TheDelographer

I've mentioned before that I expected that this economic crisis would fuel interest in Ayn Rand. Sure enough, The Ayn Rand Center reports that "[s]ales of Ayn Rand’s 'Atlas Shrugged' have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008," which itself was a record year.

Hat tip: Diana Hsieh

Upcoming post: Comments on Greg Glassman's revolutionary definitions of health and fitness (probably won't get a chance to write up my thoughts until the end of the quarter)

I've experimented a few times with avocadoes in smoothies, and I think I've finally hit upon the perfect combination:

1 banana
1 avocado
1 teaspoon coconut oil
8-12 oz whole milk

BLEND

Five rounds:
Walking lunges, 10 reps, 30 lb dumbbell overhead
Burpees, 21 reps
(ground was somewhat uneven)

Time: 19:30

I still want to go out with my Vibram FiveFingers a few more times before commenting on them too much. My initial impressions, though, are positive, in that they are as close to barefoot running as I was hoping they would be. Also, they do a good job of forcing me to run properly. If I land on my heels, or if I smash my feet into the ground, it does not feel good at all. But I also seem to have a better awareness of what I'm doing with my feet when I'm wearing them, so they're mostly comfortable enough. On the other hand, running on concrete feels, well, like running on concrete. And if I step on a pebble, I feel the pebble and there's even a hint of pain--just a hint. I think that's pretty cool.

Running on grass was perfect. Since I go out running at night, the grass is very wet. A little moisture gets to my feet, but nothing to complain about.

And on that note, tonight I did the following:
Run 800 meters
Rest 1 minute
Sprint 100 meters
Rest 1 minute
Sprint 100 meters
Rest 1 minute
Sprint 100 meters
Rest 1 minute
Run 800 meters

I didn't time the sprints, but I was going fast enough to scare the dogs that were being walked in the park. One of them started to chase me. I lived.

Lynne - bodyweight benchpress, pullups - 5 rounds for max reps

Warmup: dips, pullups, squats (I had planned to do a different workout using the squat rack, which was in use; otherwise I wouldn't have done pullups during warmup.)
Round 1: 2 X 185 bp; 10 pullups
Round 2: 4 X 175 bp; 7 pullups
Round 3: 4 X 175 bp; 7 pullups
Round 4: 3 X 175 bp; 7 pullups
Round 5: 2 X 165 bp; 6 pullups

The 185 benchpress is a new PR! The pullups were all kipping pullups.

And once again school has eaten my life.

There's Dollhouse to look forward to. Joss Whedon's new show premiers in just about two and a half weeks on Feb 13.

I think I might start posting my workout numbers here, just to post them somewhere. I had made a place in my personal journal for that info, but I don't seem to record it there because it just seems like too much information. So let's give that a start.

Workout - 1/25/09

Deadlift 1-1-1-1-1-1-1
205 - 245 - 265 - 275 - 275 - 265 - 265

New PR on the deadlift - 275 lbs!

Yesterday I discovered the greatest little program, Microsoft SyncToy. When I'm at home, you see, I like to use my desktop computer, but I also do a lot of work away from home and hence have a lot of material on my notebook computer. After a long period of time, I was left with a confusing lack of organization. Microsoft SyncToy lets you easily sync two computers over a wireless connection. Now I've set up three folders on each computer to be mirror images of each other: my documents folder, my Microsoft OneNote folder that contains all of my notes and many other documents, and my EndNote library (which contains all of my bibliographic information). The program is working perfectly. If you have similar needs, I highly recommend it.

One thing to watch out for. If I take notes on one computer and then, before syncing, take notes in the same OneNote notebook on the other computer, then I presume I would lose the notes from the first computer (since the program would just transfer the more recent version from computer 2 to computer 1).

Today I went running to the beach, and then on the beach. This is such a beautiful place; it's a pity I have so little time to enjoy it.

Mark Rippetoe is well-known in the crossfit community as the author of Starting Strength. He is also both wise and hilarious. Here are some gems:

"Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general."

On drinking not 1, but 2 gallons of milk per day:
"But you would be shitting primarily cheese. Are you ready for this?"

"Now I also know that you're supposed to 'listen to your body', but my brain says 'don't be a pussy, and just lift the fucking weights', and that's just what I do."

"The bulk/cut approach holds that you can either add muscle or lose bodyfat, and that all training should be concerned with one or the other. This assumes that aesthetics is the criterion by which progress is measured, that pictures therefore tell the story, and that picture magazines can be the arbiters of success. This type of thinking completely ignores the performance aspects of training, and performance is much more easily and rapidly influenced. Rapid, quantifiable progress keeps motivation high, much higher than waiting for a six-pack that may or may not show up."

On the ethics of meat eating:
"Okay, have you ever been around chickens? They are stupid, uncooperative, inconvenient, ill-tempered creatures. They get what they deserve. Fuck chickens."

