Truly Social

During our recent family vacation we spent three hours in an outrigger canoe on Big River (and you can do the same). It was the morning after Thanksgiving. The river was glassy-smooth and a deep sense of calm descended on all three of us, to the point that even our boisterous boy piped down, listening to the gentle splash of oars in the water and the occasional birdsong.

Canoeing in a river will reduce distractions and slow down cognition to the point that one notices small things: a bid perched on an old tree, harbor seals sunning themselves on the river bank, slippery river otters slinking into the water, grebes diving for fish. I want to notice such things in my surroundings.

Back at the inn, I read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media. I found them even more persuasive in 2024, when the online cacophony is crowding my brain and impairing my ability to think freely. It feels like all these corporations try to do is upset me or try to sell me something, or a combination of both, which dovetails nicely with Cory Doctorow’s excellent analysis of the enshittification of online platforms. I’m persuaded. Today I’m disengaging from all social media for the time being, and we’ll see how that impacts my quality of life, mental acuity, emotional availability, and priorities.

The plan is to replace this fake socialization with true socializing, one on one, with people I know and enjoy; invest effort in my neighborhood and local community; and spend some of it on solo pursuits like my fitness, music, and reading. And, of course, on my family, who deserve me at my best. I will continue to blog, and I wonder how being removed from the turmoil of social media will impact where my interests go or how this platform evolves.

Learning to Read Again

On the heels of finishing the manuscript for my next book, Behind Ancient Bars, we’re taking a much-needed Thanksgiving break in Mendocino. The breathtaking vistas and calm atmosphere are an opportunity to rest, lift, swim, play, and read at a different pace, one I have missed lately while working and studying full time.

One thing I’m doing on this break, whenever some downtime is available, is reading. From an actual book, not from a screen. It is a sensation I have missed and longed for, and yet it feels unfamiliar and not as easy as it was in my childhood. A few times during my GTU journey we were encouraged by our professors–and rightly so–to print out the materials and read them on paper or to purchase the books in hardback or paperback. I’m sorry to say I didn’t always take them up on their invitation to engage with the text in a more tactile way, for a simple reason: I commute by bicycle and train and carrying a lot of books or printed paper with me is much more of a chore than carrying a MacBook Air. It’s true that reading from a screen opens the door to online distractions, and even though I use software that locks down the worst offenders, the temptation nags at me. Believe me, the irony of typing about this onscreen for people to read onscreen, and also the irony of teaching using an electronic casebook, have not escaped me, but the convenience can’t be beat–nor can the price, in the case of multiple hefty textbooks.

While here, though, I’ve started to read Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, about the impact that digital reading and engagement has on our cognitive process. She focuses mostly on children, because they don’t have the analog background that us “olds” do, but honestly, after decades of working on a screen, I know exactly what she’s talking about. It feels like the synapses in my brain have changed to accommodate a completely new way of thinking, and I miss some aspects of my old cognitive ways. I’m finding the printed page challenging to engage with. My mental acuity, focus, and concentration are not what they were, and it’s probably not just aging–it’s aging while living digitally.

There are a bunch of things that remind me that I’m aging. Layers of superfluous stuff are being shed. Comfort in my own skin takes precedence. My faith in knowing The Truth (or that it can even be known, or held exclusively by one group or one side) has eroded, and I’m more comfortable asking questions and listening. Chronic conditions and issues start amassing, things that need attention. More and more precious people are gone, more lights are dimmed, and a lot of new stuff fades into irrelevance. Alongside these things comes an urgency to preserve and improve my mental acuity, and a big part of that is to learn to read again off a printed page, redevelop long-term concentration, and choose what and how I read intentionally and with care.

I’m especially enjoying reading new takes and angles on classic works that have accompanied my life. Being a big lover of Jane Austen, I Appreciated Ruth Wilson’s The Austen Remedy, and I now enjoy engaging with works that expand and challenge my view of the classics: Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which tells the Pride and Prejudice story from the perspective of the servants, and Claudia Gray’s mystery series featuring the second generation of some Austen characters. Along the same lines, I’m enjoying Percival Everett’s James, which retells the Huckleberry Finn story from the wry, witty, and compassionate perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is so infantilized and ridiculed in the original. Same deal with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which sheds a Dickensian light on some of the poor of this land (my new book engages with Bleak House and with Oliver Twist, so I have a new fondness for seeing how these perennial stories play out in different times and places). Charles Finch’s mystery novels are a delight to revisit. And I’m enjoying revisiting the flawed and complex heroes at the heart of Ann Cleves’ mystery novels: the Matthew Venn and Vera Stanhope series. I’m also enjoying reading about natural history–especially about trees and mushrooms–and about the impact of music, exercise, art, the outdoors, etc., on the human mind and body.

It was interesting to think about reading on page and off page when taking the Dead Sea Scrolls class. Most of my classmates, who are not native Hebrew speakers, challenged themselves–and did admirably–with the Hebrew text (with no nikud). To take on an equivalent challenge, I tried to read each scroll in the original, which is to say, from a digital imaging of the original papyrus. It’s still a screen, of course, but it made some of the experience palpable in the sense that it provoked the excitement of looking at words that another person wrote by hand. I want to invite that challenge, and that pleasure, back into my cognition this year.

I’m not sure yet how to balance this with the convenience (and ecological prudence) of reading things offscreen without printing them out. Perhaps I can resolve to read on paper whenever I read for pleasure or whenever a book is assigned (and will purchase the physical book, rather than its Kindle rendition).

The Oddness of Race Cheating

In 2011 I swam a 10k race in the Applegate lake in Oregon. It was a four-lap race around a circular course of buoys that spanned a big chunk of the lake. Open water races with repeated laps are psychologically difficult–at least, for me–because, when you’re already exhausted, it’s really difficult to rally your spirits and override the morosity of “here we go AGAIN.” I remember finishing the third lap near what would eventually be the finish line–the wind had changed directions and intensified by then, and every stroke was a challenge–and thinking, “if I came out of the water now, who would know?” It was the sort of cognitive miasma that tends to hit, at least for me, at about 75% of the race–though sometimes it takes the form of what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Normal people are just waking up for brunch. Who does this? Willingly? By the time the Oregon race rolled around, I was a fairly experienced open water swimmer (though new to marathons), and I already knew negative self-talk for what it was. When your brain starts vomiting garbage at you during an endurance race, if you know yourself well enough to expect it, you can identify the poisonous thought in your mind, like the Buddha greeting the demon Mara. I like to say to myself, “hello, Darkness, my old friend.” Usually it evaporates right away. Thing is, it would never occur to me–not in a million years–to actually exit the water after three laps of a four-lap race unless I was injured and intended to report as DNF right away. Not because I’m such a virtuous person–far from it–but because what would be the point? Didn’t I sign in to swim 10k? Why would I want to swim 7.5k and claim I swam 10k? what’s to be gained? And how would I look myself in the eye in the mirror later?

