Journal of Magic & Happiness

[roundcoconut]

Yes, I definitely love that starch. Not eating it from sun-up till sun-down though. Wow, that got outta hand quick!

Yum, rice never gets old. Just keeping it in proportion with my level of activity.

[roundcoconut]

Some updates for today:

I’m really inspired to adjust my training to keep almost all of my exercise time at MAF (roughly), which is to say, to put my money on the VOLUME of training that I do. I think that’s going to be my path in life!

It is summer, and I like to believe that summer is for training your fitness — your legs, your lungs, your heart.

Summer is a wonderful time to making steady gains to your fitness!

I confess I am mostly a gym girl — I like to be in a controlled area where I can put both earbuds in my ears, and not worry that I’m about to get run over by a car or bit by a dog.

At the same time, i DO like going out into the sunshine and taking a walk. So I actually would like to experiment with doing both, on alternate days.

Like, I like the idea of training ONLY at the gym on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays. And then having both an outdoor session and an indoor session on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I TOTALLY love this idea. Just for the summer and fall — not really beyond that.

I must confess that I feel so lucky to have an extremely inexpensive gym. I have lived in places where the gyms are priced more like country clubs, and that’s just pure heartache! Like, how y’gonna justify spending a crap-ton of money, just to use the stairmaster in a climate-controlled environment?? So I am looking forward to having that luxury for several more months — not worrying about whether the sun is going down, not worrying about anything besides “Are you going over your aerobic zone?”

I actually have very simple goals in life!

[roundcoconut]

One thing about me is that I really enjoy hatching new projects and seeing them take shape! And fitness is a wonderful new project for me.

I actually love watching the YouTube videos of a runner whose channel is called El Coyote Loco. He’s not the best runner ever, but he’s really dedicated to his training. So, I watch his videos. (I have a definitely soft spot for New York folks, and I am especially a softie for him for doing well in the local road races of where I grew up. Went weak in the knees there!)

One of the funniest things he says is, “Nothing to do but run!” Like, for a guy who was a Division I collegiate runner, and then graduates into the real world, it is enormously appealing to live cheap and train well.

And I am a lot like him. I am happy to train in shoes that have holes in them (as nearly all of his shoes do!) and to live life without a smartphone — and overall, just to have few expenses, but also very few work obligations.

So, he is actually a huge advocate of volume training — lots of training, at a low difficulty, strengthens your aerobic base and makes you nearly immune to injury. Love that philosophy! Also, nearly everyone likes to train easy and train long — it’s just fun!

[Ruff]

Funny you are a gym girl. I hate gyms, I cannot cope with the music, the tv screens, the other people, the machines themselves!

For me running is about being on the beach at dawn watching the sun rise out of the sea.....

Of course at the moment we have an appalling southerly storm (first landfall since Antartica) and there is no sun, and there are hailstorms sweeping across the beach instead! Maybe I won’t actually run today.....this is the sort of day a gym might actually be acceptable

[roundcoconut]

Funny you are a gym girl. I hate gyms, I cannot cope with the music, the tv screens, the other people, the machines themselves!

Yeah, it’s funny that you say that because I notice a lot of practices that are deemed “cool” by little pockets of society. For example, your natural disposition (“Wow, I just can’t stand running on treadmills!”) seems to often be said with pride in certain circles.

And there are SOOO many more things that fall into the category of having a value judgment by certain pockets of society. Like someone who likes hot, spicy foods is also oddly considered cool, and people brag about needing really aggressively hot food to be truly happy. It is like they are saying something great about themselves!

So, I do my best to follow my own path. There’s nothing worse than people who “try” to be night owl, or “try” to enjoy a glass of wine, or “try” liking edgy hip-hop music — all because they think that people would like them better, if they were somebody other than themselves.

OK! That was a side-rant, which I’m (naturally) quite talented at, and not just pretending to be good at.

(Oh, Ruff, that rant had nothing to do with you. I don’t think you would bother to “fake it” to be an outdoorsy girl. That would be nuts!)

