Day 036: Who am I?

"Can I conceal myself for evermore, pretend I'm not the man I was before?"

Day 031: - 25 lbs, 35 burpees in 7 minutes

When I started this I could do 10 burpees total and not one more for fear of dying right on the spot. I can feel how far I've come.

Day 030: Friends with actual faces

Friends are a good thing, and Facebook is a very bad thing. An actual friend, that you might meet some day, that you want to or even need to stay in contact with one another, is a beautiful thing. Facebook lures you into thinking that several hundred people are your friends, and that they hang on every word of yours, and you on theirs. And then, if you leave, as I have today, for the sixty-ninth time I admit, you realize that Facebook is a delusion of contact that isn't there. If you are lonely and you facebook, you are still lonely. Its just that that loneliness is more colorful and amusing, but you may in fact not have any real friends. Friends that don't need an excuse, or some official role, to care about contacting you.

I'd rather face my condition as it is. As it is, if I am not my own friend, other than my son, I probably don't have any friends. That's a good thing to face, because it really does begin with me. This very challenge I am in can be a tremendous act of compassion and caring for myself, as only the best of real friends would offer, or it can be a performance for  bunch of people that don't really give a shit, because they have their own life and dramas to understand and deal with.

I think I am going to go hang around some twelve-step meetings in the upcoming weeks. Facebook was and is an unmitigated addiction, and one that deluded me into believing I was happier because of it, but probably the exact opposite was true.

I am 30 days into this challenge and I am maintaining 20 lbs of weight lost, and I want to go further next month. I want to accomplish something because it is an actual good thing in my life, and in the life of my son whom I dearly love. Facebook is a distraction, and has nothing of any value to offer me.

Day 025: Russian Roulette

My uncle Ricardo learned today that his son is in a vegetative state after the massive heart attack he suffered a week ago. His family faces the unimaginable reality of having to decide how long to maintain life support and avert the virtually inevitable.

My cousin is my age, and he has Type 1 diabetes. He's has some issue with being slightly overweight, but he seemed to manage that (better than I ever did). But his diabetes required management of what he ate, and the faithful injection of insulin. He was a doctor and a surgeon.

Apparently in what were the last weeks of his life, he spent trying to pretend that he didn't have this disease and could eat like anyone else. His wife said that his blood sugar readings were running more than twice what they were supposed to be. The doctors say that his untreated diabetes made him have a massive heart attack and lapse into a diabetic coma.

I can't help but feel like there is a bullet that I dodged, that my cousin took for me. The bullet we were both putting in the chamber of a revolver, giving it a spin, and pulling the trigger.

I ate an entire pizza by myself. Click. I went to a drive-through junk food on the way from one meal on my way to the next. Click. I had a bagel sandwich for breakfast for the 5th morning in a row. Click.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Bang ! ! ! ! !

I should be dead. This could have been me. No one asked for this more than me.

To die of an untreated disease, to be in the death throws of a massive heart attack, and to know - in my withering heart - that I was finally succeeding in killing myself, and to feel such overwhelming shame and regret about that, was my most diabolically secret and terrifying fear.

Nothing can be the same after this. Today I am treating my illness. I don't need to be like my mother, that when I was a child would drunkenly brag to everyone that she was invincible because she survived shooting herself with a 0.44 caliber Magnum in the stomach, and event buried in the lost memories of being a 5 year old.

I hereby amend the intention of this challenge, which I had dedicated to my son, and I also dedicate it, on behalf of my cousin, to the unknown someone that I will help some day, that is killing themselves slowly, one papercut at a time. To someone that is "loving with nothing more than hope, and crying with everything except tears".

I always had this intention, and it was that intention that I shared with Ani Pema Chödron when I first approached her, craftily coded so that she might recognize my bodhisattva vision, and it worked, and thus began a letter correspondence with her.