A couple of years later, a few of us were chatting over at the Marathon Swimmers Forum, and someone mentioned that he had overheard two (presumably) triathletes at the start line of that same race casually chatting about how they intended to only swim two or three laps, depending on how they felt like. We all found this very jarring, especially given how difficult it is to police open water races as it is. Everyone looks the same in the water with their race caps on, and no one is particularly invested in dogged surveillance of some particular dude, out of hundreds of others, getting out of the water a couple of laps earlier than he should.

This whole incident came back to mind when I read today’s article on Shvoong, an Israeli news source for everything endurance/adventure. Apparently, some guy ran the Ha-Yarkon Park Half Marathon wearing his own bib on his chest but keeping his friend’s bib in his pocket. Since this guy also happened to be very fast–he ran the race in 1:15–the ghost runner who “paced” him aroused suspicion, and the guy ended up confessing.

The interesting bit was that the story went viral in the online running community, and this guy actually replied to the post:

“Hi everyone, I’m commenting here because I think it’s about me. I ran with my chest bib according to the rules. In addition, there was an extra kit for a guy who could’t participate in my pocket. Out of my misunderstanding, I took the whole thing lightly, in perspective, without thinking too much about my ‘crime’. I learned this Friday from veterans in the running community that I wasn’t behaving with sportsmanlike ethics. I take full responsibility for my actions. I certainly learned from this and won’t do it again. I wish everyone quiet days.”

Later on, the same runner answered another commenter and expanded: “I’ll honestly say that, thanks to this incident, I learned a lot from veteran runners about the athletic unfairness, deeply, about what I’ve done… I tried to write something about my mistake/silliness/stupidity without hurting colleagues… I take full responsibility. I admit it was purely wanting to help a friend’s goal, who also did not understand the severity of the deed and I didn’t think it was such “deception” or immoral. The most important thing for me is that I learned from it and understood deeply the meaning of what I’d done. By the way, my results were disqualified as well and I’m glad justice was done.”

I find this absolutely fascinating, both as an athlete and as a criminologist. On one hand, true remorse is rare to find and difficult to identify, and if that’s what this is, then all’s well that ends well. On the other hand, how can a fairly fast runner–someone who finishes a half in 1:15 has (literally!) been around the block many times–fail to fully grasp the fundamental unfairness of what he’s done? Is it not plainly obvious that the concept of a race is that everyone competes under equal conditions? Have we not witnessed decades of quibbling over costumes, shoes, prosthetics, etc., in races to understand how important it is to keep athletic competitions fair? What’s there to misunderstand here?

The story sent me down a rabbit hole and I found out that marathon cheating is extremely common, to the point that a man named Derek Murphy has made it his life’s mission to catch the cheaters. The article expresses the same mystification I have with cheating; the only way to understand someone like Rosie Ruiz, the infamous Boston Marathon cheater, is to assume some form of individual clinical pathology. But the Ottawa Citizen ran a phenomenal in-depth story on marathon cheating, in which Jonathan Lasnier, a University of Ottawa sports psychologist, offers additional possibilities:

“Somebody can be task-oriented, and another can be ego-oriented,” he says. It’s the ego-oriented people who tend to be the cheaters. Rather than run the race for the sake of running it, “they will use other reference criteria to evaluate their competence,” says Lasnier. “They will focus more on the other people instead of themselves, and they will define success as superiority over others.”

Their mentality seems to be this: “when winning is everything, it is worth doing anything to win,” says Lasnier. But surely, not everyone who is motivated by ego and vanity is given to cheating? Surely there are some moral narcissists out there?

Lasnier says that it comes down to more personal factors. “I think it depends on your identity as an individual,” he says. A hypothetical: “Let’s say you’re an athlete and your identity is solely based on the fact that you are an athlete, and you want to perform and want to show competence toward others, because it’s the only thing in your life that’s supporting your identity. I think this can be dangerous, in a way.”

To Lasnier’s analysis I would add that the stakes of any given event are not the same for all people. Open water marathoners swim marathons because that’s what they do. But triathletes, like the two anonymous cheats that my friend overheard at the Applegate lake, probably register for open water races as prep for triathlons, which is the sport they really care about. They might have thought of the race as a nice opportunity to train for the swim leg and didn’t give a shit about the fact that the rest of us swam for time. Is it selfish? Sure. Does it reflect a common sort of solipsism, where you are only preoccupied with yourself and your goals and everyone else sort of fades into the background? Probably.

Similarly, someone who runs a marathon for time–for the sake of that very race–has a very different mentality than someone who runs it to qualify for another marathon (say, Boston). Indeed, one of the ways Derek Murphy catches Boston qualifier cheats is by comparing their qualifying time to the time they actually logged in Boston. This raises the inevitable question whether these people really believe that faking their results would produce an astonishing performance in Boston. To qualify for Boston, a woman my age (in the 50-54 age group) has to run a marathon in 3:50:00. In 2022, I ran the Oakland Marathon in about 5:15 (I’m slow and my knee caved in at mile 19). Wouldn’t it be weird if I qualified for Boston in less than four hours, only to run the actual race in more than five?

Still, if Lasnier is right, maybe the answer lies not so much in psychopathology but in sociology. I’m thinking specifically of Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s classic article Techniques of Neutralization (1958). Sykes and Matza wrote the article during a golden age of scholarly interest in juvenile delinquency, making a revolutionary (for its time) argument: juvenile delinquents do not have some warped sense of values and moralities that are opposed to ours. Indeed, they are on board with “our” (the supposedly law-abiding middle-class folks that Sykes and Matza envisioned as their audience) basic notions of justice and fairness. They therefore argued that “much delinquency is based on what is essentially an unrecognized extension of defenses to crimes, in the form of justifications for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent but not by the legal system or society at large.”

Sykes and Matza identify five such justifications: denial of responsibility (e.g., “it was an accident!”), denial of injury (e.g., “I just borrowed their car, what’s the big deal” or “they have insurance”), denial of the victim, (e.g., “that shop owner had it coming!” or “he had no business coming on to me at the pub”), condemnation of the condemners (e.g., “rich people steal all the time by evading taxes”), and appeals to higher loyalties (e.g., “I had to help my mom pay the bills.”)

The article itself is not based on empirical evidence, but rather on secondary observations of other people’s research, which are not without their flaws. Sykes and Matza do not consider, for example, the possibility that the interviewees might have actually held opposing values, but chose to explain what they had done in terms that they thought would appeal to their interviewers. And even though it is easy to see that these techniques of neutralization are framed in a way that does lend them persuasive purchase (after all, the question of damages, for example, is central to the disposition of tort cases, and the question of higher loyalties is fundamental to the necessity defense), it is not entirely clear why different people draw the line in different places on what seems to be persuasive. The Ha-Yarkon park runner, for example, relied on some of these: “I didn’t intend to” is a denial of responsibility; “I didn’t think anyone else was harmed” is a denial of injury and victim, and “I wanted to help a friend” is an appeal to higher loyalties. It doesn’t seem that folks bought his rationale, and his contrition does appear to reflect a sense of deeply buying into a set of norms that were, previously, extrinsic to him.