[roundcoconut]

More on authenticity:

For whatever reason, we have come to a point in society where endurance running is considered oddly cool. And I honestly question how many people ALREADY like endurance running, versus how many people are trying to prove something or get somewhere by doing it.

There are a few good articles, videos and podcasts about this phenomena of marathon runners all developing the same kinds of heart disease — part of their heart becomes thickened and/or enlarged (forgot which part!) and they become far more prone to atrial fibrillation (I think) than people who are fit without having trained at traumatizing intensities or distances. And they have more heart attacks than people who did not train at extreme levels.

(I was listening to one such podcast last night by Richard Diaz, who is lovely — he’s more from the Frank Shorter generation, than from the Strava generation.)

But on the authenticity issue, I think that if I were genuinely one of those rare humans who has a gift for elite-level endurance running, or has a genuine affection for that sport — then great, I would go for it, and be prepared to lose five or ten years of longevity in the process.

But I highly doubt that the tens of thousands of half-marathon-and-above people wearing a race bib, are coming from that place, but rather are probably SEARCHING for something to validate them, or someplace in society to fit in, or chasing the thrill that someone else says that they experience with athleticism. Trying to be somebody they’re not.

I can’t confirm this, but that’s what I THINK I see in other people.

It is hilarious, because Michael Arnstein (“the Fruitarian”) has joked about “I just thought I’d get up and run 100 miles today!”, which kind of hints at the idea that liking the actual act of running extreme distances is not always in the drivers seat, but rather the idea of proving something to oneself, or to others, or getting recognition, or who knows what else.

Ranting, as always!

[Ruff]

It’s funny because here (New Zealand) where maybe we take the outdoors for granted, the cool thing IS the gym! Particularly cross fit gyms, which don’t seem to be called gyms but boxes?

As for endurance running, which I don’t do but wish to, isn’t it just about being outside all day? Just imagine how wonderful it would be to be able to run all day! Hill and valley, trail and mountain, one after another! I would willingly trade 5 years of life to be able to do that. My problem is I started too late in life. I was into my 50s before I lost the weight and started running. But I cannot be on the summit of an Hill without “thanking whatever gods may be” for being able to get up there. During the obese years I thought these joys were lost to me forever. I was simply too large to climb a mountain. I can do 4-5 hours on my feet now. I would love to be able to do 8-9, then I could do the Mt Isobel traverse, or the Mount Somers circuit in a day! How cool would that be!

I just realised what I said! I said it would be cool! Maybe I am seeking coolness!

I am too old to really consider coolness as a goal. That is one of the beauties of age, the ability to simply do what one wishes to do, without worrying about what people think of you. It’s in the “When I am old I shall wear purple, With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me....” poem. It’s called “Warning” by Jenny Joseph and I love it. The freedom from stepping aside from society’s expectations is really a joy of aging.

I am often surprised by people who are into HIIT who say the main joy is not having to run for hours! Endless mindless cardio! I just smile and nod, and head for the beach! We must do what gives us joy in our exercise, otherwise why, exactly, are we doing it?

[roundcoconut]

It’s funny because here (New Zealand) where maybe we take the outdoors for granted, the cool thing IS the gym!

So y’mean to tell me that I’m just one hemisphere away from being the cool kid in town??? Well, give me a moment to pack my bags, ‘cause how fun would THAT be!

As for endurance running, which I don’t do but wish to, isn’t it just about being outside all day?

I dunno, I think it might also be about moving your body all day! I sometimes think that if I owned my own treadmill, I would do longer long sessions, just because it feels so good to do so. That climate-controlled environment of being on a treadmill, stairmaster, or stationary bike is ridiculously appealing to me — ha! Needless to say, I don’t like wind, don’t like sunburn, CERTAINLY don’t like rain, DEFINITELY don’t like snow, and can’t even say I like uneven surfaces. Good lord, a bigger princess has not been invented!

Well, I’m off to the gym!

