Author: cdwan

Physical Fitness

Woke up crusty this morning. I’ve had what we used to describe as the “creeping crud” for about a week now. Started out as a runny nose, then moved to an itchy throat, and now it’s become a nice productive cough. All of these have been relatively mild – but it’s annoying as hell. In addition, we’re now at a point where I fear H1N1 (hamthrax) when I stub my toe … so there’s that.

Really looking forward to the judo tournament tomorrow. I’m hoping that the crustiness doesn’t affect the competition. If I feel contagious, I’ll pull myself out of the tournament. Infecting a bunch of international athletes just feels rude.

I went ahead and did the experiment of going into full “training” mode like a real athlete … and it’s been instructive.

First off: I think that athletes work really hard. My “full on training” mode consisted of:

* Exercising at least a little bit every single day, and working out seriously at least every other day
* No alcohol whatsoever
* Getting to bed by 11

I already eat pretty healthy, but I made an effort to avoid the mid-afternoon ice cream sundae.

The result was startling. I was already feeling fit and healthy, walking around at between 173 and 176 pounds (I fluctuate by three pounds – even weighing myself at the same time under the same conditions every day). This morning I weighed myself at 167. That’s at least four pounds of flab that just melted away under fairly mild training conditions. I can’t imagine what would happen if I took these changes to heart.

There are two reasons this might matter:

* For my general health, I don’t think it matters at all. By any measure (BMI, activity level, …) I was already in awesome shape. I’m moving around within a band of “healthy weight for me.” Also, to reassure people who might jump me for caring about BMI – I’m the body type for which they created BMI. When I weigh 172, I’m able to participate in the activities that I want to do – I don’t get tired easily, and I’m happy with how I look. Let’s be clear: I don’t give a damn about *your* BMI – but I’m happy with mine.

* The other reason it might matter is that judo tournaments are broken up into weight classes. If I pass certain thresholds, I have to fight either much smaller or much larger guys. Those boundaries are 162lbs and 178lbs. So I’m in no danger whatsoever of breaking either of those limits. I bet that if I was willing to really work at it, I could get down to 162 – but there’s no point. I would rather feel strong where I am. I’m also going to weigh in with my pants on. I may not even put down my gym bag.

I don’t feel particularly better. I find that I wake up easier – having gone to bed earlier. I find that my endurance at the gym is quite good – but I’ve always been able to keep up, mostly. I hate dedicated cardio workouts with a passion – so I have very little data on whether this has affected endurance at all. My body may recover from little bruises and sprains more rapidly if I don’t pour beer on it … but I don’t have the data to tell. The small-annoying-injury rate has increased in line with the frequency of workouts … so it’s hard to tell whether I’m healing faster or not.

A variety of thoughts

No real theme here – just trying to not let the days trickle by un-sung.

Played a Judo tournament this last weekend. Oddly, at 170 lbs I was the lightest person in the entire masters (over 30) category. They wound up combining the novice and expert divisions, and spreading my division up to about 195. A 25 pound weight difference is pretty significant – and coupled with the expert / novice thing … I didn’t last long. Okay, I didn’t last at all. It was a double elimination bracket, and I lost my first two fights. Good times. Worked the scoreboard for the rest of the day and, as usual, learned a lot. I may never actually be good at this sport – but I feel like I’m getting better at something difficult. That’s all I ask, really.

I’ve been invited to a couple of online arguments recently. I’ve got a pretty ironclad policy on arguing about things like abortion online. There’s no point. It *never* works out well. I’m happy to talk about these things in person, provided that there’s a bit of give and take to the conversation. Online, particularly in some dumbass comment thread on facebook – just “no.”

I’ve given up on the health care reform package being passed by congress. It skips all of the truly important changes that we might make in order to really improve our system. While it might represent a decent set of evolutionary steps, it falls well short of the *revolutionary* change that I thought we might see.

My cat is sitting on the desk, leaning up on my chest. She is warm.

Train

Here’s a new one: I missed the last train to Boston from Philly last night, so I got to chill at the station, with the homeless, until the midnight regional arrived. I piled on board with a bevy of disappointed Yankees fans, who shared a raucous hour up to New York and debarked. I spent the next 6 hours curled up in a variety of uncomfortable configurations until now – 7 in the morning. I’m sipping insta-coffee and watching one of the most glorious fall sunrises I’ve seen in a long time, over the still waters of costal Rhode Island.

The man who served my coffee remarked on my Michigan sweatshirt. Turns out that he grew in in Detroit – he’s a little older than my mother would have been. Where she was a high school student for the riots of 1967, he was a police officer.

While I sorta got burned on this schedule, I still swear by the train for travel in the Northeast corridor. I think that Philly may be the southern limit of “dead simple one-day travel” by train though. Even with the standard mantra about “you save an hour for security, and the seats are so much more comfortable,” a seven hour midnight ride is pretty clearly inferior to an hour in the air.

Descriptor

A useful Abstraction

I’ve been doing a little trick that taught me, and it works, so I’ll pass it on.

I’m a big fan of lists. Everything needs to be on a list. I will go back and populate a to-do list with things I’ve already done … checking them off as I go. That’s my broken-ness.

So here’s the trick. I run one to-do list for any given day. I set it up in the morning. I add to it as things need doing. In the evening, I check things off and review.

In the morning, I look at yesterday’s list … and then I throw it away. Every day gets a clean sheet of paper. Perhaps yesterday’s tasks don’t make it to today’s list. In fact, that’s the big trick – figuring out the things that made the list yesterday but aren’t really important.

Amped Up

Just got back from my second appearance on Freethought RI. This is a radio show that my good friend Dan started a year or so ago as part of his work with the RI Atheist Society. I find myself all amped up and excited about free speech, broadcasting myself, and so on.