This is quite a sobering week to think about this stuff. First of all, it’s quaint to consider that, in 1958, a major innovation in criminology would have been to argue that delinquent teenagers are “just like us,” holding similar values and feeling guilt and shame, on a week in which the American people have voted for a man who still holds fast to the 1980s superpredator theory of juvenile delinquency (and who still openly and proudly espouses that the emblems of that flawed theory, the Central Park Five, who were exonerated by DNA evidence years ago, were guilty; they are suing him.) I have my own theories and opinions about the election, but the last thing we all need, I think, is more tiresome punditry about that, so I’ll keep it to myself. But in the spirt of “what is old is new again,” it’s interesting to consider that Sykes and Matza were writing against the grain of many delinquency scholars of their time in arguing that we share values in common even with people who appear to be doing things we all oppose, i.e., crime. Most people in the field at the time might as well have thought that folks of a different class and subculture lived on a different moral planet. I’d like to think, like Leonard Nemoy’s Spock in Star Trek, that there are always possibilities, and the coming years will provide ample opportunities to explore them.

More on Fitness at Almost 50

I’m a month and a half out from the beginning of my HRT journey and it’s a good time to review my health and fitness scenario. Many reasons to despair of the world, but I’m trying to keep as upbeat as I can through it by pursuing sources of inspiration. One of these is David Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky’s fabulous book Venus with Biceps, which offers a 200-year history of muscular women and strongwomen and their exploits through art and photography. Another has been the marvelous Team USA Gymnastics; my family and I went to see the Gold Over America Tour last night and marvel at the feats of athleticism and grace.

My personal favorite in this astounding group is Brody Malone, whose miraculous comeback from a horrific knee injury in time to be a massive contributor to the MAG USA team’s heroic bronze medal was an incredible tour de force of spiritual fortitude, discipline and grit. I’ve had to come back from far smaller setbacks–shoulder tendon things, broken toes, and sprained ankles–the latter only four months before I ran the Oakland Marathon, and remember well how grueling that was, so I am filled with awe. There are a lot of other reasons why I admire this guy so much–in the current, aggressively polarized state of this nation, it’s no small thing for a guy from a small town in Georgia to spend formative college years at Stanford and handle the culture clash with such grace (Brody, if you’re reading this, I would love to meet you! You and your family are welcome in my home anytime, and also, we need to have a conversation about animal rights). But everyone else in this group is phenomenal as well, and we had a wonderful time reveling in the breathtaking routines and delightful choreography of the whole thing.

It’s to the credit of the new HRT regime, as well as some newfound room to breathe while on research leave, that I owe what seems to be an upswing in my fitness. I’m improving in the weight room in ways that surprise me–not only in adding weights and reps, but also in being humble sometimes and staying with the same weights until I see better form. My benching and squatting have improved and I’ve noticed that my deadlifting gets a huge boost from listening to cheesy encouraging music when I add plates. I’ve also thrown in some olympic weightlifting sets on occasion, inspired by the remarkable Olivia Reeves. Really grateful to coaches Karina Inkster and Zoe Peled for their no-BS advice and coaching in the weight room and in the kitchen.

Things are looking up in the swimming pool as well, and although I’m treating this as the beginning of a comeback, I’m not yet sure what I’m coming back to. Maybe other parents of young children manage to somehow weave marathon swimming and training into their day, but our rhythm at home will not come close to allow me to spend the kind of time in the pool that I did when I trained for Tampa, the Sea of Galilee, or even something shorter like the Thames Marathon. Technique takes one only so far, and for serious marathoning one has to swim big volumes, and those take time. So maybe I’m looking at racing only within the 6-to-10-mile range. I’m not sure yet.

There’s one thing I’m doing better than when I was racing, and that’s cross training. I was, and still largely am, a disciple of Terry Laughlin and Total Immersion, and a big part of that was swimming races and long sets with a very slight two-beat-kick. The idea was to keep the quads, which eat up a lot of oxygen, for later, but “later” never seemed to come, and I don’t think I ever learned to kick properly. The difference is that I used to spend all my workout time in the pool, whereas now I spend half of it at the gym. Putting in the effort to build leg muscles in the gym is paying off in the sense that I have muscles I can now recruit, and this is going to be what I rely on to bring my times in the pool back to where they were. I still have several months of work to shave some seconds and minutes off my time, but I’m already seeing some times that I wasn’t expecting, so this addition of a small and fast six-beat-kick is already paying off in the second half of each interval. I’m still benefitting a lot from the months I spent working with coach Celeste St. Pierre on this and from her sage advice on stroke refinement and on midlife in general.

To give you an idea of what things look like these days, here’s an overview of my week. I’m now doing some form of cardio and some form of strength almost every day, and the combination seems to work well. Things do change some from week to week, because pool and gym proximity can be an issue and OW is getting cold (I’m more of a wuss than I used to be). Thankfully, San Francisco has lots of fantastic stairways, and choosing a different one every week to do some repeats is fun.

MondayLower body liftSwim (with pull drills, short intervals) or stairs, or hills
TuesdayUpper body liftSwim (with kick drills, short intervals)
WednesdayAbsPlyo + trampoline
ThursdayLower body lift Swim (more short axis)
FridayUpper body liftKrav Maga (sometimes also swim)
SaturdayPilates + mobilitySwim (OW or short) or stairs
Sundaymobility + foam rollingleisurely morning walk
Typical weekly workout schedule, summer/fall 2024

Add to this the fact that I commute by e-bike, and I think it’s a pretty active week for someone who turns 50 in November and is just beginning to find a way out of the perimenopausal woods of woe. The key is to schedule this around research and family; I want to finish the biblical prison book in a few weeks, and I also want to be a present and energetic parent. The time expenditure is not trivial; we’re talking about 90 mins of physical activity not including the bike commute, so at least some of it has to happen before my kid wakes up and some of it while he’s in school. In general, this calls for more productivity and less dawdling in the library and in the classroom, and I find that the HRT bought me some mental clarity that helps with that.

As far as food goes, I try to hit 100g of protein a day, which requires some aggressive strategizing when it’s plant-based. I usually succeed if I start the day with 30-40 grams right out of the gate, which require some combination of tofu/tempeh, high protein vegan yogurt, and/or protein powder. The easiest thing to get this to happen is with a giant protein smoothie, full of fruit and greens; it’s not a culinary sensation, but it’s fast, simple, and effective. Being strategic about snacks (my go-to is a bag of lupini beans) helps a lot. My fiber goal (hovering around 40-50 grams) is much easier with plant-based diets, and I usually hit it without even making an effort. I take a multi that includes iron, zinc, and of course B12, and also creatine (usually in my morning smoothie). The next step will be to add some probiotics to the mix, as there seems to be research that supports the connection between a healthy gut and increased estrogen production.

