What I've Learned So Far

I love lifting weights, but I’ve let it slip from my schedule. Not anymore, though.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reincorporating deadlifts and bench presses into my schedule, bit by bit, using the weights in my garage. But today I returned to the scene of my greatest lifting exploits (he said, tongue firmly in cheek) . . . Hyde Park Gym:

My home away from home.

My immediate inspiration for the expedition — and this post — came from my friend Corey, after we discussed his . . . frankly insane workout from the other night. (Corey’s a former competitive bodybuilder who runs his own personal training business in Barbados. Don’t just launch into his workouts if you value your sanity.)

Planning the Assault

Step 1: Sleep for nine hours. Wake up feeling awesome.

Step 2: Follow good nutrition when you wake up. In my case, this meant a protein shake, Ezekiel cereal, and plenty of coffee. I skipped the pastries when I took the kids to the coffee shop.

None for me, thanks.

After giving myself time to digest that and warm up a bit for the day, I loaded up with yet more coffee, plus water, and laced up my favorite Sambas. (In my world, Sambas = deadlifts.) Then I drove to HPG with the windows down, letting the sun soak into me.

At the Gym

Ten minutes with the foam roller to loosen my muscles, especially in my legs. (Soundtrack: “La Grange” by ZZ Top.) Then I reacquainted myself with one of the power racks shown in the first picture above.

Barbell deadlifts: 10 x 95# warmup, 10 x 135#, 10 x 165# — by which point my body began to understand that I was there to do some real work.

Barbell squats: 10 x 135#, 10 x 145#, 10 x 155# — at which point my body was reminding me in no uncertain terms that it’s been too long since I’ve done squats.

T-bar row: 3 sets x 10 x 45# — slow and controlled. Alternated these with . . .
Plate-loading leg press: 12 x 180#, 10 x 270#, 15 x 270# — Hyde Park has my favorite leg press machine ever. Something about the angle and construction of it is perfect for my frame . . . meaning that I felt increasingly sick as I made my way through these sets.

If I hadn’t talked about this workout with Corey and our Twitter friends Deb and Kristin, I might have stopped at 10 reps on the last set. Instead, I decided to channel a little bit of their intensity and blow it on out to 15.

Glad I did.

Yesterday I wrote a little story, “Aboard,” that I published here. Sometimes I’ll do this–take a story idea and run with it to see what I can do with it quickly. In this case, my prompt came from a Twitter exchange. Regardless of the specific origin, the point is to write, write quickly, and avoid overthinking.

What’s the opposite of this quick-and-dirty approach? How about the dozens of pages of notes I unearthed today listing the pieces I’ve wanted to write at various times in the past? For the most part, this isn’t draftwork or serious work toward getting a piece done, but rather just listings of things that I’d like to do. Pointless.

These days, I have a document — one that’s actually useful — titled “Idea hopper.” Like the name suggests, it’s a place where I can collect story ideas for later. It’s useful because it’s a handy repository, and gives me something to go back to when I’m looking for the next project to work on. To put it another way, it’s useful because it’s actually related to the finished work of writing. It captures ideas and helps me get things done.

The old lists I just uncovered? No. They’re the worst sort of self-trickery. They seem to be related to writing, since they list the titles of articles, stories, books, and so on that I might write on some future day . . . but in fact they’re vacuous. They’re really just words scattered on a page, maybe divided under headings, that don’t actually bring the real writing any closer to fruition.

Here, I have made you a handy visual aid:

My point in this? To help you (assuming you’re an aspiring writer / creator) to avoid the dead-ends I’ve gone down. The short version is that an activity either helps you get the work done, or it doesn’t. Avoid the latter.

For some friendly advice from a writer who knew how to get the work done for real, check out this interview with the late Stephen J. Cannell:

I love what he says about lowering your expectations — who cares if you work is deathless? — and being most interested in the current thing you’re working on.

