weights, nutrition update

My previous push press 10RM was 85lbs. Doesn't sound like a lot, right, but remember, it's a 10RM, not a 2RM or even a 5RM. Today I did 5x5 115lb push presses. At the end of the fifth set, I was beat, and my form was suffering, so I knew I'd hit my max for a 5RM.

I'm also cautiously stepping into deadlifts. Before this week, I'd been using 2 pood kettlebell. That was the biggest we had at the time, and I could easily bang out 10x10 on it. This week I've been using the bar, albeit super duper careful, and after consulting my doctor and personal trainer. When you have a broken back, form is everything on a deadlift. So, my deadlift is presently 85lbs (which is slightly more than 2 pood). This was 5x5 this morning (I love the 0630 workout; I get a shit ton done before the sun even comes up). I know I could go higher, and I'm pretty sure my 2RM is quite a bit over 100lbs, but I need to exercise those muscles, get them conditioned, and then start increasing the weight.

One side effect of the accident is I have reduced mobility (I'm not sure if this is because my spinal column is tighter because of the ligature/musculature or whether it's a physical immobility) and can't get into the proper lowest position for a DL. So we get a couple of 25-lb plates (a bit more than an inch tall) and stack them on either side of the barbell. Thus, my lift starts about 2-3" above the ground and finishes there, but my form is better. Oh, and I have to take my shoes off. Sneakers (I have trail running shoes that unfortunately have a pretty significant heel raise) just don't cut it for lifts. I'm looking in to getting some Inov-8's or NB Minimus soonish (problem is I have ogre feet and they don't always come in my size).

Today's WOD was Cindy. Cindy and I are not friends. My time was 16:48 (we did 10 sets for time rather than AMRAP 20, so in theory my first Cindy might have been 12), the last person in the class to finish. Individually, the exercises weren't hard -- pullups, pushups, and air squats -- but for ten rounds, you get a serious burn on. Today I did something I haven't done at CrossFit before, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. When doing the squats, my muscles were screaming at me (remember, this is just an air squat) to rest, just a second, and I ignored them. I winced and closed my eyes and just kept banging out the next rep. Six, then nine, then twelve, and I-know-I'm-almost-there, then fifteen was up. Of course, that's small consolation, because then I was back to pullups.

It almost felt like I had hit a peak (the first set of squats I actually had to rest at 5, and then did the remaining 10) and pushed past it and was working on different energy. This is kind of in line with what Glassman says about the various "pathways" to energy. Cribbing shamelessly here, the immediate burst of energy is the phosphagenic pathway, followed by the glycolytic pathway, and finally the oxidative pathway. Is it possible I noticed a switch in the way my body was powering the squats?

Lastly, I had my first treatment of prolotherapy last Thursday. I took Thursday and Friday off but hit the gym hard on Saturday. In fact, because of the way the prolo acted on my muscles, I really wanted to work out on Friday. I kept asking my wife, "and I can't go back to the gym until Saturday??" Basically, prolo feels like you've gotten a real serious workout in, only without the workout. I can see how this would actually work, especially for patients who are convalescing and can't exercise the traumatized area.

In my case, I am looking back and really irritated that I was given so many anti-inflammatories. Inflammation is crucial to the healing process. The first thing the doctors did was give me IM toradol and gobs of NSAIDs. No wonder those muscles atrophied and became mostly useless! I think we need to seriously reconsider the utility of the inflammation cycle in traumatic injuries. I know I rant about it a lot, but I think the best treatment for pain in cases of traumatic injury is probably low doses of morphine po, rather than a hydrocodone/APAP formula. But we as a nation are so afraid of opiate addiction that we instead allow people to become permanently injured because they never heal – because of the anti-inflammatories we give them!! (and thus they want more pain killers, and so on).

When I injure myself again – let's not kid ourselves, it's going to happen – I am going to be insistent that I not be given anti-inflammatories. I realize for people who haven't gone through this process that this must sound like quackery, but I have seen inflammation improve my condition, and the proof, folks, is in the putting.

