Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

“Men overestimate their ability to fight or defend themselves by 4000%.” –Jake “Jakers” Parent

“People always overestimate their talents, always, and maybe as a consequence underestimate unexpected or unrealized talents.” –Christopher Waltz

This is interesting and, I admit, a bit scary. There’s a double negative here, isn’t there? No matter how good we might be at any particular whatever, Waltz suggests that we are never as good as we think we are. No accuracy in identifying the limit of our expertise. To make matters worse, in a world in which we are constantly advised to double-down on our strengths, both the internal and external incentives to stay in this not-as-sweet as we think sweet spot blinds us to the existence of other virtues that may actually trump our perceived alpha talent.

When I first read this I saw unexpected “consequences” where Waltz actually said “talents”, a totally different message. One only needs to glance at Jakers’ quote above to get a sense of what my mis-read might portend. Missing out on an undiscovered talent is at the same time less frightening (not learning that you can sing won’t get you beat up) and more. What if you never discover a talent that will elevate your family’s circumstances 2 or 5 or 10-fold? What if you are unaware that you can run a sub-4:00 mile if chased and instead stand and fight? What a bummer.

What’s really terrifying is the very thought of moving outside your zone, outside your lane, and exploring the thought that you might have an unexpected talent. What if you’re not as good at your present talent as you thought? What if you DON’T have another talent? This is as good as you get. If you have the courage to look into all of the corners of who you are and what you can do, you still have to have the strength to handle what you find. Some of those unexplored corners can house some pretty dark stuff.

Whether it leads to a consequence born of omission or commission, it behooves each of us to be conscious of this universal bias, that as good as we might be, we likely are not as good as we think we are.

Me: “How’s our Christmas shopping going?”

Mrs. bingo: “Well, I’m not too sure.”
Me: “Uh oh.”

Sound familiar?

In the Western World, at least in the U.S. and maybe Canada, the “Christmas Season” has become in many ways more about shopping than about giving, don’t you think? Especially now as North America slowly crawls out of 6 years of economic doldrums, as rank and file citizens dust off the cobwebs sealing their pocket book and spend a bit extra. No data to share, just a feeling.

Time was when Christmas (or Hanukah) rolled around the excitement centered more around the gathering of family, and to be sure around the rel!gious meaning of the day. You’d spent the preceding weeks getting excited about being home. As often as not thoughts of gifting and gifts became actionable a day or two before Christmas rather than a day or two after Thanksgiving. Your buy, your gift, was a response and a result of an inner conversation about the recipient, not a reaction to either advertising or cultural momentum (like Black Friday).

Nope. When you thought about gift shopping you really thought, deeply and hard, about the person to whom you would give that gift. What makes them tick? What is it about them or their life that makes them (and you) smile? At this time of year I find myself, along with Mrs. bingo, thinking an awful lot about what the people in my life want rather than what they might need.

That sounds funny coming from me, huh? The “want vs. need” guy. Here’s the thing: a gift-giving time like Christmas is one time when we can help those we care about have a little something that they want, but maybe know they shouldn’t get on their own precisely because they do understand the difference between want and need. In order to do that you, the gift giver, must take the time and make the effort to know the gift receiver well enough to figure out that gift that, rather than making them relieved, might make them just a tiny bit happier.

In the end the real gift that you are giving is of yourself. Your time. Your care. Your love. In order to give this kind of gift it is necessary to do more than shop. When you decide to really give a gift rather than simply shop for one, what you are really doing is telling that person that you see them for who they are. You’ve taken the time to know who they really are. That you do, indeed, like and love them, at least for Christmas, just for who they are.

Otherwise, it’s just a trip to the mall.

“Fran” came up as the WOD on CrossFit.com a couple of weeks ago. Then it came up at my son Randy’s Affiliate, CrossFit Bingo. For the umpteenth time since 1/1/06 I saddled up and did “Fran”.

I got crushed.

It’s funny…well, it’s always funny when someone ELSE gets crushed by “Fran”…but I was just talking with my friend Jeff about programming in general, and programming for old Guys like us in particular. We’re kinda wonky nerds when it comes to CrossFit programming, and we talk about this stuff all the time. Jeff said he no longer does “Fran” at all, so frustrated is he that he will never even approach his lifetime PR that he finds no value in doing “Fran” as Rx’d. Instead he does all kinds of variations on the theme as a pure training exercise, seeking the value of the work and not necessarily the comparison to a previous set point. I get that, at least to a point.

In that response lies the answer to a plethora of questions about CrossFit programming, and indeed CrossFit training itself. A benchmark workout by its definition is meant to provide a marker against which one might measure oneself. This is one form of the competitive nature of CrossFit, my beloved “you vs. you”. It is also a source of continued attack from outside the CrossFit community, that all CrossFit programming and training is necessarily performed in “attack mode”. Every WOD is only a successful endeavor if you go to that “dark place” in which PR’s are found. This is a gross over-simplification of not only CrossFit but high intensity exercise in general because it implicitly ignores the fact that the definition is “relatively high intensity”. There are some days in the gym when intensity is relatively not very high at all. Sometimes even on purpose.

