcohol strong, is said to be “navy strength”. If you spill it on your gunpowder, the gunpowder will still ignite.

I like everything about that.

4) Grit. In a post on last week’s “musings” that nobody saw (it was caught in the filter TWICE) I ruminated a bit on opportunity in America in response to a link on FB offered by my CrossFit friend JT, and an op-ed in the Sunday NYT. For the second week in a row a commentator is taking up space on the first page of the Review section bleating about an indelibly institutionalized LACK of opportunity the U.S.

Sigh.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m not going to go back to that well here today (though I will in Random Thoughts for both of you who care) except to say that you can show pretty much anything you care to simply by cherry-picking your cohort. Instead, let’s take a look at the singular ingredient necessary to seize and take advantage of opportunity when it arises: grit.

What is it that produces vastly different work products, outcomes, from similarly situated and talented individuals? Why do two equally gifted athletes similar in every way achieve at different levels? How best to explain widely disparate test scores in math, for example, from the “best and brightest” students? There is something within those who succeed at the higher level that is somehow missing in the others, or at least missing the same degree of expression. It’s likely that there are a number of words or expressions that capture this quality, but I kinda like “grit”.

Grit begins with a belief in self, a sense of self-worth, of being worthy of success. Without this first step it’s rather easy to see how anyone might just give up before ever starting. Here, as my cousin Rick has pointed out, might be a true variable when discussing opportunity: those of us who grow up in a demanding family characterized by firm boundaries, unfailing support, and high expectations may actually have an unfair advantage. People with this type of upbringing truly do believe that the iron is always hot and that they are worthy and capable of striking. Without this foundation of belief in self it’s easy to see how one might look at the same iron and think only of how not to get burned.

By the way, this is why neither poverty nor wealth is a valid predictor for success. Think of people who grew up in dismal poverty and climbed to literally dizzying heights in life, or the opposite, scions of wealth who grew up to be self-loathing under-achievers. A look in the window of the former would find an atmosphere like the one Rick describes, one in which that deep belief in yourself is instilled. The wealthy family from which opportunity is squandered is more likely one in which little or no support is offered to a child, one in which the child is continually found wanting and told as much.

To have grit one takes this core belief and puts it into action. Angela Duckworth, professor at Penn, calls passion and perseverance the two actionable components of grit. You have to want it, whatever it might be, and you have to work at making it happen; the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people looked upon as lucky actually worked their asses off to get that way. Perseverance might very well be defined as ongoing maximal effort. One who has grit might not necessarily get the best outcome, but it’s not likely to be due to being out-worked at that thing called “it”.

An important sub-category of perseverance is resilience, and this is the final core attribute to grit. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from defeat with faith intact to resume the quest for “it”. Think about what comes to your mind when you hear someone described as “gritty”. It’s someone who has a passion, a commitment and a willingness to work toward an achievement. More than that, someone you think of as gritty has faced adversity or moved on after defeat. No one has a straight line to success; the gritty move on, secure in the knowledge that they are willing and able to do the work needed to succeed.

Grit is passion and perseverance bookended by a sense of worthiness on the front side, and the resilience to overcome setbacks on the back.  Opportunity is wasted without it.

I’ll see you next week…

My siblings and I only need to remember one weekend each year when it comes to celebrating my Dad. His birthday almost always falls within a day or two of Father’s Day. So it was that I found myself in Rhode Island the past couple of days, in the company of my Mom and a guy masquerading as my Dad, a guy who was very curious about the new fella who’d dropped by for a visit.

Getting old is not for sissies, my friends.

Somewhere inside, deep inside, there’s still some of my Dad in the jumbled up connections of his mind, carried by the body that failed him in such spectacular fashion 2 ½ years ago. Dad is extremely intelligent, the only family member in his generation to have gone to college. Quite the athlete, he used football and the GI Bill to pay for school. Like so many in his generation he then worked, raised a family, and put himself through grad school. He won his club championship in golf twice at the ages of 50 and 60. No typo. Beat the reigning RI State Amateur champ on his home course for the first one.

As we sat on the porch of his house overlooking the par 5  14^th hole, I had an ever so brief visit from that guy. From my Dad. Like a citizen of Brigadoon he came slowly through the mist of his mind to join me for a bit. We’d always bonded over golf. My brother and I never turned down an invitation to join him on the course, either as partners or as caddies for him and his buddies. It was quite a privilege to do either; my Dad’s most elemental essence was expressed on the golf course.

