On weightloss, snoring, and Mason Dots

     To sleep better, I downloaded some white noise to my phone... ocean waves crashing on a rocky coast. This was a start. But the speakers on my android were tinny. It was as if the elemental forces of nature had been presented by Alvin and the Chipmunks.  So I plugged my Bose speakers into them. Now I lash myself to the recliner and play "Lieutenant Dan." This has not aided the sleep process.

     My weight hovered at 221 pounds for the last year. Out of frustration of accidentally buying Levi's with a size 34 waist, I decided to go back on Weight Watchers.
    
     In the first six days I have lost six pounds. This is without a tremendous amount of hardship. The one possible negative was that, given the number of points that a beer costs in the weight watchers system, I've had to give up food. Not all of it, mind you. But I'm leaving significantly more parsley and orange rind on the plate when I get up from the table.

     As my non-russian immigrant mother would say, "I kid. I am kidder." The plan makes me acknowledge everything I eat by putting it in the point tracker. It's corny, but corny works. On the way home I sometimes like to swing by Walgreens and buy the movie theater size box of Mason Dots. Over the course of a day or two, I'd snarf down the entire box. On the points system, an entire box of Dots is equal to 20 points (yes, they are in the WW tracker). This is almost half a day's food allotment that was just being slowly sprinkled in over 24-48 hours. And it was certainly not "in lieu" of anything.

      I came to a realization: if I can lose six pounds in six days by controlling portions, and I had failed to do so in 12 months, there was only one explanation.  I had been eating a crapload of food.

     The sort of mindless gnoshing... the bag of chips here, the large chicken salad there (it's a waste of money to buy the small... and you gotta have the mayo) were all fuel to maintain that weight point of 221.  And it made me realize that I really have no idea what is good for me. The harmless chicken salad sub above cost me almost as much as the dots. More, when you throw in the chips I used to eat with it.

     My sleep has been miserable over the past few months due to snoring. I wake up in pain in the roof of my mouth from the hammering it takes. M buddy, a fire fighter and former Marine on whose couch I recently slept, was quoted thusly: "I've slept in the barracks. I've slept in the fire house. Never in my life have I heard a sound like that come from a man."  Thursday night was the first snore-less night I've had in a while. (Then I had a burger, fries, and a couple of beers last night and tore the roof off my mouth again. Strum and drang, baby).

     I can't imagine this is the most interesting post. If you've never dieted, it's a travelogue to a country you've no interest in visiting. If you have, it's a "Yelp" post by someone who "discovered" a little restaurant you've been sucking it up and going to for years. Regardless, I'll have the chicken and broccoli.

Clearer Skies

The Universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.     - Thoreau

At about 3 and 2/3rds of a mile, today's run was the longest I've done since the summer. A buddy recently tapped me for a New Years Eve 5k in Vermont, so this is my first stab at getting prepped for it. 
There are some terrible, awful, very bad aspects to living in New England this time of year. The air starts to bite, the Sun goes down roughly 20 minutes after it comes up, and water... Water, for God's sake, pick a state of matter. By spring, I promise you, I'll have bitched about all this in detail to you. For now, I want to talk about the best part of Winter. The best part of the Darkness.
Arctic air is cold air, and cold air is dense air... the less heat, the less kinetic energy the molecules have. This allows cold air to be incredibly tightly packed. And when this mass of air comes down out of the northern reaches, it rumbles in like a Polar Bear sitting its fat ass in the snow. Its dense nature pushes all sorts of particulates out of the sky and we see the most brilliant nights of the year. That, combined with the bare trees, make for some stunning evenings. In the shot above, you can make out Venus in the center of the frame. Below, Venus is center left.

I spent some really great years living in some of the most beautiful parts of America. At times, I get frustrated that my current zip code is inside Boston's 128 Beltway. But then I get to places like the Fells, and Breakheart Reservation, and Walden, and I can't tell if I'm in a metro area park or some culvert in the Siskiyous. 

The quote above isn't the quote I went in search of... that was something about seeing the value of travelling, and appreciating, the local.

But the one above more directly speaks to me. I've been a little off track of late. Or, in keeping with Thoreau, my conception has been lacking. I've spent plenty of time considering what wasn't, and strikingly little considering what was, or envisioning what could be. 