[LakeConroePenny]

[quote="roundcoconut"] However, the portions I’ve allocated for myself have been monstrously big! Like, I’ve been using 1 cup dry measure of white rice, as the basis for a single meal. Uhhhh, that’s a lot of freaking calories! So there are no mysteries as to why I’m experiencing a really high scale weight these days. (1 cup of rice equals about 740 calories, which might be a nice starch base for a husky male’s meal, but it is too high as a starting point for a moderately active female. Also, the rice is just my starting point, and I eat a lot of food on top of just the starch portion of my meal.) I may actually go buy a set of measuring cups that includes a 3/4 cup scoop so that I can just dedicate myself to the process for my next meal.

Hi Y'all. Please be careful when eating a lot of rice unless you handle it correctly. Most of it contains arsenic. Some rice gets it naturally, and some because it is planted in old cotton fields where boll weevils were killed. It should be rinsed first, and as Mary points out, cook it "pasta" style with at least a 6-1 ratio of water. Drain, and throw away the water, not like other foods like potatoes or veggies where the cooking water can be used as a basis for stock.
Happy Trail. Penny

[roundcoconut]

LCPenny, yes, thanks for those reminders about rice! I have alternated starches over the last couples of days (potatoes are wonderful also!), so as to consume somewhat less arsenic. Doing more than that hasn’t been my priority these days!

It actually IS funny, because each of us has to somehow select two or three things to change about our lives, when each of us probably has over 25 things that would improve our health. So, we have to decide where to deploy our resources to get the greatest return!

For me, I am very much into making fitness a priority, which is to say, I am getting my heart rate elevated nearly every day of the week. It’s good a person’s heart, legs, lungs. Definitely stands to pay me back lots of my investment!

And yet, I’ve heard people say, “You HAVE to do strength training! Your BONES won’t be strong if you don’t!” And I guess I’m OK with that. Maybe I’m not setting myself up to have the greatest bone density ever, but if something’s gotta give, i’m fine with it being my bone density, rather than my endurance-fitness.

There is also the issue of stretching and flexibility, which has a higher priority for me, than buying organic. Like, let’s assume that I don’t have infinite personal resources (energy and attention) to do everything that would benefit my health. So, when it comes down to picking the five or six things that I want to make sure to do for my health, I DO want to include at least some effort to stretch my muscles and foam-roll the main areas I am working.

From my perspective there’s not much that worse than people who have severely compromised range of motion — that just becomes a sad state of affairs, when people cannot move their legs through a proper range of motion. Talk about being trapped in one’s own body!

Anyways, so those are my thoughts on deciding what’s important to me. I am not buying organic produce these days — so I am consuming certain toxins that would otherwise be absent, but at least spending less on groceries.

Also, I am not really doing any type of intentional relaxation these days, and I think that would be a nice thing to add back into my routine when I have a little bit of extra bandwidth. On this topic, I have to admit that I always used to be a pretty good sleeper, but recently, I am so keyed up and anxious, that I have been sleeping with some type of podcast or documentary playing in the background. And that’s been going on for maybe a month or so. (It’s been a rough freaking month for me emotionally. Too much anxiety and not enough relaxation!)

So those are some of my thoughts on picking and choosing from the various things we can (and want to) do for ourselves, without getting too hung up on the all the other things that didn’t make that cut!

[roundcoconut]

A few quick thoughts, on being (or becoming) well-adjusted in a country that has gone down some very bad paths:

For background, I should mention that I was talking yesterday to a guy at my favorite coffee shop. And, he is the kind of person who is willing to call things as he sees them. Just willing to take the blinders off and be utterly truthful.

And some of the things we were talking about, are certain qualities that are well-engrained into the American culture. Like, Americans are generally people who need instant gratification, or they quit. This isn’t really a quality I look up to. Many Americans need to be promised rapid results. Things that take two or three years to bear fruit, are generally not things that Americans do a good job at.

