post vacation -- kids and L are almost back

Just got back from spending XMas with Mom -- much better than spending it alone in a bar, weeping over not having the kids and Lopa with me. She threw a great Xmas party. I thought that this years get together would be depressing w/o kids running around, but it was really fun and I actually got to talk to people! Spent the 26th over there, and returned late last night.

Today I expect I will be supporting 3 very grumpy, very jetlagged people. I did not know what to get for food, but I did get milk+eggs+fruit. That, coupled with bread, should get us by at least one meal. Then I'm going to make them pizza, and I'm going to also make my stew (this time, I won't cook it as fast) for next week.

The whole diet thing was derailed again by my dietary Kryptonite, sugar cookies and XMas desserts. Still, I did get in a 5 miler and a 4 miler at altitude. I also replaced my heart rate sensor battery, and saw some return to sanity with heart rate (still, much higher than usual, though).

Measurements: not sure if these are rounding errors or measurement errors, but I'm honing in on how I do this:

measurement	last week	this week
belly	35.5	35
chest	45	42
bicep	14.125	14.5
quad	23.125	23.5
waist	34	34

Not significant change, but I wasn't expecting any in a week of inconsistent, sugary eating :) Right now I'm nursing a bit of a cold, but hope to run (slowly!) through it to get my legs used to some motion.

one week back

Well, one week back from India, and I think my heart rate monitor is on the fritz. The HR readings are very high for the way I feel -- as in I don't feel as bad as my heart rate is telling me I should feel. Now, I'm out of shape after a month of sitting on my ass and eating really good food. But I would think that would mean that I would feel terrible while running, and I just feel slightly not so good, not terrible, not even close.

As far as diet -- Good God, Man, it's Christmas. My personal kryptonite, sugar cookies, surround me at every turn. Even my killer Paleo beef stew pales in taste when compared to an amazing sugar cookie or two. Plus, I like beer. Not terrible amounts. I had a pint the other night, a bottle the one before. So....not much happening on the weight loss count. I think I need to up the amount of exercise by biking into work. I'll set that up next week by getting a locker so I can shower up there.

Off to NM today -- taking the bus to the train to the airport. I fully expect tomorrow -- XMas -- to be all about good food. And possibly good scotch. At this point, I have to state my core belief -- life is too short to be miserable. So I'll go ahead and indulge slightly, and run it off the next day.

Run # 2, Paleo Diet, and the Universe

This morning (Tuesday) I went on the same run I did on Sunday. For some reason I felt like running hard at the end, and actually got my heart rate up to 189 -- that's pretty insanely high for me! The weird thing is that I wasn't hurting. This means I'm so out of shape I don't need to push that hard to get my HR up. Really Up. This changes my calcs of my training zones -- I'll recalc them once I get a decent measurement of resting HR.

Last night I cooked a Paleo stew, which tasted terrible at the time. I cooked enough for an army, and was really not looking forward to eating it. But, I heated it up tonight and....not bad! I forgot that stews get better with age.  

Post India Revelation: Great Food + No Exercise = Fat + Out of Shape

Unlike other vacations, India was not about doing things, it was about seeing people, and places, and eating along the way. The food was good up North. It was good down South. It was good home cooked. It was good in restaurants. It was good on safari. The food was quite consistently amazing, and I ate every meal like it was my last. Between bouts of sitting on my ass and/or sleeping.

Consequences? I am incredibly fucking out of shape. Strangely enough, I don't actually weigh that much more at all. I'm clocking in around 172. But I went out running today on a recovery run around the house. Normally this 4 mile run is my recovery run -- done very slow to make sure I don't get over 70% max heart rate. Its a hilly run, with approximately 600 feet climbing -- my house is the high point, so the first and last mile are steep down and steep up respectively. In late spring this year, I averaged 9:55/miles @ 138 BPM average HR. Today I averaged 10:15 @ 162 BPM. Thats right, slower pace at more apparent effort. 162-138/38 = 17% more effort to go 4% slower, to be concrete about it.  BTW I normally don't hit 162 except in long intervals and races.

As a bonus for slothing around and eating like a pig,  I've got incipient man boobs and significant love handles. Jesus. The Horror. Gentle reader, part of my motivation for getting my mojo back is pure shame at having moobs + mandles.

So, I've got a long ways to go to get back to being reasonably fit.

First thing first: diet. I've been reading about the Paleo Diet for some time, after talking to a friend who tried it and loved the way it made him feel. In the end, he loved bread more, but he goes Paleo when he starts training for events.
I'm going to eat as Paleo as I can. Given that this is the week before XMas, and Santa shaped Sugar Cookies are my Kryptonite, this will be a difficult challenge.

Second: how to measure. As shown above, weight apparently doesn't matter. Shape (literally) does. I can tell I have a (much!) bigger belly right now, so I'm going to measure it among other things to see whether I'm making progress.