The perimenopausal weight gain is not budging, but it’s been rearranging itself differently, and there even seem to be some glimmers of a physique that are really gratifying (the muscular women’s book is a real inspiration!). I’m avidly following marvelous Olympic rugby star Ilona Maher for some liberating inspiration and am enjoying her wisdom very much. My main goal is to get as strong as I can, to increasingly improve my quality of life, and to figure out the next steps in my swimming comeback. Honestly, the fact that the weepiness, constant periods, and nightly sweat lodge seem to be in the rearview mirror is a LOT, and just the fact that I have the energy to do all this makes me very happy.

One factor that seems to be outside my control is the resting scenario. Even with optimal conditions–pitch dark room, reasonable bedtime, ice-cold tart cherry juice before bed–and even with the HRT-induced improvement in my insomnia–it’s still difficult to sleep straight through the night. Grief and fear are very much in the picture, the news intrude into my nightmares, and even though I meditate at night and have a short and beautiful prayer routine upon awakening, there’s only so much I can do with world events and personal trauma against the backdrop of perimenopause. If this is what’s jamming the wheels of my journey, there’s precious little I can do about it that I’m not doing already, and as the Serenity Prayer reminds us, the wisdom to know what we can and cannot control is priceless.

There’s one more thing to add to this snapshot, and that seems to be that my new pastimes seem to be organized around themes of butchy resilience and competence. I started learning to play drums in February, in a really supportive group led by master teacher Brian Gorman, where the hilarious, no-nonsense Gen X energy feeds my soul. I’m in love with this! I’m also in love with my new krav maga class; the new realities of living in this environment have reminded me that knowing how to defend oneself is an important life skill. I don’t need robes, belts, or gurus–I just need to know how to beat the crap out of people if the need arises, and that’s exactly what they teach us at Tactica. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.

All of this reinvention may seem a bit odd, but remember that many life events have hastened it: the death of my beloved father and resulting changes in our family dynamics, the horrors of October 7, the ensuing war, and the resulting devastation of my professional environment, are all part of this. The older I get, the more I feel that what we do–jobs, hobbies, even relationships–is really not who we are. Very little, if anything, of what comprises my daily life is an inalienable part of my identity. The smaller the ego becomes, and the less is wrapped up in it, the better I feel, and these new things that are healthy and life-giving right now are no more a part of me than, say, flute playing or singing or meditation teaching were in the past. It’s just what feels right to do at the moment, and I can revisit as the seasons of my life continue to change.

Professor Presbury Takes His Meds

One of the creepier, more Gothic stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon is The Adventure of the Creeping Man, in which Holmes and Watson are retained by the secretary of an academic, Professor Presbury, when the professor begins to behave in a peculiar and alarming manner. Recently engaged to a woman much younger than himself, the professor becomes irascible and menacing and his body language is altered: he climbs and creeps like a monkey, at some point climbing up to his daughter’s window. In addition, the professor is very secretive about packages he receives from Europe, and his own dog begins to attack him.

Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers (but I hope you won’t, because otherwise the rest of this post won’t make much sense): Holmes figures out that the professor’s behavior is cyclical–he seems to be taking some behavior-altering substance every nine days. It turns out that he sought suspicious rejuvenating treatments from a shady European practitioner (one in a long line of shady antagonists from the continent in the canon) in anticipation of his future nuptials to the young woman.

I’ve probably read this story dozens of times, alongside the rest of the canon, and like any person who has a decades-long loving relationship with an artistic or literary work, it hits me different each time. In her gorgeous book The Jane Austen Remedy, octogenarian author and literary scholar Ruth Wilson tells of her evolving understanding and relating to Austin’s novels, which she has been reading and rereading since 1947. I have the same sort of relationship with Arthur Conan Doyle. His works enrich and educate me, and sometimes piss me off, in ways that evolve throughout my life. I just recently rediscovered the terrific, chilling film adaptation of Lot no. 249 and my life hasn’t quite been the same since I saw it. But I digress–let’s get back to Professor Presbury and his mysterious medication.

Earlier in my life I found Presbury pitiful and creepy in equal measures, and as a modern reader, identified with the deep distaste that Presbury’s daughter Edith and his secretary, Bennett, have for the huge age gap between Presbury and his fiancée. It’s easy to mercilessly dismiss Presbury as a pathetic old man, desperately attempting the impossible: to bend evolution to his will using the Victorian version of Viagra so as to turn back the wheel of time. But when I started studying criminology and learned of the emergence of positivism, a lot of this stuff made more sense to me. As I have explained elsewhere, Doyle started writing the stories when Darwinism was already a sensation in England, and his enthusiasm about the marriage of science and crime is palpable in the stories. Shortly before Doyle began writing, Italian doctor and academic Cesare Lombroso published his book L’Uomo Delinquente, in which he argued that criminals were atavists, evolutionary aberrations, who could be identified by physical markers such as their measurements and facial features. If you visit Museo Lombroso in Turin, an experience I highly recommend, you’ll get more of a sense of the life and times of Lombroso, as well as of the sociopolitical underpinnings of his theory, and you’ll see his huge collections of skeletons, skulls, and death masks of criminals. You can also read David Horn’s fantastic book about Lombroso. This also explains why Holmes offers such aggressive censure of Presbury toward the end of the story, when all is revealed: “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.” To subvert the natural course of events by injecting one with the extract of monkey glands is to reverse the ape-to-human evolution. It is an aberration, it is recurrence to atavism, and it must not be attempted.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Professor Presbury lately because of my own physical predicament. Normally I have heaps of distaste for tiresome, self-centered Internet confessionals crafted to “raise awareness” to the suffering and misery of the author, so of course I ask your forgiveness in advance for burdening you with more of this annoying genre, but this is such an unspoken issue that it can benefit from some exposure. I’m in perimenopause and in the thick of an entire buffet of horrible symptoms. It is difficult to describe the bad feeling to anyone who is not experiencing it. Everything you’ve read about–the brain fog, the weight gain, the irritability, the heart palpitations, the sudden drop in aerobic capacity, the frequent and unpredictable periods, the hot flashes and night sweats–is true, of course, but underlying it all is a deep, unrelenting feeling of malaise beyond definition, that makes one want to crawl out of one’s own skin and flee far, far away. I’ve tried to remind myself that this could also be a product of my grief over my father and the appalling antisemitic climate I experienced this year, but the physical suffering cannot be denied and it is immense. I’m not a crybaby, I’ve swum marathons in frigid water without complaint, but perimenopause has truly brought me to my knees, and shortly before my 50th birthday I found myself asking my doctor for HRT.

Hormone replacement therapy takes a different form for each woman. In my case, it involves 12 days a month of progesterone, taken orally in enormous capsules, and estrogen patches that are supposed to be waterproof but don’t fare 100% well if one swims a strenuous workout. Anyway, we’re a month in, and the sense of relief is palpable. I feel alive. I have my life back. My period was short and predictable. No more sweating, no more weeping, mental clarity is back, and my lifting and swimming have both improved.