The best thing about a cold, dark winter's night is that it squeezes the dust and debris out of the night sky, causing the stars and planets, the things you'd really rather be looking at, to stand out in sharp contrast to the inky black.

Happy Holidays, kids.

View Fells Run in a larger map

The vast, infinite swirly that is my phone.

In today's trip to the gym I did something so contrary to my essence... it stands like a broad bladed knife in the butter "me."

I left my phone at home.

It was charged. The bill was, more or less, current. It did not fall in the toilet, sink, or coffee. There was no star-spangled crack in the screen.  It's a perfectly good phone.

The phone stayed behind because it is turning me into a slow-witted, club-footed zombie who would probably see the virtues of an astronaut diaper if he had access to one.

It's an Android... one of those lickety split 4G numbers. At arm's length, it is roughly the same proportional size as my 32" HDTV as viewed from the couch.

It is never held at arm's length.

The device is a stimulus vortex, a portable engagement universe that entertains incipient fancy. It humors me as I stumble from the republican primary to highway navigation to Fruit Ninja to eBay to Lady Gaga. There is a game in which I am a shark and I eat people. There is a game where I line up pumpkins and hurl them at monsters. That game is amazing.

The first draft of this blog post was written on an actual notebook.  I understand the subtle(?) pretentiousness of this. "What's next? Taking a semester off from Hampshire College to make a home for runaways out of grass reeds?"

Maybe. But I needed a break from the screens. This iPad I blog on contains Angry Birds: Seasons. In the Halloween update, I have completed all levels with three (3) stars. This is the maximum, in terms of attainable, Angry Bird stars. Out of the millions of downloads, I currently rank in the top five thousand IN THE WORLD. You could maybe fill the bleachers at Fenway with the number of people who have achieved more than me in this sphere.

As David Lee Roth might say to me: "You gonna get some leg tonight fo' sho'"

So the gym, the remarkably plain gym with its steel, sweat, and lack of screens (more or less) was as lame as it was supposed to be. Tomorrow will be the same.
But maybe the day after that will be a little more interesting.

In the end, we have to decide if we want a life whose frequency is measured in hertz.

Happy Thanksgiving, campers.

41

So it's been a while. As a manner of explanation, I offer you this. Last April I pushed myself on my longest run in over a decade... about 9.5 miles. I typically run around the Charles River in Boston, starting on Memorial Drive at the Cambridgeside Galleria, I follow the waterway down, past the Boston Musem of Science, to Storrow Drive. Along Storrow there are any number of turns one can take to head back across into Cambridge, then follow Memorial Drive back to the start.

Normally I would cut at the Mass Ave bridge, for a four mile loop, or make a six mile loop at the BU Bridge. But on this day I pushed it. I took the run down to the Harvard foot bridge, with the belief that the long loop would force me to run further than I had since my mid-20's.

The downside of a no-turning-back loop is, well, that there is no turning back. About three hundred yards after I crossed the footbridge, about as far as possible from my starting point, I felt something between my lower back and ass that, umm, stood apart. Some pains are experienced in color, others in sounds. This had both.

As to color, I would use a reddish black, a la the event-horizon in Disney's "The Black Hole." As to sound, It was something along the lines of "SPROOIIING." It was like a bedspring had snapped inside the lumbar region of my spinal column. I eked my way back the four miles to my scooter, too proud and stupid to bum a cell phone and call for help. The run ended up lasting about 3 and a half hours.

What I gained from this, outside of a spoonful of humility and frustration, was the understanding that, at this age with this body, you can't just run. Yes, I needed to stretch more... especially after the run. I also needed to establish a core... the system does not operate alone. For the legs to run, they need a stronger abdomen, a healthier back, and probably even a tighter torso overall.

Over the past six months I've been working on that, using p90x and other exercises to develop overall health. My back is still tweaked, and always seemed prepared to give out. If I really want it to suck, however, I don't do anything. Working out is still the cure. And I haven't ruled out a marathon in the long run. But my targets are going to be closer range. 10k's and maybe a half marathon. But the message is still the same: Use it or lose it, kids.
Godspeed.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

"Yer gonna eat lightning and yer gonna crap thunder."

