Climb, Alone

 It wasn't intentional–there isn't an easy way to privatise a small mountain in Vermont–but I had a nice time climbing alone this week. Soulful, and not all that super easy. I went up to a place called Burnt Rock Mountain.

No one else at all happened to be hiking on the mountain that morning. It was just me and my thoughts and my map. I brought my trusty app Endomondo and it calculated my total ascent as 2,643 feet, to about 3,200.  I hike uphill pretty fast (around 24-minute miles) and decend slowly on tenderized, middle-aged knees.
The round-trip from Hedgehog Brook Trail to the Long Trail and back is about seven miles (7.2 according to my GPS).

It was 79 degrees fahrenheit on the mountain–all of a sudden! winter has lingered here–and I sweated heavily, didn't quite bring enough water. The hike involved a brisk walk through woods with trekking poles, crossing several streams where I dunked my head but didn't drink because of the possible bacteria, then climbing up stone-filled drainages and hiking through kind of stressed forests, with falling down trees, and interesting pockets of left-over ice and snow.

This made it feel for a short time like the Alps, where it can be wicked hot on the hike but there's snow all around. One picture shows a place that had a small cliff with ice and snow forming a soupy meltwater at the bottom of it. This feature is described as a "glacial pothole," a rare find in New England apparently.

It was odd to come upon this crevasse-like feature with it so hot and in Vermont.

Then Burnt Rock near the top becomes hiking over open, rather exposed boulders. I could see how it could be hazardous if there was a sudden icy rain, but this time it was sunny and very dry. It was almost too hot to sit on the top, where it was just me and a slight wind. A nice 360-degree view that includes adjacent valleys and Sugarbush ski area. I got going back somewhat fast because I thought it would be a bit of a puzzle finding my way back (it wasn't).

Great exercise, highy recommended, and I dived into a cold river afterwards–51 degrees F.– to get rid of the soreness. It worked!

10 Ways To Respond To Workout And Sports Injuries

I can relate to this one because I got injured last weekend, my lower back around the lumbar spine, which can be scary. I seemed to have failed #1 and #9 below, but now I'm on a fast track to recovery. At 56, I've had many common sports injuries over the decades, so I'm familiar with the typical response and recovery patterns.

#1: Own up to the injury. Declare yourself injured as soon as possible; this will speed your recovery. This won't be a difficult step if you tear an ACL or Achilles tendon, for example (you won't be able to walk!), but many injuries are more subtle: mild or moderate concussions, various soft tissue tears or sprains. You're tempted to just "soldier on," your identity and self esteem are heavily wrapped up with your daily routine and you hate backing off it (maybe that's another issue to work on). Believe me, this is a mistake. You can make the injury worse and prolong your recovery. Many injury-response steps have to do with attitude. You're going to have to change what you do for several days, and the sooner you start the better.

#2: The good old R.I.C.E. acronym will do you no wrong for the vast majority of physical mishaps like soft tissue injuries (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation). Ice is best for the first day because it minimizes swelling and bleeding. Get the ice pack on right away. Then move to a combination of ice followed by heat.

#3: Eat and sleep really well. Your body is broken but has an amazing capacity for regeneration. You have to repair tears in tissue and sometimes bone fractures and the like; that means you have to provide the raw materials, which are quality proteins. Whatever your favorite good protein source is, chow down: fish, red meat, fowl, eggs, avocados, etc. Ease back on sugar and other inflammatory foods like refined flour; you want to *reduce* inflammation. Get plenty of sleep, because sleep is repair and rejuvenation time for the body. The difference in injury-recovery time when you're sleeping well compared with burning the candle at both ends is *amazing*.

#4: Listen to your body and ease back on the painkillers and pills. This may seem kind of Spartan but…Ibuprofen helps by masking the pain and inflammation, but doesn't initiate any healing in its own right. Listen to your own body; it embodies thousands of years of accumulated evolutionary wisdom. I'm not talking about real pain-management issues. This advice refers to the typical sports and overuse injuries that involve more stiffness and restriction of movement. I find that injured people tend to live on NSAIDs when they didn't really have to ("I took 12 Motrin yesterday!"). I took a grand total of one 200 mg Motrin for my back injury. I wanted to know what I had done to myself, and to monitor the sensations to find out if I was improving.

