Alexandersmap

    Category: Fitness

    • Out of the Wordless

      This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
      Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
      Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
      lovest best.
      Night, sleep, death and the stars.
      — Walt Whitman, A Clear Midnight

      Sleep comes easily on one end of the day, but retreats just as quickly on the other side. Call it the curse of the early bird in a nest full of night owls. As with any bird’s nest, a cat will create unrest. Nocturnal hunter, angry by nature—don’t you dare try to sleep any longer! And so sleep score be damned, I rise when it’s time to get up. The cat seems smugly satisfied, but her indignation is stirred when I don’t reward her wakeup call by immediately filling her bowl. That would result in an even earlier wakeup call tomorrow.

      Every morning, dark and cold though it may be, I step outside and look up at the sky to see what I’ve been missing. Maybe I’m tracking infinity through ritual, or maybe I’m simply checking in on the universe to let it know I’ve made it to another day, but the ritual feels natural, even if the night owls in my life believe it’s unnatural to rise before the sun. In my rush to slow down and take it all in, I wonder what I missed. At the moment, I’m missing sleep. Maybe tonight then?

      The cat isn’t the only restless soul stirring before 5 AM. Waking up restless is a sign that we dozed off with unfinished business on the mind. Just what quiet desperation is haunting me? I feel the urge to write until I find the words. Yes, there’s just so much to do and be and say. If only the words will come on this cold November morning.

    • Measured in Inches

      “Question yourself every day. Ask yourself: Who am I? What have I learned? What have I created? What forward progress have I made? Who have I helped? What am I doing to improve myself—today? To get better, faster, stronger, healthier, smarter?”
      ― Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual

      Nothing like a bit of Jocko to smack us back into focus now and then. But really, we ought to be accountable to ourselves every day without the assist. We are our own creation, like it or not, and who we are is based on how we react to the world when we wake up each day. Get up and get to work or stay under those comfy covers—the choice is ours.

      We’re two days from Halloween, and the sheer ubiquity of chocolate is testing my willpower. I’m a little too casual with the carbs lately too. As the weather gets cooler and the nights get longer, it’s easy to eat a bit more, sleep more, ride the couch with a snack and something to wash it down with. We are what we repeatedly do.

      Excellence, then, is a habit. It’s discipline and doing what we promised we’d do, again and again until we’ve done that thing. Sneaking Socrates quotes in is an old trick, and I know you’ve seen that one before. The point is, we can’t let up now when there’s so much more to be done. Shake it off and get to work already.

      “Nothing is going to change, unless someone does something soon.” — Dr. Seuss

      So do something. Now. Today anyway. Something that moves the chains towards the goal. Something that takes this inclination for comfort and ease and turns it into sweat equity. Discipline equals freedom from those pesky inclinations. Personal excellence, our old friend Arete, is not for the undisciplined excuse-makers. We inch towards our potential through self-accountability, rigid routines and hard work. Does that sound fun? No? That’s why it’s hard.

      The world already has plenty of people who don’t want to do much of anything. To have the audacity to dream of excellence requires more than big talk, we have to navigate the excuses that will inevitably get in the way with every step. But we know that, don’t we? So get to it already! Today is well underway, and tomorrow is too late. Progress is measured in inches, and so is comfort. The choice is ours.

    • If We Choose To

      Do you want to know the truth about yourself? Hold a forearm plank for as long as you can and your abdominal muscles will offer you all the truth you can handle. The truth is right in front of us when we dare to notice it. Getting fit is harder than staying fit, but staying fit is a matter of making harder choices over easier options.

      For what it’s worth, I’m far more fit than I was on my last birthday. I hope when I arrive at my next birthday to be far more fit than I currently am. Call it a birthday gift to myself. Fitness is itself worthy of pursuit, if only to improve the quality and perhaps duration of our time while we’re alive. When we’re fit we become more alert, with more energy, and we feel better about ourselves when the favorite jeans slide on easily. Doesn’t that just brighten up a day?

      There’s another key benefit to consistently choosing harder over easier. When we do what we say we’re going to do, we learn to trust ourselves. Our promises aren’t empty. It counts for a lot in a world increasingly jaded and skeptical when we can look in the mirror and trust the character looking back at us.