A light breeze was blowing through the forest in the back yard just beyond the rough. We chuckled at the golfers who failed to take the wind into consideration, sheepishly trying to sneak into our yard to retrieve their out-of-bounds second shot. Dad talked about caddying as a kid in the Depression. We both noted the absence of caddies as the foursomes passed in and out of view. It was really very nice.

I quite like the Dad of my adulthood. Quick to smile, slow to anger, unfailingly loyal and kind. It’s hard to imagine now how distant he was when I was a boy, his friendship as an adult is so easy. I’m not sure how long we sat there to be honest, nor when I noticed that he was slipping away. As surely as the village of Brigadoon disappears, the mist had returned to claim him. I got up, walked over to his chair, held his hand and gave him a kiss. I wished him a Happy Birthday and a Happy Father’s Day, hoping that I’d made it on time. That he was still there. That he knew it was me, Darrell, his oldest child. I told him I loved him.

He smiled and gave my hand a little pat as he disappeared into the mist.

1) Droll. Troll who spent some time at Second City.

2) Pressure. “Pressure is a privilege.” Billie Jean King.

Perhaps Ms. King means that “pressure” is felt only by those who participate in an activity by choice. Those who have no choice feel no pressure because they simply do what they must. War. Poverty. Disease. Little or no time or energy for pressure. One must simply do.

Lots of layers to explore in that little gem.

3) Joy. “Take a chance on joy.” Saw this about 7 times in the last 24 hours in 7 very different places, 7 very different ways. Must be a sign.

Seriously, why not?

4) Profit. We ought to understand that the first priority of any business is to stay in business. The overarching priority of every business man/woman is to keep their business open. We should never be surprised when the true owners of a business make this the desired outcome of their strategy, and IMO we have no standing to criticize any legitimate business that does so.

We are, however, free to be surprised by their tactics.

5) Authenticity. Several friends and acquaintances checking in from travels afar this morning have me thinking. What constitutes a culturally authentic experience? Serious question. The follow-up, of course, is who gets to decide on behalf of a particular culture whether or not said experience was indeed authentic?

There are more questions in this bucket than answers, at least from me I’m afraid. As one not of a particular culture, is it even possible to have an authentic experience? Is the simple fact that one is without cultural “chops” nullification of authenticity? At a distance, reading about a particular culture for example, what makes it possible to have true empathy with a character? To have an authentic experience by proxy, as it were?

I am by nature a curious being, constantly on the prowl for knowledge. As I age I find that my thirst for knowledge is quenched more by experiences gained than by the acquisition of skills with practical application. It’s a search for enrichment, I think, more than a skill set. Perhaps adding a requirement of authenticity is unnecessary, even a bit precious or presumptuous. Is it even possible for a child of the unoppressed, barely burdened American middle class capable of experiential authenticity? Dunno.

In the end it probably doesn’t really matter, eh? The take home message, at least for me, is simply to seek experiences that are outside my own cultural silo. To do so respectfully, and in a way that they are as close to authentic as they might be, in order that I may then expand my understanding of cultures ever further from whatever may be my own.

Maybe–just maybe– that’ll make the experiences authentic enough.

I’ll see you next week…

Gutted. Just a deep, sickening sadness when I heard the news. I confess, I wasn’t watching the Regionals feed, just reading and studying and occasionally glancing at various SM feeds. They all blew up at the same time, precisely 5 minutes after Julie Foucher’s achilles tendon did the same.

I wanted to throw up.

To be honest, while I would be saddened by any injury to a Regionals competitor, Julie is a friend, someone I know face-to-face. Seeing her hurting was a more personal thing for me and for all of Clan bingo. We know her story and we know her people. It felt like watching my neighbor’s kid get hurt, the one who always made you smile when you saw her outside playing. Her tears brought ours.

There is some anger out there in CrossFit land about this, and we will soon be hearing condemnation of not only the movement during which the injury occurred, but also by extension the entirety of CrossFit itself. Julie does not seem angry (we’ve not yet spoken; I’ve seen the same videos you have), and for whatever little it’s worth I’m not, either. I think this is misplaced, this anger, and that it speaks to a continuing and fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between training and competing, between CrossFit and The Sport of Fitness®. As such it bears examination and illumination. Again.

Julie Foucher, and competitors at her level, is a professional athlete. She is paid for her outcomes. Paid for performance. As such, like every other professional athlete, she accepts a higher degree of risk in both her training and her competitions. This is a fact of life in every athletic pursuit. Full stop. As sports evolve one hopes that leaders strive to make essential aspects of those sports safer, but at some point it becomes impossible to increase safety without removing essential.

Smaller engines and slower speeds would certainly reduce crashes at Indy, but then it would be a commute, not a race.

