Saturday Reading Room: Good Stuff is Coming Soon!

It's late June.  That means it's almost time for the Tour de France.

Juste avant @letour, devenez une légende en portant l'un des 4 maillots officiels du #TDF> http://t.co/dNTdNphFc6 pic.twitter.com/CvCiAkIeRH
— Le Tour de France (@letour) June 21, 2014

From left to right: the overall Leader's jersey, the King of the Mountains jersey, the Sprinter's jersey, and the Best Young Rider's jersey.  One of the best, most interesting things about the tour is that there's something in play every day, and oftentimes multiple jerseys are in contention on the same day.

Arbonne Fizzy Sticks

To say the least, I was not overly excited when my wife Sally signed up to be a sales consultant for Arbonne.  I don't want to get into it too much, but to say that we fought about it is the understatement of the year.  But regardless of my thoughts on the matter, Sally signed up, and now it's done.  Finis.  Sayonara.  Game over.

I may not be a fan of Arbonne,
but I can admit that their fizzy
sticks are endurance recovery
wonder-drinks.

Why is this important?  Because while I may hate Arbonne with an abiding passion, I can still admit that their "fizzy stick" drinks are without doubt the very best post-workout recovery drinks known to man.  They make me feel better after every workout absolutely without fail.  I literally chugged the things when I had the flu, and I put at least one down every single time I go for a long run these days.

If you're wondering, fizzy sticks are basically a mildly caffeinated form of Gatorade, save that they have about a thousand times more vitamins than Gatorade, and they get their caffeine from green tea extract.  There's not too much sugar--at only 2 grams, I would actually prefer it if there was more--but there're plenty of electrolytes, and like I said, they always make me feel great, even after a serious effort.

Anyway, I don't want to push these things too hard, but being married to an Arbonne consultant, I feel contractually obligated to tell you how to order these things so that you can try them for yourself.  All you have to do is go to the Arbonne website, search through until you find the fizzy sticks (hint: I gave you the link above; I personally recommend pomegranate), and use my wife's ID number (12766622) to complete the transaction.  It's important to use Sally's ID number, of course, because she gets paid by Arbonne on commission.

So that's it.

Seriously, I don't care if you buy anything else from Arbonne ever again, but if you're doing serious endurance training this season, give the fizzy sticks a try.  You'll be glad you did.

Friday Mad Science: Just the Facts, Ma'am

Several media outlets have noted that VP Candidate Paul Ryan’s speech was factually inaccurate in many details.  Additional media outlets have noted that no one cares.  And I gotta say that it’s driving me crazy.

Sir Issac Newton, big fan of Physics.

I mean, it’s fine.  Believe what you want.  Truly.  I already know that I’m not going to change your mind.  What I’m telling you is that it’s driving me crazy the way that you ignore truths that you find inconvenient.  You need to learn to deal with them.  Find a way to assimilate them into your worldview, and *gasp* try keep an open mind to the idea that—it is at least possible—your pre-conceived ideas might be partially incorrect.

One of my favorite sayings is that “when the laws of physics and economics collide, physics wins.”  I’d further postulate that the laws of economics trump politics when faced with the real facts of life, leading to a kind of hierarchy of truth that I personally believe in:

Physics > Economics > Politics

That’s important because I’m an engineer with a degree in finance.  A lot of what I’ve done with my professional life has been figuring out what the reality is and then figuring out how that reality is going to change the economics involved.  And when you’re doing that, bottom line, the truth is important.  The guys asking the questions may want to hear a specific version of that truth, but the truth that they need to hear is the fulltruth.  And ultimately, regardless of the short term consequences, they always thank me for it.

Right now, I think America needs to hear the full truth about a lot of things, but as an electorate, we keep insisting that our public servants feed up a line of crap that’s easier to tolerate in the short term.  You personally keep insisting on that.  And that is why, ultimately, we’re both going to get exactly the leaders that we deserve.

***

You’re not buying any of this are you?  Heh.  As if I don’t know. 

So here’s proof, via ESPN.  In Blue States, people HATE the NFL’s replacement referees.  In Red States—with the notable exceptions of Texas and Louisiana (where I think I can safely say that football is more important than Jesus) people really don’t care.  Truth, accuracy, and fairness are simply less important in those places.

