“The Enormous Radio”

I don’t usually like to quote from someone else’s writing but this rang a bell with me. In the April 8, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, Edmond White reviewed several books pertaining to John Cheever, a noted short story writer and novelist. White had this to say:

“One of his (Cheever’s) first successful stories, “The Enormous Radio,” is about a young wife in New York who listens to a new radio all day that strangely enough, is tuned in not to broadcasts but to the conversations going on in the adjoining apartments. When her husband comes home one day she’s a wreck. She sobs:

‘They’re all worried about money. Mrs. Hutchinson’s mother is dying of cancer in Florida and they don’t have enough money to send her to the Mayo Clinic. At least, Mr. Hutchinson says they don’t have enough money. And some woman in this building is having an affair with the handyman – with the hideous handyman. It’s too disgusting. And Mrs. Melville has heart trouble and Mr. Hendricks is going to lose his job in April and Mrs. Hendricks is horrid about the whole thing and that girl who plays the “Missouri Waltz” is a whore, a common whore, and the elevator man has tuberculosis and Mr. Osborn has been beating Mrs. Osborn.’

White concludes, “The consoling husband has the radio removed – other people’s stories may be gripping but they can also have such a sad cumulative effect that they make one’s own life impossible to live.”

Cheever, who died in 1982, had no way of knowing that he had perfectly described our current predicament: Between cable news, the Drudge Report, emails and FaceBook we are immersed in the misery of mankind on a constant basis. Running is my only escape, and so I run.

Keep Running!

Not Fair – Part 6

This will be the last of my series on weight control. We understand now that instinctually we crave certain foods that have high calorie content. We also understand that in our abundant society it is too easy to eat more calories than we burn and thus gain weight. Which will control: animal instinct or rational mind?

To answer this question I want to turn to F. A. Hayek. He has been called the preeminent social philosopher of our time. He is best known as a libertarian political philosopher. Hayek says that our instincts developed long ago before civilization of any kind existed, back when we were still hunters and gatherers. These instincts served our distant ancestors well for the world they lived in but are not very useful for us now.

Reason or conscious thought, according to Hayek is of little use in the face of these instincts. Even though we can rationally say what proper behavior is, that knowledge by itself cannot overcome our instincts. He proposes that mankind has developed cultural institutions which stand between our instincts and rational thought. These societal rules guide our behavior in ways that we are not consciously aware of and override our instinctual appetites.

The Ten Commandments, whether handed down by God to Moses or not, are simply good rules for people that live in a civilized society. Even though lying, stealing, coveting, murder and adultery may have been beneficial in the bush (studies of chimps have observed all of these), there are not beneficial in the village or city.

There are, of course, many food taboos. Some traditions do not allow one to eat cats, dogs, horses, pigs or cows. China, for instance, is currently debating whether it should outlaw the eating of cats and dogs. Whether you are Jewish or not, you are probably familiar with some kosher food rules which are quite extensive. Many people today find eating any meat a taboo.

If Hayek is correct, and I believe he is, we cannot rely on our intellectual understanding of nutrition to keep us from eating too much given our current circumstances. Moses did not have the need for these commandments: Thou shall not overeat and Thou shall exercise every day. He had to tell people to rest one day a week and the Psalm 23 prays for God to set a table before us and for our cups to runneth over.

What are your food traditions? In my family if you don’t pig out at a holiday it just isn’t a holiday. Meat must be served at every meal. Wine must accompany dinner and some lunches. Bread is to be eaten before dinner, at dinner and at any other time day.

I am working on trying to change the cultural pattern that I have learned from birth. I have a taboo on eating in fast food restaurants and am working on a taboo against eating out at all. I met a woman who says the smell of Mexican food makes her sick. I wish I could get there. I would like to re-demonize alcohol and I could become a vegetarian. I am sure if I did these things I would lose weight.

Now you are probably thinking that those kinds of taboos will take all the fun out of life. That is exactly Hayek’s point: cultural traditions prevent us from satisfying our animal desires. He doesn’t voice an opinion as to whether these traditions are inherently good or bad but simply asks if they are functional or not: Will a society have a better chance of flourishing with these rules? Spend some time with grade school children if you don’t believe that we have a problem with our dietary rules in this country. Obesity is a more immediate challenge to our civilization than global warming or Iran.