While I fully understand Jeff’s sentiment (I will never get within two zip codes of my “Fran” PR), and I do find myself looking for “Fran Proxies” for most of my training, I still do “Fran” in both “as Rx’d” and scaled forms. Getting crushed by “Fran” the other day was just as important as a measurement as were each iteration on my way to that PR so long ago. IMO there is a definite value to knowing and understanding where your fitness stands at any moment (mine is challenged by the time issues of not enough time to train, and too much life stress affecting the quality of my non-training time), and “Fran” is as good a metric as any. I had little to give that day, but I still got back value from my training–I went to the gym and moved both my body and a bit of extra weight instead of just heading home from the OR.

We all lose a little bit of our objectivity when it comes to “Fran”, though. It’s the original WOD, after all; every CrossFitter in the world not only knows exactly what you are talking about when you say “Fran” but they can tell you pretty much every time they’ve ever had with her. There’s still much we have to learn from “Fran”, both about ourselves and about high intensity training in general.

“Fran” is pure CrossFit, a couplet that combines gymnastics and barbells in a time domain that allows us to work almost completely within the glycolytic energy pathway. Each time we are about to transition to the oxidative pathway we change exercises. Doing “Fran” is a worthwhile training exercise done as part of a fitness program that emphasizes variance as well as intensity. Even if your fitness has crested, if you are on the back side of the mountain in some way like my friend Jeff and I are, returning to a well-known benchmark to provide a measurement of your moment is still instructive. Knowing where you are at any given time gives you an important compass point that allows you to objectively evaluate why you are there and how you will get where you wish to be. Doing “Fran” as your WOD is step one on your way.

Viewed as either a pure training exercise or a near existential benchmark, “Fran” still matters after all these years.

Sunday musings…

1) Inconvenience. “Inconvenience is only adventure wrongly considered.” C.K. Chesterton (1908).

I’m gonna chew on this and visit it next week. This is really good.

2) Wedding. It’s wedding season 2.0 for Clan bingo. Our progeny and their friends are in full wedding mode. We seem to be on the 2/month plan.

v2.0 is quite a little pricier than v1.0.

3) Patent. Jonas Salk would be 100 this weekend.

With all of the hysteria about Ebola it’s worth noting that literally hundreds of thousands of children were either killed or crippled every single year in the U.S. from Polio before the Salk vaccine was developed and widely disseminated. >300,000 children were killed by Smallpox each year. Last year some 56,000 Americans died from the Flu. Every single one of these has been, or could be avoided through the use of a vaccine. All of them trace back in some way to Salk.
When asked who owned the patent on his vaccine Salk was said to have answered thusly: “Well, I guess the people, I would say. There is no patent.

Could you patent the sun?”

3) Short sale. Lots of meanings for this, especially with the whole real estate bust thing. Kinda scary words at any time, but all the more frightening when we hear that the big gov-backed mortgage giants will once again loosen their lending standards, arguably the initial step that built up our housing bubble in the first place.

As usual, though, the obvious leap is not the one I’m interested in today. The more frightening short sale is one in which you sell YOURSELF short. Settle for something that is not good for you, or not really good enough, because you think what you have is somehow all you deserve. That’s terrifying, and I’m calling you out, right now.

Why are you still in that job that makes you shudder at the very thought of waking up on a work day? That boyfriend or girlfriend who is always dragging you down, telling you you’re not good enough without them, or holding you back because they can’t handle your success? Tell me, why are they still in the picture? Seriously, you’re gonna have to help me out on this one because I just don’t get those kinds of decisions. Defaulting to the status quo only makes sense when the status quo is pretty darned good.

This is not about selling yourself, this is about assigning worth. I’ve talked a bit about this before but I was reminded of it this weekend when I met a young woman who can reasonably be described as “the whole package”, and yet she seems to have tied herself to someone who wishes to hold her back, just as the anchor holds the speed boat at bay. She is selling herself short into what should be a booming market for who she is and could be. She, you, all of us are worth so much more.

Don’t sell yourself short.

I’ll see you next week…

In life, as in baseball, there is a complete canon of unwritten rules. Call them The Human Contract. It exists for all but those who live their lives entirely alone. Quite different from the so-called “Social Contract” in which government attempts to provide for the less fortunate among its citizens, The Human Contract at its core allows for a smooth set of interactions among humans within a defined space. It bends and stretches depending on when and where it is applied, but it is ever-present wherever  one finds more than one human being.

A very funny comedian brought it up on morning drive-time radio in the context of what is–and isn’t–OK to do while on a commercial flight. Taking off your shoes and socks and putting your feet on the seat back in front of you, or eating a tuna sandwich were a couple of his examples of humans breaking their contract. Many of you who have befriended me travel for a living and I thought of you.