      It’s evident that consistent and challenging workouts will move us to a healthier body. We could apply this knowledge to other pursuits like reading, writing or learning about something that will open doors for us in our career. Imagine the shine on that kitchen floor if we’d simply take the harder path and mop it regularly.

      We ought to do hard things, because hard things move us to a meaningfully better place. Easy things feel comfortable but aren’t moving us in the direction we want to go in. Pay the piper now or surely we’ll pay later. We learn that personal excellence is forever evasive, but always within our power to strive towards. If we choose to, anyway.

    • The Precious Hour

      “To fill the hour—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

      To win the hour is to advance. To waste it is the proverbial two steps back. We grow forward or we recede backwards into a lesser version of ourselves. Stack enough wins together and we have the makings of a great day—and a great life.

      As time goes, nothing is worth more to me than the first hour of the day. If I don’t use it properly, the rest of the morning feels rushed or incomplete. What is proper? Using the mind before the day steals my attention. Writing and reading something worthy of the precious hour.

      My bride is still asleep when that first precious hour ends. Her productive time is later, when my energy begins to wain. And she’s still going strong well after I’m ready to call it a night. We all have our time when we feel most effective. We all know our limitations, even if we won’t always admit them to ourselves.

      We’ve heard it many times: we each have the same 24 hours to work with. Making good life choices for each may create an amazing day. Making really bad choices can certainly ruin it. We are the sum of our decisions and the discipline we bring to each hour. It will all fly past us if we aren’t more deliberate with how we use the time. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem.

      For me the 13th hour is when I begin to stumble into the questionable. I may eat nutritious food, exercise, do focused and meaningful work and be a good companion to my fellow travelers on this ship of fools we call the present. But then I get mentally lazy, snack on junk food, maybe wash it down with a drink, scroll social media and allow that to stir feelings of anger or envy. All of it wastes that hour, and may leave a lasting impression on the other 23.

      The trick is not just to make the most of our best hour, but to raise the standard for our worst. One good hour won’t make or break a lifetime, but it can certainly put us on the right path. There are 8,760 hours in a year (leaving those leap years aside). That’s way too many to focus on, but we don’t get to skip ahead anyway. It’s fair to ask more of ourselves in each hour to come if we wish to reach a higher level of personal excellence than we reached previously. Raising our average begins with expecting more of ourselves in our best and worst hours. And of course, that begins with this one. Make it precious.

    • Wealth in Health

      “The greatest wealth is health.” — Virgil

      On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t get out for a ride on the bike. It’s been leaning against the wall mocking me for weeks, waiting for my excuses to run out. Busy should never be our excuse for not exercising, not when the true answer is that we chose to prioritize something else with our precious time. So I got out there, and quickly surprised myself with the gains I’d made.

      If we remember our three currencies in life—health, wealth and time—we ought to consider both our accumulation and spend rate of each. Will I be riding a bike up steep hills when I’m 85? Probably not, but I can do it today. And in doing it today I’m increasing the probability of doing it one day when I’m 85. So I ought to do the work today that makes me healthier tomorrow.

      But it’s hard for us to work hard to accumulate for some imagined version of ourselves in a few decades. Perhaps the better thing to do is focus on more immediate gains in health and vitality and let the compound interest of a lifetime of fitness do the rest. The trick is not just to be active, but to do the activities that are enjoyable so that we keep on doing them for the rest of our days.

      I’ve come to enjoy weight circuits because they’re relatively enjoyable to do (and I get to play my favorite music loudly). Those weight circuits have made me stronger and leaner, making those hill climbs on the bike easier, which in turn makes riding the bike even more fun than it already was. After not being on a bike for a month, I set four PR’s on four measured segments of the route, making for one exhilarating ride yesterday. It wasn’t like I set out to do a time trial, it just happened because I was more fit than the last time I rode.

      I know that each workout is going to help me as I grow older, but the payoff can’t be some far off tomorrow if I hope to be inspired enough to make it a lifetime habit. But thankfully, today’s reward is an immediate increase in energy, vitality, athletic performance and in the way we feel about ourselves as we see gains. It all builds on itself, allowing us to reap the rewards of an active life now while building a stronger foundation of fitness for our latter years. And that, friends, is a win-win.

    • Solid and Perfected

      “I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.” — Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

      Some people hit the ground running. They learn and adapt quickly, show promise and then exceed expectations with every step. They make those lists of rising stars and show exactly why they got there. I appreciate the relentless drive they show each day to reach for excellence.

