Jeff Bezos’ commencement speech to Princeton’s Class of 2010: We Are What We Choose. Starts with a great story.

Darkly, darkly awesome: The Skull of Regret. The description of the drive-thru window. The deep-fat fryer as potential suicide implement. The pause before “ex-girlfriend.” All genius.

Chris Glass recreated this excellent, alternative NYC subway sign:

I will now have to watch Stefan Sagmeister’s TED Talk, “Yes, Design Can Make You Happy.”

The Cult of Done Manifesto. I love #8: “Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.” James Provost’s poster version rocks.

This is something I've touched on in a few other posts, but I thought it was worth calling out on it's own.

It feels like I've often heard sentiments like "do it for 3 weeks and it will get easier" or "six weeks is the magic number, and after that it's a habit."

Hogwash.

I have an exercise habit now, but looking back I think it took me roughly TWO YEARS to cultivate. Two years of forcing myself to do it. Sure, it got gradually easier over time, but there were many days, weeks, even months where it took just as much effort to force myself into the gym as it did in the first few weeks. As for diet, I'm over three months into this "no sugar" thing, and I'm certain the bulk of the journey is still ahead of me. Again, the Leptin stuff is interesting). Plus, if you plotted me on The Big Bell Curve of American Fitness when I started all this a few years ago, I was already in pretty good shape! I was an athlete turned weekend warrior striving to reclaim my dormant (but not lost) athleticism. And it was still damn hard to form the habits. Imagine if I spent my first 30 years on the couch instead?

Anyway, I'm sure the intentions behind the whole "it'll get easier in a few weeks" claims are good; you want to encourage people by giving them a light at the end of the tunnel. But what happens in a few weeks, when it's still bloody hard? Discouragement, backsliding, plan abandonment. I say, tell 'em it's going to take years of hard work, and then maybe, if you're lucky, it'll be a habit. If nothing else, it's the truth.

I meant to give at least a couple of these more individualized attention, but I moved this week, and that is always a nightmare (I think it's the top of my "Suckiest Non-Tragic Things" list). Anyway...

• The Great Fitness Experiment: Sugar Busted. I met (online) Charlotte recently when Mark's Daily Apple linked us both up in the same post. She runs a great (and funny!) blog, and her sugar post hits home given my current abstinence experiment. Sounds like we have pretty much the same sugar bug, and she even links me up! Very cool.
• I've written a bunch on Tabata Intervals, but Matt Fitzgerald really sums them up nicely (can't remember who pointed me to this one). Like Charlotte's, Matt's blog just found a prominent home in my aggregator.
• The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man. Three THOUSAND reps?!

Even though I'm subscribed to a substantial number of programming blogs, you wouldn't think that would ever produce fodder for me here. Well, whadda ya know, Coding Horror on effortful practice:

It's an important distinction. I may drive to work every day, but I'm far from a professional driver. Similarly, programming every day may not be enough to make you a professional programmer. So what can turn someone into a professional driver or programmer? What do you do to practice?

The answer lies in the Scientific American article The Expert Mind:

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Effortful study means constantly tackling problems at the very edge of your ability. Stuff you may have a high probability of failing at. Unless you're failing some of the time, you're probably not growing professionally. You have to seek out those challenges and push yourself beyond your comfort limit.

The SciAm article Atwood links to above is fascinating, I encourage you to click through if you have a moment.

Roger Ebert's Journal: How Studs Helps Me Lead My Life.

I really enjoyed this Jason Ferruggia post: Questions and (no) Answers. So many unknowns. There is no best way to train, just thousands of good ways, some better than others, for certain applications. Hard work is the only constant (and that's for competitive sport, I'm not so sure it needs to be hard for healthy living).

Ross Enamait, "Conventional Wisdom". Great post.

Tom Furman at Physical Strategies has a great post up, The Thin Red Line, which describes an elegant method for staying on track using a wall calendar and magic marker. Inspired by Jerry Seinfeld, believe it or not.

Ross Enamait just posted a Nike commercial that vaulted into my top five. Don't ask me what the other four are, because then I'd have to start YouTubing them and my workday would be shot.