As for the nutrition challenge/paleo thing, I am mostly finding it annoying. I can't say I have noticed any quantitative effects; certainly not on my workouts. I said this morning that I'm anxious to have it over, not to simply have it over, but to be able to look back and see what effects it had, and weigh those effects on my future diet choices. We've still got a little less than four weeks to go, so maybe things will change. Maybe I'll be able to burn on that glycolytic pathway more easily in the coming weeks. For now, though, it's just a hassle and expensive.

The shopping list for week two is below. We spent about $350. So that makes $375/wk so far, for two people. And we're using almost everything.


item unit (SAE)
eggs organic 36ct
arugula 7oz
spinach 12oz
lettuce mix 5oz
peppers bell 6ct
blackberries organic 16oz
tomato roma 18oz
pineapple spears 32oz
cantaloup spears 16oz
macadamia nuts 10oz
cauliflower 1ct
carrots shredded 10oz
trail mix 30oz
eggplant curry punjab 20oz
zico coconut water
tomato juice 64floz
cranberry juice unfiltered 64floz
turkey breast roast applegate 14oz
carrots baby 16oz
nuts mixed roasted 12oz
squash butternut 20oz
peas english 10oz
parsley 1ct
celery hearts 3ct
tomatoes hothouse 3ct
pears 3ct
cucumbers pickling 3ct
green beans 12oz
lemons 3ct
spring onions 2ct
mint fresh organic 2oz
apples gala 3ct
sausage pork andouille smoked organic 12oz
pork loin roast 61.28oz
salmon fillet 24oz
sausage pork italian mild organic 8oz
sausage pork habanero green chile organic 8oz
bacon organic dry 32oz
steak strip 77.28oz
oranges, clementine 22.08oz
fruit mixed, diced 24oz
kiwi, sliced peeled 11.2oz
olives fresh jalapeno
guacamole 1.8lbs
raspberries organic 12oz
dates 1.33lbs
onions white 32oz
leaves lime keffir 1ct
jicama 1ct
oranges navel 5ct
chimichurri sauce 8floz
hot sauce carribbean 5floz

What an abrupt change in diet actually revealed

"What are your cravings?" "What do you reach for when you crave X?" "What will you do instead of reaching for that?"

These are all questions that come up as part of this paleo-cleanse thing that we're doing with the Crossfit thing. I (honestly) said, you know, I don't crave sweet things. I occasionally find myself craving protein (I go veg for a year or two at a time periodically), but mostly I've figured out ways to deal with that. It never really occurred to me that this quick drop off would exacerbate the one life-long addiction I've had.

I have been injured so many times in so many accidents it would be easy to say that my addiction was opiates. Nope, not even close. My addiction is caffeine. I sure do kick it from time to time, but I always come back to it. I have a supply of provigil (with corresponding prescription of course), and that's never gotten me off of it. In fact, I think it's fair to say that the times my life has been most out-of-control, I've had more caffeine about me than at any other time in my life.

If you see me with a 24oz can of red bull, chances are, it's not a happy day for me. And not because I didn't get enough sleep. I reach for caffeine when things are going tango uniform, and it tends to calm things down. You could make a lot of judgments as to whether there's some neurochem going on (kids with ADD doing better with caffeine and other stims for example), but I think it's beyond the scope, and frankly not quite relevant.

But this diet forbade us from having artificial sweeteners, too. I've never been in a position where I couldn't just go grab caffeine. Imagine if one day somebody made caffeine illegal. Imagine if you couldn't get it at the store, you didn't have any at home, you didn't have any No-Doz in the seats of your couch, Excedrin in your cupboard, and so on. Some people would seriously panic.