But now that becomes more real than I could have ever imagined. And I have narrowly averted being the one with artificial respiration and in an induced coma, and having my son and my parents facing the mortifying reality that I killed myself with a fatal unwillingness to take the medication and the medical advice my Doc prescribed — having only wanted for me to treat my completely treatable disease.

Day 021: Fight Gone Better

On the 21st elapsed day of my Paleo challenge, I weighed in with -20 lbs (12% of my body weight) gone, and on the CrossFit workout "Fight Gone Bad":

3 rounds for rep count,
each exercise - 1 min AMRAP
 - Wall Balls
 - Sumo Deadlift High-pull
 - Box Jumps
 - Push Press
 - Row for Calories
 - 1 min rest

my score improved from 183 to 235, a 28% improvement of performance.

"Paleo Chicken Soup" (It couldn't hurt...)

4 tablespoons of coconut oil, 3 large Vidalia onions, 1 head of garlic, 6 stalks of scallions, 4 stalks of celery, 2 cups of sliced Portabello mushrooms, 1 cup of sliced carrots, 4 chicken thigh pieces (taken out cooked, deboned and stripped and returned), 3 large limes, and 1 cup of sliced cilantro, with sea salt to taste.

Day 19: -20 lb DOWN in nineteen days

Well, there has been a gap in my journaling, corresponding to a couple of days when I just battened down and stuck to my eating goals, because I was feeling ill with a kind of head and stomach flu at the same time, and it was all I could do to go on small walks.

Today I am weighing in at 20 lbs lighter than just 19 days ago. That's outright scary. It's amazing what sticking to a strict eating plan (that isn't even remotely related to starving) together with working out twice a day - can accomplish.

Twenty pounds is a lot. I know it's only 12% of the way from where I started to my goal, but . . . I am on my way, and I have a substantial accomplishment for less than two weeks of sustained effort.

This is worth doing. That's really clear.

Oh and I changed gyms. Smaller, closer and with less drama, was a huge upgrade. It's too bad that I will dearly miss some of the friends I made at the previous one, and quite a few of the more laid back coaches (whose ring I didn't have to kiss).

Day 016: Sick

I was able to stay on track with my eating but I started noticing feeling ill mid day and by the time I went to sleep I had the shivers of having a fever. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Day 015: . . .

Of all the days in this challenge, this was one of them. For some reason I went from having one job prospect to 4, as a flurry of prospecting messages arrived all asking me if I had availability. That I do.

Day 14: "finally found" -16.2 lb. in 14 days

More than a "stone" down (14 lb.) in 2 weeks. I wouldn't call this a habit yet, but offered a money-back return on my previous life or keeping this one, I say good riddance to the supposed joys of "eating whatever I want" and inactivity. I do eat what I want, and actually my eating has not even remotely looked like starving. I just don't eat what I understand as poison as if it were (using the most appropriate metaphor possible: ) pizza and ice cream. You have it. Everyone that wants it, have it, and enjoy it if it does your body good.

This week with my mother's stroke, I faced a couple of unplanned deviations, and it was fortunate that I didn't beat myself up over it, and just went right back to the eating plan.

The exercise is still running twice a day, once at the gym if I can, and once either walking or cycling from my house (I live in the hills, so I always get a good workout at home as well).

Windhorse.

Day 013: Dancing machine

I went out to some clubs in Red Bank directly from River View hospital, after visiting my mom.

The "Downtown" bar was quite the scene. I asked the bartenders if they worked out at the same gym, because if they did, perhaps I was going to the wrong gym. The one girl I noticing dancing with herself (at this bar that didn't have a dance floor) inspired me to ask her - so where do you go dancing, which she obviously must be doing. She was really nice and clued me in to the club I was right next too, which had dancing. Initially I walked in there and there was no dancing happening yet, lots of people swaying at the bar. Finally as the time approached midnight, the place let its hair down, and the dancing started breaking out left and right.