• Belly: 35.5" (Good God, Man!)
• Waist: 34" (that's a whole lot of waist...)
• Chest: 45" (hard to tell how much of that is moobs)
• Bicep: 14.125" (shrunken from lack of activity)
• Quad: 23.125" (same)

I'm going to take measurements weekly, including the recovery run. Although next week is XMas at Moms house, not exactly a time and place you want to go all Spartan. The food is just too damn good! I'll bring the running shoes. If a  formerly-known-as-a-recovery-run kicks my ass this bad, doing it at 5000 feet ought to be, well, interesting. 

On Being Happy: Part 1: Stop Being So Back-Assward!

Just got back from a trip to India, which was the first time in years that I've been 'suspended from normalcy' enough to think about the big picture. I had a lot of time to think, to read, to hang out with family and some really great people I met there. India ended up being so much better than I ever thought it could be, mainly because of the people I met there. Hmmmm. People. I didn't think I liked them that much. Could I be on to something?

Well, yes.  Here it is: Life is about enjoying and experiencing other people. Fairly obvious to most everyone else, but this is big stuff for me!

Part of this revelation may have been influenced by some of the books I picked up during the trip. The amazing thing about books is that you find the ones you need when you need them. The Happiness Advantage and The Shift have really taught me to never judge a book by the initial "self improvement for greater work efficiency" covers, because they're really about being happy more than being an efficient corporate citizen.

This isn't the place for me to give you a blow by blow account of the books. If you can read this, you can read them. So let me summarize my takeaways from both books:

1. My quality of life is directly proportional to the quality of the relationships I have with the people around me.
2. Those relationships are much more effective at making me happy than than the things I do -- work, athletic endeavors, etc.
3. When I'm happy, the things I love to do tend to go much better.
4. When things get hard, the most important step I can take is to interact with other people. Not necessarily whine about my life, but involve myself in theirs to (a) forget about myself and (b) put my problems in the right perspective.

Wow. This is not my default operational mode. Let me revisit the Arun Jacob Standard Operating Manual:

1. I find happiness by pushing myself hard at work, at play, etc, because there is real meaning in pushing at my limits.
2. I have relationships through the things I do. They are by-products of the things I do -- they involve people that do those things.
3. My pursuit of happiness is largely a solitary effort. Lots of time is spent alone. Even in a group I'm focused on the activity first, the companionship second.
4. When the going gets hard, I go it alone. I don't want to burden anyone with my issues.

This approach worked quite well in my 20s, when my friends at work were my closest friends and we set up work to enable us to do the things we loved, which gave us a lot of time to snowboard, climb, etc. Oh, and we had a lot of time and flexibility in which to live this way. I had a blast. 

When kids came long, the time and flexibility went away, and my priorities and perspectives changed radically. I love my kids, and I love spending time with them. But I can't do that and go on weekend trips with the guys. Who have all since gotten married and had kids of their own, so they wouldn't be available anyways. So I shifted to a lot of solitary exercise. Long bike rides and runs really served to ground me. And I've found that triathlons can be as fun as long climbs or epic snowboarding days.

But right now, at (almost!) 43, married, as a husband and father who works for a large corporation that does not have the same snow day policy that my friends did, I don't have the option getting happiness and relationships as by products of work or play. That is quite simply an inefficient approach that doesn't scale to my life today, because to do it right would mean I have less time to be a husband and father. And I love being a husband and a father, so scaling back on either is not an option.

I'm not throwing everything out: in fact, I have no intention of throwing anything out -- maybe I'll put some stuff on the shelf, but long runs and rides, snowboarding, surfing are still as fun as ever. This year I want to go off-road with triathlons, and get back into mountainbiking, something that I really enjoyed before kids came along. And climbing was too much a part of my soul to ever completely let go of. I know there will be a time in my life when I will have the time to get back into it. 

But I've known for some time that I have a fundamental misalignment that is preventing me from being as happy as I can be. Now I see that doing these things in pursuit of happiness is putting the cart before the horse. 

When that happens on the job, I get frustrated, start whining, and quit. I've had a journeyman career, and while part of that has been great, it's actually been caused by how I work. I tunnel into hard problems because I enjoy them, but then I over extend, completely over work, and end up feeling unappreciated for my efforts. So I move on.

When that happens in a marriage ... lets just say that my amazing wife stuck it out through some very painful times during and after my dad got sick and passed away.  My initial tendencies during that time were to retreat into myself and lock everyone else out, including her. That didn't work out so well. Now time has passed, the kids are older, we have more time to talk, and we are enjoying one another. But when I look back at that time, I cannot explain how I got my head out of my ass, other than to say that something much bigger than me was doing the pulling. 

Another example: this past year in Triathlons I lost my way, putting mileage and target pace ahead of fundamental health. I'm still paying the price for that (hello, left achilles tendon!). The tris I did last summer were not nearly as fun as the ones I did the summer before, when I had no expectations. 

So while I am slowly moving in the right direction, I've still got a long way to go to change from pursuing happiness through activities to being happy by being with and around people. 

My pursuit of happiness is selfish. It absolutely is! But when I'm happy, I have a much better chance to make other people around me happy. And, as a husband, a father, a friend, a co-worker, a human, that seems like a very unselfish thing to do.

So. Where to go from here?