The moral of the story: Move on from talking about the thing or mentating on the thing . . . and just do the thing.

Go get it.

I have been on this train for nine years. That’s nine years without seeing my family, without a vacation, without the touch of a woman other than the working girls who operate in the last car between Station 16 and Station 23. (In theory we don’t know they’re there, but how could we not? In practice they’re an alternate stream of income for the conductors and the stationmasters along the way — as well as an outlet for the likes of me.)

What did I expect when I got on? As far as the nature of the work, pretty much like it actually is. You keep things in working order, you keep the cars clean, you deal with the conductors and the engineers and the passengers. Like you’d imagine.

What’s different is the . . . life. I mean, these trains are way bigger than the old days, right? This isn’t the Wild West and the Transcontinental Railroad and Butch Cassidy. It’s not Strangers on a Train or the Orient Express with all the mystery and intrigue. But the technology is way past what any of them could have imagined. I mean, this kind of speed was just impossible, even twenty years ago.

They retrofitted a lot of the cars with the new drives. So I’m not sleeping in a twenty-year-old berth. It’s actually like forty years old, but it might as well be a thousand. Everything is mostly worn out, repaired a bunch of times. I’m talking about the staff cars, obviously — the passenger cars are sharp. The new dining car we got this year — it’s actually pretty amazing. And better food than before, even for us.

But of course I can’t leave, and that makes me think differently about everything. With the dining fabricators, I can have duck l’orange as easy as a cheeseburger, but so what? When you’re confined somewhere, no options, it can still feel like prison, even if it technically isn’t.

The upside is that I can send money home. I eat well. The gym car is good, and I stay pretty fit — although we transported a prisoner a couple of months ago, a guy who’d been in for like 15 years, and he was beyond built. Muscles on top of muscles. I can’t compete with that. Still, he has to call himself “prisoner.” I get to call myself “porter.”

They used to have a thing — I read about it in school — called “indentured servitude.” I looked it up on the computer a while back, because I couldn’t remember the word. (Would you believe I was a good student? I was, though I never paid enough attention. But I hadn’t heard that since I was like fifteen, so I had to look it up.) Anyway, I guess that’s what I am, an indentured servant. It beats being a prisoner. That guy they brought on here, the muscleman, they kept him in chains the whole time. They would have shot him dead if he tried to leave.

If I tried to leave — which I wouldn’t, because I’m not stupid and I don’t want to put my family at risk — they’d just track me down and bring me back. Though I guess at that point they could make me a prisoner, too. Nobody yet has figured out to de-implant the chip they put in your spine. So where are you gonna go?

Anyway, nine years. With however many left to go. It’s not so bad. We actually have some laughs on this train.

I guess I’ll die on here, someday.

Image source.

Let me start with a confession: this whole premise is a lie.

I did not, in fact, participate in the Zooma half-marathon, held yesterday in the hinterlands of Austin. I registered for it, got my race packet, the whole thing. And I did assault a half-marathon distance on the appointed day. But I didn’t go to the Zooma race as planned.

There are two key reasons for this — which dawned on me only when I received my race packet in the mail:

1. Because of parking limitations at the resort where the race is held, there was no way to park at the event, or for my family to park at the event. Practically speaking, this meant that no one I knew would be waiting for me when I was done. That was a big deal to my wife last year when she finished her first half-marathon — having me and the kids at the finish line. It was a key part of the race-day experience that I was looking for.
2. Again because of the parking thing, I would need to be up somewhat before 5 a.m. on Saturday to drive to an airport parking lot, so that I could then take a 40-minute shuttle-bus ride to the race site, so that I could wait an hour for the race to start. And then I would repeat the shuttle process when the race was over. This may sound like the griping of a lazy person. If it is, that’s fine by me. Either way, it would have been a schlep, and no mistake.

What I wanted was to run the distance and have a fun experience. The logistics of this particular race, since it didn’t occur to me at the right time to book a room at the resort for my family, carved away too much of the fun and made it seem too much like work — and not the hard work of running that was the point of the whole thing.