Or else they’re just more devoted to the college game than they are to the pros.

***

The journal Nature this week published the results of a study that surprised the scientific community.  Previously, scientists believed that eating a very low calorie diet would lead to better overall health, but the most recent study shows that actually, calorie count by itself doesn’t seem to matter much.  When the New York Times covered this story, they did so with a kind of shrug, essentially saying, “Eat what you want, because we’re all damned anyway.”  Thankfully, the writers at Slate dug a little deeper.

What actually appears to be the case is that it matters more what you eat than how much you eat.  This is not a surprise, is it?  And yet, it surprised researchers because, bottom line, they’d been feeding their monkeys a food mix that was basically all crap because that crap mix was easier to control from a total calorie standpoint than was a more natural, “whole foods” type of diet.  However, that led to a false conclusion that very nearly became accepted scientific fact—that eating less made one healthier.  In fact, it now appears that what makes one healthier is simply eating less crap.  However, if you are eating a basically healthy diet, then eating substantially less total food doesn’t provide significant additional benefit.  What’s more important is that you avoid excess sugar, preservatives, transfats, etc.

Of course, eating to the point of obesity is still bad for you, but bottom line, you don’t have to starve yourself to be healthy.  What you need to do is avoid eating crap.

***

It occurs to me that some of you are now thinking that the third story this week invalidates the first story because the third story proves that scientists don’t know everything.  I hope that you will take a minute to carefully consider why a few studies that confound scientists’ expectations actually prove that science itself is an unbiased actor.

Yes, it’s true that science cannot explain everything.  However, you’ll note that science also doesn’t get angry when its expectations and beliefs are challenged.  Instead, science goes to find a better solution, one that fits all of the available facts.

***

Related: Why do Republicans hate the Fed?

I can’t easily prove this at the moment, but I am pretty sure that Voodoo Economics would be impossible without an elastic money supply.

***

Finally, it’s a lot from Slate this week, I know, but here’s one more: Are you better off marrying your high school or college sweatheart, or should you wait and marry someone you meet later in life?  Oddly, the evidence—which does not appear to be rigorously tested as yet—seems to conclude that you’re better off if you wait, but that you should then marry your long-lost high school sweetheart.  What the Hell is that all about?

Here’s my theory for love: Find your mate in a place where you’re doing something that you really love to do.  That way, you’ll always have that thing in common. 

Sadly, it’s damned near impossible to find cute girls at RPG or Comic conventions.

Offseason Training Update

The good thing about the offseason is that it’s a little looser and less regulated than my in-season triathlon training schedule tends to be.  Without any races on the schedule, I’ve got time to work on pretty much whatever I want, and I usually use that time to either rest up after a long season of racing or to focus on one discipline of tri, pretty much to the exclusion or near-exclusion of the others.  The downside of that, however, is that there’s less rigor in my training plan design.  As I’ve written here before, I usually work on a four-week schedule, going hard for three weeks and then cutting back in the fourth week, my so-called “Rest Week”.  However, during the offseason I’m much more inclined to just do whatever feels right on any given day, up to and including skipping workouts when I just don’t feel like working out.  This offseason, however, I’ve been feeling pretty good and pushing pretty hard, both because I’d gained weight during my involuntary layoff and because, bottom line, it’s still summer.  I’m into offseason training early this year exactly because I had to take a five-week break right in the middle of the year’s racing season.  That leaves me with plenty of daylight and good weather for training.

All of which is a long way of saying that I’m getting tired. 

That's me on my way into the finish of the
Milford, CT, Y-Tri.

It’s a problem I’ve never had before in the offseason.  But having jettisoned my regular four-week routine, it makes perfect sense.  I’m still working hard, I’m just not working with much of a plan.  So I’ve not built in any rest, and the result is predictable.

The solution, of course, is to develop a plan.  Basically, I just need to find a way to add some rest and some rest days into my basic offseason concept.  Unfortunately, the offseason concept is to ride as much as possible, add in running intervals, and do plenty of weights.  That’s a Hell of an ambitious program, and it doesn’t leave a lot of time for rest days.