"Soy milk is essentially Coffee-Mate laced with estrogen, and is best left to vegans and other socialist vegetarian types that can't bring themselves to eat the completely natural-for-humans flesh of our friends the Animals but who have no trouble with slaughtering trillions of our other friends the Plants and processing -- in gigantic factories run by multinational corporations with shareholders that eat meat themselves -- very selectively chosen components of their poor little bodies into gooey shit that humans have never had an opportunity to adapt to digesting. Why, eating such material, with its high levels of isoflavones, touted by gynecologists as tantamount to Estrogen Replacement Therapy (ERT), will make you grow boobs, and this will screw up the clean lines of this fine young man's Under Armor. I recommend against it."

Since I've switched over happily to their raw milk from grass-fed cows (raw meaning not pasteurized and not homogenized), I decided to pick up and try some Organic Pastures Raw Butter today. I haven't used butter at home in ages. I haven't done much baking, I don't put it on toast on those rare occasions when I eat toast, and I've been opting for oils like olive oil and coconut oil in my cooking. A little more variety in my diet is a good thing, though, so along comes raw butter.

Well, could raw butter possibly be better than ordinary butter?

It's hard to say. For one thing, it's unsalted, so my taste test straight out of the tub was indecisive. I think I noticed some of the grassy taste of the milk in there, but it's tough to say. No huge difference, in any case. Then I used the butter in some of my cooking later on. The thing is, though, that the butter is obviously no longer raw when it is used this way. It's still worth using this as opposed to other butter, in my view, because of the grass-fed diet, so that it may win in the category of nutrition, but when all is said and done, raw butter doesn't win in the category of taste.

Some time ago, I was having a discussion about diet with one of the many vegetarian graduate students in the philosophy department. He is a vegetarian on utilitarian grounds--more specifically, he believes (1) that an omnivorous diet brings more suffering into the world than a vegetarian one, (2) that the pleasure to be gained from eating animals is not sufficient to override that suffering, and (3) that an action is right if and only if it maximizes the pleasure and minimizes the pain of all sentient creatures. I asked him what he would do if he found out that omnivores lived healthier or longer lives than vegetarians. He replied that it would depend on how much of a difference there was. I pressed him to be specific, but of course he could not be. If he could live one year longer by eating meat, would that one year allow him more pleasure than is taken away from all of the animals he would have killed for it? What if those animals are killed painlessly? What of the fact that, according to him, intellectual pleasures are more valuable, and of the fact that his continued existence might lead to more pleasure for other people?

My point now is not, however, that utiltarianism is an impracticable ethical theory. What I'm more interested in, at the moment, is his treatment of my question as an idle thought experiment. Vegetarians seem to think of their diet as a healthy one. Until now, I was skeptical, but thought that ultimately it is at least possible to be healthy (provided one takes supplements) on a vegetarian diet.

Recently, I discovered the blog of Dr. Michael Eades over at proteinpower.com. In one post, he discusses one possible mechanism that might lead to health problems for vegetarians. My layman's understanding is that vegetarians tend to consume more fructose (since this is concentrated in fruits and vegetables). This fructose in the blood then bonds to proteins; too much of this is a bad thing, because the proteins cannot function properly when sugars are hanging off them.

A vegetarian could be very careful about monitoring blood sugar, but I have no idea how a vegetarian would satisfy his appetite without consuming enough fruit and grains to do the damage.

So what I am wondering is how seriously utilitarians take their utilitarianism (or vegetarians their vegetarianism). If it could be shown that my vegetarian friend is guaranteed to cut a year or two off his lifespan by eating a vegetarian diet, what would he really do? Change his diet? Abandon utilitarianism? Close his eyes and wish the knowledge away?

In related news: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/veganed-to-death/

Despite the fact that America is terribly unhealthy, one has to bear in mind that there has never before now been a time when it was possible to be healthier. Yes, the culture and the government make it difficult to find information about the proper way to work out or about proper nutrition. I have in mind here, for example, those mandated tables that they put on food, which lead people to treat nutrition as a numbers game in which everything ought to be fine as long as the numbers add up to the government-stipulated values. And then there is the government promotion of a high-carb diet, which is probably in large part to blame for the epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

But there are so many good people out there who have worked hard to challenge the conventional wisdom. Their reasoning and their evidence is out there. Food is plentiful. And new technologies are popping up. They may not be popular, but they are available.

One such technology is a piece of footwear called the Vibram FiveFingers. These are like no other shoe on earth. Humans are not designed to strike the heel while running, and barefoot runners do not naturally do this. I do not know the history here (perhaps something to read up on in the future), but somehow the shoe industry decided that it knew better than nature. Shoes were designed with massive amounts of cushioning that enabled runners to land on their heels.

Some time ago, persuaded by those who argued that barefoot running is not only safer but more conducive to fitness, I purchased a pair of Nike Free shoes, which were advertised as being the closest thing to barefoot running. They're fine shoes but, in truth, they are nothing like being barefoot. They are lightweight, which is good. And they are a little more flexible than the typical shoe, which I like. But they aren't good enough.

So today I purchased a pair of the FiveFingers. I'll have more to say about my experience with them some time soon.

The following is an excerpt from my personal journal for January 1. I post it not so much for the information about my life as for the illustration of my method of thinking.