      That wasn’t my path. Forget about being the smartest person in the room, I hadn’t earned a ticket to enter it in the first place. So began a quest to fill in gaps through formal and self-education. Forever a work in progress, we grow closer to our potential through consistent action.

      We are where we are, most of us arriving here through a series of events largely out of our control, the very occasional good choice made at the right time, and a healthy dose of dumb luck. We may not have been labeled a rising star or have the pedigree of the elite, but we’ve all hit the lottery anyway, didn’t we? Arriving here, largely intact despite some poor choices along the way. Lucky us.

      This moment in our life is always and forever our beginning. From here we rise to meet our future. To become more resilient, stronger and wiser is a choice. So is the choice to coast into (or remain in) something easier. Beginning again today, with the skills, knowledge and fitness level that yesterday’s choices earned us, we get to choose based on who we wish to become. Our growth depends on our being rooted in aspirations higher than our current position: To grow into someone solid and perfected.

    • Drive

      So if I decide to waiver my
      Chance to be one of the hive
      Will I choose water over wine
      And hold my own and drive?
      Oh
      It’s driven me before
      And it seems to be the way, that everyone else gets around
      But lately I’m
      Beginning to find that when I drive myself, my light is found
      Whatever tomorrow brings I’ll be there
      With open arms and open eyes, yeah
      Whatever tomorrow brings I’ll be there
      I’ll be there
      — Incubus, Drive

      When we finally step away from the endless loop of habit, when we break free of that relentless and pervasive collective belief about who we are and what we ought to be doing with our lives, we may be surprised at the character who emerges. There’s much more to us than the stories we’ve told ourselves. Identity is honed one choice at a time.

      Since completing a summer of transformative action, I gave myself a break. Easing off the twice a day workouts, having some carbs with that protein (or skipping the protein for carbs), and perhaps the most transformative thing of all, indulging in a few drinks to mark the occasion(s). A few days of that will inform pretty quickly. We can easily slide back into who we once were, or we can decide that there’s no going back and reset our days accordingly. It’s like moving back home after college—we’re different people than we were before, and those old rules don’t apply quite the same way.

      Choosing water over wine more often than the other way around profoundly impacts wellness. This is not much of a secret, but it isn’t something we like to think about when we’re deep in the cycle of having a glass of wine with dinner, and another to cap off the evening. I’ve found that my sleep score is greatly improved when I don’t drink. Deep, restorative rest is more important than ever for me. Is our sleep pattern the foundation of wellness? Ask someone who doesn’t sleep well. How’s your sleep? What ought to change to improve it?

      My answer to making significant changes in my life is to choose big goals but the smallest possible increments with which to move the chains. I have a big round number birthday coming up in the spring, and there are a few things I’d like to be when I get there. Healthy and fit, for starters. But also more informed than I am now by continuing on a path of learning that is accretive. And of course, this writing path has a natural milestone that must be crossed eventually.

      Each of us has a vision of who we’d like to be at some point in our lives. We forget that time is flying along (tempus fugit) and we’re quickly running out of runway to take off. Applying a bit of lift each day is the only way to ever get off the ground. Sure, light is where we find it—gratitude and awareness of who we are today is as essential to our wellness as sleep, diet or exercise, but rising to an ever-higher level of illumination optimizes who we will be when we get there. Growth is by its very nature expansive, even as it remains deeply rooted in identity.

      Whatever tomorrow brings, surely we hope to be there. Just who do we want to be when we arrive? There’s no time to waste now, friend. Drive.

    • Full Advantage

      “After a big success, don’t let up. Capitalize on the momentum and work even harder, so you can take full advantage of the opportunity.” — Tom Brady

      There’s no doubt that taking a few moments to celebrate success in our lives is beneficial. Who climbs to the summit and doesn’t look around a bit to savor the earned view? But linger too long and nature reminds us that we must keep moving.

      After a week of vigorously avoiding all that I did this summer, I’ve grown restless again. Habits slip away so easily. To lose momentum after you’ve worked to gain it is a waste. Soon all those gains will slip away if I let them. So it’s time to double down and do even more.