But I've kicked caffeine before. What's different this time? Well, I'm not just kicking caffeine. In fact, to be fair, I'm not kicking caffeine at all – I can still take Excedrin and No-Doz and anything else I want. But I can't take caffeine with sugar. There's no ritual with it. When I was a kid, I smoked cigarettes. Briefly, but long enough to know what it's about. Cigarettes are partially as addicting as they are because there's a ritual associated with their usage. This is why "the patch" is not effective: you're not stepping away from your desk, taking an elevator to the lobby, stepping outside, tamping your cigarettes, picking one and lighting it, and taking controlled breaths for a few minutes before returning to work (or after sex, or after dinner, or whatever).

No, this time, I'm losing a coping mechanism as well as the drug. Sure, it doesn't sound like much to say that the whole process of sipping on 24floz of Red Bull is a ritual, but think about it: I will stop everything on a Saturday when I've got errands to run to pointedly stop in at a drug store and buy a dozen energy drinks, throw eleven of them in the trunk, and drink one of them. Nobody really thinks twice about this. Were that a bong, were I sticking a needle in my arm, or, I dare say, were I smoking a cigarette, people would say I have a problem.

When I'm working, I will stop what I am doing, walk to the refrigerator, grab whichever drink I am inclined towards, walk back to my desk, langor over it a moment, and then slowly sip at it while I am regaining my composure (yes, I do lose composure if I haven't had the appropriate level of caffeine – or, I guess, sugar, insulin, whatever it is), and when I feel "up to it" (it really gets that bad, now that I think about it), I get back to the task I was working on. Whether I am more productive after that amount of caffeine etc is another discussion, but again kind of out of scope.

The fact is, I have a problem.

Caffeine? A problem? Well, consider that my life is pretty tame (read: boring). And consider that I have been on and off the entire spectrum of opiates from your average darvocet, nalbuphine, and vicodin all the way up through dilaudid, fentanyl, and morphine since 1997, having broken over a dozen ribs, both feet, both arms, two fingers, and.. well, I'm not going to finish. Lots of injuries. I've "kicked" opiates many, many times. But it's never been "kicking" it as such. I've never said to myself, "this is a problem, I should probably cut out this fentanyl habit." I have said that about caffeine numerous times.

Combine the loss of ritualized caffeine and the harsh change in diet (the loss of simple carbs, the loss of refined sugars) and the change in the ritual of diet (many foods wifey and I relied upon to sort of ease us through a harsh day are now verboten; in my case including the occasional few-drinks-with-dinner), and I'm dealing with some pretty unpleasant circumstances. My sleep is a wreck, I've got daily headaches that are absolutely brutal, I've been having muscle spasms and cramps like I haven't had in six-plus months, and I'm in general feeling like shit.

Is this a good thing, recognizing it? Well, probably, but the consequence is that I won't be able to just amble through life henceforth thinking it's harmless. As Siddharth told us, "nobody just falls into a box of donuts." We're adults, and these are choices. In the future, if I head back to the sugared or otherwise sweetened caffeine drinks, I am not going to be naïve about what I'm actually drinking. It's nothing less than a ritualized addiction. An addiction that, for me, has caused more damage than fentanyl ever did. What the hell kind of statement is that?

shopping and nutrition

So we went shopping today for food that wouldn't fuck with our diet. Mostly we don't eat too terribly, but a lot of what we eat involves soy or noodles or added sugar, and all that is out.

I'll post the list of stuff at the end of it (it's long), but the short story is we went to two markets (trader joe's and whole foods) and we spent about $400 in two hours. I would estimate that we have a week's worth of food. That makes $1600 per month, or $200 per person per week.

The thing that struck me the most is this is a horribly inefficient way to shop/eat/consume. We bought local and organic. "In-season" is impossible; it's snowing. So everything we bought came in smaller quantities because it's more expensive and I assume people buy less of it. It came from smaller farms, and had no preservatives (none of it). This means that there is a lot more vehicular traffic associated with it. There's more refrigeration associated with it. There's more overhead in farming with it (again, all of it). So it would seem to me that the people who think this is a more responsible way to eat, environmentally, are just plain wrong. Or they live in the sticks where they can buy this shit from the farm itself. Not so when you live in the city.