The bottom line is you must develop some food and exercise traditions that will help you manage your weight. You can’t rely on just understanding your body’s chemistry. Over time, if you work at it, the new traditions will become strong enough to override your instinctual urges.

Keep Running!

Not Fair – Part 4

The weight loss math is easy. I have covered that in the previous three blogs. Basically you have to eat fewer calories than you burn. If you do that you will lose weight. You may know someone that eats like a pig and is skinny as a rail. They are not very nutritionally efficient. I don’t know how their genes survived periods of famine. You, however, are very nutritionally efficient. You turn everything you eat into useful energy. Lucky you!

While we are all subject to the same laws of physics, those laws are expressed differently in each of us. As a result what works for me may not work for you. That goes for running, weight control and just about everything else in life. It is good to listen to what others have to say, but it is better to listen to your own body. Ask yourself, “Under what conditions have I been able to lose weight and under what conditions do I tend to gain weight?”

For me the answer to that question is simple. I have lost weight and maintained the weight loss three times in my post-college life. Each time I eliminated alcoholic drinks and walked a few extra miles a day. Everything else was the same. The elimination of alcohol was worth about 250 calories a day and the walking was worth 250 calories a day. Magically fifteen to twenty pounds were shed over a few weeks.

I can’t tell you what will work for you and neither can anyone else. But my experience suggests that there are a couple of easy shots that you can take that will be relatively painless and can have big results. If you are a super competitive athlete, you might need a scalpel to trim the calories. Most of us just need an axe to chop off a few branches.

Think about two things: 1. When have you been most successful at losing weight and what were those circumstances? 2. Where can you easily eliminate a few hundred calories a day either through exercise or reduced ingestion? Then experiment, experiment, experiment.

Keep Running!

Not Fair - Part 3

To summarize my previous two blogs, we know as a matter of chemistry and physics the following:

1. You gain weight by eating more calories than you burn, and vice versa.

2. The body stores energy in two places, one quick access (glycogen) and one slow access (fat).

3. You need about 12 calories per day to support a pound of body weight with no exercise.

4. A pound of fat has 3500 calories of energy in it.

From a strictly chemical standpoint, maintaining a certain desired weight is just a matter of mathematics:

1. Figure out your base calorie expenditure at your desired weight (12 x desired body weight). Add to that your exercise calorie burn. Eat that many calories.

2. Try to match calorie ingestion to calorie expenditure throughout the day. Do this by eating small meals six times per day and eating before, during and after exercise.

3. Do slow cardio work outs such as walking to burn fat.

4. Do strength training to build muscle mass which increases your calorie burn even when you are at rest.

But as we all know eating is much more than a matter of mathematics. Our bodies are hard coded to desire fats and sweets. A recent book, Supernormal Stimuli by Deidre Barrett, talks about how, even though we understand the concept of weight management from a intellectual standpoint, our bodies still make us eat more than we need. We see examples of how behavior is controlled by more than just the rational conscious part of the brain. Think politicians’ peccadilloes here.

This brings us back to the blog series, “Train Yourself.” We can’t get there through intellectualizing and will power. Our native instincts are too strong. We must train ourselves to eat differently if we are going to lose weight.

KeepRunning!

Not Fair – Part 2

In my last blog I talked about how it isn’t fair that eating only a few extra calories can pack on the pounds. The flip side of that equation, however, is that if you cut back a few calories and are patient, you can lose the weight.

Have you ever thought about the fact that you expend energy all the time but only eat every now and then? In between eating, your body has to use energy previously stored so that it can continue to power the chemical reactions that we call life. Your body has two different types of energy storage systems. One is fast acting and readily available. The other is harder to access but can store much more energy. Think of it as the difference between the food you have at home in the frig or pantry and the food that is available at the grocery store.

The primary quick response storage unit consists of glycogen which is stored in the muscle cells and in the liver. Liver glycogen is mostly reserved for the brain. In most people glycogen can provide somewhere around 2,000 calories of energy or about one day’s worth. This also happens to be about the number of calories that it takes to run 20 miles which is why many runners hit the “wall” at that point in a marathon.

