Alexandersmap

    Category: Fitness

    • Breakfast of Champions

      There’s a classic Saturday Night Live sketch where John Belushi portrays a dominant track athletic at his peak. His secret? Little chocolate donuts. It spoofs every performance food ad of the time and really, since. And it raises the question—what exactly are we eating for optimal performance in our days?

      Travel opens our eyes to what constitutes breakfast from place-to-place, and forces us to examine what exactly we consume to start our day. What exactly fuels us as we begin our days? As we learn more about what is good for us and what simply fills us up, shouldn’t our expectations for what we consume is evolve?

      Eating breakfast in places around the world, you immediately pick up on the differences. Americans are heavy on portion size. We like our eggs and bacon and pancakes with a healthy pile of home fries or grits, depending on how you feel about snow. Austrians and Germans seem to favor cheese and cold cuts with a hard-boiled egg and bread. Other countries favor fish, olives, figs, dates and yogurt.

      Who’s right? We are what we eat, but the Mediterranean diet seems to be the consensus pick for healthiest. Still, it might be a tough transition from corn flakes or biscuits to smoked fish and a handful of figs. Ultimately, we have to decide what we’re going to eat. We ought to lean in on fuel and shy from fill. But who doesn’t love a chocolate donut now and then?

      I suppose the answer is to standardize on the healthy diet, and splurge occasionally on the things that taste good in the moment but aren’t especially good fuel for our bodies. It’s a pay me now or pay me later scenario, but the now is a very immediate rush of satisfaction and a fairly short window before the debt is owed. If we can resist the immediate temptation until we’re satiated on the good stuff, maybe we can avoid the bad stuff altogether.

      Part of the breakfast offering in Israel

    • For a Little Bit More

      “You’re not lazy, you’re in the wrong job. Do what moves your soul.” — @master_nobody

      This tweet is admittedly a bit fluffy, but it poked at me all day after stumbling upon it in my feed. I suppose it’s because there are times when I scold myself for being lazy. For not doing the work necessary to make more progress in my profession or with my overall fitness. We all get like that sometimes, don’t we? Self-critical about our productivity. Maybe our labor is misdirected?

      There are plenty of times when I’ll forget I’m working at all. I’ll find myself moving six yards of loam after work and pushing past a point of exhaustion to get it done before nightfall so the coming rain doesn’t turn it into a mud pile. Or being teased about not ever relaxing on weekends or vacation, instead constantly working on the garden or doing an errand instead of sitting still with a book or a beer. Or methodically writing and re-writing a sentence in a blog post that may or may not resonate with anyone but me. These actions are not lazy, they’re stored up energy attracted to heat. There’s nothing hotter than clear purpose.

      Why do we waste the vitality we’re blessed with on anything but the pursuit of our individual greatness? It takes a few turns through the grinder of absolutely-wrong jobs to see the tragedy of misapplied energy. We do what we must to keep food on the table, but we ought to always be moving towards blissful work. Work that makes us laugh at the thought of ever retiring.

      Sure, we may just be able to relax someday, but I don’t know if that nagging feeling that we could have done more would ever disappear. Doesn’t it make sense to make a go of it with this, our one precious life? To do things that inspire and excite us, and make us want for a little bit more at the end of a long day. When we move to purpose laziness disappears.

    • The Edge

      “Development is all about growth. Your body starts to grow when, when your body says, ‘No more.’ That’s when things start to happen. Teams become great. Players become great when you get to The Edge.”
      “The Edge is where average stops and elite begins.” — Urban Meyer

      Sure, there’s a bit of football locker room bravado in this quote, but Meyer is right on point. Our growth happens when we push beyond our limits—beyond the edge of our comfort zone. This certain applies in fitness, but equally well in our creative life. We either push beyond the limit or we languish in mediocrity. That may seem harsh, or maybe obvious, depending on how we accept our current position near the edge.

      Think about it: the accepted method for quickly mastering a language is immersion. You plunge well beyond your comfort zone into a place where you have to figure things out or you’ll fail. Isn’t that pushing beyond an edge?

      We place ourselves into positions where comfort rules growth. How can we expect growth in these moments? We create participation trophies and expect everyone to celebrate just the same, and wonder why we aren’t seeing more people break through the average. Don’t get me wrong, everyone matters, but without differentiation and rewarding the individual pursuit of excellence what becomes of us?