It may be healthier – I will tell you my thoughts in six weeks – but it's also something that not everyone can do due to the hideous cost of eating this way. Even eating out, you're deeply fucked. All kinds of things that are nominally healthy (edamame, oat bran cereal, curried chickpeas, the list just goes on and on) are off-limits. I can't go out for Mexican or Indian or Sushi (sashimi, I suppose, is okay). Chinese and Korean are big struggles too. That's the other thing that hit me – this diet is almost explicitly American Cuisine. Many of the basic staples of non-American cuisine are verboten.

So, you've got an environmentally unsound, expensive, ethnocentric diet that may be healthier for you. I am not sure I see an up side here.

Oh, and liquor is out. Which isn't such a bad thing, I guess. All liquor, not just beer (gluten) or spirits (insulin spikes).

Caffeine, interestingly (or perhaps not so interestingly, given nobody'd do it if it was off-limits) is "open."

The list (remember, we are shopping for both of us):

salsa fresh	12floz
pineapple spears fresh	16oz
blackberries fresh	12oz
jalapenos fresh	8oz
blueberries fresh	24oz
cantaloupe fresh spears	32oz
raspberries fresh	12oz
tomatoes pearl fresh	14oz
baby bok choi fresh	6ct
brussels sprouts fresh	20oz
chicken stock organic	2qt
canola oil	1L
tuna in penang curry	28oz
chicken whole organic	62.4oz
eggs jumbo organic	48ct
cranberries fresh	1 dry qt
unsweetened assam tea	64floz
mixed fruit fresh	27.36oz
guacamole	13.76oz
ghee	7.5oz
oranges clementine sectioned peeled	25.6oz
sugar snap peas	19.52oz
organic cilantro	1ct
organic spring onions	1ct
broccoli crowns	3ct
apples fresh	3ct
grapefruit large	2ct
mustard dry	1ct
hearts of romaine organic	3ct
mushrooms button white	10oz
arugula/spinach/lettuce salad blend	5oz
trail mix	12oz
bell pepper colored	3ct
onion yellow	1ct
onion red	1ct
roma tomatoes	18oz
lara bars	2ct
chicken breasts	58oz
bacon uncured	12.48oz
salmon fillets	24oz
shrimp peeled deveined uncooked	16oz
steak strip organic local	32oz
pork loin chops	54.4oz
lemons meyer	4ct
limes, 5ct	5ct
macadamia nuts	10oz
oranges navel	6ct
celery hearts	2ct
ginger fresh	4oz
turkey breast applegate sliced	14oz
cashews raw	8oz
almond butter	16oz
vinegar white balsamic	17floz
olive oil extra virgin	500ml
olive oil	1L
garlic crushed	9oz
mustard deli brown	12oz
peaches halved in grape juice	14oz
mustard dijon	14oz
vinegar red wine	8floz
chai rooibos	1.5oz

We shall see how long this actually lasts. For a visualization of how much food this is, it entirely filled the trunk of a 2011 Chevy Malibu.

"leaner" military

Probably a stupid question, but why can we not have a treaty like START to reduce the size of standing armies? Obviously programs like the JSF cost a lot of money, but maintaining a standing army is expensive and compels the rest of the world to increase its forces as well.

Do we need eleven CVBG's?

I think a rational argument can be made that we can safely decrease the size of our military and increase the size of our robotic forces (ooooh does that sound spooky) to something that allows us to maintain a just-the-safer-side-of-parity with the rest of the world.

But nobody is saying one thing that seems to be glaringly obvious: the military is a huge source of jobs for people. This is one of the reasons insurgencies work: they employ people. If we start reducing the number of people-in-uniforms, we reduce the number of people they rely on (let's say there's even a 25:1 relationship there; we still lose thousands of jobs when we start reducing the number of troops by 40-50k). Additionally, the military has been a sort of job-of-last-resort for the poor. This is not a value judgment, rather just acknowledging a fact that's stated all the time. One major complaint from philosophers against the military is one may not want to fight in the military, but one is obligated to when one needs to earn a wage. As such, a disproportionate ratio of low- and middle-class people populate the military.