The body’s long-term energy storage is fat. There are 3500 calories available per pound of fat. Suppose you have 20 pounds of fat. That amounts to 70,000 calories of energy, a 35 day supply. That pretty amazing and complex system allows us to survive in conditions where food may not be available for extended periods of time, not usually a problem for us but a problem in past societies and in some places today.

Losing weight then is a simple matter of eating less energy than you expend. If you do that, your body will use the stored fat for energy. If your expenditure of calories exceeds your intake by 500 calories per day, then in a week you will lose a pound.

You are not a perpetual motion machine. Your energy has to come from fat or food. You decide.

Keep Running!

Not Fair – Part 1

It doesn’t seem fair that it takes 5 minutes to eat 600 calories and 60 minutes to burn 600 calories. A standard fast food hamburger plus fries and a sugar drink put you over 1000 calories very quickly. Even relatively healthy food adds calories faster than we might think or hope.

In many societies it was difficult to get enough calories to sustain life and people still starve to death in some countries today. The body’s chemistry was designed to deal with ongoing food shortages and periods of outright starvation. This combined with active work requirements meant that obesity was not a problem.

Today most of us are sedentary and have at our disposal copious amounts of food. Our challenge is not to find food but to avoid it and to burn excess calories through exercise. The entire human energy equation is now upside down. We need to waste energy because we cannot bring ourselves to eat less.

A rule of thumb is that it takes 12 to 13 calories per pound of body weight to sustain that body weight in a sedentary individual. So if you want to weigh 150 pounds you need to eat 1800 calories. (12 x 150 = 1800) A typical fast food meal provides over half your daily caloric needs.

Eating an extra 120 calories a day increases your weight by 10 pounds. That also doesn’t seem fair. 120 calories is nothing. A small chocolate bar or some mayonnaise is 120 calories. How about a single beer or a Coke? Just an extra 120 calories per day and you are 10 pounds heavier.

I have fought the battle of the bulge most of my adult life and for the most part lost, the battle not the bulge. I have, however, gained some understanding of nutritional science and will share that with you over the next few posts.

Keep Running!

Train Yourself – Part 3

This is the last of a three part series on how to train yourself. I am not talking about what exercises to do or how far to run. I am talking about how to train yourself to make running a natural part of your lifestyle. My first post dealt with the fact that you are an animal and hence can be trained to behave in a certain way using the same techniques that animal trainers use. In the second post, I discussed the two most important training methods - the methods that are used to teach Shamu to do tricks. First, you must ignore mistakes, bad behavior, and any lapses in achieving your goals. Second, you need to reward achievements, good behavior, reaching your goal.

Now, how do you apply this to yourself? The first step is somewhat easy: Ignore failures. The trick here is to set progressively harder goals that you are pretty certain to reach. If you set out to run ten miles the first day of training, you will probably fail. Good training programs build in progressively harder workouts so that the participant gets a sense of achievement and feels good about the progress being made. If you are training on your own, you still need to apply this technique. Accept that there will be good days and bad days. Willie Nelson has a song that coached, “Remember the good times they're smaller in number and easier to recall/Don't spend too much time on the bad times/They're staggering in number and will be heavy as lead on your mind.”

The second step is to get positive feedback on your activity. Again, a good running program should provide that. The coaches and other participants should encourage you to come to the group runs so that eventually you feel good about running even when they are not present. You may also throw yourself a “treat” when you do well. A lot of people look forward to a group breakfast after a long Saturday run. You could buy a new running outfit or go to an out of town race. I always wear my medals for a few days to let others know what I have accomplished. You need to find what works for you.

The bottom line is that you cannot be a successful runner if every run is a test of your will power. You must enjoy the training or you will fail. Yes, sometimes you have to force yourself out the door but most of the time it should be something you look forward to doing. Follow the above two techniques and running will become a natural part of your life so that not running will seem strange.

Keep Running!

Olympics

I love the Olympics. Although I sometimes complain about the TV coverage, this year I am really impressed with the way NBC is reporting the games: A lot of actual action and just enough background on the athletes to understand where they are coming from.

As a competitive runner, I feel an empathy with the participants that I suspect most couch potatoes don’t. It is clear that no one gets to this level of competition without a lot of hard training and sacrifice. Sure I don’t have the talent that they have, but I know what it feels like to get out and run in the hot weather and in the cold weather. To train when you would rather stay in bed.