Dancing is awesome, and actually represents a decent amount of cardiovascular (to this old guy)! I was the fifth black chick. The other four weren't aware that I'd be joining them just because I happened to be dancing against the same wall. I could get used to going out dancing, but I really wishing drinking was minimally involved since it breaks my Paleo diet. I haven't made it to the twerk zone yet, but it feels immanent.

Day 012: Husband

      

Today, I still spent most of it in a hospital being of some support to my mother, being this admirable son that everyone seems to want me to be sure I know.

I managed to blow off breakfast this morning, and waited until lunch time to eat. Not good. Predictably, I made, by decree of the universal monarch, an exception for ordering an order of onion rings with my Caesar salad. And I sat there hypocritically enjoying the little rush of being bad especially on the sly, except that the whole thing was performed in front of the goddamn guy trying to write this blog. True to form, after a nearly orgasmic satisfaction (I know, that's hyperbole), it was so not worth doing that. The writing was on the wall, not making the time in the morning for the egg whites and getting the day started correctly. And before that I was obsessed about some back-and-forthness of the scale, which last week plummeted consistently like a rock. I need to not touch the scale except once a week.

So I jogged the same trip I did yesterday, without swinging weights, but attempting a faster rate (on a track that has a 150' elevation change down and up). 

I'm curious about measuring effort. Naively it seems it should be the calories measure, and interestingly enough by jogging rather than walking, I competed the same mile in less time, and with less calories burned. Perhaps a more interesting measure would be

calories / minutes today = 178cal / 17:15min = 10.3 calories / minute

calories / minutes yesterday = 223cal / 22:17min = 10 calories / minute

Oh, and the title. My mother identified me to the questioning occupational therapists as "her husband". Twice. All right, having a stroke is an awfully good reason to be confused about that. It's just a little scary to hear after you have suspected that there is a really unrealistic and unhealthy perspective taking place in that now ravaged brain of hers.

Day 011: Stroke

    

Today my mother suddenly had a stroke that took out quite a bit of her ability to verbally communicate. It was painful watching her not be able to be herself. In the hospital, she wanted so desperately to make contact with and become the intimate stranger friend of everyone she met, that I felt I had to do it for her. It made it okay that I was "only" doing it on behalf of her. In a way its nice to crazily expect everyone to want to know you, and you to want to know them. That's her thing.

Heart rate monitoring is cool. I do this loop around the house that ends with an uphill, and I really leaned in to that uphill, as my heart rate in "Zone 4" (within 20% of a 'theoretical' max) shows.

I think calories will be an interesting measure, not from the mindfuck of thinking I have more calories to consume or banking negative calories, but just from the seeing how many watts of energy I generate, if I were a "generator". Clearly when that number goes up on the same walk, my fitness is probably improving. Also that bar chart of how much time during the exercise I spent at different profiles, will be interesting to see as I progressively work on certain standard sets of exercises.

Day 010: Drunken Elephant

Drunken Elephant —
Catching mirage by net;
In the mirror of my mind I comb my hair
With the brush of samsaric absurdity 

— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Yes, my Paleo eating and CrossFit training goals are accomplished, and not a hell of a lot else.

Day 009: Carrying that weight

Tonight on my walk around the block (which since I live on a hill, is a third of a mile, but down and up around 150 feet of elevation) I carried a couple of 20 lb dumbbells with me.

If occurred to me that when these 40 lbs of unnecessary weight could be set down, what an amazing relief that was, and how much better I felt. Conversely, the walk which I could do pretty painlessly now was excruciating to pull of, so the impact of those 40 lbs was truly palpable

Day 008: "Helen"

There are just two things that matter to me in my life right now: eating Paleo and training CrossFit.

Today I am taking care of those two things. You can take that to the bank.

"Helen" is a nice workout. I wish. I mean the CrossFit workout by that name.

Day 007: -11.4 lbs for week 1

Paleo eating and crossfit training goals: achieved.

