5ks and Competition

Recently, a friend posted on Facebook about his weight loss and--probably more importantly--his efforts and successes at becoming more fit, which included working up to running a 5k (and now he's aiming for a half marathon!). That's a pretty cool accomplishment, in my book, to go from not being able to run a 5k to actually running a 5k. I know other people who've made that journey.

I'm not really one of them. I mean, yes, there was a time when I couldn't run 3.1 miles all at once, but it was sometime before I went to college (or, anyway, before I graduated). And it was at least 5 years after I was regularly running 5 miles at a time that I ran in my first organized 5k, so I wasn't exactly feeling suspense about whether or not I could complete it. Basically all my adult life, I've felt pretty confident that I could complete a 5k. This was true regardless of whether I was running daily or getting all of my exercise between the couch and the fridge (shout out to Pizza Rolls and beer every night, aka "spring schedule" movie nights in 2005 and 2006 and to Tastefully Simple's beer bread and spinach dip, aka every night in my first year of marriage and to massive pool of molten cookie dough covered with ice cream, aka every night of Lauren's first pregnancy). But really, I still could manage a 5k, even if it would hurt the next morning. And at the same time, even at my fittest, I've never been a fast runner (again, excepting short sprints to the fridge), so it didn't seem to make any sense to care about times. They were never impressive enough to care about.

Saturday, I ran an organized 5k for just the third time in my life. And I'll be damned if there wasn't a part of me that really wanted to brag about it, to say something about it on Facebook, or whatever. Where does that come from?

Only my shrink knows for sure.

But by the same token, as I've already outlined, it's hard for me to feel like running a 5k is anything to brag about. Now, this might have been my fastest organized 5k, but it was a run rather than a race, so there was no official time. I didn't even time it myself, so all I have to go on is what a friend who finished 30 seconds ahead of me said, that I'd finished in 24:00 even. He didn't feel like he'd run it as fast as all that, so my friend wondered if maybe the course was short, but yet another friend had some kind of GPS or something and it said that we'd all run 3.23 miles, so 24:00 would be even better than I thought.

Still, that wasn't the sort of time that put me anywhere close to the fastest finishers.

Of course, all this thinking just brought me back around to something that I've known for a long time: we should remember that if we're competing, we're really competing against ourselves. It's the only competition that's meaningful. Seriously, what would it matter if I was faster than my friend? Maybe if we were always running against each other, if we had some kind of back and forth where he sometimes wins and I sometimes win, but even the, so what? I could win while failing to improve or lose while getting a personal best. So who cares?

And yet, there's a sense in which competition does matter and is important. There's a sense in which the answer to my rhetorical question is: "I do!" Take my experience at the run. Somewhere in the last half mile or so, two girls from our school passed me (which, of course, I resented!). Up ahead of me, one stopped to walk and the other kept running, and I decided I was going to beat her to the finish line. I caught up and started passing, then she sped up to stay with me. So it's not like I was the only competitive one here. By the end we were in a full sprint, equally matched, and ended up in a photo finish that I absolutely won. In my own mind--she might have seen it differently. In any case, I'm sure we each ran faster and pushed ourselves harder because the other was there. For that moment, it was all about the competition.

As soon as we crossed the finish line, it didn't matter who "won." I clapped her on the back: "great finish!" (For the record: I won.)

And before that, my friend alluded to earlier spent most of the run about 20 yards ahead of me. The fact that he was there and that I had a vague sense that his mile splits were near where I hoped mine would be, I pushed myself to keep at least that close and maybe play a little catch-up when I could (mostly, I couldn't). Again, I probably ran faster because of the "competition" than I would have if I had just gone out for a nice jog by myself. Hypothetically, I know this could have worked against me: if I'd picked the wrong "competition," I might have started too fast and not been able to finish. But that's all part of running at this amateur level: figuring out whom to measure oneself against. It seems to me that if you have a general sense of how fast you can go / want to go, you can figure out as you go who's who. There was a joy, too, in discovering along the way people that got ahead of me earlier in the race that I could later pass (some were left behind, some passed me later; so it goes).

If it wasn't already obvious, I state it for the record: I'm a pretty casual runner. There was a time in my life when it was my primary form of exercise, when I would go for 5-mile runs three to five times a week, but now I hardly ever run any distances. Instead, I gravitate mostly to weight training and tennis. Which, really, are the opposite ends of the spectrum, with running squarely between them.

