zombification.org

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.

I’m torn.  I’m torn between the desire for everyone to leave me alone and the desire to be close to people and have friends.  I’ve come to grips with the fact that I just don’t want to put the work into being a likable person, and that will tend to leave me with few friends, but that doesn’t explain this feeling I have right now.

Part of me wishes that everyone I know would just stop talking to me entirely, leave me alone and just let me do my thing in peace, and the other part of me is crying out for people to want to be around me. I don’t understand this feeling at all and, frankly, I don’t like it. (more…)

I paid money to watch the big fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Juan Manuel Marquez tonight, and I’m glad I did.  There were three undercards and they were all very good and the main event was a display of boxing skill and athleticism of the highest order.

Money Maywether is an athlete like no other. He is imminently skilled and supremely athletic. The man can do things with his body that just should not be possible.  He really has it all; he’s at the top of his game, he’s rich, good looking and young, so why is he such a titanic douche.

Contrast him to Manny Pacquiao, who is similarly gifted in nearly every way but who is, by all accounts, a great guy.  Here you have two athletes, each at the pinnacle of their being and one is as genuine and endearing as can be, and the other is someone I’d like to see get hit by a car.

Even with all the skill and prowess Mayweather possesses he is not the best fighter in the world.  You see, fighters fight, and what Mayweather does is not exactly fighting. He chooses opponents that he can easily dominate, then he refuses to take the small risks necessary to win by knock-out or, usually, even to win in dominant fashion.

Tonight Mayweather did dominate, but he chose his opponent so carefully that there was no real risk.  Where is the glory in that?  The great boxers of the past inspired love from their fans not for the wins they accumulated, but for the risks they took in garnering those wins. (more…)

I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I am simply unable to get up at a reasonable hour. Every night I plan to get up at around 10 or so, and when my eyes open and I feel human again it’s after noon.

I haven’t had this hard a time with sleep since college.  I know a lot of it has to do with not having a job, but even when I have jobs I never seem to be able to get up.  At this point I know it’s going to be a lifelong concern, but I need to find some kind of workable solution.

The last time I ’solved’ this I did it by setting a hard time to get up in the morning and never ever deviating from that time.  When I was able to do that I eventually worked my way into a reasonable bed time and mornings got slightly more bearable.

I just don’t understand why, no matter what i do, the mornings are torture.  There has got to be a way around this.  Everyone else in the world has figured it out and it’s still a major stumbling block for me.

I’ve decided that I need to get my site looking a little better.  I want a theme that’s dark, clever and wide enough that it’s not obnoxious on a huge monitor.  I do most of my writing and editing from a 12″ Mac so, it also has to scale well to a small resolution.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find a theme that works for what I want.  A lot of the really great themes are super popular, so I tend to stray away from them because I want my site to look like my site, not like someone else’s.  This current theme is pretty minimalist, which I like and seems to look good.  It’s not super dark like the last one I was using, but it’s got some cool effects on it.

If you have an opinion, or a suggestion, let me know!  Regardless, expect the blog to change over the next week or so as I go through a flurry of themes, then get lazy and stick with whatever one happens to be up when I stop caring about being unique and trendy.

After two horrific site crashes I’m finally getting the blog back together.  It’s taken me a long time, but here it is.  Yay.