My workouts have not been vigorous enough this week. On Tuesday I went down to the fitness center with a particular plan that required the fifty pound dumbbells. When I arrived, another guy was hogging not just the fifties, but a lot of other dumbbells as well. I did other things for a good twenty minutes, but he kept on doing his bicep curls and bench presses or whatever. With my plans having been dashed, I wasn't really into the alternative workout I decided upon. I wanted a strength workout and all I could do with 35 lb dumbbells was a metabolic conditioning workout, which I've been doing a lot of over my gym-less winter.

That's Tuesday. Yesterday was New Year's Eve. Though I ended up not doing anything for the holiday, I didn't work out at all. In part, I think I was just sick of doing the same small batch of exercises that I'm able to do using only my body, a pullup bar, rings, and dumbbells up to 50 lbs (which is all I have access to until the campus gym re-opens). But I really have no excuse.

Today I thought I might go running, but my roommate suggested a game of tennis. That would be a fine substitute, given I've already been running a lot lately. But the courts turned out to be locked, so I ended up running with my roommate, who slowed me down and cut short the distance. So again, that's three days in a row of either not working out or not working out as hard as I should have been.

It would be one thing if my body were telling me to take it easy. If the body says it needs rest, go ahead and listen to it. But that's not what happened this week. I actually felt great running today…it came with an ease I've hardly ever felt. (I'm not sure to what extent that is due to the fact that I was running more slowly than usual, but the point remains that I could have run more vigorously. By the way, when I got too far ahead, I stopped and, when there were pullup or dip stations nearby, did those until the roommate caught up.)

In order to learn for the future, let's see what lessons I can take away from these three cases. Both today and Tuesday show that I need to do a better job of dealing with unexpected obstacles. I knew that my roommate would not be up to a real workout, but the drawback of this didn't quite seem real to me until I was actually running and found it too easy. What should I have done? Gone running without him? But we were already planning a game of tennis and the roommately thing to do seemed to be to find some alternative joint activity. I could have kept running after he stopped, but we were supposed to be going out to dinner at some point and I wasn't sure how long I had. So as best I can tell, there's nothing that I should have done differently.

Tuesday was different. That was all in my mood and should be correctable. I think if I am more aware of that phenomenon and identify it when it threatens, I can use it to my advantage. What I could have said is, "Alright, bicep-curling bozo, you're not going to get in my way. I'm having a serious workout." But I didn't.

I think there is a broader character trait in play here. I'm the sort of person who plans heavily. Even when I rely on spontaneity, the spontaneity is planned. When I teach, for example, I don't plan out the whole course of a discussion, but I do think in advance about what the possible questions are and what avenues the discussion might take. It's not that I have to plan less. What needs to change is the way I treat my plans. They are not divine. In the context in which I initially come up with a plan, it is probably the best option. But things change; the context changes. And I need to be prepared to redraft my plans and to recognize that, in the new context, it is the new plan, not the old, that is best. It is the replacement workout, not the old workout, that I should be excited about and put all of my energy into. The problem is that emotions don't automatically respond to the full context of a situation, and that's why I can't settle for the automatic.

I have no excuse for not working out on New Year's Eve.


The gym on campus re-opens tomorrow. I'll have to kick my own ass this Saturday.

I'm going to try to post more often in the new year. There might not always be much. I'll probably give weekly highlights out of my private journal when they are suitable for public consumption. Today, I have a picture. I've been doing crossfit workouts regularly for about a year now and I've never been in better shape. So a big thank you to all of those who created Crossfit. I just renewed my subscription to the Crossfit Journal. You might want to check it out: http://journal.crossfit.com/

Although I wasn't quite able to keep my resolution of working out five days a week through the whole year, I approximated that goal much more closely than would have been likely had I not made the resolution. Therefore, now is a good time to reaffirm some committments and to establish some new ones:

1. Complete the crossfit workout of the day five days a week--Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday.
a. Run a sub-65 minute 10 k mud run.
b. Run a sub-22 minute 5 k.
c. Reach a CrossFit Total score of 720 or higher. (This score is the sum of the one rep max on the squat, shoulder press, and deadlift. My current score is about a 560. I would be able to tell you a number with more certainty if I had been doing #2 below.)

2. Practice regular note-taking instead of just jotting things in margins; maintain a daily (personal) journal.
The purpose of the daily journal is (and thus the content is to consist of), in descending order of importance:
- To note and encourage the observation of things to be happy about, including personal achievements, qualities of my friends, good meals or recipes, etc, etc.
- To note down both the good and the bad in my own actions, thinking, habits, etc.,
- To record my thinking on any subject,
- To keep records of important memories, of workouts, and of other important information.

3. I reaffirm my committment to healthy eating and resolve to establish the following habits:
a. Prepare lunch the night before so that I can avoid eating at restaurants on campus (particularly Subway, which I am boycotting for their absurd limits on veggies.)
b. Reduce sugar intake by limiting sweets and juice.
c. Plan ahead to avoid being stuck hungry and without healthy options.