* * *

I’m pretty much off my diet.  I got down to a low of 192 lbs, but having now been back in the gym for four full weeks now, I’m not losing weight any more.  I’m adding muscle mass.  I look trimmer, and my body fat percentage is still going down (I think), and that’s all good, but I happen to know that my cycling and running form is eventually going to suffer, at least marginally, especially when I’m climbing.  For the time being, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.  That said, this spring is gonna be a bitch.  Getting to a leaner figure without sacrificing more strength than necessary is not easy.  On the other hand, building muscle mass now has the virtue of strengthening joints and ligaments, and that kind of thing pays HUGE dividends when the heavy demands of spring base training roll around.  Plus, I feel like I can climb with better pop right now than I could earlier in the season, and that’s awesome.  It’s not so good for sustained efforts, but I can explode out of the saddle right now like nobody’s business on a short, sharp climb.

While we’re talking about the diet thing, it’s also worth noting that my constant calorie counting was driving my wife Sally crazy.  On top of that, I started getting hunger headaches pretty consistently last weekend, so that, bottom line, it just wasn’t working for me any more.  I mean, I’m still trying hard to watch what I eat (and how much beer I drink, especially on the weekends), but I’ve had to reconsider the hard line approach I was using via Lose It!.  Instead, I’m trying to go more by feel and appetite.  It’s a more intuitive approach, obviously, but I think it can work, basically in the same way that going by feel also works in lieu of using a heart rate monitor.

Diet Update: Day 14

As usual, I weighed in after spin class today--192.5 lbs!  That's down 3.5 from where I started, which is awesome.  With that said, I think I've learned a few things since I started dieting.

1.  A person's weight can fluctuate a lot.  For me, time of day and relative water weight are both factors that can give me +/- 3 lbs or so.

2.  Using a calorie counter program over time is fine, but it's no use trying to over-achieve on any given day.  On the days when I've gone way under my calorie goal for the day, I've invariably been hungry as all Hell the day after.

3.  Counting calories every day is a huge pain in the ass.  I can see why so many people fall off their diets.  It's like every time I sit down, I have to stop, grab my phone, and take notes on what I'm eating or doing.  Since I tend to eat little snack-like meals all day long, that means I'm pretty much always taking notes.  The same is true for exercise, as is the fact that I spend lots of time doing little exercise-type things during the day.

4.  It would be much harder to manage this diet if I worked outside Manhattan.  As it is, I spend at least three quarters of an hour either walking or riding around the City pretty much every single work day.  If I commuted by car, I'd have to find some other way to make up that casual bit of exercise, and that would be a huge pain.

* * *

Okay, this isn't exactly diet related, but if you ask me, the fact that Mitt Romney has picked Paul Ryan as his running mate means, bottom line, that Romney isn't sure his base is going to turn out for him, and that it's becoming a serious problem.  So he's doubled down on Voodoo Economics because, y'know, the Tea Party likes that kind of thing.

It never ceases to astonish me how far the GOP has moved to the right since 1980.  In fact, it was George H.W. Bush who actually coined the term "voodoo economics" as a description of Ronald Reagan's then-proposal to both cut taxes and raise spending in order to get the country out the recession of the 1970s.  Here they are debating the issue way back when.

So.  Nothing ever changes.  Except the tone of the debate, of course.  These two guys at least sounded civil and intelligent.

Friday Mad Science: The non-Diet Diet

Hey guys, happy Friday!

Let’s start with my diet… and the fact that it’s an open question as to whether or not it’s working.  I feel like I look better, but when I weighed myself on Wednesday before lifting weights, I came in at a whopping 197 lbs!  That’s a pound heavier than I was when I started two weeks ago and two pounds heavier than when I weighed myself last Saturday.

I been eatin' a TON of this stuff.

Now I know that weight—and specifically water weight—can fluctuate significantly over the course of a given day or week, but still, this is not the kind of progress that I was hoping to see here.  I’ve been back in the gym for a couple of weeks now, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve lost fat but gained some small amount of muscle mass, but to be fair, I’d have thought it would take longer than two weeks to put on a measurable amount of muscle.  So right now I’m stumped.

Either way, weight gain is not a positive for me.  I mean, yeah, having more muscle mass is not necessarily less healthy than simply being slender, and it may even look better, but as an endurance athlete, I happen to know that the extra muscle isn’t necessarily helping, either.  This is why I don’t typically spend much time in the weight room during the meat of the triathlon season.  Because I tend to put the weight on in my chest and shoulders, and that makes it basically superfluous when I’m on the bike or running.

