Date: October 24th, 2012
There’s fit, there’s training, there’s recreation, there’s performance, and then there’s obsession with looking fit. For my entire life I’ve lived in “fit” places or within fit communities. Boulder is the uber-fit capital of the planet; you can’t go just ride your bike, you’ve got to know your cadence, heart rate, and have the right shorts on. Canmore is slightly more laid back, but for god’s sake don’t turn on the iPhone app that shows you whether or not you’re setting a new PR on a casual evening ride, or how much you’re off the record pace on the ride. This fall I went for a casual ride with a friend, and his damn phone kept beeping at him to tell him to go faster… “Can’t stop, gotta keep on my pace to beat my PR!” Now, I’m all for training my ass off. When I’m in the gym trying a problem or lifting a set don’t talk to me or I will hate you, you’re distracting me. Encouragement good. Asking me about my training methods or some stupid blog post I wrote just distracts me from doing my best. But the day I’m out for a ride or run and my phone starts beeping at me to hold a pace on a casual evening ride? Something is wrong. And I see a lot of this sort of, “training is everything, all the time” attitude. It’s not, unless you’re a competitive athlete, and even then it’s not. Even the best competitive athletes know when they are training and when they are out for a ride, and don’t confuse the two. Because ultimately if you’re not having fun life sucks…
And then there are the gym rats I see all over the world. I see them in the weight room “training for climbing” by busting out high-intensity workouts involving mirrors and bicep curls, or overhead lunges agains the clock. I used to have no idea what they were training for, but now I’m pretty sure: They are training mainly to look fit… If you “train” more than you do your sport then you’re probably confusing the reasons you train. Which is OK; “training” can be a sport. Crossfit is a sport in my mind, and I respect those athletes because they train with meaning and intensity and then (mostly) leave that in the gym. But there’s some dissonance between thinking you’re training for a sport and then never actually doing the sport you’re training for. I keep going back to Fugazi: “Function is the key!” Not biceps, not times, but actual performance results. Did you perform better last time you went out or not? Sitting a PR on squats is gratifying to the ego, but meaningless unless the results back up the training. I can hear a legion of gym rats howling now; “training” is an unexamined religion to many, and nobody likes to get their religion questioned.
I see a lot of athletes far more focused on the training than on the performing. Endless reps, endless diets, endless negative self-talk about “training really hard even though I suck!” stuff. The best athletes I have ever known did focus really hard on training, but they always measured that training against a steel ruler of performance results. And when they weren’t training at high intensities they had fun. Go riding ,climbing, hiking, swimming, surfing, whatever, have fun. If you’re having fun then you’ll keep doing it, and be fit enough. This is why so many gym programs fail; ultimately they aren’t fun, and are more about meaningless reps than actual performance or goals. Unless you’re training to be an elite-level athlete (that means at a sport) then go forth and have some damn fun already!
The far end of this spectrum is the anorexic athletes I see around Canmore. I really feel for them, it’s brutal; I see a woman running many mornings as I’m going climbing, and her knee joints are wider than her hamstrings and quads. She runs in slow motion, bundled up because she can’t generate enough energy to move fast and stay warm. I’ve done my time as the anorexic sport climber (not joking, just how it was in the early 90s) and this is the ultimate expression of losing sight of the big goal, which is to perform better, not just look like whatever the current version of “fit” is. I won comps at 155 and whatever body fat I had, and failed to make the finals at 145. But I thought dieting harder and training harder would surely equal better success… I had stopped measuring results, and was only measuring training and body fat. These do not equal performance. Obsessing with training and the appearance of training is ultimately a downward spiral…
Part of the “train at all costs, all the time” perspective on life is looking at training like the cover captions on a men’s/women’s magazine: “Ten Weird Tricks to Lose Body Fat!” or, “One Trick to Master Everything!” Training isn’t about doing monkey monster lunges while balancing on a paleo pizza. It’s about doing steady, repetitive, occasionally boring things. There is no secret trick out there about why one athlete is better than the others. The best athletes focuse on performance, not the appearance of performance or weird workouts involving bondage and/or personal humiliation. Lift the weight using your mind first, hands second, and ninja spiked wraps not at all.