I couldn't get in to the gym this morning to try repeating my "Fight Gone Bad" workout (which annoyingly requires a machine rower because part of the score is rowing calories), so I took my bike to my favorite single-track ride in New Jersey, "Clayton Park". The stats of the ride seem impressive to me:

Length: 4.8 miles long
Average speed: 4.1 mph
Elevation changes: Up 2278 ft. / Down 2303 ft.
Duration: 01:09:32

Its nice, I can try this again in a few weeks and see how my performance is changing.

I will say I remember taking Elliot hear last year, and finding the ride impossible to finish without some protracted stops to recover, and I walked most of the uphills, but today I was able to pound out the uphills quite a bit, and only having to resort to walking relatively few times.

Day 006: Nose to the grindstone

Paleo eating and crossfit training goals achieved.

I love how all bike rides from my house start with a downhill and end with an uphill (the return). I was able to pedal all the way up Ocean Blvd, which is a probably 1000 ft of elevation change on a snaking S-turn road that ends up at 250 feet above sea level. I was walking some of that fairly recently so it could be that there are some endurance changes being noticeable.

The Warrior's World ~ Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Windhorse is a translation of the Tibetan lungta. Lung means "wind" and ta means "horse". Invoking secret drala is the experience of raising windhorse, raising a wind of delight and power and riding on, or conquering, that energy. Such wind can come with great force, like a typhoon that can blow down trees and buildings and create huge waves in the water. The personal experience of this wind comes as a feeling of being completely and powerfully in the present. The horse aspect is that, in spite of the power of this great wind, you also feel stability. You are never swayed by the confusion of life, never swayed by excitement or depression. You can ride on the energy of your life. So windhorse is not purely movement and speed, but it includes practicality and discrimination, a natural sense of skill. This quality of lungta is like the four legs of a horse, which make it stable and balanced. Of course in this case you are not riding an ordinary horse; you are riding a windhorse.

By invoking the external and internal drala principles, you raise a wind of energy and delight in your life. You begin to feel natural power and upliftedness manifesting in your existence. Then, having raised your windhorse, you can accommodate whatever arises in your state of mind. There is no problem or hesitation of any kind. So the fruition of invoking secret drala is that, having raised windhorse, you experience a state of mind that is free from subconscious gossip, free from hesitation and disbelief. You experience the very moment of your state of mind. It is fresh and youthful and virginal. That very moment is innocent and genuine. It does not contain doubt or disbelief at all. It is gullible, in the positive sense, and it is completely fresh. Secret drala is experiencing that very moment of your state of mind, which is the essence of nowness. You actually experience being able to connect yourself to the inconceivable vision and wisdom of the cosmic mirror on the spot. At the same time, you realize that this experience of nowness can join together the vastness of primordial wisdom with both the wisdom of past traditions and the realities of contemporary life. So in that way, you begin to see how the warrior's world of sacredness can be created altogether.

Excerpted from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (pg. 114), by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Day 005: It's a two-way thing

Paleo eating and CrossFit training goals achieved. I didn't do my second workout tonight, but very much enjoyed watching Don Jon, which I was right in suspecting would deceive everyone into thinking it was about who will win in the war of "Coke" against "Diet Coke", but it turns out being just as fucked up getting addicted to the one-way ness of porn, as it is to the one-way ness of the myth and stories about how a princesses charming love should be. His little sister nails it when she says she thinks Barb always had "an agenda". Julianne Moore shows some actual compassion, and demonstrates what real love looks like. Very inspiring.

Day 004: Staring to believe my own hype

Paleo eating and CrossFit goals achieved.

I just stayed up until 3am going through a nearly infinite recursion of backup folders, such priceless document paths as:

/Windows7Backup/Desktop/Needs Organizing/Needs Filing/Thinkpad/Desktop/Needs Filing/<customer name>/<project name>/deliverables/<the stuff I did>

I tell you, it's practically archaeological this search through the things I've done. I see them after the years, and I can scarcely believe that I worked those weeks and months on these client deliverables. It's like it was another person at another time. I don't know who I am any more.