There are other qualities that have become well-rooted in American culture, like having a somewhat childish attitude toward doing self-destructive things. Like, I remember 13-year-old kids feeling like they were getting away with something by stealing their parents cigarettes and going out to the woods and inhaling carcinogens. They were like, “ha ha, we’re getting away with doing something naughty!”

And modern Americans seem to have the same attitudes, like people kinda giggle with glee sometimes when they are ordering dessert that they KNOW isn’t going to improve their heart’s functioning at all. But some Americans are so miscalibrated that they feel all badass when they choose to do the things that do them no favors.

So there are just SOOOO many things in American culture, that probably weren’t a huge part of other human cultures throughout the long, long history of humanity.

Anyways, so many Americans have really cultivated qualities of being reckless, irresponsible, willfully ignorant, unwilling to make any effort on their own behalf, etc. And I tend to be very hands-off with those kinds of people! People cannot act in self-destructive ways, and expect that society is going to step in and fix things.

In short, Live by the sword, Die by the sword. People who are in deeply ingrained habits of living in inactivity and eating food CRAP, are simply going to experience the natural outcomes of those habits.

And yeah, it’s really not black and white. I’m sure that I occupy some part of the continuum, because my lifetime consumption of twinkies is WAY higher than someone who lived far longer ago. My lifetime exposure to radiation is WAY higher than someone from a different era. I have a LOT of sitting on couches and I believe my body shows the damage from all of that.

In any event, there are just HUGE parts of the group consciousness that are not going in a good direction, and you almost have to have a hands-off approach of letting the group bear their consequences and learn their lessons and experience their own free will. The HUGE tendency among plant-based folks, is to engage in this weird co-dependent role, of begging people to change, who do not want to change right now. We have this tendency to beg them to change, or to rationalize how bad off they are, etc.

So perhaps it is about adopting the principles of Al-Anon? Do not bail people out when they get themselves into a crisis situation, but also don’t manufacture a crisis when people are simply cruising along toward a cliff edge.

Yep, those are my ridiculously uplifting thoughts for today! Thoughts are welcome, please share if you have any ideas of stories.

[roundcoconut]

More ideas from the trenches:

Lots of people have qualities that are admirable and likeable! That is probably the only way to stay sane in this society, is to FIND that which is admirable and likeable, and to place your focus and your attention there.

And also, to practice that approach towards ourselves. Do the best we can, and accept the consequences of where we have chosen wrong (like, an ex-smoker might have to live with compromised lung functioning, and that’s just that.)

Many Americans are experiencing a lot of health difficulties — lots of pain processes, inflammation, mobility impairments.

I think the willingness to respect this phenomena of cause and effect, is really a key part of the equation. Y’gotta respect the Law of Cause and Effect. You can like the many likeable qualities of people that walk this earth, but y’gotta respect Cause & Effect! If we don’t respect this basic law of the universe, then we are massively misguided and ridiculously off-course in life.

So, wow, I am hugely ranty today! . And so uplifting, too, right? But I am thinking through these things, because I like to have a strategy for the world I live in, or else i just suffer and flail as I go through my days. Suffering and flailing NO BUENO, right?

[roundcoconut]

A fitness update:

Yesterday, I happened to hop on the stairmaster and do 90 minutes of training at 146 beats per minute average, and I was surprised that I was able to sustain that heart rate without wanting to abort the workout. So, this is a major piece of data!

In the end, the fitness is my favorite thing I’ve got going on right now, and I’m excited to see how this unfolds for me — how I’m performing in May, and in June. I honestly never have done this approach before, of elevating my heart rate enough to have sweaty hair, a sweaty face, a sweaty shirt — but not elevating it so much that my breathing becomes ragged or uncomfortable.

I was listening to a YouTube video from a guy who was saying that, from the point of view of the Maffetone method, the couch-to-half-marathon plans that one most often sees, are horrible, horrible advice. Like, if I am 30 pounds overweight, and decide I’m going to train for a half-marathon in order to get in shape, then following some arbitrary prescription of “jog one minute, walk two minutes” is probably going to carry a person uncomfortably OVER the training zone they should be spending several months in.