When I shared these reasons with a colleague of mine on Friday, he tried to ride me about them. He’s a veteran of many triathlons, including more than one Ironman, and he cannot imagine being dissuaded from race day by such trivial factors as these. Which is fine . . . for him. I imagine my main running instigator — herself the veteran of several half-marathons, and in training for her first marathon — might want to ride me the same way. But I simply don’t care that much about the race-day experience. I thought I did — but it turns out I don’t. So that’s Lesson #1. YMMV.

My Own Private Half-Marathon

My wife helped me to hatch an alternative plan. One of the loops of the hike-and-bike trail around Town Lake, from the MoPac bridge to the I-35 bridge, is just under 7 miles. So two loops is about 14 miles — 13.8, to be exact. Run two loops, and you’ve done a half-marathon with 0.7 miles of sugar on top.

I got up at an early but reasonable time, ate a good breakfast (a mix of complex and simple carbs, plenty of fluids), and parked under the MoPac bridge in the middle of a beautiful spring morning.

I decided not to time myself closely. Running the distance in 2:20 versus 2:21 didn’t mean anything to me, and I wanted to enjoy the experience at a steady cruising pace.

The first lap went fine, as did the outbound leg of the second lap. I was taking gulps of water and Gatorade at regular intervals and making good progress. I had gone more than 11 miles by the 2:05 mark (I passed a building with a clock on its face), and I was even thinking of putting a flourish on the day with an extra couple of miles at the end of the second lap. After all, if you’re going to run 13.8 miles, why not make it an even 15?

Then things got much, much harder, very quickly.

I’ve hit the wall before in running. I had run 11 miles just two weeks before, and although this was going to be — and indeed was — my longest run ever, I’m no stranger to running for a couple of hours at a time. I was fueled and ready, the weather wasn’t too hot . . . but my condition declined in a hurry.

Finding My Real-Life Limitations

I made it as far an the Congress Avenue bridge on willpower, and purposed to run on from there at least as far as the First Avenue bridge. But then my body stopped answering the bell. My legs had tightened up to the point that I couldn’t run. It wasn’t about willpower or pain tolerance at that point — they wouldn’t fire properly.

So I shuffled along, trying to maintain a good cadence. I thought I’d walk to the First Avenue bridge, then jog to the next bridge. Maybe that way I’d cover the last couple of miles at some reasonable pace.

Why did it happen? In retrospect — given how much fluid I’ve needed in the past 30 hours to recover from this run — I believe I was dehydrated. For years I’ve had problems with my calves, the worst of which came five summers ago when I tore the medial head of the gastrocnemius muscle in my left leg. My right gastroc gives me fits, too, and I do every long run, including this one, wearing calf sleeves.

But yesterday my right soleus and achilles tendon started cramping, harder than I’ve ever experienced. Then, as I walked gingerly along, all of my calf and hamstring muscles felt like they had turned to fiberglass.

It was physically painful, but more than that it was frustrating. I had rolled my muscles like a good trainee. I had tapered properly with my previous long run. I was well-fueled and well-rested. I thought I had taken in plenty of fluids.

And yet I crashed and burned.

A “Learning Experience”

A CEO I used to work for had an upbeat, albeit smart-assed, way of referring to outright failures as “learning experiences.” That’s what this was. I limped along those last two miles, taking more water at every fountain and stopping several times to rest. Even at my worst, I’ve always been able to keep walking, but not this time. I squatted and stretched to get some of the knots out of my soleus. I took deep breaths and tried to loosen up my shoulders and back and well as my legs. But mostly I just suffered through.

What, specifically, did I learn?

