zombification.org

I make no secret about being American sports centric.  I can’t help it.  I was raised here and even though I played soccer a bit as a kid I am not steeped in it like all non-Americans seem to be.  It took a South American to convince me that the sport was worth watching, and once I started to understand the sport I saw the beauty in it.

The world cup brought that beauty into sharp focus for me, and the true focal point was the play of the Uruguayan squad.  They weren’t the most athletic team, not by half, but they were skilled and they played with heart, or garra.

The garra, the heart, was what sucked me in.  How can a little country of 3.5 million people compete with the world powers of soccer?  It boggles the mind that this proud little country punched above their weight and played their way to a fourth place finish.  There was no game where they were blown out, there was no game where they were out played, there was no game that didn’t affect me and there was no player that personified the beauty of Soccer, and of Uruguayan Futbol than Diego Forlan. (more…)

I couldn’t say it better myself, so I’m not even going to try:

The Iron, By Henry Rollins:

I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself.

Completely.

When I was young I had no sense of myself. All I was, was a product of all the fear and humiliation I suffered. Fear of my parents. The humiliation of teachers calling me “garbage can” and telling me I’d be mowing lawns for a living. And the very real terror of my fellow students. I was threatened and beaten up for the color of my skin and my size. I was skinny and clumsy, and when others would tease me I didn’t run home crying, wondering why.

I knew all too well. I was there to be antagonized. In sports I was laughed at. A spaz. I was pretty good at boxing but only because the rage that filled my every waking moment made me wild and unpredictable. I fought with some strange fury. The other boys thought I was crazy.

I hated myself all the time.

As stupid at it seems now, I wanted to talk like them, dress like them, carry myself with the ease of knowing that I wasn’t going to get pounded in the hallway between classes. Years passed and I learned to keep it all inside. I only talked to a few boys in my grade. Other losers. Some of them are to this day the greatest people I have ever known. Hang out with a guy who has had his head flushed down a toilet a few times, treat him with respect, and you’ll find a faithful friend forever. But even with friends, school sucked. Teachers gave me hard time. I didn’t think much of them either.

Then came Mr. Pepperman, my advisor. He was a powerfully built Vietnam veteran, and he was scary. No one ever talked out of turn in his class. Once one kid did and Mr. P. lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the blackboard. Mr. P. could see that I was in bad shape, and one Friday in October he asked me if I had ever worked out with weights. I told him no. He told me that I was going to take some of the money that I had saved and buy a hundred-pound set of weights at Sears. As I left his office, I started to think of things I would say to him on Monday when he asked about the weights that I was not going to buy. Still, it made me feel special. My father never really got that close to caring. On Saturday I bought the weights, but I couldn’t even drag them to my mom’s car. An attendant laughed at me as he put them on a dolly. (more…)

This is directly lifted from Robb Wolf. Check him out, he’s pretty awesome.

Also, friend of the blog Marisa Mezs reacquainted me with this elegant summary.  Check her out too!

SUMMARY

All of the lean meat, fish, seafood, eggs you can eat
All of the non starchy vegetables you can eat
Plenty of fruit
Moderate healthy fats
Moderate nuts and seeds
No grains or cereals at all
No legumes
No dairy products (eggs are meat)
No processed foods – make it yourself!
No sugars. Agave, organic honey, molasses, pure spun golden sunshine….it doesn’t matter. They are all equally bad for you.
No artificial sweeteners. These are not food! Creepy laboratory products with sketchy safety records, artificial sweeteners have been shown to produce an insulin response.

Delicious details after the jump: (more…)

I started this diet, which some might call drastic or crazy or stupid, on the first of the year.  At that time I was close to 240 lbs, working out like crazy but eating everything in sight.  I was in great shape, though in hindsight a little over trained, but on this crazy cycle of working, eating, working out, eating, watching tv and eating more.  I wasn’t really happy with the results of my training because even though I was performing fairly well I was chubby.  I was also having a hell of a time getting up in the morning or feeling excited about doing anything. All in all, life was kind of dragging me down which is a bummer since life is basically all there is.

Enter the Paleo Diet.  I had flirted with it once back in June and I lost 10 pounds.  Those pounds came back gradually when I reintroduced neolithic foods (in great quantities) to my diet.  That was part of the reason for my general funk.  I felt like I was working out as hard as my body would allow me to but a large part of the results I wanted were just flat not showing up.  Reasonably there was no way I could work out any harder so something else needed to change for me to effect some kind of different outcome.  A lot of the people at the gym I used to work at were on the Paleo diet more or less permanently and they had all gotten great results.  It had worked for me in the past, so why not give it a try again? (more…)

I haven’t read as many books as I should have in my life. Being an English major in college sapped some of my love of reading, and after that I went through a long period of reading for fun.  Not that reading for fun is a bad thing, I just wasn’t heavily criticizing  the books I read at the time.

As my college days have faded more and more into memory, I’ve become more selective about the books I read and that’s allowed me to come back to a more critical view of the works themselves.  I’m still not as granular in my criticism as I used to be, and that’s a good thing because it allows me to enjoy a broader spectrum of work.  Given that, when I heard that Blood Meridian was praised as one of the 20th century’s best novels I thought I’d take a whack at it.