The show itself is a bit rambling. Dan and Neil and I just sort of talked for an hour. I have no idea how many people actually listen … except that I know my little sister was one of them! She called me right after the show ended saying something like (ironically enough) “thank god that there are smart people able to access the airwaves and broadcast this stuff! liberty is not dead!”

So yeah. Free speech is not dead. Long live free speech.

And, more to follow, but get off your asses and use your freedoms before we lose them forever.

Seriously. If you’re not screaming, you’re not paying attention.

–EDIT–

Wow, listen to me free form it at around 23:00. I didn’t plan any of this, but it came out smooth like buttah. The topic was that the Pope has recently extended a friendly hand to the Anglican church, offering them the chance to come on back to the fold – bring your straight, male, married priests … but ditch those gays and women. So I said:

“The question to me is: if you’re really serious about the essential nature of communion and confession and the sacred nature of these rites – that if you don’t do the ritual correctly then it’s not pleasing to God, and God will punish you forever – if that’s at the foundation of your belief: How does it make you feel that the pope is willing to pitch some of that just to get a few more bucks?

And one wonders how far we are from that here at BSR radio, from the pope calling up and saying “hey, do you guys want to be catholic?” Is that different in some way? Different from people who for 500 years have practiced a different religion? Hey, I light incense at home.”

–EDIT 2–

We get loopy at 51 minutes in. Scientology fraud.

Pan Am Masters

I just registered to compete in my first international Judo tournament. The Pan Am Master’s. It’s worth noting that “masters” in judo means nothing more than “more than 30 years old.” We jokingly refer to it as either the executive or the geritol division.

This is a tournament exclusively for us old guys. However, it is also a Pan Am, which means that competitors will come from North and South America to kick my ass. Fortunately, I’m still a novice. This means that the 31 year old former world champions will not be in my division.

I’m totally psyched, because all the guys from my club who never compete locally are going to come out. This includes my coach – who I’ve never seen go full speed before. I know for a fact that even when we do ‘free sparring,’ he’s just working with us and being nice. I’m quite excited to see him *not* be nice … to someone who is not me.

Also, I get a “USA” patch for my gi. Oh precious “USA” patch …

I read the news today, oh boy

Man, the hits came fast and hard as I read the news today. For whatever reason, I seem to be taking it personally today:

* The last meal

The chef, who has built his professional life on a devotion to precision, analysis and control that borders on the obsessive, came to understand in new ways that life is messy, friends and colleagues say.

* Changing the world

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

* For runaways, sex buys survival

“Give me some time,” Mr. Garrabrant pleaded as he handed her a card and asked her to keep it handy. With no time left, he released Roxanne back to the local police, who took her to the youth shelter.

Four hours later, she disappeared. Seventeen days after that, according to the F.B.I, she was found stabbed to death by the pimp she had so adamantly denied existed.

In one of her pockets she had Mr. Garrabrant’s card.

“Two days, that’s all I needed to get her to stay away from her pimp and I think things would’ve ended up differently,” said Mr. Garrabrant, shaking his head in frustration. “I still don’t understand how these guys loop these girls in so far.”

Shiai

Competed in the tournament yesterday, and it went really well. My division was three men, and they ran single elimination – so I got two matches.

I’m actually prouder of the match that I lost. This was the first one, against a young brown belt – a bit smaller than me. We went back and forth without much incident for about 3 and a half minutes out of the four minute match. He caught me early on with something or other for a small point – and we went briefly to the ground. Thought I might get him to tap on a choke (a friend in the crowd was shouting “it’s under his chin, PULL” but to no avail), but it didn’t happen. With 30 seconds remaining, down on points, I went for it and attacked continually. He took that as an opportunity to toss me with a beautiful, high shoulder throw. It was one of those ones where the room goes silent and everybody is like “ooo,” while one guy sails over the head of the other. Apparently I tucked and rolled like a champ – and I got complemented by several people on doing “good judo.”

The second match was against a blue belt, much younger than me and probably 20 pounds lighter. We went maybe 2 minutes before I caught him twice in a row with the same throw (tai-otoshi). Honestly, even though I won that one, I thought that my first match was better played. I didn’t have the leverage or position to make the throw work really well – I was just bigger and stronger than him and so I made it work.

Perhaps more important, while I was sore afterwards – both my knee and my shoulder held up well.

I’m BACK!

Back on the mat

I’m competing in a small, local judo tournament this morning. It’s a monthly “shiai,” which is traditionally an opportunity for students to get real competition experience in a friendly and supportive environment.

While I’ve been working out vigorously and even doing “randori” (loosely translated as ‘free play’), I haven’t actually competed in a very long time. Shiai is very different from randori. Randori is an extension of class. You’re expected to work hard – but also to support your partner. If they execute a technique well – and you’re thrown – the expectation is that you go with it. You bounce back up after a throw and continue to work. In particular, you do not focus all-out on blocking, countering, and cranking your partner into the mat. The key difference here is “partner” as opposed to “opponent.”

Competition is something else again. For one thing, only a few matches go on at a time, and everyone watches. There’s a referee. Also – the ‘one point’ aspect of Judo comes into play. Winning and losing is sudden and complete. A well executed throw simply ends the match.

So it’s time to go pack my full day’s exercise into perhaps 10 minutes. Woo.

Sometimes it’s useful to go back through the archive

I took my first judo lesson in late November, 2007.

Looks like the last time I actually competed was in January

In mid March I got my knee scoped (about seven months ago). Apparently that was also the last month in which I brewed beer.

In late May, I got back to randori

So there you go. 10 month hiatus, and 7 months post surgery. Go team.