Run Tune: Misery Business, by Paramore

Yesterday I get to the gym an hour before it closes because I've spent the previous two hours screwing around with the iPod I got off of Craigslist. The iPod is clearly the shiny bauble of our time. I could look at it for hours, with its silvery metal housing and postage-stamp screen (it's a Nano). I marvel at the way it turns music and film into nothing but shifting packets of electricity... no substance, no real matter to represent the purchases. It's like buying thought.
So I've shit away most of my Sunday afternoon gym time on THAT.
The workout I get is substantial, though. Forty seven minutes on a Cold War era Stair-Master. The older machines are poetry. There are no safety clips that stop the machine if you slip off. Just the constant churning of the stairs, grinning at you like the teeth of Mickey Goldmill (as portrayed by Burgess Meredith, blessings and peace be upon him).
"Yer gonna spit nails, kid."
I set the machine at ten, half-way to the maximum. I last five minutes before notching it down to seven, but Mick is bleeding me. I see sweat pearling up on my arms like a racehorse. A wheezing, mildly asthmatic racehorse, but regardless...
"Yer gonna eat lightnin' and yer gonna crap thunder."
With seven minutes left I take it all the way down to "one" for a minute, my heart pumping like a skydiver assaulted by great blue herons while ON heroin.
"Yer gonna become a very dangerous person."
With three minutes left on my workout, all power in the gym shuts down, then back up again... the front desk's subtle way of asking us to leave. With my workout data scrubbed from the machine (but exhaustion intact) I call it a night.
"You lay off that pet shop dame. Women weaken the legs."
Thanks, Mick. Thanks a bundle.

Rather Than Running...

Runs: 4 Miles along Charles River, 3 miles on my Cambridge Street circuit.

Stair Master: Golds Gym.

Run Tune: Is It Too Late, by World Party (Right-click and open in new tab to listen to what gets me through a run).

I hate running. I hate running in the rain. And I suspect that gravity and inertia together are in on a good laugh.

Here are ten things I'd rather do than run.

1. Apply Bacitracin after the briss.

2. Organize the SACLU (Saudi Arabian Civil Liberties Union).

3. Be thirteen again.

4. Capture, categorize, and catalog snowflakes on a hotplate.

5. Be twenty-two again.

6. Organize Martha Coakley's Attorney General campaign. 

7. Be a Mets fan.

8. Be Mia Hamm (around an unemployed Nomar Garciapara... does he do that wrist thing when he sweeps out the garage?)

9. Fight Mothra (o.k., that would actually be sweet).

10. Witness a Prussian orgy.*

But I will go on running. The marathon (Yes... this blog is about running a marathon... I don't think I mentioned that before) has become a holy grail for me. I'll have to explore this more later. Suffice to say, it's gonna happen. 

* I pictured "Two girls, one spiky helmet" when I came up with that one and feel TERRIBLE about it.

On the Inertial Qualities of Fat...

Run: 4.5 miles around stretch of Charles River, Boston & Cambridge, MA

Run Tune of the Day (right click and open in a new tab to listen while reading): Boll Weevil, by The Presidents Of The United States

If Lycra and shrink-wrap had a baby, it would be my running shirt. If I were to fall and rip open my brachial artery, the sleeve would act instantly as a tourniquet. It's superhero cloth, and it's been sitting in my closet for a long time. Today I ran in it.

Fat moves. And that's acceptable, I guess. But to have it snapped back into place is another thing. Over the years I've acquired my fat, I've gotten unconsciously accustomed to its movements.  But now my shirt has added an elastic aspect... as my gut bounces, it's immediately sprung back into place.

I imagine this is like having breasts... one large breast that makes up your abdomen (but won't get you a cab).  Which makes me tip my hat to women runners. This constant inertial reminder of your body would clearly wear thin.

I ran around the lower section of the Charles River: Memorial Drive to the Mass Ave Bridge, then down Storrow Drive to the Museum of Science to complete the loop. The Sun was out and the Earth was smiling. Runners, walkers, bikers, and bladers all out in full force. It is no wonder so many cultures worshiped the Sun. And it is no wonder we do, as well.