I’m mentioning this because I sense there is still some stigma attached to taking hormones. For one thing, it presents one with one’s Professor Presbury-ness: I’m now older, I miss being younger, I’m pathetically trying to bring back my juice by taking hormones my body no longer reliably produces. It’s embarrassing and humbling and, oddly, has brought about a wave of sympathy for Presbury (and for another pathetic and scary heroine of a book I read in childhood, She by Henry Rider Haggard.) I get it now. I get no longer recognizing your vessel and longing for the sense of vitality you’d taken for granted. Watching (and being enthralled by) the Olympics certainly drove the point home. I am captivated and inspired by the athletes and their stories. Like so many people worldwide, I was swept into the drama, joy, camaraderie, and astonishing performance of the USA Men’s Artistic Gymnastics team and their heroic capturing of the bronze medal. I could daydream about performing astonishing feats of strength, endurance, and agility on the international stage, but I’m not an insanely talented kid in his or her early twenties who spent hours at the gym every day of their life; instead, I’m a middle-aged family woman and where I am in life is a lot more reminiscent of the athletes’ parents, shown cheering for them in the audience. But the joy on the faces accomplishing their incredible athletic goals made me also crave the sense of feeling strong, capable, confident in my body, the way I felt a decade ago when I was swimming open water marathons. HRT has brought this sensation back. I feel at peace inside my vessel. It is much easier to be an Instrument of God’s Peace, as per the Prayer of St. Francis, when your body works in predictable and satisfying ways.

There’s also the health stuff: many women are still terrified of HRT because of misleading science, which made many friends of mine who are now in their sixties miss out on a medically provable, low-risk solution to abject physical misery. If you follow only one link in this blog post, make sure it’s this superb, science-based NYT exposé of how women have been cheated out of this important remedy (you’ve read thousands of screeds about misogyny in medicine, so insert one here). Risks of cancer with HRT are associated only with start of use after one turns 60. Start using hormones before you’re 60, and the benefits often outweigh the risks.

Finally, there’s this notion that we must accept what is happening naturally and resort to herbal remedies and meditation. HRT, we are warned, will not do the trick if we are too lazy to eat well, exercise, and reduce stress. I find this message patronizing and insulting, not only to me, but to many women in the same condition. I eat extremely healthy, plant-based, and maximize lean protein and fiber beyond what doctors and coaches prescribe active people. I work out approximately 90 minutes a day, combining strength and cardio, I lift heavy, I do plyo, I do intervals and sprints in the pool, I do pilates and abs and conditioning, I stretch, and I commute by bicycle. “Reducing stress” as a prescription for women with kids and aging parents and mounting responsibilities at work and elsewhere is a risible proposition, but I’m a meditation teacher, I do engage in contemplative practices and know how to do it. Why try to sell me on black cohosh and St. John’s Wort rather than on the hormones my body has produced naturally for decades–estrogen and progesterone–and give women who resort to the latter the sense that they have somehow failed to take proper control of their health? I’ve spoken to several friends who have started taking HRT. It’s not an openly talked about issue, which, lemme tell ya, is a damn shame, because there is a wealth of information in these stories. For one thing, the hormonal dosage and delivery method do require attention and, frequently, tweaking along the way. But every single woman I talked to has raved about the vast improvement to her quality of life taking hormones. Why not take them? Do some investigating, talk to your doctor, and take your life back. Feeling comfortable in your own skin is your birthright.

Oh, and please read Stacy Sims’ excellent book Next Level, which is a phenomenal primer on menopause and perimenopause physiology for active women, accompanied by superb action items and recommendations, or take her fantastic menopause online course. This is happening in your body right now. You’re living it. You’re not in the waiting room, holding out for something better. This is your one and only body, your one and only precious life. I’m rooting for you to improve it, to seize it by the horns. Kind of like Professor Presbury tried to do, but science-based and practical. Not on the sly, not in the shadows. In the open, so that we can all talk about this and make the best medical decisions for ourselves.

The Elusive Body Recomposition Quest

The vegan fitness world is aflutter and atwitter about a new documentary miniseries on Netflix called You Are What You Eat: A Twins Experiment. The show follows a recent Stanford experiment in which pairs of identical twins were randomly assigned vegan and omnivore diets and their metrics were followed for eight weeks. Everyone I talk to about this is a certifiable fitness nerd–including myself–so here is the link to the actual JAMA publication and here is the write-up from the Stanford comms department. In the areas of cardiovascular health and telomere length, the subjects on the vegan diet did better than their omnivore twins:

At three time points — at the beginning of the trial, at four weeks and at eight weeks — researchers weighed the participants and drew their blood. The average baseline LDL-C level for the vegans was 110.7 mg/dL and 118.5 mg/dL for the omnivore participants; it dropped to 95.5 for vegans and 116.1 for omnivores at the end of the study. The optimal healthy LDL-C level is less than 100.

Because the participants already had healthy LDL-C levels, there was less room for improvement, Gardner said, speculating that participants who had higher baseline levels would show greater change.

The vegan participants also showed about a 20% drop in fasting insulin — higher insulin level is a risk factor for developing diabetes. The vegans also lost an average of 4.2 more pounds than the omnivores.

But when it got to weight and body composition, things got a lot trickier. A big challenge in comparing weight loss and muscle gain has to do with the distribution of macronutrients across the two diets: a higher consumption of protein supports muscle growth. I fished out the table from the supplement comparing the macro contents of the diets, which shows that protein provision and consumption among the vegan group was significantly lower than among the omnivorous group. This was true both for the Trifecta meals and for the self-provided ones.

On one hand, this sets up the vegan group to fail: they had fewer muscle building blocks than their omnivore counterparts. On the other hand, this situation may not be all that dissimilar to how vegans and omnivores eat in the wild. For all the good times we have mocking omnivores who inquire “where we get our protein,” when someone is actively strength training and striving to build muscle the quest for protein feels a little bit like nutrition Tetris. I should know: last year I read Stacy Sims’ wonderful book Next Level, about women athletes in perimenopause and menopause. Sims, who studies exercise physiology and is a leading voice in the quest to recognize the uniqueness of female physique (“women are not small men”), emphasizes the importance of lifting heavy, eating protein, improving explosive power through sprints and HIIT, and building strong bones through plyometric sets. It was because of that (and with the help of coach Celeste St. Pierre, as well as coaches Karina Inkster and Zoe Peled) that I changed my training regime quite dramatically. With the new emphasis on strength, I’ve joined the ranks of vegans who are strategic about the protein content of their meals. Sadly, the nutrition breakthrough study we are all waiting for, which will uncover the life-giving properties of pasta with tomato sauce, is not in the cards, and in addition to a lot of protein in my meals, I’m also emphasizing it in my snacks (more on that in a bit.)