      This writing every day thing has been informative, often challenging, perhaps mundane and repetitive for the reader (sorry) and often eclectic (not sorry), but it’s been a steady push to find the edge. Blogging is an investment in thyself, shared with the world. But there’s an edge that hasn’t been pushed through yet, waiting for the skill and gumption of the writer to catch up.

      We can’t be elite in our craft until we break through our boundaries. We can either accept average or find more in ourself. Life rewards those who break through that damned edge.

    • The “What’s Our Fire” Exam

      “Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval

      We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really matters to us, and are we moving towards that? Sometimes examination tells us we’re on the right track, sometimes we find more smoke than fire. But we ought to sort out what’s going on either way.

      Examination doesn’t invite trouble, it offers a lifeline. We get in the habit of saying things that won’t rock the boat. I’d suggest that the boat ought to be rocked now and then. There’s nothing wrong with a spring cleaning for the soul. Purge all those pent-up resentments and simmering anger and give them air to breath. They’ll either ignite into a bonfire or smother for lack of fuel. But we can’t just live every day ignoring the growing inferno without being burned alive from the inside-out.

      Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Are we meant to be a torch or merely kindling for someone else’s dreams? Think of the things that we accept in our life that are frivolous and inconsequential on the surface, and worse, distract us from the things that might be life-changing given the chance. The thing that makes Naval’s statement incendiary is that we may find we’ve just been kindling all along. Isn’t it fair to ask, what is our fire, anyway?

    • Coffee Indebtedness

      How do you earn your first cup of coffee in the morning? Or do you set the table for your day with that first cuppa, creating a debt that must be paid back with sweat equity? I’ve always used the latter process with coffee, but lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it ought to be the former.

      Maybe that’s the trick, simply get a good workout in right off the bat, no wasting time. Get right to the tough stuff. Get all Jocco Willink about it and take a picture of my watch and sweaty workout gear. Not today, mind you, but someday when I don’t need this first cup quite so much as I do now.

      Habits are funny things. We begin our day with ritual, we end our day with ritual, and in between is a chaotic mix of reaction and routine. Where do you stick your workout? How about your writing? And what of that immersive reading? Just what makes a day successful for you anyway?

      All these questions come to mind with that first cup of coffee. By the second cup the day is underway, the writing is at least partially complete. The first boxes are checked on that to-do list. But there’s still that nagging question lingering in the back of your mind… have I paid back that debt to my coffee yet?

    • The Meaningful Routine

      Routine is yet another English word with a couple of meanings. It can work in your favor, a ritual of habits that get you through your day in productive fashion. And it can be used to evoke the commonplace (“Yet another routine day”). As with words like habits and ritual and discipline, your routine is what you make of it. Surely there are a whole lot of self-help gurus who love to dole out healthy portions of advice on routine. But getting beyond the transformational power of routine as a magical shortcut to all of your dreams (ack), what is it to you and me?

      “Perfection is a theory. You cannot be a perfect human being, perfect artist. You cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father probably and probably I am not. But go through your daily routine with hope you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful” — Mikhail Baryshnikov

      I like Baryshnikov’s take on routine. Let’s not make more of it than we should, but recognize that the things we do daily matter in bringing us to somewhere more meaningful than where we began the day. Each day is another step towards better. Each step is part of our routine. Simple, right?

      Routine is on my mind yet again, because some of mine are working really well, but others aren’t getting established to the level that they must. A bit more emphasis on fitness would be beneficial, but it gets lost in the shuffle. Writing the blog is a cornerstone activity, but writing that potentially great novel is more sporadic. If we are what we repeatedly do, then it follows that we won’t become what we consistently aren’t doing.

      All this speaks to the need to assess our routines and make changes to reflect that new compass heading we want to follow. Without getting all self-helpy, routines are both our greatest ally and our greatest enemy. That makes what we do with our routine… meaningful.

    • Struggle Informs

      “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.” — Flannery O’Connor

      This is the most vivid description of ego as our enemy that I’ve come across. Whatever your feelings on God, put that aside for a moment and recognize the prayer for what it is—a cry to get out of our own way to do what we know we’re here to do. For there’s nothing more universal than the internal struggle of ego casting a shadow on our true mission.