#5: See a specialist if there's no incremental or noticeable improvement. My rule of thumb is that if even a moderately bad injury (not disabling) is improving with treatment day by day, you don't have to see a specialist. Every concussion, however, necessitates a trip to the doctor and the complete cessation of the activity for a long time. By that I mean dizziness afterwards, headaches, nausea, certainly any evidence you were knocked out or saw stars. In other cases, for example, my back injury is getting better every day, very quickly, so I don't have to go see "the back guy." In fact, pursue a less is more strategy in general for handling your physical issues.

#6: Tell others that you are out of action, including work. This goes back to #1; you're injured, you have restricted movement, you are trying to get better, and you have to dial back what you do for several days. Don't be afraid or embarrassed to ask for help if you're lugging babies around or the like. Believe me, I've been there.

#7: Be patient. Older people will almost always take longer to recover from injuries than younger people. The famous Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say something on the order of "a 20 year old player who pulls a hammy is out for a week; a 40 year old is out for a month." Just assume that you're out of action for a while–the joy when you comeback faster will be all the more uplifitng.

#8: Be aware that stress and fatigue precludes injuries. Mental stress and anxiety leads to eroded reaction time, loss of coordination, poor concentration, all the things that lead up to muscular, tendon, and joint injuries. When you're stressed, do easy relaxation type exercises and leave the high-intensity stuff for another time.

#9: Learn to avoid injury in the first place by knowing your limits and not having to prove yourself over and over again. The definiton of injury is literally placing a too-heavy load or force on a set of muscles and joints for too long a time.  If you're going to challenge yourself physically, then train adequately for the activity and work up to it incrementally. Most of us aren't athletic savants; if you've only done crossfit twice, don't enter the crossfit tournament. The apparent source of my injury was, in retrospect, a little pathetic. I spent the good chunk of a morning in one of those automatic batting cages proving to myself that I could still get around on a fastball. I even had a little cheering section of kids ("Gee Mister, did you used to play baseball?") The next morning I looked and moved like Jed Clampett.

#10: After you're 100 percent again, use resistance training and other techniques (e.g., common sense stretches and yoga) to strengthen the area that was injured. The injury was your body's way of exposing your weakness, and how joyful it is to find new routines and not get injured again!

Boston: Shaken Not Bowed

I was driving on the highway down from Vermont yesterday, ears glued to the radio stream, talking to family members on my cell phone and locating others. We got a text message from a nephew who was about a mile from the finish line on the marathon course. I talked to my brother who's a firefighter and had planned to be in the Boston Marathon volunteer's tent at the finish line (he was one of the better male masters to have run Boston in recent years) but missed the sign-up. He "wanted to be there."

We're all Bostonians on days like this, all the citizens of the world. And all of us who know and love Boston (I grew up about a quarter mile from the Old North Bridge in Concord), and run and/or watched the marathon for years, are quite shaken and dismayed by the surreal and tragic mayhem of yesterday. What's clear is that the city will make a rather fast and inspiring comeback–and please help donate to the victims.

Let the healing process begin (after today and maybe tomorrow too, when the city downtown is still pretty much a cordoned off crime scene). Send the message that life is going to go on regardless of what some terrorist has planned. I'm planning on being in town on Thursday night if my event isn't cancelled.

Like many, I wonder who could be responsible for this soulless and odious event. I'm also, from my childhood days, steeped in the history that apparently was the symbolic basis for the attack (Patriot's Day). Will the investigation results be cut-and-dried or as complex and multilayered as I assume they will be? How will it be investigated?

Aftermath, written in retrospect: The atrocity has apparently had little or nothing to do with Patriot's Day, and was committed by, as someone else put it, "two homicidal nobodies." They probably knew next to nothing of local history, spent much of their time on violent, vacuous, jihadist Internet sites, and picked the marathon as a target because, at the moment, they could.

The New Kindle Book "Barbarous Coasts"

A seasoned cop, a paroled hacker, and epic chicanery in the financial world.

A well-dressed man falls forty-two floors off the roof of a New York City hotel. A Big League pitcher witnesses the event. Somehow, Detective Karl Standt, a Vermont boy who's made his mark in the big city, believes this is more than a Wall Streeter's fall from grace. He forms an off-beat alliance with a computer hacker, and what unfolds is a fast-moving, multilayered tableau depicting the sharp end of contemporary America.


The new detective thriller is downloadable in Kindle format from Amazon. Remember that you can put the Kindle reader software at no charge onto your computer or smartphone. Enjoy it!