Being injured in the heat of competition is very disappointing; being injured in training more so, because that which you do to become better has made you worse. The safety bar is therefore raised higher in the gym than in the arena. Indeed, the further we are from the pinnacle of performance in any competitive endeavor, the more important it becomes to emphasize safety.

Regarding the movement in question today, the Box Jump, this is rather straightforward: step down in training, and step down in competitions entered for your own entertainment and enlightenment. Again, Full Stop. You are not Julie Foucher. I am not Julie Foucher. It is folly to conflate a competition in which you perform functional movements at relatively high intensity against a clock and fellow recreational athletes with the CrossFit Games.

This, in turn, illustrates the folly and fallacious thinking of extrapolating a ruptured achilles tendon in an elite athlete at the highest level of competition to the conclusion that CrossFit is dangerous. Poppycock. Constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity is as safe as any other fitness methodology. It is especially so if you adhere to the classic progression, still taught at every CrossFit seminar: technique, then consistency, then–and only then–intensity.

The Sport of Fitness is also as safe as other sports. Injuries to women? How about the epidemic of non-contact ACL tears in young women playing soccer? The higher the level of amateur soccer played, the greater the number and higher the percentage of girls and women who blow their ACL. Not at the pro level though, because they train differently. Where is the outrage here? Achilles tendon injuries, you say? Ask your buddy the orthopod about middle-aged men who play basketball and racquet sports. It’s so common it’s a cartoon.

No, anger is misplaced here if it is directed toward either CrossFit or The Sport of Fitness. The best example of why? None other than Julie Foucher. What makes Julie such a special person is what she did and is doing after her injury: moving on. There is sadness to be sure. A sense that the journey ended too soon. A quest not quite fulfilled. After the tears, though, came a smile. Perspective. There was talk of fun. CrossFit with CrossFitters as fun.

We welcome Julie back to our world of training to be better at life. As she now steps down like the rest of us she has offered us one final gift as she moves on from competition: a smile and a hand up to each of us, a reminder that what we do is fun because we do it together. For that, and for the joy of watching her compete these many years, we in turn should holster our anger, dry our tears, and smile back at her in thanks.

We are but mortals. Billionaire or barkeep, the vessels of our voyage will all come to rest just as deeply, just as empty. Born low or high, eventually we shall all be bourn aloft or below, our sails forever furled. Shod in buckles and bows, or like my Father, with cardboard to cover the holes, each of us enter and exit equally bare.

None of us are to be spared.

There exists a path to immortality, though, at least of a sort. However shod, however adorned our vessel, the course of our travels is forever marked by its intersection with that of our fellow wayfarers. The power and character of that immortality depends on the depth and character of those encounters.

You see, no memory is spared.

Who will remember you? How will you be remembered? As your vessel slows, becalmed in an ever more shallow breeze, will you be accompanied? Have your travels brought other vessels closer, tenders still knotted? How large was your fleet? At the end will it be your vessel or your voyage that is remembered? Your shoes or your footprints?

“Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.”
–Thomas Gray

The journey to immortality travels through friendship.

Sunday musings…

1) Gopher. Not really sure what my varmint is, but something very much like Bill Murray’s nemesis is winning right now Chez bingo.

2) Small talk. The gift of gab. In olden times in the medical world, bedside manner.

It’s just painful to watch/listen to someone who just can’t do it and hasn’t yet figured that out.

3) Buehler. Sometimes it’s necessary to be present. That’s all, just present and accounted for. Not often, but on occasion it’s unavoidable. Very few folks who get to ignore this requirement.

Sadly, I am on the list of folks who must occasionally see and be seen.

4) Cultural relevance. In the course of my day job it is necessary for me to find some sort of conversational common ground with people from all walks of life. I’m a pretty weird dude; heck, we’re all pretty weird in our own way. What makes me, and you, unique can be a barrier to us connecting if one of us doesn’t find some “place” where we can meet, at least conversationally.

Many folks find this in the cultural touchstones found on television. Letterman is retiring this month. Aong with Johnny Carson and a very tiny number of other drivers of cultural currency, Letterman has in many ways created a cultural intersection across which people of all sorts might reach in order to connect.

My diurnal curve forced me to miss all things Letterman, at least until Youtube and Facebook.

Yet I’ve managed to keep myself no more than a slightly amusing single step behind the ebb and flow of our popular culture here in the U.S. Enough, at least, to make it possible to connect with those younger and older, less well or better educated, higher or lower on the economic food chain. It takes a bit of work, if watching Letterman or reading People magazine can be considered work, and I think that’s probably the point.