Most of these unwritten rules are, you know, unwritten because they constitute something which approaches the intersection between common sense and common courtesy. Like, don’t floss your teeth in the van after you made all of your travel mates late waiting for you anyway. The comedian was way funnier about it, but you get the picture.

Reading the comments for yesterday’s CrossFit.com WOD I was reminded of the Human Contract and how it, like politics, is local, derived in, and particular to, a specific place. 9 years ago I lurked there for 3 or 4 months before I posted anything so that I could get a sense for the local customs. Learn the unwritten rules as it were. Some of them are universal. Do your homework. Know what you are talking about before you start talking. Expect to support your statements with something more than “I think” or “I feel”. Be polite; tone is as important as content. None of that has changed in the years since 2005. Every other space has equally well-defined “rules of the road”, and it is equally important that one spend the time necessary to learn them.

The preamble for The Human Contract if it were ever to be actually written would doubtless begin with something along the lines of “That which unites us far exceeds anything that may divide us.” This is most certainly true in the CrossFit world, both in your local Affiliate communities and in the Cyber-gym, and it is equally true for every airline passenger.

It behooves you to do a bit of research on the local version of The Human Contract before you make your entrance, too.

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.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the only constant is change; the only thing in life on which you can depend is that things will not always ever be the same. An important corollary to this is that all things, good or bad, will come to an end. So it appears to be in my little slice of the world. While it’s not quite clear exactly when, it is clear that a very important part of my adult life is near an end.

This is the weekend when Beth and I digest the latest iteration of the annual White Family Cape Cod vacation week. For 23 consecutive years all, or almost all, of my family has congregated in the same 2 cottages across the street from the ocean in the idyllic little town of West Dennis, MA. After that comes 12-14 hours of driving home, a rolling debriefing and decompression from a full-immersion experience into my family. For 8 years or so both vacation and the drive home have been fodder for my “Sunday musings”, some of my best. Although some aspects of the vacation were as immutable as Bill Murray waking up in that hotel room every day in Groundhog Day–a seeming violation of my “everything changes” dictum–each year has actually turned out to be a truly unique story told exactly once. For 23 years. It’s really been a remarkable streak when you think about it.

The genesis of this annual odyssey was my youngest sister’s wedding and the addition of a fourth set of in-laws to the family Holiday dynamic. Beth and I are both first borns. We were the first to marry and the first to bring members of the next generation into the family. We have always lived a mutually disagreeable distance from both families, in the backyard of neither, and no closer to either. Both families were equally unhappy with our zip code. Really a compliment, when you think about it.

As part of this it was clear right from the start that there would be no winning and losing when it came to family visits on the big 2 American Holidays Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nope, it was gonna be all War of the Roses, just degrees of losing. My proposed solution? We would declare a summer White Family Holiday and we would all convene in one place for a week together. Thus began 23 years of “The Cape Week.” When we began my caboose, Randy, was 6 weeks old, the 5th of what would become a gaggle of 10 grandchildren, the youngest of whom is now an 8th grader. Somewhere there’s a picture of him dwarfed by a 15 lb. lobster at dinner in year one.

For 23 years we distilled each year’s visits into a single week. We laughed and we cried, whispered and screamed. We loved and not-so-loved over each week as my generation fell into and out of our childhood family roles. It’s kinda like draft slots, right? You sit at the same place at the family dinner table and its even called “Beth’s seat”, or “Darrell’s seat”, or whomever. Whatever your place was in the family (agitator, comforter, achiever, slacker) at some point in the week you fell right into your allotted space. Triumphs and tribulations were tabulated as we offered each other all manner of advice and support. Some of it even solicited! In some years we single-handedly kept the vintners of California solvent with our dinner-time consumption.

So why now? Why is this summer the year that the end is nigh? Ah, it’s that old bugaboo, change. The younger couples and their children were paying attention and they have seen what it takes for the grandchildren to attend as they get older; this has (rightfully) given them pause. It’s hard, very hard, to make a week like this happen every year. As the kids get older, move through their school years and into real life, getting them to the Cape becomes ever more challenging, even when they truly want to be there. More than that, though, is the inexorable change wrought by time in my parents, Gram and Gramp. Soon, much too soon, the trip will either be too much for them to handle, or they’ll not be with us to handle it at all. All things come to an end, after all. Even something as unlikely and wonderful as a family of 20 meeting for a week on the same beach for 23 years.

The lessons are as obvious as they are at once joyous and sad. Good things are worth the effort it takes to keep them alive. My family, led by my brother, will likely try to do just that. Even good things, or the best of things, will eventually succumb to change and perhaps even come to an end. These realizations are bittersweet in our case for they bring along the dread for what this proxy for ultimate change portends. Late one night Mrs. bingo was awakened to the sounds of my muffled sobs as the end appeared before me. This year? Next? Change is the only constant. Everything comes to an end.

As I turned to leave, not knowing if I would ever return, I bent down to kiss my beloved beach goodbye.