The Cast Away Diet

The 2000 movie Cast Away is really about a man who never has enough time–he runs around with a stopwatch trying to get his FedEx workers moving, and can't even spend Christmas with his fiancee–then suddenly has so much empty time marooned on a South Pacific island that he attempts suicide.

In the beginning of the movie he's flabby, overworked, and has tooth decay (Hanks apparently gained about 50 pounds for the role, a la Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull). This is the state he's in when he floats up to the island after a plane crash. (Same director as Flight by the way.)

Then the film stencils Seven Years Later across the screen, and Tom Hanks has been transformed: he's solid, bleached, lean, and standing in the tropical shallows with a homemade spear.

The implications are obvious: he was forced into a self-imposed Cast Away Diet. The pounds were shed living off the land and subsisting on, presumably, shell-fish, fish, fruit, and coconuts. Possibly some root vegetables were thrown in there. So he got plenty of lean protein; fish fats (Omega 3s), coconut fat (lauric acid is a "healthy saturated fat"); vitamin C and other important nutrients.

The Cast Away Diet is actually superior to the Mediterranean Diet, which relies too heavily on grains (a filler-food at best and fat-making and toxic at worst, as in gluten, lectin, and other anti-nutrients). The Cast Away Diet doesn't demonize any of the macronutrients; it just gets good amounts of all three. it might be better than the Paleo Diet, given the recent dust-up over red meat.

The reliance on seafood and not animal-muscle meat removes some of the squeamishness some people considering Paleo have toward red meat.

The Cast Away Diet is far more nutritious than vegetarian or vegan diets, with the healthy fats and rich amino acids from fish, and the absence of grains. A cast away would probably also hunt seabirds and eat small reptiles, so you can add fowl and game to the mix.

This diet is not difficult to replicate for the average eater, more or less permanently cast away on the shores of one of our large cities, who gets to know one of the innumerable fish stores. I'm basically eating a Cast Away Diet this month, with lots of shrimp, scallops, lobster tails, arctic char, fruits, salads, a bit of chicken, etc. Now all I need is a volleyball. Wilson!!

Endomondo and Strava Sprinters Have a New Instructional Ebook

Today, I rode my mountainbike since spring has finally arrived in the northeast U.S. I had both Strava and Endomondo apps running during the ride, because I like looking at both results pages.

In the same spirit of "riding the two apps," I recently wrote a short book called Using Smartphone Apps With Interval Training for your Kindle. The book describes in detail how to use Endomondo's and Strava's interval-training features, plus includes a chapter on how to weave sprints into your training in general. Screenshots included, and technical references (with built-in links). Enjoy!

What Should Kids Eat For Breakfast? Ask Their Grandma...

I sat next to a guy on a plane, nice fella, whose business it was to sell affordable packages of breakfast to USA school districts. His target student "wasn't the kid who drives a BMW to school and eats breakfast at Starbucks," but kids in cash-starved districts where they only have a shocking 75 cents on average to spend on each breakfast. With which you could possibly buy a single orange.

So what was in their breakfasts? Cereal and breakfast bars, mostly, all "USDA approved" and "organic," and nutritionally not worth the plastic packaging they were wrapped in. They hardly looked better than the snackettes that the airlines pass out these days. The man wearily pointed out that they were limited by this USDA-approval nonsense and the extremely strapped funds of the school districts, who have to feed the kids something.

Other than sugar wheat and sugar water (skim milk), what actually is a more optimal breakfast for kids? If I had to produce a neat package it would look like hard-boiled or scrambled eggs (full fat and optimally from local farms), some fruit, bacon, and maybe a coconut-milk based "green" or berrie-based smoothy.

So-called ketogenic or high-fat plus protein meals are not only more satiating and nutritious than sugar wheat and sugar water, but they have a proven calming and anti-inflammatory affect on kids with ADHD and other behavior issues. A good farm breakfast that grandma would have whipped up (maybe minus the stack of pancakes) is far better than the institutionalized breakfasts–based on dysfunctionally subsidized soy, corn, and wheat–that tens of millions of American kids are getting now. If they even get breakfast.

So who's going to pay for all this? Most people can't get a farm breakfast these days for 75 cents (those were the days). How about a couple of our billionaires coming forward to pony up the funds (the highly philanthropic Bloomberg and The Gates Foundation come to mind). Let's get that started, maybe a Children's Breakfast Initiative (CBI)?