Connecting across broad societal domains requires a bit of personal cultural relevance, and it’s probably worth the effort to obtain and maintain that no matter what your lot in life.

5) Disruption. The NYT is bleating this morning that technology has disrupted the economy, as if this is somehow new and different and unique to electronic technology. I call BS. Technology, or more specifically new and better technology, has been disrupting economies since the first gathering of pre-humans around a fire.

Think about it for a minute. Is the internet and all of our ability to connect and transmit ideas any more disruptive than the Guttenberg printing press? I think not. Indeed, there was as much call to ban the printing press among the tyrants of that day as we see efforts to restrict access to various sites on the internet today.

There is a multiplier effect seen in new technology of any sort, and early adopters of effective and lasting new tech gain a significant advantage over their competitors. Combine a truly new, revolutionary concept or product with another new technology and you can literally change at least a part of the world.

Papyrus -> Guttenberg -> Radio -> TV -> Internet. Fingers + Toes -> Abacus -> Calculator -> Watson. Think for a moment about other tech, other new ideas, ideologies new and old that piggy-backed on this trend line. Since this is CrossFit.com, think for just a moment about what “CrossFit” in all of its facets would be if the internet didn’t exist, or it it had not been so keenly embraced early on. An interesting exercise to apply to lots of stuff, eh? What would the CrossFit world, heck what would CrossFit as a fitness program be like if the most efficient means of spreading CrossFit knowledge was the printed and spoken word?

The NYT asks if technology is ultimately the answer to solving the disruptions of technology. That’s as silly as bemoaning the disruption itself, and lacks as much intuition as the original premise that modern tech is somehow more disruptive than historical technology. If you use the creative disruption produced by a new technological development to solve the issues created by the last technological disruption, what do you get? Well, in the fitness world at least, you get CrossFit.

The challenge now, for CrossFit and other present day disrupters, is to figure out what the next disruption is likely to be, and then use that next new technology to remain culturally relevant.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at May 3, 2015 7:48 AM

CrossFit HQ just published the CrossFit Games ticket information. Pretty exciting. Now that Games Open 2015 is complete, we , and trust me, everyone in every Box is gonna start thinking about how they will prepare for next year’s Open experience. Really. There are some very high quality CrossFit sites with a proven track record of producing CrossFit Games competitors who are publishing supplemental training programming for 2016 Open Athletes. Heck, I’m “borrowing” some stuff from Ben Bergeron (thanks Ben!) for my son Randy’s Box. Innumerable FB threads and blog posts host spirited discourse on “Competition Training”. Too much/too little. Goldilocks is lost in the forest of Open training.

Fear not. I am here to guide you.

Why do you do CrossFit? This is a proxy for “What are your goals?” It’s really that simple. Really. That’s not to say it’s not hard, though. You must sit yourself down and have that little chat. Why am I doing this? What is the outcome I seek? It goes back to Coach Glassman’s Black Box theory of research: define the right-side output you want and keep changing the left-side inputs into the Black Box (YOU!) until you churn out the desired result. Fuel. Volume. Technical emphasis. But it all starts with knowing what you seek to achieve.

I’d like to introduce a concept from my day job (with attribution to Mark Sisson for reminding me) that applies here, especially when it comes to the siren song of CrossFit and other fitness competitions: Minimum Effective Dose. That amount of left side input that is the lowest amount of whatever–lowest dose–that will produce a desired outcome. How much food and what type. How much training. How much time. Unlike above where we do not know what talents we may or may not possess until we have completed the Crossfit Open, we know exactly how much time we have in every day, and we have a pretty clear idea about what else must be accomplished in our lives outside of CrossFit. You know, stuff like your day job, napping, nookie and such.

Whether you are a Games aspirant, a Regionals shoo-in, someone who routinely competes at a local level, or the rest of us just trying to ensure that we will be able to get up off the loo when we are 80, this is a concept that you should embrace. Start on the right side of the Black Box that is you and define a set of goals, outcomes. Seek to find the MED of the CrossFit Prescription (WOD, skill work, nutrition, recovery, etc) that maximizes the likelihood of achieving those outcomes while minimizing negative results (injury, lack of balance, life losses due to inattention to other priorities, etc.). Relentlessly re-evaluate your own MED in light of both your desired outcome and other essential priorities, putting equal emphasis on both the “Effective” part and the “Minimal”. While not particularly easy, it really is that simple.

I have long held that the most important competition in CrossFit is actually the one you wage with only yourself, the battle to be a better version of you tomorrow than you were yesterday through your efforts today. The Minimum Effective Dose is as personal as any other part of you vs. you.