I’ve been tracking my calories carefully, and I’d really hoped to see some genuine weight loss.  If that’s not in my future, I’ll be really sad.  That said, I plan to stay in the weight room through the balance of the offseason one way or another.  I feel like I need to get stronger, and in any event, I also know that I need a change of pace.  Still, I do not want the outcome of my diet to be huge, ungainly fatness.

* * *

Marvel announced this week that they’ve succeeded in getting writer/director Joss Whedon back on board for Avengers 2.  That’s news because Whedon had supposedly said beforehand that he felt like doing these Avengers movies was an awful lot of work to put into what he felt was ultimately somebody else’s story.  To handle that problem, Marvel apparently gave Whedon the keys to the kingdom.  Not only is he writing and directing Avengers 2, he’s also basically in charge of the creative direction of the Marvel movie universe in general, and he’s gonna have some kind of a hand in Marvel’s new SHIELD TV show.

Wow.  Not a bad gig, right?

* * *

While we’re talking about Marvel, Fox announced this week that they’re going to miss the production deadline for a new Daredevil movie, meaning that the rights to Daredevil will now revert to Marvel/Disney.  However, the rumor is that Marvel/Disney offered to let Fox keep Daredevil in exchange for the movie rights to Galactus and the Silver Surfer, both of whom appear in 20^th Century Fox’s Fantastic Four 2. 

A shot of the Guardians of the Galaxy from a recent issue of Avengers Assemble.

 Despite the fact that both companies have denied this rumor, I can easily believe that it’s true.  First off, it makes sense.  What with their showing Thanos at the end of the Avengers and then their announcingGuardians of the Galaxy as an upcoming project for 2014, it seems obvious that Marvel’s movie universe is headed in a distinctly cosmic direction.  Meanwhile, the Silver Surfer in particular is an ongoing foe of Thanos while Galactus is probably the biggest bully on the block in Marvel’s more cosmic comic books.  Both of these guys would fit well with what Marvel seems to have going on right now.

The Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil was
awesome.

With all of that said, I personally would like to see Marvel scrap the SHIELD TV show, add Adam Warlock to the Guardians’ roster in lieu of whatever they had planned for the Surfer, and then begin production on aDaredevil TV show.  I’ve discussed my love for the Bendis/Maleev run on Daredevil in this space before, and like a lot of people, that’s a run that I think would be perfect for adaptation to television.   It’s a dialogue-heavy character piece that’s light on wacko special effects-type stuff, and it went on forever.  There’s plenty there to mine for an ongoing story.  It’s also dark-and-gritty crime fiction, and that stuff is all the rage on TV these days.

* * *

Readership on this blog still isn't back up to where it was before my month-long break during our recent crisis at work.  I'm a little frustrated with that, but I confess that I'm not at all sure how to get the word out about what we've got going on here.  I feel like this is a decent blog—mostly readable and updated every single day.  But while I can get a spike in readership by reviewing something popular and then posting the review on the subject’s Facebook page, getting those casual readers to then stick around hasn't been at all easy. 

I realize that one of the challenges with this blog is the fact that, bottom line, it’s not really about anything.  It’s not, for example, your one-stop-shop for triathlon.  Or comics.  Or even craft beer.  And “crazy mad science” isn’t even a real thing.  Still, I like writing this blog, I don’t think of it as a get-rich-quick scheme, and most of the time, I’m reasonably proud of what’s here.  And even on the days when all I put up is aYouTube video, at least you can still come here and see that.

So, loyal reader(s), have you got any thoughts on how we grow our readership?  I’d love to have more comments and more discussion, but fact is, first we need a critical mass of readers, and frankly, we’ve yet to build that.  That said, I’m certainly open to your suggestions.

* * *

One of the creepy Olympic
mascots coming out of T1.

On a related note, I've been asked to write for about.triathlon.com, and I've tentatively said yes. My first article is gonna be "How Do I Know If Triathlon Is Right for Me."  I have an idea and a basic outline, but at this point, I still need to sit down and hammer the thing out, hopefully this weekend.  I started working on it the other day, but I didn't like the first draft much, and I don't want to turn in something I don't love for my first piece.  That said, the main reason I accepted the gig over there was to try to drive traffic here, so...