      If we learn anything in life, we ought to learn about our tendencies. What we do with each day is based on ritual and habit. We must remind ourselves that we have agency and must use it to change when we see we aren’t going where we want to go. Decide what to be and go be it. I’ll say that line to my last day. Remember that it’s now or never.

      To feel the urgency of the moment and then do something with it is one of the few things we can control in this crazy world. We have so much more to do. To realize our full advantage, we must raise our game and do more, even when it feels like we’ve earned the view.

    • Using Our Full Kit

      “It’s helpful to remember that when you throw away an old playbook, you still get to keep the skills you learned along the way. These hard-earned abilities transcend rules. They’re yours to keep. Imagine what can arise when you overlay an entirely new set of materials and instructions over your accumulated expertise.” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

      We accumulate skills and wisdom as we learn and grow, stumble and pick ourselves back up again. Step-by-step, we learn more and more about the world and how we may survive and thrive in it. This is part of our curriculum vitae—a part of our identity. We are the kind of person who can do this sort of thing. Skills learned in Microsoft Excel aren’t just transferrable from job-to-job, but those spreadsheet skills are applicable in everyday life as well. And we’re just the sort of person who can pull it off.

      Naturally, this applies to creative writing and personal finance and wiring a new light fixture as well. And physical fitness. And raising children. And speaking a language. And most important of all, following through on what we said we’d do. The person we identity as, the person people come to know us as, is an accumulation of skills and wisdom and follow-through that brought us here, now. And now that we’re here, what comes next? Luckily, we’ve got the momentum of all we bring to the table to help propel us into the future version of us we aspire to become.

      Yesterday, I broke free of 75 days of rigid diet and had some pasta, bread and wine to wash it down. I’d like to say that it was worth waiting 75 days for, but it was simply a good meal, enjoyed with family. The point of it wasn’t to celebrate eating processed carbohydrates again, or drinking alcohol for that matter, it was to mark the occasion of having completed something and resetting the mind and body for what comes next. In short, a little of that stuff, but a lot of what brought me here too. Leading up to that meal I’d already worked out twice, drank a gallon of water, read and wrote. Identity had shifted, but not been eliminated by a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta.

      One of the habits I’ve picked up along the way is tracking my sleep score and correlating it with what I consumed or expended prior to going to bed. On average, I sleep very well. But not last night. It seems that my body didn’t celebrate the return of carbs and alcohol in the same way that my mind did in the moment. More research is clearly needed, but it’s a notable development only seen through the lens of awareness developed through discipline.

      The skills learned in doing anything, including abstaining from consuming food one happens to love, are transferrable. Having laid a foundation of fitness, I may either squander that and slip back into bad habits, or use what I’ve learned to grow more fit, more productive, and more selective about what I consume in caloric and information intake. These are life skills I thought I had already, but wasn’t practicing until I jumped into the deep end with an all or nothing regimen. Lessons learned. Wisdom gained. The trick now is to not waste it by not using it going forward.

      Accumulating skills and wisdom are only valuable if we continue to use them on our path to better. We should be consistently asking ourselves, what is the next big thing for us on our climb to personal excellence? What habits need to change? What skills need to be acquired? And what can we use from all that we’ve done to bring us here to help us get there? On to the next, using our full kit of habits, skills, wisdom and street smarts. Our mindset ought to be progressive accumulation and application of all that we’ve learned, towards that place where we’d like to be. For we’ve only just begun.

    • That Ain’t Us

      Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
      There’s still time to change the road you’re on
      — Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

      We forget sometimes that change is dynamic. We make choices, live with the consequences and if we are lucky, get to react to the changes they bring to pivot when appropriate. Or simply double down on the road we’re on now.

      Decide what to be and go be it. If we don’t like being that character, change into someone entirely new. We get to re-write the script again and again in a lifetime, unless we really screw up. Choices, like changes, are incremental. We rarely reach a path of no return. We simply find that returning to who we once were isn’t all that appealing anymore.

      Having reached a place I recently aspired to be at, I have decisions to make once again: Go by the same path I’m currently on or try something new. New is often our best bet. We may take the best of what’s working and build a new path with that skillset and curated stack of good habits. This is how we all learn and grow and evolve towards our potential, by forging a new path with the best we’ve picked up along the way. And those things that don’t fit this new version of us can stay on the path behind us, because that ain’t us anymore.