Runners know about the jitters that come in the week before a big race. What the night before feels like. The excitement of putting on your running gear and pinning on your bib. The concentration required during competition to start slowly and then press to the finish line. The emotions that surge after the race is over. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

I was touched by what Alexandre Bilodeau, Canadian gold medal winner in the moguls, had to say about training. His older brother Frederic was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and told he would lose his ability to walk by age 10. Frederic did not accept that prognosis and through hard work continues to walk at age 28. Alex said, “How could I ever skip a work out given what my brother has to do just to walk?”

Keep Running!

Train Yourself - Part 2

One of the most important articles I have ever read I found in the New York Times in 2006. I have read a ton of stuff and I am serious about this being a life changing piece. It was written by Amy Sutherland and entitled, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.”

Amy’s insight was that we could apply the techniques used to train animals to the training of humans. Humans are animals, so Amy’s suggestion should not be particularly surprising but it is. We want to explain, teach, argue, and nag people into behaving the way we want them to. Those techniques do not work.

Amy had this to say:

“The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband."

"Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller."

"I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.”

It is truly amazing how well this technique works. It can be used on friends, family and business associates. I have used it in many situations and it was so easy that I felt like I was cheating the system. In almost no time people were doing what I wanted without my explicitly telling them what to do.

The bottom line is, “Reward desired behavior; ignore undesirable behavior.” Next week I will discuss what Shamu can teach us about running.

Keep Running!

Addiction

I was thinking about ending my running career a few years ago after a tough physical and psychological race. I worked out my feelings in this poem and decided that an addiction to running was a good thing.

Cold Turkey

Addiction
Dependency
Must be had at all costs
Take chances
Risk everything
Controls waking moments
No sleep

Kicking it hurts
Deep down
Not mentally
Not conceptually
At a cellular level
Muscles and joints scream
Disorientation

Pain will end
But not the want
Still want it
Oh but no
Remember, remember
Just a little
One last time

Keep Running!

Train Yourself - Part 1

I am sorry to inform you that you are an animal. I don’t mean that in the sense that you are overpowering as in “So and so is a real animal.” What I mean is that you are an animal not a plant. You are like dogs, cats, horses, and so forth. You can’t be a “couch potato” but you might be a “sofa sloth.”

Because you are an animal you can be “trained” to do things that you might not think possible. Most of you have probably tried to train a dog or some other pet to do tricks. We can apply the same concepts used to train other animals to train ourselves.

Pavlov is widely credited with doing the first research on conditioned responses. Perhaps somewhat apocryphal, the story was that he rang a bell each time he feed his dogs. After a while, the dogs would begin to salivate when the bell was rung whether or not they were given food. Pavlov was training the mind not the saliva glands by establishing a feeding ritual that the mind then responded to.

You can use rituals to train humans to behave in certain ways. When my kids were young we had a well established bedtime ritual which began about 5:00 in the afternoon and ended with them in bed at 7:00. I am sure that, if asked, they would rather have stayed up, but the food, the bath, the pajamas, the reading of a story and then going to bed seemed natural to them.

You want to run. You know intellectually that you need to get out there. You may have a schedule leading up to your next race. I hear people all the time saying, “I need to run.” You can, of course, force yourself to run, but it is much easier to train yourself to get out there.

I will over the next few posts discuss how you can train yourself to do your workouts. I am not talking about the training effects that come from the workout itself but about how you can change your behavior so that running is the most natural thing you do.

Keep Running!

This is a poem I wrote a few years ago. It captures my feelings at the end of the training season.

Big run, big room.
Twenty-six point two miles.
Sixty-foot ceilings, thousands of square yards.
Both dwarf the individual.

We start here and end here:
The George R. Brown Convention Center.
Ten thousand people crammed in at 7:00 a.m.
Outward excitement, fear in their eyes.

When I get back, it is nearly empty.
Some have finished and gone home.
Some dropped out and are grieving.
Some still on the course determining their fate.

I wander into that cavern feeling very small,
Exhausted by the race.
Vowing never again,
I encounter the runners I had coached.

We chat briefly.
I head toward the world,
Consciously ending the season with those steps.
They are the hardest of the day.

-ADA