Y'know, I'm constantly amazed by how many folks are interested in triathlon.  It seems like kind of a niche sport to me.  Granted, almost everyone can swim, bike, and run, but even a Sprint Tri is gonna last more than an hour, and the number of folks who're actually good at even two of the three disciplines isn't huge. 

Maybe it’s just the challenge of the thing?  Or the sexiness?  I don’t know.

I personally like triathlon because with three separate disciplines, plus nutrition and yoga, it’s something different every day.  But that’s just me, and I hardly expect that the rest of the world is marching to the beat of my particular drum.  And even then, I’ve been ready for a break from tri for more than a year now.

Are you a fan of triathlon?  Why do you like it?

* * *

Finally, a recent study shows that both men and women tend to be happier in their marriages when the wife has a lower body mass index than the husband.  That seems like common sense to me when considered anecdotally, but I suppose it’s surprising in the context of a scientific survey.  I mean, why should men be more demanding of their mates than women?  Don’t women also care what their spouses look and feel like?  Honestly, I’d have though that the best case scenario was relative equality in the marriage, with both spouses in at least reasonably good physical condition.  But no, apparently the men want to feel like they’ve overachieved slightly.

In the same article, however, they reference another recent study that shows that men who’re under stress tend to prefer heavier women.  Which is interesting, right?  The article in question suggestions evolutionary reasons why stressed out guys might want women with relatively more fat stores on their bodies, but it then goes on to note that men who’re stressed tend to find all women relatively more attractive than do men without stress. 

I take all of that to mean that when things are going badly, men will go where they can to find comfort.  But when they’re fat and happy, they tend to be choosier and more conscious of societal norms than they would otherwise be.

* * *

That’s all I’ve got.  Have a great weekend!

Nutrition and Workout Notes (Offseason Week 1)

First off, let me just note that I’ve been working on Centurion Six this week, but I’ve not had quite as much time with it as I would’ve liked, and as a result, I don’t particularly like the product I’ve got.  So I want to tighten it up a bit before I start posting it again.  I figure, as long as I’m on break and the publication schedule is out of whack anyway, I may as well take some time with it and come back with something that doesn’t suck.  Hopefully you guys don’t mind.

Anyway, I’ve been on my diet for a full week now, and if you’re wondering, yes, it’s working exactly as it was designed.  I was down exactly one pound this week, measured as before immediately following my weekly spin class.  That put me at exactly 195 lbs—a bit on the heavy side but within my normal weight range.  I feel like I look a little thinner, too, but I've no idea if that's just my imagination, or if it's possible to see the loss of a pound if you're looking closely enough.

Final thought on nutrition--yes, I'm still drinking beer.  Good beer.  I just tend to think of it now as a starch and use it accordingly.  In ancient times, beer was called "liquid bread".  If you think of it that way, I think you can leave it in your diet.  But you have to realize that it's got to substitute for something, preferably something that would've already been part of your nutritional base load.

My baby is back.  Oh how I have missed her.

My offseason workout schedule looks basically like this:

Monday – Short Run

 - 2 to 3 miles

Tuesday – Weight Training

Wednesday – Short Run

 - 3 to 4 miles

Thursday – Off

Friday – Weight Training

Saturday – Brick Workout: Spin Class + Short Run

 - Spin class is about an hour.

 - Short runs tend to go between 20 and 30 minutes.

Sunday – Long Ride (90+ minutes)

‘Course, I managed to strain a ligament in the bottom of my foot this weekend, probably my plantar fascia, during spin class.  I made the mistake of wearing my favorite Converse All*Stars to spin, which I figured would work fine given that spinning is a zero impact activity.  But the Converse have very flimsy soles, meaning that I basically spent an hour balancing on the balls of my feet while in the pedals, and that left me sore.  And then Sally and I went running immediately after class.  Not smart. 

And now my left foot is so sore that I can barely walk.