Hitting the weights is, for me at least, pretty purely about competition with myself. I'm not going to be entering any strongman competitions, and I've learned long ago not to bother with comparisons. If someone's lifting a lot more weight that I am, well, good for them. Maybe some day I can get there. Maybe I can learn something. If someone's lifting a lot less weight than I am, well, so what. Everyone has to start somewhere--there shouldn't be any shame in being a beginner. If you're showing up and doing the work, you're in the club.

While I still sometimes do it, mostly I don't judge the workouts that other people are doing, either. Sure, I might feel like some of the kids are spending too much time just on bench press and curls or that some people should venture away from the cardio machines and join in the fun of moving heavy weights around, but the bottom line is that we're all on our own journey with our own goals. We've found our own "information," and I'm happy to share what I "know" (I put it in quotes because I recognize the provisional nature of that knowledge), but I don't think there's one right way that everyone should be working out.

Then there's tennis. I can wax Zen on the subject of tennis, but really, it's pretty competitive, whether I'm playing against a former D-1 college player in a tournament or against a JV player in our local league. I want to win, and basically so does everyone else you encounter on the courts.

If we were just competing against ourselves to play the perfect game or to improve, we could "just hit" and I could be happy because I've been more consistent with my forehand or I'm getting more zip on my backhand or whatever. Most of the people I know who play tennis are bored with hitting about 30 seconds in and will suggest taking some serves and starting a set. And then best two out of three.

In the summers, I play in a league. It's set up to provide roughly equal matches, to an even greater extent than the format of high school tennis, where there's a similar organizational principle, with teams required by both rules and a sense of fair play to present their singles players  and their doubles teams in order of ability. But for most of us, whether our opponent is "better" or "worse" than us (and most of us have made a judgment about that within the first 10 seconds of hitting with them), we're there to win. That's probably why tennis players, as a category of people, tend to be so poorly adjusted. We have an intense desire to win, but we're constantly losing. Even when you win a game, you're likely losing points. Even when you're winning a set, you're likely losing games. But anyway, we care about winning and losing.

I've rambled long enough for most and far too long for some. If there's a point here, it's simply this: we humans have a natural tendency to compete, and that's not a bad thing. It can push us to do better in whatever it is that we're doing. But at the same time, for myself at least, I know that competition is just a thing of the moment. My ultimate worth isn't on the line when I'm under the bar, on the race course, or stepping up to the service line. It's all about perspective: we should embrace competition exactly to the extent that it makes us better, that it pushes us to work harder and achieve more, but beyond that we have to let it go and appreciate the moment of competition itself more than result of that competition.

Paleo Greek Lemon Chicken Soup

I hope I'm not alone when I admit that I get a lot of e-mail blasts from a lot of different places, most of which I barely even read. At some point in my life, it seemed appropriate to sign up for whatever it is. At this point in my life, I'm too busy to read the subject line of most of these, much less the actual message. A couple years ago, I did four solid months of P90X and got loosely involved in the Beachbody world. One lingering memento of that time, beyond the ripped body that I've gained (trust me, you don't need to see the pictures, just trust me that I'm totally jacked now), is the Beachbody newsletter that I get every so often. Beyond advertising their various programs and Shakeology (which I presume is an on-line degree program in the study of old-school furniture), they have health and fitness articles and usually one recipe per blast.

Now, Lauren and I have been eating Paleo most of 2013 so far, subsisting on recipes I've found in a cookbook or on the internet, or else something so simple to throw together that it doesn't even merit the term "recipe." Now, the Beachbody recipes are what most people would consider to be healthy, but they're rarely Paleo, so I took a pretty healthy recipe and not only made it amazingly healthy (unless your definition of healthy is limited to vegetarian/vegan recipes, in which case this is definitely not healthy) but also made it Paleo. Wait, I feel like I'm repeating myself. Anyway, you're welcome.

The reason why this recipe appealed to me is because it reminded me of a recipe Lauren and I loved that was even less  Paleo than this one: Creamy Lemon Pasta from The Moosewood Collective's Simple Suppers cookbook. We were blown away by the combination of creamy and lemony (Parmesan cheese and pasta didn't hurt, either). Now, pretty much every ingredient in that original recipe is out: no cream, no Parm, no pasta... just lemon. But this Beachbody recipe? Just one ingredient that doesn't fit (pasta), and it's got a great workaround to give a creamy lemony texture. High in protein, lots of the most healthy vegetables. Big win. And without further ado:

Paleo Greek Lemon Chicken Soup

1 c. cauliflower

1 lb raw chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces
4 c. chicken broth (hot)

3 large eggs
6-9 T. lemon juice
1 c. chopped fresh spinach
salt and pepper to taste

Cook cauliflower. Cook chicken. Heat broth. You can do this any way you want, but let me suggest a couple options. What I did: put the chicken (I didn't pre-cut it) and the cauliflower in a steamer, turned on the heat and let it go. It's done in 15-20 minutes. What I considered: bring the broth to a boil, cut up the chicken, and cook it in the broth, then scoop the chicken bits out--it's like a whole lot of fondue, sans forks. You might even cook the cauliflower along with it.