All this was predicated because I have to revise my resume with more details and I needed to do an audit of a deeply nested set of backups, from 2 computers past, to find everything I can refer to in a marketing piece about myself.

I'm starting to believe my own hype, which at this point might be a good thing.

Day 003: Words are superfluous

Paleo eating achieved:

• Got a protein shake snack in to the afternoon right after my workout
• I am liking the food, and I am not really hungry. The calling of my habit foods is feeling kind of hollow and insubstantial.

CrossFit training achieved:

• Workout in the afternoon, quite hard involving box humps and sleigh pulls (across a parking lot)
• Evening walk was lovely as 'always'

On my walk I look into the dark woods and I wonder, with trails like 'Foxes Hollow', are there any foxes in there that know that is the trail they are supposed to take? How does one meet a fox? I was playing my National guitar on the porch after the walk and I wondered if it could be heard in the distances across the street in the woods, and if anyone, remaining distant was curious without being able to be observed. I know it's borderline delusional, but I'll have you know at know time to I actually see any foxes that tell me to kill anyone. :-)

In my time of dying

Day 002: Walking in the stars

TODAY:

Paleo eating:

• Accomplished
• I'm under-eating, only 2 meals and one protein shake. The objective is 5 smaller meals nearly constantly. Those long gaps are dangerous.
• I was better about no dairy, starting to enjoy coffee black. I like my coffee like I like my . . .
• WATER!!! I am ridiculously under water today. I need to POUND down 1 liter every 3 hrs. Must do this.

CrossFit training:

• Accomplished
• WOD at my gym at 9am
• Nice walk in the hills in the evening. Most beautiful experience of my day by far (including all this facebook nonsense. Who would have thought you could enjoy a very decent number of stars in the sky (which I only say because I don't live in Finland, or somewhere away from the light pollution of the city, which I still want to live in.
• It's strange but in the evening you can imagine you are completely alone in this neighborhood. I suspect it won't feel like that in Manhattan ever. I like that. I want to drown and die in a sea of people that I can pretty much never escape.

Day 001 - "FIGHT GONE BAD"

Today I take on the commitment to 30 days in a row (my CrossFit gyms 'Paleo Challenge') with workouts and strictly following a Paleo diet. For now the goal is as simple as making it through 30 days without significant deviation, and I kid around about wanting to win, but I'd really just like my effort to be as inspired and joyful as possible. That'd be enough of a prize, but that being said, being very unfit might even give me an advantage to having the best track record of change by the end of the challenge.

Commitments for the next 30 days (until Wednesday October 23rd):

Paleo eating:

• Every day, no exceptions and no excuses
• No grains
• No dairy (a little cream or butter sparingly)
• Aim for 5 smaller meals every 3 hrs
• Have plenty of green leafy and non-starchy vegetables
• Have plenty of animal protein
• Luxuriously use good fats like coconut oil, and only sparing use of other fats
• Eat nuts and drink protein shakes for in-between meals and snacks.
• Drink 4 liters (128oz) of water (at least, half body weight recommended)

CrossFit training:

• Every day, no exceptions and no excuses
• One CrossFit WOD in the morning (in or out of the gym)
• One more workout in the evening, if only a walk.
• Once a week repeat the final performance test

Benchmark Measurements:

Weight: 366.6 lbs (dressed without shoes)


Benchmark fitness test.

• "FIGHT GONE BAD"
• Scored for AMRAP
• 3 Rounds / Rotating every minute (no rest between exercises)
• 1) Wallball - 10lbs
• 2) Sumo Deadlift High-pull (
• 3) Box Jumps - 12"
• 4) Push Press - 
• 5) Row for Calories
• Rest 1 minute between rounds
• BENCHMARK SCORE: 183

TODAY:

Paleo eating achieved.

• have to watch out and avoid sugars in sauces
• have to watch out my *sparing* use of cream or butter
• only ate 3 meals, need to get my inbetween meals happening

CrossFit training achieved.