My thoughts after the jump: (more…)

“Always Burpees”

3 Rounds, (1:00 rest between rounds), of:

10 Pushups
5 Burpees
10 Squats
5 Burpees
10 Situps
5 Burpees
10 Pullups
5 Burpees
10 Thrusters (95/65#)
5 Burpees
10 Kettlebell Swings (53/35#)
5 Burpees
10 KB Sumo Deadlift High Pull (53/35#)
5 Burpees
10 Knees to Elbows
5 Burpees
10 Box Jumps (24/20#)
5 Burpees
10 D-Ball Slams
5 Burpees
1:00 Rest

Average time for the tennis crew was about 33 minutes, rest included.

Having boxed for eight years and now, working in a gym, I see a lot of people working out.  I feel like there are a select few who look at their workouts the same way I do, and the difference comes down to effort. Now before I go off on a tirade and sound like an even bigger asshole than I normally do, I’m going to preface this a little:

Everyone has off days.  No one gives 100% every time they work out.  Some days are a struggle for whatever reason, and sometimes just showing up to work out takes more effort than a full effort normally would.  I have off days, days I don’t really try and the like, and I’m not trying to say I’m better than anyone.

That being said, lets get down to business.

I look at every workout as an opportunity.  Your body can only take so much, your mind can only take so much and your social and personal lives can only take so much.  Given this you only have a limited time to get your workout in.  Now regardless of how long you can manage to schedule for that workout I think you’ll agree that the time you spend at they gym is precious.  If that’s true, why do so many people half-ass that precious workout time?

It doesn’t make sense to me.  For me each workout is a test.  If I get done with it and I feel like I could have done one more rep, or could have gone one second faster, I feel like I’ve failed that test.  I want to wring every ounce of effort out of my body in the time I have.

It’s not just that the amount of time I have in the day to workout is limited either.  There are also rest days to consider, and the fact that time in general is slipping away.  If I give less than 100% in my training, then I’m not improving and that’s a wasted day.  Those wasted days add up, and none of us are getting any younger.  All of this is, of course, compounded if you’re training for an event, say a marathon or a fight or something.

I’m not sure what drives me to work as hard as I do.  Part of it is innate, I’m sure, but a lot of it is learned.  I remember a fight I had where I went into the ring not in shape.  I was tired after the first round, exhausted after the second and dead on my feet in the third.  That feeling stuck with me, and it drives me.  As awful as I felt then, even though I won, I basically promised myself never to be in that position again.

I’m sure there are easier ways to learn that lesson, but I just don’t know how to teach it.

I’ve been working out like a fiend lately, and when I work out a lot I tend to eat a ton because I’m sore.  It’s been no exception in the last few months, and despite my nearly constant exercise I’ve been putting on the pounds.

It’s simple math really, even if you burn off a thousand calories working out, and two thousand just being alive you’re going to gain weight if you eat four or five thousand a day, and that’s what I was doing.

Not to mention, I’ve been making pretty terrible choices about the types of food I eat.  In no diet is Chocolate Peanut Butter Haagen Das a good acceptable, especially not after eating three steaks with sweet potato fries.

I’ve been learning a lot about nutrition at my job lately, and basically I know what I have to do: Paleo.  If you read my blog before my hosting crashed (twice) you know that I did the Paleo Diet once for a month earlier and lost ten pounds.  I felt pretty good on it, and once I’d been doing it for a few weeks I pretty much stopped having cravings for sweets and bread.

This time I need to lose 30 pounds, maybe 40.  It’s a long way to go, and I’m typically not good at things that take a long time to do, but I’m determined to get there.  Even if I can get rid of ten pounds, it will help me.

So here’s to willpower, I’m going to need it.

So this weekend was the Decibel Festival.  It was a great event, even better than last year, but now that I have some experience going to techno shows, I’d like to share some thoughts about things I’ve seen there.  I’ve seen all of the following at every show I’ve attended that wasn’t at a sit down venue like the Tripple Door, and this is by no means a comprehensive list.

• * Glowsticks.  I know it’s obvious, but there is no escaping them.
• * Some girl wearing feathers.
• * Some guy dancing so wildly that he’s taking up enough room for 6 normal people, bumping into everyone and not noticing even a little bit
• * People using a very practiced dance-walk move to get from place to place while still looking like they’re boogying.
• * My girlfriend’s ex boyfriend.
• * At least one fat DJ
• * People wearing their hearing protection wrong.  Like really wrong. Like ‘why bother with ear plugs if you are just going to kind of set them on your ears’ wrong.
• * A girl, wearing no hearing protection at all, standing right in front of the woofers for several hours.

I’ll try to add to this list maybe, but so far, I’ve seen all of these things at EVERY show.

One time I was in a class and the instructor told us a story about goals.  He said that in a study of ivy league students, the ones that ended up being the most successful had specific goals, and that of those with goals, the 5% or so that had their goals written down and carried them with them everywhere they went turned out to be the rulers of the modern world or some such.

I’m sure the teacher was trying to impart some lesson about the importance of having goals, but really all it did was make me feel bad. I’m not the kind of person who has clearly elucidated goals.  I’ve never been good at figuring out what I want, beyond simple physical gratification, and I knew as this parable unfolded that I was not the kind of person who carried his goals around in his pocket. I was sharp enough to know how correlative studies like this work.

You see, if you want to be successful, you have to put in the work to be successful, you don’t just start keeping a list of goals in your shirt pocket and end up running Starbucks. Besides, I still don’t have goals, and even when I do I’m terrible at following through on them.

The other night a friend counseled me that I needed to break out of the lull I’m in by focusing on myself more.  She said that I need to figure out what I want and go for it, and she was right.  That, however has been a problem for a while.