If you haven't already, cut up the chicken. Mash the cauliflower or puree it.

Whisk together eggs and 6 T. lemon juice in a medium saucepan. Slowly add broth, whisking constantly, until outside of pan feels warm to the touch. Add chicken, spinach, cauliflower, and any remaining broth. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, for about 2 minutes. The spinach doesn't need to get all the way to wilted, unless that's how you roll. Season with salt and pepper, add remaining 3 T. lemon juice if desired. Serve immediately.

Success is counted sweetest...

... by those whose goal is to get fat.

Which, recently, has been my goal.

I know that sounds strange. Most people want to get thin, they want to lose weight. And in a certain sense, I do too. Just not right now.

You see, a couple weeks ago, my wife directed my attention to a competition being put on by the wellness department at our school, in which teams of two would compete to lose weight over a 2-month period. Back in January, we did a Whole30 challenge to adhere to a strict Paleo diet for 30 days. Lauren, especially, was shedding the pounds pretty consistently and easily on this diet, even to the point where she felt like she was losing too much, too quickly (the standard for making that judgment: her ability to feed our daughter). She said she figured we could clean up in this competition.

Well, I thought: you could. For my part, I had settled in at a weight in the low 170s and seemed to be more or less stuck there. Which was fine--although at some point in the last year and a half or so I was as lean as the low 160s, 170-something is a very healthy weight for me, and one I can maintain with little effort. So maybe with some serious work I could get back down to that lean weight, but that really wasn't that many pounds to lose, and that might be a lot of work. I would hate to sabotage Lauren's amazing results with mediocre ones because, at heart, I'm a competitive SOB. When I do something, I want to win.

Fortunately, Lauren had brought this to my attention a few weeks before it actually started. I assume you can see where this is going. From 171 or so, in the past three weeks, I'm gained, oh let's see... 13 pounds. Four of them in the last day (thank you Valentine's Day candy).

Don't get me wrong. There's a sense in which this horrifies me. Especially since I still have a couple days to put on some more weight. People like, say, physicians would probably tell me that playing with my weight this way is an absolutely terrible thing to do to myself. To which I say: uh, yeah, probably. But we'll see.

This little experiment in packing on the pounds has been interesting in a couple ways. First, although I do feel a bit bloated and heavy, I don't really feel like I'm 13 pounds fatter than I was. I mean, my pants still fit, and I don't feel like I look much different with my shirt off. So where is that weight sitting? I can only imagine that my blood vessels are now carrying around pure, liquid fat instead of blood. But hey, if it wins us $180, I guess I'm okay with that.

The Season of Disbelievin'

Our oldest daughter, at just-under-3, is still at the age where she's a believer in just about anything. Santa? Check. Minga Madinga, her Elf on the Shelf? Absolutely. The inherent awesomeness of her parents? Most of the time. Well, sometimes. If we're not denying her a toy, making her use the potty, turning off the TV/computer/iPod, trying to get her to eat, or generally engaging her when she's cranky (which, at almost-3, seems to be much of the time).

But anyway: belief. She's got it in spades. She sort of had some idea about Santa Claus last year, as being something more than just the terrifying overlord of the mall, sitting on his throne with minions taking pictures. This year, she pretty well gets it: Santa's the guy bringing toys (also, less positively, the guy who's going to take away her pacifiers and give them to younger children).

The thing I've realized as I watch her watching Christmas movies is how many of them deal actively with the subject of belief and--noticeably--disbelief. From animated Disney movies to live-action features, there's often a character saying "Santa Claus isn't real" or "There's no such thing as elves," or whatever. And, of course, like doubting Thomas, the characters on the screen get incredibly tangible proof to back up the reality of the pro-magical-Christmas crowd's claims.

I have to wonder, though: what about the kids (which is to say, pretty much all of them) who don't get to meet a talking dog who's Santa's best friend, or see a magical elf, or receive a visit from Santa himself? In other words, what I'm asking is: what's my daughter seeing in these movies? Do the disbelievers' assertions make any dent, in what is otherwise completely unchallenged belief?