• I didn’t miss being involved in the race. As already mentioned, I don’t care that much about a racing environment. Until I hit the wall, I was having a great time seeing other runners, parents with babies in strollers, people walking their dogs, and so on. I was enjoying the breeze and the sunshine and the lakeside views of my fair city. I’m sure I will care about the race-day environment when it’s a marathon, or an ultra, or maybe an adventure race. But for a 13.1-mile run, I don’t care enough about the race itself if there’s too much logistical friction. (Would a race environment have helped me yesterday? Who knows?)
• Better hydration is a must. I think I drank plenty during the run. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t drink enough in the 24 hours before I started the run. Duly noted.
• More base runs are a must. While I did ratchet up my weekly long runs to put me within striking distance of 13.1, I let my work schedule get the better of me over the past few weeks in terms of my shorter weekday runs. I did some good hill climbs, but not enough of the base mileage runs that I needed to build up my strength for this.
• I’m just nowhere near as fit as I want to be. I’m not beating myself up, but facts are facts: I thought it would require a solid effort to run 13.8 miles, but I figured I would do it smoothly, without stopping, and without agony. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
• More effort — and especially more consistency — is required. It’s not enough to work hard, or to work hard most of the time. You have to train for the purpose at hand. Obviously I didn’t, or the outcome would have been different.

While it would have been a lot more fun to finish the 13.8 (or 13.1) without learning these lessons — or feeling as miserable as I have ever felt while running — at least I genuinely learned these lessons at first hand. It’s one thing to understand something in the abstract, but something else again to know it experientially. I’ve been guilty of thinking that my abstract knowledge was an adequate substitute for first-hand experience more than a few . . . thousand . . . times in my life.

But now — at least for this one small subset of lessons — I know.

Image source.

“To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intently and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing—and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine.”

—Henry James, quoted by Alan Hollinghurst

Let’s start with a little story. A friend of mine once asked me for career advice. I pointed him to the series I had written up on job-hunting a while before. We got together after that, ostensibly to go over his resume, but really to help him think through what alternate paths he might like to take for the next part of his career.

He had been stuck for a long time in one line of work that he didn’t particularly like, and he couldn’t see his way out of it — to the point that he literally could not come up with skills he had that might be applicable to other lines of work. So I started talking with him about transferable skills.

The poor guy was beaten down so much that he was thinking in terms of “I can use Microsoft Word” and even his words-per-minute typing speed. I tried to get him thinking about broader concepts like “communicating” and “troubleshooting problems for customers,” but none of it seemed to ring any bells for him.

He’s still stuck in that same line of work, years later.

Creative or Corporate: FINISH

The further I go in business, and the longer I write, the more I believe that real success lies with those who finish things. It sounds simplistic, but stick with me:

• Successful projects are finished projects.
• Good pieces of writing (or art, or music) are finished pieces.
• The things that shine on your resume are finished things.

Et cetera. The point is that real accomplishment comes from finishing important work. And the plain truth is that rewards fall disproportionately to those who do the most finishing — even though their finishing is imperfect, even though it means other things left by the wayside. Think about the people you know in business who have built reputations around getting things done. It could be a CEO or an office manager, but they have made it clear, by repeated demonstration, that if you give them a task they will carry it all the way home.

(Computer programmer and entrepreneur Joel Spolsky published a book about hiring ace programmers. He called it Smart and Gets Things Done — because that’s fundamentally what he looks for in an employee. Somehow, the entire book is available online in PDF form.)

Think, too, about the creators we admire — Austen or Rembrandt or Jack White or whomever. They’re known for their finished works. Even great unfinished pieces, like Dickens’s Edwin Drood or Beethoven’s 10th Symphony, intrigue us because we know what those artists were capable of . . . based on their prior finished works.

Taking Myself to Finishing School

I’m starting a new decade of my life in a few months. Looking back over the one that’s coming to a close, I see too many worthy projects, both corporate and creative, that got partway done but were then abandoned, thwarted, or otherwise scratched. My focus now is to keep better track of what I’m working on, what I’m finishing, and especially the ratio between the two.