But the problem of body composition is by no means endemic to vegans. As Prof. Gardner explains on the show, nutrition studies are notoriously untrustworthy because they require human compliance in areas that are difficult to measure. To try and counter this problem, the research team provided the twins with prepared meals from Trifecta for the first four weeks. The twins also received terrific strength coaching. But it turned out that the twins did not follow these plans to the letter. The subjects who were interviewed said that they skipped carbs (the meals seemed “too carby” to them) and added a lot of cardio to the strength workouts; the nutritionist scolded them for “wasting all that beautiful muscle” that they were building on the diet. Other subjects really struggled to eat enough to build muscle. This fantastic article by powerlifter and strength training coach Casey Johnston explains what’s what. If you’ll look at her avocado diagram, you’ll immediately grasp the problem with conventional dieting: one wants to lose fat, so one cuts calories, but in the process loses muscle as well. When one despairs of the diet and regains the weight, that weight is fat–so now one is bigger but has lost muscle. The next diet will lead to more loss of fat and muscle combined, followed by regaining fat but not muscle, etc. etc. In other words:

What I learned from the twins experiment is that reversing this trend by eating very little or by doing heaps of cardio is a quest destined to fail. For a while, at the beginning of a quest journey, beginners might see a change in body composition that encompasses both muscle gain and fat loss. But after that magical “newbie gains” period, body recomposition becomes much more elusive, and the only way to accomplish it is by periodizing one’s goals: spending a few months bulking (eating more, building more muscle *and* fat) and then a few months cutting (eating less but still strength training to lose the fat):

I know people whose lives revolve around lifting and the gym, and who can devote a considerable portion of their brain space to grams of protein and weightlifting sets. And if I had more time, I might become one of those people; as it happens, I’m working *and* studying full time, which is why I have paid people to do the thinking for me (I just follow the workouts on the app and try to watch my macros). Thankfully, we live in the future: some of my new snacks include conveniently packaged lupini beans and the most wonderful vegan Italian prosciutto and carpaccio (these are not cheap treats, alas. I really hope to see high quality vegan meats, etc., become less expensive in the very near future). The more profound aspect of this is that it is hard, but essential (I think), to leave behind the vacuous appearance-related aspirations and to make the journey about function: gaining muscle and becoming stronger is its own reward.

Here’s how I know: when my beloved father got ill, when I was training regularly, I flew out to be with him at the hospital, and packed a bunch of stuff in my wheelie bag, as I didn’t know how long I was going for. Or was it a trip to a conference? Anyway, it was when I was still increasing weights quite frequently from workout to workout. When I got inside the plane, I braced myself for the dreaded lift of the wheelie bag into the overhead compartment (“lady, do you need help?”). Reader, IT WAS CHILD’S PLAY. I was truly amazed at how much spending 20 minutes in my garage a few times a week improved my quality of life.

I’ve now spent a few months sitting on my butt and doing nothing in the exercise and fitness department: I’ve been busy with my new scholarly pursuits, and the grief and horror have been too great. But I’m not helping anyone, least of all myself, by eating things that make me unwell and letting go of my strength, mobility, and agility. So, it’s back on track for me. The dream of a dramatically chiseled and trim appearance is over. I’m going to focus my attention on aggressively improving my quality of life, so that I can continue to productively contribute my efforts to the world–raising my son, finishing my new schooling, launching a new scholarly adventure, forging a fresh career path, building new community–for many years to come.

Film Review: 26.2 to Life

I still remember the incredible emotions that choked me as I took the last steps of the Oakland Marathon and realized that, yes, I was going to finish. Even with lots of experience racing endurance events, including some very long marathon swim, there was nothing quite like it. And the faces of everyone around me reflected that we had all undergone a very special experience, stretching body, mind and spirit to their limits, and that we would forever share that experience.

It is this direct appeal to common humanity that drives Christine Yoo’s fantastic documentary 26.2 to Life, which is now playing in select theaters and winning all sorts of incredible awards at film festival. With unparalleled access to the inside of San Quentin–the yard, of course, 105 laps of which add up to 26.2 miles, but also other areas of the prison, including the cells–this documentary has the potential to go where no work of advocacy has gone before.

Lots of tired, jargony academic pieces about carceral geography and mass incarceration blather about “bodies” and “embodiment”, but nowhere is the somatic experience of an incarcerated body more visceral than in this film. We see people living under the horrid conditions that are only too familiar to regular readers of this blog and using endurance running–their own bodies, pushed to their limit–to sublimate and divert anger, to release stress, to find liberation, to imagine commonalities and brotherhood with people running on the outside. In one memorable scene, runner Jonathan Levin talks of running as a physical form of doing penance for his crime, reminding me vividly of the incredible ending scene of the Buddhist film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring.

Other runners feature more prominently, and we get to learn their personal stories. Markelle “The Gazelle” Taylor, the fastest runner of the club, dreams of qualifying for the Boston Marathon and running it if he makes parole. Rahsaan “New York” Thomas finds his voice as a journalist and leader in prison (his work for the San Quentin News and for Ear Hustle is also featured in Adamu Chan’s recent documentary What These Walls Cannot Hold. Tommy Wickerd works hard to redeem himself from a life of violence and be as much of a good husband to Marin and father to Tommy II as he can from behind bars. These folks, and many others featured in the film, are people I know. Some of them I met in person, though most of them I did not; I did spend many many hours with their loved ones, and hearing from them, in the weekly #StopSanQuentinOutbreak coalition meetings that we document in FESTER. There was something heartbreaking in watching these very familiar people in footage from before the calamity would strike and terrorize them and require them to develop new forms of courage and work new psychological muscles.

What stands out in the movie is how it lends itself to bridges of empathy and perspective taking. Not pity–though the men’s stories are contextualized in a way that does not absolve them from accountability and yet evinces profound understanding of their circumstances–but the same sense that every one of us has felt upon embarking on a huge athletic undertaking. The same sense of exhilaration and terror that is evident in the first steps of the protagonist of Brittany Runs a Marathon; the same trepidation and enormous effort of the swimmers in Driven; the sense of dread, then relief, accompanying Alex Honnold’s heroic climb of El Capitan in Free Solo. Christine Yoo has elevated Taylor, Thomas, Wickerd and the other runners to their rightful place along these cinematic athletic heroes by bringing her viewers into communion with the most basic things we all share: our bodies and our striving to make something of our lives within them.

You must see this movie. And you also must consider financially helping some of the film’s heroes. As pioneering research by Alessandro de Giorgi shows, the first and foremost challenges for anyone on the outside involve their basic survival: finding a place to live and a job. Even phenomenal athletes are not exempt from this. Markelle sells amazing athletic gear you can wear in pride for your training and racing, and Rahsaan is doing wonderful journalistic work that requires support.. Too often we expect formerly incarcerated folks to hit the ground running with activism for their friends still on the inside, discounting the importance of getting their own lives in order. Let’s lend our fellow athletes a helping hand.

The Dream Is Over? Seasons in Fitness and Sports

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclestiastes 3:1-8

For many of us, this is an ordinary Friday; not so for the small subset of people interested in marathon swimming. Today, my friend Avishag Kofman-Turek, whom I met through our mutual interest in swimming the Sea of Galilee, completed an amazing athletic feat: swimming the North Channel from Ireland to Scotland.

Throughout the day, since the wee hours of the morning, I followed the GPS feed and rooted for Avishag’s safe and successful crossing. It is a huge endeavor. The water is frigid and required many months of difficult acclimation, not to mention a considerable increase in practice yardage (I should say, mileage.)