So a cut in the military would result in a loss of jobs for a segment of society that most needs jobs. What is most responsible here is finding a place to put those people that isn't in a uniformed, standing army. Perhaps something more akin to conscription, where people do their two years, gain skills, move into industry, and can be called up to service (this should sound familiar to anyone who pays attention to militaries in the rest of the world).

Perhaps the thing to do right now is get the enlisted folks trained up on how to actually fight wars and then transition them to civilian employment developing robotic replacements, from which they can pivot to other technical fields.

So I missed a workout at PhysioDC and the appointment with my surgeon to discuss whether I'm cleared for skydiving because some asshat broke into our car. Normally this doesn't make a car un-drivable, but parking a car with a busted-in passenger window (it's only got two windows) in the District is not high on my list of things to do. The other problem is that it was hovering between 15-20°F in our area the night it was broken into and yesterday, so driving around in that weather with the window open is foolhardy.

I start the CFSA nutrition challenge on the 8th. I mostly think the "Paleo Diet" is hogwash and based on poor thinking (organisms do evolve quicker than the five-hundred-ish generations Paleo folks seem to talk about, and if they don't, it's positive for the species overall, so why regress? It makes little sense, but we're not talking about evolutionary biologists, we're talking about fitness wonks, and to some extent, nutritionist(a)s).

We had your average CrossFit Total this week, and frankly I'm kind of disappointed in my own results. But if we realize that everything I do at the gym is based on the principal of my having five broken vertebrae, I suppose it's not so bad. Rather than a traditional deadlift, I'm doing a lift with a kettle bell. The rest of the Total is a back squat and a push press (making the order BP, PP, DL). I managed 125/85/70, for a "total" of 280. This is an unremarkable score, except that I was doing a 10RM, rather than 5RM or 2RM, and I had more in me for the kettle bell lift, but we didn't have a heavier KB. What does this mean? Well, it's a good benchmark, but it bears little significance when compared to, say, your CFT. So we revisit this in some months, and see how I'm doing.

What's kind of a trip is that my deltoids and triceps have started really showing definition. Putting on deodorant in the bathroom the other day (I wasn't checking myself out, really), I noticed my arm looks way different than it did before. My quads and hams have pulled a similar trick, and my pants just don't fit the same as they used to. Which is probably more than you wanted to know.

In other news, I've been thinking a lot about the pairing of otto-cycle engines with turbines. I know that turbines are very, very efficient. But they're not very efficient in terms of "putting the power to the ground." For locomotion, they're actually kind of crummy if you want to go anywhere quickly. Fast, sure. Quick, no. Which is why turbines never caught on in cars (although, with flywheels and turbine-electric hybrid power plants, we may get there). So, borrowing liberally from the Spun files, I've been experimenting (on paper) with the notion of keeping a turbine spun up on E85 (or straight E), and using the output of the turbine to drive your average otto-cycle to generate torque. "Thrust" in this case is negligible, and the real difficulty is making the transfer of power from the turbine to the pavement efficient. Transmission to the pavement results in huge losses (sometimes > 20%, which is why we talk about "wheel hp" vs "crank" or "brake" hp), and otto-cycle engines lose tremendous wattage to power. The diesel cycle is more heat-efficient, but I don't think anyone wants to diesel ethanol, and I'd like the turbine and the reciprocating engine to use the same fuel for lubricant (foil/air bearings do come to mind, though), fuel, and cooling. Ethanol fits all those requirements quite well.

Anyways, it's an exciting idea. Totally impractical for anything that would ever be widely-adopted (not to mention dangerous), but if you wanted to make something blazing fast and efficient, you could certainly pull it off with a motor like that. You'd have to think real, real hard about the transmission part, but if you got that fixed, I reckon you could run enormous amounts of boost. With a 6L V12, I don't think 3,000hp is out of the range of reliable horsepower. This would obviously be for land-speed-record type efforts, not drag strip, and not for the street.