I love training hard, and I love performing, and I love doing my sports, and if truth be told I’m happy to be reasonably fit. These things don’t all happen at the same time, and if I had to pick only one it would be doing my sports at whatever level I could. Because this is a life-long enjoyable thing to do. I hope to be walking up hills if I’m lucky enough to make it to 80. And I would much, much rather be the guy below in the surfing video than the gym rat eating another skinned chicken breast with paleo dirt sauce. It’s easy to see who is having more fun. Oh, and a lot of new research shows that being fat isn’t all that unhealthy, it’s the diet that many fat people eat that’s unhealthy…
The point in all of these words is that obsessive training is sort of like excessive masturbation; you’ll undoubtedly get better at it. And?
Rant mode off, time to go have some fun outside again, yeah! Love this surfing video; the guy is fat, but he’s out surfing and loving life, not flexing in front of the gym mirror.
Posted in: Blog
Date: October 22nd, 2012
This is pretty darn neat–first V14 done by a woman or something. V14. I can remember when V8 was “rad,” and few men and no women climbed at that level. Not only is it great to watch, but to me it shows that whether you’re male or female perceived performance limits are mostly in our own heads, not laws of physics that need to be obeyed… I have no idea who this woman is, but she’s rad, and I am inspired to train better.
Posted in: Blog
Date: October 11th, 2012
A friend of mine recently put up a youtube link on Facebook. I almost didn’t click on it as most links on Facebook lead to some cat eating a cheeseburger, and I lose five minutes of my life freaking on it. But I’m really, really glad I clicked on this link. I realized as I listened to it that it perfectly encapsulated many of the things I believe about life, sport, education and death. This is it:http://youtu.be/siu6JYqOZ0g
I think that as a child my parents must have read the text of the video to me over and over at night. The voice is that of Alan Watts (not the climber, though he is cool too), philosopher Alan Watts. The big quesiton Watts poses is, “What would you do if money were no object?” I’ve spent most of my life trying to answer that question with actions. When I was 29 I walked out of the best job I ever had as measured by enjoyment, money, peers, atmosphere, etc., in order to make far less money but to do what I wanted to do: Climb and fly. I still greatly value the experience I had with John Winsor and others at that job, but fundamentally I was following Watts’ idea of doing what you really love, and ultimately mastering it and being able to make a living doing what you love… I do not think my actions were spontaneous; without my upbringing and mountain childhood and even professional experiences I would not have been able to do what I have. But that moment of going, “Fuck it, I’m going to try something wildly different” is a small crystal of courage I am proud to have found, at least occasionally in life. For I often can’t live up to the ideal Watts writes of; I do do things for money regularly. But I know when I’m on the path and off it, and that is important knowledge.
A friend of mine and I recently spent a week climbing sea stacks in Newfoundland. Neither one of us made a penny during the week, but I think for both of us it was one great week. But we could not have gone on that trip without spending many, many thousands of hours doing what we liked in order to get the mastery that Watts talks about, or at least enough of it to figure out how to go and make a TV show about climbing towers sticking out of the ocean… More on that trip soon, which was a failure as a “climbing” trip but was a success as measured by doing something you really love.
A corollary to the “Do what you love” idea is that I believe no real effort is ever wasted, it just builds force behind our actions. The past creates the future. If I had not learned how to write through working at magazines I could not do what I do today. Those hundreds and thousands of hours spent hanging onto little plastic holds allowed me to climb a crumbling sea stack. Watts is not espousing laziness, he’s espousing real courage and doing something really difficult: Following your real, genuine interest in life. That is a huge leap completely out of what we’re told to do. I’ve read so many editorials telling the youth to stop messing about and go get degrees that will pay well. These are ridiculous statements; we should be telling the youth to go do what they love. So here’s a big fat kick in the ass to all the people who would have us be “responsible” youth. That path is sure to lead to the garbage heap of despair, to quote KMFDM. Watts is right, most of the people in the world are just wrong.
I got so fired up I transcribed a few lines from the video above and hung them on my wall. Here they are:
“What would you do if money were no object? You do that, and forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important part then you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And, after all, if you do spend your life doing what you really like doing then you can become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much; somebody is interested in anything you’re interested in. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like so you can continue doing things you don’t like, and to teach your children to follow in the same track.”
-Alan Watts
Posted in: Blog