While witnessing this accomplishment, I was busy reading and completing assignments for four courses: Modern Jewish Thought, Intro to Buddhism and Buddhist Studies, How to Read the Book of Job, and Buddhism in the West. Recently, I’ve embarked on my own marathon swim, an intellectual one; I’m pursuing rabbinical ordination at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism and a masters degree at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies. I’ve been keeping this on the down-low during the application process, but if you peek here you’ll see a familiar face. It’s a feat no less solitary than marathon swimming, nor is it going to be easy (I continue to work full time as a law professor and be a full-time devoted mom to my son – I just sleep a lot less and have eliminated idle Internet time from my schedule) but it looks a lot less heroic, as it entails nothing photogenic: just sitting in front of my laptop, reading and writing.

It’s been ages since I trained for, and participated in, a real marathon swim. I know exactly when the last time was: the Thames Marathon in 2016. It was beautiful and serene and a good way to go about semi-retirement from marathon swimming. I still swim in the bay once in a while, and I did crank out a 5k without much effort in Kona last year, but nothing like the distances I used to put in week after week when I was training for big things like the Sea of Galilee or the Tampa Bay Marathon. In the last year, I shifted my efforts into multisport and lifting, partly to combat perimenopause and its discontents, but in the four months since my dad’s illness everything came to a grinding halt and the grief has made it very hard to work out at all, let alone swim a meaningful distance. I’m experiencing a really rough somatic reaction to breathing while swimming, perhaps because dad died of a rare lung disease and struggled to breathe before he was intubated. The lack of exercise and some emotional eating resulted in putting on some weight, and while a couple of months of careful whole food/veg juice diet and vigorous exercise will do the trick, I’m just not feeling it as a pressing priority. I am making an effort to eat healthy things, take good supplements, and move every day (I commute by bicycle, lift in my garage, and take walks in the neighborhood). But it really is an effort.

I did feel a little melancholy today reflecting on Avishag’s amazing swim. Not a sense of envy at her success, but rather a bit of wistfulness about how I don’t seem to be able to muster the kind of gumption and perseverance I used to have about dramatic athletic feats. I take some comfort in the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, echoed in this awesome Rich Roll podcast about periodizing one’s life. Now’s the time to take good care of myself without embarking on big health-and-fitness goals, make sure I’m well nourished when I go to teach and study, and invest in my new academic pursuits. Thing is, I’m not getting any younger, and while swimming is something you can continue to do and improve in throughout your life, I doubt I’ll be able to pull off big marathon swims out of the blue when I’m in my 60s and 70s without putting the requisite time now. But none of this matters if I just don’t have it in me at the moment.

The dream is over,

What can I say?

The dream is over

Yesterday

I was the dream weaver, but now I’m reborn

I was the walrus, but now I’m John

And so, Dear Friends, we’ll just have to carry on;

The dream is over.

John Lennon, “God”

Lifting at Home

A few months ago I mentioned my new commitment to strength training, which has since taken shape with the help of my fantastic coach, Celeste St. Pierre. Celeste knows a lot about triathlons and about swimming, and, like me, she is a disciple of the excellent Stacy Sims. Sims’ work on perimenopausal and menopausal athletes emphasizes the importance of building muscle and bone at an age in which we start losing both very quickly, and offers no-nonsense advice on diet, supplements, and training, which focuses on shorter and more explosive workouts, including sprints, plyometrics, and lifting heavy. Celeste and I have been working on a weekly schedule that combines my love for endurance/cardio things with my newfound passion for lifting, so this is what my week looks like, fitness-wise:

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays: I lift, swim, and roll/stretch. On Mondays and Wednesdays I typically use the Berkeley facilities – their weight room is terrific and the Spieker Pool brings back grad school memories. If I really want a treat, I swim at the Golden Bear pool. On Fridays I lift at home and swim at Balboa Pool or at Garfield Pool and, if I have time, I take a yoga class at Yoga Flow.

Tuesdays and Thursdays: I do some form of strength (typically abs and a leg series that includes plyometrics and jump-rope) at home, followed by a sprint/interval run/walk.

On Saturday, which is my official recovery day, I take a pilates class at Synced Pilates with the fantastic Sue Free.

On Sunday I do something long – either a long run followed by boot camp in my neighborhood or a brick workout (swim followed by run.)

On all these days I also commute on my cargo e-bike, which adds some cardio to my day.

For more than half my week, several of my workouts happen at home, and over the years, with Chad’s help, I’ve constructed a fabulous little workout corner that has pretty much everything I need. I have a yoga wall, which I bought used during my days of teaching fitness at Elevate Group Fitness; I can use it with springs or with TRX straps, and I have a belt that allows me to go upside down and remember my Antigravity days (it’s also great for those of us with back afflictions.) I also have quite a collection of dumbbells, some of them adjustable, a little barbell that fits my space with some plates, and a foldable bench for bench pressing. The weighted balls are nice to use, as are a few kettlebells that I swing around when I do high-intensity interval work. I have some resistance bands around, which I also take with me if I’m at a hotel for a few days. Music is always an essential part of this routine.

I may outgrow the weights I have at some point, but I’m coming to realize that gaining muscle is a function of various different types of lifting: powerlifting heavy weights through compound lifts and burnout exercises with more moderate weights. I’m already seeing some success (newbie gains are so encouraging!) and plan to continue gain as much muscle as I can to combat perimenopause and its insidious effects on fitness. Honestly, I’m not sure whether workouts are becoming more ferocious or I’m getting older or both. But this approach of shorter, more intense and more varied workouts, combined with a lot of stretching, rolling, and recovery, is working quite well for me at this point, and it might fit those of you who are entering your forties, fifties, and beyond.

From Endurance to Strength… in Perimenopause… with Plants… with Positive Groundlessness

In the last few weeks I’ve been making big changes to my nutrition and fitness routine, which call for some careful reflection. The whole thing started when a colleague–a badass athlete in her own right–lent me her copy of Stacy Sims’ new. book Next Level, the first (as far as I know) book about perimenopausal and menopausal athlete. Just a few days later, I attended an open water swim camp in Hawaii, where my wonderful and knowledgeable coach, Celeste St. Pierre, recommended the same book, and impressed upon me the vital importance of Lifting Heavy Shit.

Up to this point, my athletic endeavors were almost squarely in the endurance world. I swam long (and slow) in open waters, transitioning then to multisport to protect myself from injury. In the heyday of my marathon swimming days, I did no cross training whatsoever – only swimming. Later, I added on calisthenics, in the form of fusion classes (which I took and taught) and antigravity fitness (using silky hammocks.) I’m not quite sure whether I was fully aware of the importance of doing all these things at the same time, and I’m also pretty sure I wasn’t told to increase the resistance and challenge or to eat more. Generally speaking, and relatedly, my weight has been almost entirely the product of my diet: when I eat more and poorly, I gain weight; when, with great control and care, I eat less and well, I lose weight. Going in the former direction is easier than the latter.