Turning 90 degrees from there, I wonder if there's a sense in which Santa Claus is actually great preparation for atheism? Think about it. Most of us growing up with Santa Claus have first-hand experience with believing in a mythical being, which other people tell us is real, and then face the inevitable moment of disillusionment. We all get practice at what it's like to become an atheist, as we become an atheist with regard to Santa Claus. And the Tooth Fairy. And the Easter Bunny.

I suppose, as with any good whopper, we can always find ways to believe if we want to. "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus..." As long as you can be as equivocal about the meaning of "is" as Bill Clinton was, then yes, there "is" a Santa Claus.

Book Review (part 1): The 4-Hour Chef

I picked up a copy of Tim Ferriss's new book, The 4-Hour Chef in hardback. And the Kindle edition too, since my wife indicated she'd be more likely to read it if she didn't have to lug around the huge (670 oversized pages) tome, and I wouldn't mind being able to read it on my computer or iPod either. In a way, it seems wrong to think about reviewing a cookbook before spending some time in the kitchen with at least a whole lot of the recipes. Or even reading most of the book. I've done neither, but I wanted to start commenting on it now instead of waiting for later.

So. If you're not familiar with Ferriss's previous work, I'll offer some background. His first book was The 4-Hour Workweek. This work had a lot of valuable parts to it, even if you don't follow the basic plan to spend way more than 4 hours per week putting together a business that can have large portions outsourced and/or automated such that you only need to put in about 4 hours per week of actual work while the business brings in big bucks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but my point is that you could get a lot out of the book even if you don't even try to go that route (I haven't). His second book was The 4-Hour Body, which he described as the journal of a mad scientist, as he basically did his best to figure out through contact with experts on the cutting edge and through self-experimentation the most efficient ways to optimize performance in all sorts of ways. One of the central elements in the book was "losing fat," which revolved around his "Slow Carb Diet" and a handful of over-the-counter supplements, but there were also sections on building muscle, getting stronger, running faster and farther, enjoying better sex, enjoying better and/or less sleep... and hitting a baseball and swimming and... anyway, there was quite a bit to that book as well.

Which brings us to The 4-Hour Chef. There is, no doubt about it, more to this book than learning how to cook. As the subtitle puts it, this is "The simple path to cooking like a pro, learning anything, and living the good life." It's too bad Tim Ferriss never aims very high, isn't it?

Ferriss has described the book as being first and foremost about optimizing learning, with cooking just being the primary example at the heart of the book. There are five sections, plus appendices, and the first--"Meta"--is all about learning. He talks here about strength training, swimming, judo, languages, Japanese characters, shooting a basketball, making a fire, chess, tango, the World Memory Championships, and a whole bunch of other things, but always his real topic is learning, as he explains and breaks down his method--which is at once the method he used to put together this book, the method the reader can, theoretically, apply to anything, and an important part of the methodology that he will use in the book to teach the skills of a chef.

And this is an important distinction: although the book has quite a few recipes in it, it's not so much a cookbook the way that The Joy of Cooking or any of the many recipe websites on the web are cookbooks (i.e. collections of recipes). Ferriss most wants his reader to understand techniques. The techniques are taught through recipes, but each of these recipes also includes variations (to the point of being whole other recipes) and more indirect suggestions for applications of the technique, which themselves invite some experimentation ("Could I do this with X instead? Let's find out!")--of which Ferriss would certainly approve. The point isn't to learn some recipes that you'll cook over and over, though chances are you will; the point is to learn techniques that will allow you to improvise your own "recipes" as needed.

Because this is already getting rather long, I'm going to break it up over the next day or two. For now I'll just say that I'm quite enjoying this book, both for the cooking that it has me doing and for the sheer enjoyment of reading what Ferriss has to write about. There's a very real danger here that Ferriss is going in so many different directions that readers won't be able to follow him. Some people will almost certainly get frustrated and say "Can't you just tell me what I need to know about cooking??" Ferriss does speak to those people, and encourage people to skip ahead as needed. For my part, I'm fascinating by just about everything he has to say, both because he makes all the various topics interesting, and because he reveals so much of himself, and he's a pretty interesting character as well. Both his content and his tone are engaging, so that I find myself very much reading ahead of where I can possibly get in the kitchen, because I want to see what he's going to tell me next.

Prayer

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." -- Matthew 7:7

"Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that my Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it." -- John 14:13-14

"And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive it, if you have faith." -- Matthew 21:22

Quite a lot of prayers are like this, probably because we're creatures of needs and wants. And as often as not, we don't know the difference.