Care to join me? I’ll talk about the results here, and I would love to have your feedback along the way.

I also plan to talk about other transferable skills that apply just as much to the business world as to corporate work. Which ones would you suggest?

Image source.

This is a topic I covered a while back in a column on showing, rather than telling, your priorities, but here it is in a nutshell . . .

There’s no sense in bothering with excuses — least of all to yourself — for what your priorities have been. Just acknowledge that your behaviors have reflected what your priorities actually were.

Don’t even waste time feeling bad about it, but admit that whatever was most important to you at the time (your goals, your family, your fears, the chance to take the easy road, . . . ) drove your actions down a particular path.

So think back over the past two weeks — just 4% of this year, but a potentially tone-setting 4%. Have your real behaviors reflected your stated priorities?

My assessment for myself:

• Good progress on projects at work.
• So-so effort on athletic training, but not enough planning to account for a super-hectic schedule at the office last week.
• Not at all adequate effort or planning for my own writing projects.

What about you? What paths have you gone down in the past two weeks? Where are you going to move the needle the rest of this month?

Image by Alyson Hurt.

This morning I set a new personal record in the deadlift. That workout was #211 of the year, meaning that I met the goal I set for myself earlier this year.

Three things I’ve figured out from this:

1. 211 workouts is not actually a lot for a year. It’s more than most people do, but in fact I let my myself get distracted by various things during the year, especially when I changed jobs in October.
2. 211 workouts in a year certainly helps you maintain good health, but it’s no guarantee of hitting any certain level of fitness. I’m retooling for next year.
3. I get by with a little help from my friends. I’ve had great support from my workout buddies — in person and online.

So, 212 for 2012? At least. Given the broader fitness goals I’m cooking up, 312 might be more like it.

Stay tuned.

Image source.

When something is legitimately complicated, we have an easy out: we’re not supposed to get it / learn it / master it on the first go, and we can even elicit others’ sympathy for making an effort.

• “You’re reading Ulysses? I’m too scared to even try.”
• “You’re taking organic chem? That would be totally over my head.”
• “You’re implementing a new CRM system? That must be a nightmare.”

It’s an easy out because this this benefit of the doubt may be there even if you’re badly half-assing your efforts at reading Ulysses.

Some people spend far more effort in mastering this strategy than they do in getting the actual work done. The fact that many of them do it subconsciously makes it less wicked, but so much sadder. These poor souls actually believe that life keeps presenting them with challenges that are just too complicated for them to master.

It’s a crock.

If you’re doing something genuinely complex — switching a Fortune 100 company from Oracle to SAP, staging La Traviata at the Met — yes, take steps to deal with the complexities. Build a team, designate leaders in different specialties, hold weekly status meetings, build out Gantt charts, what-have-you. If it’s a complex solo effort, you should still spend a little extra time on organizing to try to get the various threads to come together on time and in good order.

But whether it’s simple or complex, at some point you just have to roll up your sleeves and do the actual thing. The writing, the studying, the construction of the stage sets, the installation of the new hardware. The actual nuts and bolts of the project.

And here’s a thing that some people never get: most of the projects you do in life are only nuts and bolts. Many of them are just a single nut to be tightened onto a single bolt.

When you hit a project like that — you’ve probably had eight of them already today — just pick out a wrench and go to work. In the time it would take you to deconstruct it, worry about it, and organize it, you could have done it and the three next to it.

To review:

1. Let things be as simple as they really are.
2. Organize just enough.
3. Get to work.

It’s not easy — but it is simple.

Photo by Joel Cooper.

Early-morning
weights to make
the blood sing.

Quiet and
still, the air
begs to be
riven by
plate on plate.

Yoga if
it moves you,
or running;
the cold swim;
writing That
Thing which lurks
in shadows
of hurly-
burly days.

Pray, sip, think;
meditate,
prostrate your
Self to some
Thing larger—
or beyond.

Early morning
waits to make.

Image source.