The guy in the YouTube video was saying that you honestly couldn’t sell a training plan that said, “Walk several times a week at MAF, and if it comes to the point that you need to break into a jog to stay in that heart rate zone, then go ahead — but most likely, you won’t need to do this for several YEARS, if you’re coming offf a sedentary lifestyle.”

It does seem true to me that for 99% of Americans, jogging does more harm than good. If you happen to watch footage of the mid-packers and back-of-the-packers of any middle-America road race, it seems obvious that large percentages of people are buckling at the core, breaking at the hip, and unable to hold their pelvis in any ergonomically correct way. So, I’m kinda trying not to be a casualty of the “myth” of running — that running poorly is worth doing because it’s cool. (?)

That was my rant for the day, on running and fitness!

[roundcoconut]

Oh! And back to the matter of me trying to SOMEHOW become well-adjusted in a culture with much laziness, resignation and demand for instant gratification:

There is another quality that I see all around me and want to come to terms with, which is that many Americans engage in a lot of self-sabotage, and then they wonder why they are failing left and right.

My first instinct with people who self-sabotage (in ALL kinds of ways, but in particular with their words) is to tell them to KNOCK IT OFF! But in the end, I kind of have to accept that if/when a person realizes that self-sabotage is not a strategy they want to employ anymore, then THEY will make that determination. In their own good time.

One of my difficulties with reading posts on these forums, is that many people are rife with self-sabotage.

One example, and feel free to take this strategy and run with it, is that if a person says they are going to “try” to do something, then they are implying to themselves off the bat, that failure is pretty likely. They are scripting failure right into their attempt. NO BUENO!

A person who is not self-sabotaging may go ahead and say they would like to “practice” a certain skill or behavior. Like, if a person practices walking on a tightrope, then they are saying that they’re not sure how long or how well they are able to travel on the tightrope today, but that they are going to DO the behavior today.

Huge difference between:
“Try to have a good attitude” versus “practice optimism”. Y’see?

Oh! And this bizarre and unfortunate tendency for Americans to be “self-deprecating” and to believe that others find it charming — nope — not charming, just ill-advised. One example that I saw on these boards once was that someone said that they hoped to be fine with keeping cookies in the house, and then commented “famous last words!” Meaning, they are about to do dumb shit, and are more or less expecting it to turn out poorly anyways.

My point is that if I try to go language-police on every post where a person sets themselves up for failure, I’m going to have a REALLY unhappy life. So, I gotta just accept that many Americans do this behavior of self-sabotage, and it’s a trap for me to try to fix everyone, or alert them to what they’re doing.

Make sense?? Feel free to add any commentary, if anyone wishes to! Those are some thoughts on me trying to adjust myself happily to the conditions I’m living in.

[roundcoconut]

One of the big rules of earth seems to be, that each person does their own work.

The particularly difficult trap of discussion boards, is that there are always people who want to play the victim and people who want to play the rescuer. This is a TOTAL freaking trap!

If a person says, “I can’t seem to get out of debt. Help!” Then the rescuer comes in and says, “Are you willing to cancel internet to your home? That could save a few bucks.” And then the victim says, “I can’t cancel home internet. I have kids and I can’t do that to them.” And then the rescuer says, “What do you think about leveling with your kids about being in debt, and seeing what expenses they would prefer to cut out instead.” And then the victim says, “I just don’t want to do that to my kids — they don’t deserve that”. And on and on it goes.

So I honestly would like to extract myself from that vibe entirely!

With people who start a conversation in the victim role, it’s sometimes possible to switch the tone of the conversation. So Person A says, “I can’t seem to save money” and Person B says, “What kinds of things are you planning on trying?” (Rather than offering them what we have learned to do, and hoping they will take it and run with it.)

Wow, I’m so rambly some days! All about victims and rescuers. I definitely like the idea of steering the conversations from ever going down a path of playing victims and rescuers.