The Bible, of course, endorses this sort of thing, though in real life, the results seem to be mixed at best. We pray for a loved one to pull through and sometimes, seemingly miraculously, they do. Troublingly, given the above passages, they often don't. Perhaps equally troubling in its own way  stands the fact that believers of other religions--and of no religion--experience "miraculous" cures at about an equal rate, albeit under a different headline. 

These are probably the prayers that are said most earnestly, but, well, good luck if you're asking for something in prayer. You'll need it. Given the evidence, I don't have a lot of faith in these prayers--if there's a God, it's not the sort of God who answers prayers like some kind of genii granting wishes.

"Lord, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." -- Reinhold Niebuhr

I have noticed on several occasions that our school's Director of Spiritual Life (and Protestant minister) frequently prays in terms of virtues, or of mindfulness. A prayer that a group or individual might have some quality strengthened really amounts to emphasizing the characteristics that we think are important. If I pray for myself that I might have courage to do something that I want to do, or that I might have peace in my heart when other people annoy me, or whatever it is, I'm also reminding myself of what it is that I want myself to be, what I see as my highest self. If God exists, then perhaps He will help out, but even in the absence of God, this kind of prayer actually works pretty well. By reminding us of who and what we want to be, we are more likely to put into practice our values.

“Oh, I think that children pray so, to find a lost doll or that Father will bring home a good haul of fish, or that no one will discover a forgotten chore. Children think they know what is best for themselves, and do not fear to ask the divine for it. But I have been a man for many years, and I would be ashamed if I did not know better by now.”

                 […] “So. How does a man pray then?”

                 […] “Don’t you know? How do you pray, then?”

                 “I don’t.” And then I rethought, and laughed aloud. “Unless I’m terrified. Then I suppose I pray as a child does. ‘Get me out of this, and I’ll never be so stupid again. Just let me live.’”

He laughed with me. “Well, it looks as if, so far, your prayers have been granted. And have you kept your promise to the divine?”

I shook my head, smiling ruefully. “I’m afraid not. I just find a new direction to be foolish in.”

“Exactly. So do we all. Hence, I’ve learned I am not wise enough to ask the divine for anything.”

“So. How do you pray then, if you are not asking for something?”

“Ah. Well, prayer for me is more listening than asking.”

—Robin Hobb, Fool’s Fate

This, too, makes a fair bit of sense to me, whether there is a God or there isn't.

You don't know beans

Henry David Thoreau, on the grounds that he didn't know beans, planted, tended, harvested, and ate a whole lot of them while he was living near Walden pond. While I may not have grown them (yet), I do feel that I've known them pretty well from the kitchen side of things.

I suspect that anyone who's been cooking for an appreciable amount of time understands that there are "Recipes As Written" and then there are "Recipes as Lived." There's what the book says and there's what we do. This is so true of the way that I cook beans that even my biggest mistakes are now basically part of the process. So I offer to you my own step-by-step directions--how I make beans. The Platonic form of this recipe comes from Nourishing Traditions.

1. Soak beans in water overnight, 12-24 hours. Usually closer to 12, or 8, because of when I remember to start soaking them. Agonize over whether to use tap water or filtered water, but always choose tap water because it's a pain in the butt to filter that much water.

2. Drain the water (see, aren't you glad you didn't filter all that water just to dump it later?). Rinse the beans several times, still with tap water, because it's still a pain to do otherwise. When the water is more or less clear, go ahead and go to the trouble of getting enough filtered water together to cover the beans. Turn the burner on to high and keep adding water as it slowly makes its way through the filter.

3. Because water takes so damned long to boil, put a lid on your pot. Because water takes so damned long to boil, wander away and do something productive with your time.

4. Forget about the beans completely until you can hear the sound of water boiling over. By the time you get to the beans, there will be nasty bean water all over your stove. Unless you want to have a disgusting mess later when it dries, you should clean up the mess now. But then, you should also be skimming off the foam, so figure out your priorities.

5. Lower the heat to as low as it will go while still simmering. Come back periodically for the next several hours to fiddle with it, as you realize that the burner is too low to keep it simmering or so high that it's basically a rapid boil.

6. While you're fiddling with the heat, you may also want to make sure that there's enough water in with the beans, unless you would prefer to have the beans turn into a scorched mess at the bottom of your pan, which is not only one of the worst things you will ever try to clean up in your kitchen, but also renders all that time you spent on steps 1-5 completely useless. But hey, if that's how you roll, go for it.

7. Beans are done when you say they're done. That might be 4 hours later, that might be 8 hours later. You're the cook here, you decide. Bean appetit!