For many important biological reasons that Sims explains in a lucid, straightforward way in her book, the wellbeing and athletic priority during perimenopause and beyond should be building lean muscle and bone. For many of us, this means changing our body composition, which is not an easy thing to do and not one that can be accomplished merely with dietary changes. The building block for muscle is protein, which has to be consumed in adequate amounts, and the muscles must be used in a progressively challenging fashion for them to grow stronger.

I read the book cover to cover and then, through the recommendation of another wonderful athletic colleague, was introduced to lifter Casey Johnston and her excellent couch-to-barbell program. Two weeks ago, for the first time, I mounted plates on my barbell, and am quite fascinating with this transformation, though I still have many questions and uncertainties. Here is some of what has been happening:

  1. I am lifting three times a week – twice at the school gym with my colleague, once or twice at home. This has required a certain change to my routine. I lift on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday; I now swim on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. I also kept up my pilates on Saturday and my boot camp (which includes lifting) on Sunday. On lifting days I also do a short plyometric set (quick, HIIT-type jumping). Monday is somewhat of a lighter day, though I do ride the cargo e-bike, as I do every weekday, to drop my son off at school. That means shorter but more intense workouts, which is what Sims recommends. It does feel weird, as someone used to endurance workouts, that there’s none of the prolonged suffering that we marathoning people tend to glorify. Hilariously, I am finding the mantra “I can take anything for twenty seconds” useful for both HIIT and lifting.
  2. I am already experiencing improvement in my strength. Last week I flew to Atlanta for a conference (ASC was very good this year, and I’ve already posted about some of what I learned–on court fees and on extradition) with a big, heavy backpack containing everything I needed for four days. When I got to my airplane seat, I lifted my bag into the overhead compartment–and was immediately struck by a big difference. Reader, it was child’s play. Not that it wasn’t heavy; I was stronger, noticeably so, and it was very gratifying. Same story with groceries. My partner was astonished yesterday when I came back from the co-op with a gigantic box of produce, oat milk cartons, and the like, and carried it myself as if it was nothing despite its weird shape. All of this is very good news and provides ample motivation to keep going.
  3. The progress arc at the beginning is very satisfying. Every time I lift I think to myself, there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to lift five pounds more in two days. And then the next workout arrives, and to my astonishment, I can! I’m sure this fast progress will slow down as I progress, but for now, this linear improvement (2.5-lb increments for upper body, 5-lb increments for lower body) is providing a huge motivation boost. This is a good thing. Throughout my life, I’ve often see-sawed between two good sensations: growth (picking up a sport or a skill I know nothing about and getting through the uncomfortable months/years that it takes to become “good enough” to enjoy it) and relishing skill (making small improvements in a sport I’m already quite proficient at.) Sometimes it feels like I need to stay in my comfort zone (as with, say, swimming or flute.) Sometimes I pick up something new (such as tai chi or the handpan.) Now is a time for the latter, and I feel excitement building for when I get “good enough” to know what I’m doing.
  4. I’ve also introduced some changes to my swimming. At the open water swim camp, Celeste taught us to activate our muscles through dryland practice before getting into the water. I’m finding this highly effective, and I’ve made one more adjustment–my sets are shorter and sprintier now. I cover fewer yards overall, but the intensity of the practice has increased, which is exhilarating. I’m also hitting some surprising times with my 50s and 100s – times I hadn’t seen in the pool since I was training for Tampa Bay in 2012. At 48, this is gratifying and makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing.
  5. I’m still not 100% sure what I’m doing, nutrition-wise, despite having gotten excellent advice. Sims’ book, the coaching figures in my life, and my awesome new acquaintance, vegan fitness coach Karina Inkster, have all emphasized two principles: I have to eat a lot more than I’ve been eating, and I have to prioritize protein. These things go hand in hand, because it is a pretty impossible job to double one’s protein intake (especially on a vegan diet) and keep the caloric situation low. Sims discusses the common problem of low energy availability, or LEA, and stresses how crucial it is to fuel properly before, during, and after workouts. We vegans love to scoff at ignorant meat eaters who ask us “where do you get your protein?” and, indeed, one can get a lot of protein on a plant-based diet, but it does require more planning, as the things one should eat (good, plant based food with fiber and phytonutrients) don’t tend to come in easy protein-rich packages. On Karina’s website, one can find lots of excellent resources for protein and other nutrition strategies for vegan athletes. She even has a handy vegan protein calculator, which instructed me to eat twice as much protein as I had been eating. This means I’m chasing protein throughout the day (tofu scramble; adding vegan protein powder to green smoothies; adding hemp, flax, and chia to my morning oatmeal) and all the other calories sort of work themselves out.
  6. I’m also not sure what’s happening with my body size-wise. Despite eating almost twice what I ate during the Big Weight Loss and Health Restoring Project, and despite putting on about 12 lbs or so, my size doesn’t feel significantly different. My measurements are almost the same. The scale is unhelpful, as its body composition readings are inconsistent and bizarre. Parts of me feel more muscular, other parts softer, and, in general, I feel more like a work in progress than like the chiseled ancient Greek statue my mind imprinted on as the picture of health and strength. I can’t argue with the functional improvement, but there is definitely a part of me that is terrified of regaining all the weight I lost through so much effort–if only because I have wonderful clothes and would like to continue wearing them. This is a really interesting and juicy place to explore in meditation–attachment to body, attachment to clothes, the possibility that I purchased my current wardrobe as a protective talisman against weight gain, lots of new things to learn about myself and my relationship to my body.
  7. Spiritually, the whole thing is weird, fun, and a bit discombobulating. One of my favorite teachers, Pema Chödrön, speaks of “positive groundlessness“: coming to a sense of tentative, floating peace with the idea that nothing is permanent and there is really nothing to hold on to:

The idea of letting go of fear and becoming comfortable with groundlessness has been a recurring theme for me in the last few weeks, pretty much since I participated in the Smithfield Trial and experienced the elation of its aftermath. Recently, Wayne Hsiung and I recorded our third podcast together, in which I espoused a theory about the judge’s closed fist where it came to affirmative defenses and evidence in the trial. I’m increasingly convinced that what drives these aggressive judicial court-management maneuvers is the fear that the trial will evolve and bloat into some landmark political moment beyond the judge’s ability to handle. Fear of uncertainty, of having nothing to hold on to, no buffer or protection, drives a lot of behavior, including very bad behavior. This includes my own fear: during the trial, as Wayne and I discuss in the podcast, I was sure that taking a mistrial was the right choice for him, but he decided to take the chance and see what the jury would decide. Happily, he was proven right. It was a moment that taught me that Wayne has more guts than me, and that I need to develop my relationship with positive groundlessness.

In his book Becoming a Man, one of my favorite authors, Paul Monette, wrote: “When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.” I think this is true for virtually anything worth being brave about: animal rights, helping incarcerated people, fighting against an unjust regime, resisting orthodoxies (from the right and from the left), and changing something as solid and fundamental as one’s relationship with one’s body. Let’s just say this lifting journey is a wonderful opportunity to explore my own bravery in picking up something new, and it’s a spiritual journey as well.