Fortunately, I got my foldie back from the bike shop today, so it won’t be all that difficult to stay off my feet. Well, I won’t have to walk any in the City with a sore foot, at any rate.  And then, too, I can still ride my road bike because my regular bike shoes are plenty stiff, which keeps strain off my foot.  But I’ve no idea when I’ll be able to run again—and the pain is bad enough that right now I want my foot to stop hurting a lot more than I want to go running.  Hopefully that won’t last long.  In any event, it's likely that I'll be substituting rides on the foldie and additional weight room sessions for runs for the next few weeks.

That said, my point in posting this is to show how you might try to set up your own off-season workouty program.  I generally use the offseasons to try to get stronger physically and to try to work on the weaker disciplines of my race.  This particular offseason, I’ve been planning to focus on cycling—convenient, given the injury—but you could easily add a day or two of weights and/or swimming to change the focus for your own needs.  

Regardless, while I think the offseason is an important time to train, it’s also important to get away from the grind of endurance training.  For me, I’ve really enjoyed being back in the weight room.  It’s been a welcome break from the frustrations and pressures of this past season, and my body feels different when I'm training with weights than it does when I'm training purely for endurance and racing speed.  I've been enjoying that difference an awful lot.

I've been on my diet a week, and here's what I've learned...

If you're dieting, and you don't work out like a monkey, you're definitely going to starve to death.  It's been a week, and so far I've only taken one day off from my workout schedule.  Bottom line, I'm just too hungry not to keep working out every damned day.  Elsewise, there's no way I'll have enough calories in my diet to actually eat anything that doesn't suck.

The Lose It! Experiment

I get questions about sports nutrition all the time.  In fact, nutrition is probably the single most common question topic we get around here.  So with that in mind, I figured it might be worth a post to talk about the fact that I put myself on a diet this week.

I sometimes wish I looked like
Jesse Spence.

I wrote a little on Monday about how I’d gained some weight during the recent crisis at work and about how it bothered me.  Why?  Well look, I know I’m not super-heavy or anything, but I’m definitely a little larger than your average triathlete, and all that extra weight sure as Hell isn’t making me any faster.  Plus, truth is, I’m not the world’s handsomest guy.  I mean, I know I’m not Quasimodo or anything, but I’m also not George Clooney or that guy who played Chase on the TV show House.  I’ve got a big nose, goofy ears, weak chin, balding head…  But the one thing I’ve always had in my favor is that I’ve got a good build—a slightly stouter version of your typical swimmer’s body.  But if that’s my one thing, well, I’ve got to do what I can to hang on to it, no?  Else all I’ll be left with is a bunch of generally unappealing facial features and body that would’ve made it work… if I hadn’t put on so much weight.

So anyway, bottom line, I want to lose some weight.  Last season I dieted pretty seriously and got down to 185 lbs.  This season I raced at a little more than 190 lbs, but I was inconsistent, and I can’t help thinking that if I’d been a little more focused—in all aspects, but especially in terms of my diet—it would’ve paid dividends in training and on race day.  And now, coming out of the crisis at work, I’m weighing in at almost 200 lbs.  Not only do I feel like crap when I work out, the weight gain is bad enough that you can see the extra pounds around my midsection.  I’d like to fix that.

Last season I tried a diet based on the Thrive plan.  Thrive is a vegan diet that was developed by a professional triathlete, and I liked quite a bit of it, but I never went all the way with it.  I cut out red meat, but I left chicken, fish, and diary in my diet, and quite honestly, I don’t think that the inclusion hurt me. 

I'm using an app from LoseIt.com

This year, I’m trying Lose It! which is a simple diet and exercise logging program that’s built around an iPhone app.  I discovered it via the Football Today podcast because the show’s producer, Jay Soderberg, has used it to lose something like forty pounds with it.  Well, that was enough for me.  I downloaded the app on Sunday night and started using it the next day.  Lose It! gave me a goal of consuming no more than 2,128 calories per day (plus exercise), and so far that hasn’t been too hard to manage.  That said, I don’t know how much thinner I’m getting here, but I suppose we’ll find out when I weigh myself this weekend.

If you’re wondering, my goal weight is 180 lbs, and I want to get there at a rate of one pound per week.  That’d put me at about what I weighed when I was 25, just before I went to Korea.  Whether using Lose It! and exercising per my normal schedule is enough to get me there is something of an open question in my mind, but it’d sure be nice if the program does happen to work as advertised.

Afternoon Matinee: Triathlon Nutrition