      Struggle informs. It teaches us where our gaps are. Gaps in knowledge or skill or physical strength. Learning where our gaps are offers us an opportunity to bridge it with effort and help. Alternatively, we might turn from the gap thinking it a chasm we cannot cross. We all make choices on what we might grow into and what we let die. When that dying is a piece of us it feels a bit more personal, doesn’t it?

      And yet we must choose to move forward in our lives. We must decide what to be and go be it. That may sound smug and simplistic on the surface, especially when we so clearly see the gaps and view it as a chasm. But the ask isn’t to take a flying leap, but to begin closing that gap, one step at a time. To gently push ourselves out of the way, just a little, to see what we might become over time, should we take another step after this one.

      What casts a greater shadow over our potential than our own ego? We must learn to get out of our own way. For there’s so much more beyond our current position. Can’t you just see it?

    • You Are What You Eat

      “The longer your food lasts, the shorter you will.” — David Sinclair

      Simple tweet from Sinclair that elegantly sums up the mission: eat fresh, natural food without preservatives. Eliminate the sketchy processed foods from our diets. Stop piling on junk atop junk for our bodies to stress over. We all know it intuitively yet make exceptions for what we chew on. We forget the long game for the savory moment.

      When you read a statement like that, are you inclined to dismiss it? Challenge it? Or accept it as a wisdom nugget? Do you change the way you eat or defer action to another day? If we are what we eat what exactly are we becoming?

      The shorter the truth nugget, the longer it lingers in the mind.

    • Incremental Awareness

      As the days grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere we detect the changes around us. The changes were happening anyway, but it seems to accelerate. Just this morning I watched the sun rise through a window where I haven’t seen the sun rise since last autumn. A mix of travel and weather conditions made it a complete surprise when it happened.

      And what of the changes we take ourselves through? We exercise, eat the right food, read and write every day and nothing seems to come of it. And one day we catch ourselves in surprise at who we’ve become without realizing it. Hey, that’s me! The light dawns on Marblehead, as they say in Boston when you’re the last to know. We know we’re changing, but don’t often see it in ourselves.

      Until we do.

      Why don’t we have more incremental awareness? Why don’t we see the smallest of changes in ourselves as we’re making them? Are we lacking self-awareness or are we just not giving ourselves the credit we deserve for doing the work? It’s as if we’re trained not to notice that we got up and worked out for three days in a row, we have to wait until we have washboard abs to be allowed to celebrate.

      The only way to be incrementally aware is to track ourselves. To write it down. To draw a big X through another day on the calendar (especially when you didn’t really feel like doing X that day). It’s not about the washboard abs or the number on the scale or the published novel, it’s about the process — saying we’re going to do something and following through on it. And then doing it all again tomorrow. Incremental action isn’t suddenly seeing the sunrise after your first day, it adds up over time and reveals itself slowly.

      When it will suddenly dawn on you.

    • Discipline, Daily

      Watch the man beating a rug.
      He is not mad at it.
      He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.

      Ego accumulations are not loosened with one swat.
      Continual work is necessary, disciplines.
      — Rumi

      We’re all on our journey of becoming. We’re all working to grow in our chosen work, to experience life more richly, to continually refine and reinvent ourselves, to reach our potential. But we can’t grow in a box. The journey requires some space and momentum, which necessitates cleaning out some old beliefs and habits acquired along the way. Sometimes cleaning up the old is easy because it was never really a part of our core, but sometimes the old is so embedded in who we are that we’ve got to beat it out.

      I have some old beliefs and habits I’m not particularly willing to carry around with me anymore. I don’t give them any light to grow, but ugly beliefs and bad habits don’t need a lot of light to fester. The process of clearing them out requires a lifetime of consistent effort.

      Discipline is derived from the Latin disciplina, which means “to learn”. But any dance with the dictionary will indicate that discipline also has another meaning: “to chastise or scold.” Discipline thus has both a positive and negative connotation. No wonder people shrink away from discipline! So what are we to make of it?

      We’re all works in progress. Old habits are like old friends that remind us of what we once were. Sometimes that’s a delight. But often we shake our head at who we used to be. To live in the present is to acknowledge that former self and see who we are today. Every day is a reset, a chance to move forward or to slide back. Every day we get to decide what to be and go be it.