I seem to be stuck in a pretty deep rut at the moment. Training, parenting, pet projects, work, you name it. But for our purposes we'll stick to training. I think my big three obstacles are:

1. Winter sucks. My basement, pretty dismal under the best of circumstances, truly starts looking like a prison by February.
2. Big (but largely good) changes in my schedule from last winter have left me without a regular workout time, and the times left to me are often abbreviated or during times where my body really doesn't want to do it. So I might have a choice of doing a 15-minute blitz midday (we don't need no stinkin' warmup) or a longer workout late at night when I really should be sleeping. The lack of routine is proving to be very difficult to deal with.
3. Motivation. I'm sure the schedule feeds into this, but ouch, even when I'm feeling gung-ho it takes a strong amount of will power to force myself to hit the intensities I'm aiming for, and when my heads not in it, it puts a big crimp in the quality of my workout.

Anyway, enough whining. Open question: How do you folks deal with your training ruts?

Here's a workout I tried tonight, trying to address my detrained state, and trying to build a warmup right into the workout to get my thick, syrupy, late-night blood flowing:

• Minute 1: 1 burpee.
• Minute 2: 2 burpees.
• Minute 3: 3 burpees.
• etc.
• Minute 10: 10 burpees.
• Minute 11: 10 burpees.
• Minute 12: 10 burpees.
• Minute 13: 10 burpees.
• Minute 14: 10 burpees.
• Minute 15: 10 burpees.

I bumped minutes 11-15 up to 75 seconds (told you I was detrained), and did lots of "just 3 more rounds and you can quit without hating yourself, you #$%@&$" self-flagellation to get through it. I hope this marks the beginning of a turnaround. After a couple months of just going through the motions, I'm due.

I went to the Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference with my Dad yesterday, and it was fun and informative. I just wanted to share a few notes from the presentations I attended:

Keynote: Ultimate Mental Toughness by Dr. Alan Goldberg

Dr. Goldberg is a nationally known sport psychologist, and well worth catching if you ever have the opportunity. Very entertaining and informative talk, with lots of nice examples that physically underscored his points for the whole audience (one of his central ideas—no doubt correct—is that what goes on in your mind creates actual physiological changes in your body that directly affect performance). I was particularly struck by the Mark Spitz quote he invoked early on, which I'll paraphrase:

Going fast in practice is 90% physical and 10% mental. You have to put in the work to be great. But in competition the ratio inverts. Competition is 90% mental and 10% physical.

Unfortunately I can say from experience that Dr. Goldberg did a really nice job putting into words what it feels like—and what goes through your head—when you choke. It's all about focusing on the right things. Along those lines, he stressed that everybody loses focus. The trick, and the thing to train, is immediately recognizing when the loss of focus occurs and bringing yourself back. He then illustrated how hard this can be by making us do something seemingly easy. Close your eyes, breath regularly, focusing on your diaphram on the inhale, and the word "one" on the exhale. Every time you lose focus, increment the number. So the first time you are distracted you bump up to "two". We got started, no problem at the start, but then he started talking, drumming, etc. and I got up to like 25 before I was too distracted to bring my focus back at all. He then suggested a simple drill. Do the same thing with a disc in front of you, concentrate on your diaphram on the inhale, and some word on the exhale ("now", perhaps). Get the hang of that. Then put the disc on top of your TV and turn the TV on. Learn the feeling of losing focus, and retrieving it.

Anyway, I have improved two things over the past few years: my conditioning and my focus. But I've put much more effort into the conditioning. Can it really be something as simple as this could help me continue to improve?

Perhaps. It all reminded me of Sectionals last year: I was tapped to help call subs, something I find mentally and emotionally draining. My play went completely to pieces. Multiple multi-turnover points. Fortunately our captain recognized this, and relieved me after one game. But that game was agonizing. The mind feeds the body, for sure.

Marking Techniques & Strategies by Ben Wiggins

Good stuff. Lots of individual and team tactics and strategies. From my notes:

• Get in shape. You can't mark if you're not in shape.
• Instead of marking in the typical feet-parallel crouch, he suggested marking with your feet a bit staggered so you can more quickly change the distance from the thrower. Helps against throwers skilled at drawing the foul. I imagine this will be even more important when the 11th edition goes live.
• Keep your head up instead of leaning in looking down at the disc. Better vision, harder for the thrower to draw the foul.
• Discussed the concept of "blocking back". When you go for the hand block, instead of up (since your hands should always be under the disc) and in towards the throwers hand, block up and away to minimize the chance of fouling. Ben emphasized not fouling, both for pragmatic and ethical reasons.
• Oftentime emphasize "winning the first second", even on the live side. So mark to stop the continuation before settling into the force.
• His diagrams belied (thankfully) something you hear commonly: namely that the mark takes away a third (or a half!) of the field. Against good throwers it's really a pretty narrow band.
• I liked his description of a team defense you might employ against a team that relies on the huck. He called it "rising pressure" and the basic idea is that the marker sets up with his butt pointed towards the back cone on the closed side. When the O is far away from the endzone (or the disc is close to the closed side), this will make the mark flatter. As the disc gets closer to the endzone (and the huck thus disappears), the mark angles more sharply (but still flattens when the disc is on the closed site). So simple. Can't believe this is the first I'd heard of it.
• In terms of substitutions, Ben noted as tourneys progress D teams tend to put more of their guys who are getting blocks on the field, until eventually they are fielding D lines with all blockers, and no markers. A mistake, he says.

Fitness and Training for Ultimate by Bryan Doo & Dan Cogan-Drew

Also good stuff. Bryan Doo did most of the talking, with Dan Cogan-Drew jumping in from time to time. Even though readers of this weblog are likely to be most interested in this presentation, I don't have too much to say, largely 'cause I agree with it all. Nice emphasis on the hamstrings, glutes, and hips, and rotational power/stability. From Bryan's examples and build, he's clearly a very fit guy with fantastic body control. A couple small but important things I took away though:

• I really liked the look of the "spiderman stretch", where you get into a pushup position, then bring your left foot to the outside of your left hand (you can drop your right knee down if it helps you get into this position, then try to straighten it out to activate the stretch). It seems to hit just about everything.
• Bryan also discussed the importance of glute activation in exercises where you don't necessarily think it's going to matter. As an example, he had a volunteer come to the stage and perform a bodyweight squat. Then he had the volunteer put one of these mini-bands around his knees which tended to pull them together. He had the volunteer resume a shoulder-width stance (thus stretching the band) and squat, and his form improved! The effect persisted after the band was removed. Funny, just a few days ago I was reading this interview with Pavel Tsatsouline where he had the interviewer do a hand-squeeze test normally, and then again with glutes activated. I recently discovered that it makes a difference when you're trying dragon flags as well (oh, as long as we're on the subject, two more T-Nation articles: Get Your Butt In Gear! (and Part II)

I wish this presentation had been a day rather than an hour. There are simply too many fitness attributes, exercises, and routines applicable to Ultimate to cover in an hour. I could've asked a million questions. Oh well, next time.

Real-Time Decision Making in Ultimate by Jim Parinella

Yet again, good stuff. Sadly my coverage is getting spottier the further I go. In this case it was because Jim's talk was the most "had to be there" of the bunch. I would probably also argue that of the presentations I saw, his was the most ambitious topic. Really what it boiled down to was an attempt to put into words all the decisions that good Ultimate players make unconsciously. As such, I think he wanted to give folks in the room an idea of the types of situations and experiences they need to accumulate and internalize. It actually tied in quite nicely with the keynote. Where the keynote talked about how your play needs to happen in the hind brain rather than the forebrain, Jim's talk focused on what, exactly, your hind brain needs to know. It can only come with experience, but it was interesting to have the types of experience needed articulated. Jim's own weblog post includes links to his PowerPoint slides and handout.

Kudos

My Dad and I left early, so unfortunately I didn't catch the last round of presentations or the panel discussion, but I had a great time nonetheless. Thanks and congratulations to Tiina Booth, George Cooke, and everyone involved for making this happen! This was a very impressive event, and I never would have guessed it was the first one of its kind!

Wow, good link day. Drop what you're doing and read these three:

• The Year I Did Everything Right
• Physical Strategies: Don't Be A Sissy
• Why Pull-ups? by Ed Thompson

I bet this bit of Internet flotsam has been around for awhile, but it still makes me want to go out and buy a pile of marbles. If you feel so moved as well, you can always go for the big box o' pee-wees for $29.

Just a quick link to get you through the long weekend, The Wedge of Discouragement:

"Ah yes," said the devil, "THAT is my favorite tool of all. You see, it's so easy to use. It hardly takes any effort. All I have to do is get the very tip of the wedge into my victim and the rest is easy. Once the wedge is in, I just tap it ever so slightly and it slides in deeper and deeper.

"Sometimes I don't have to do anything - my victims push the wedge in deeper all by themselves! A small opening soon becomes a gaping crack, making room for the rest of my tools. Before you know it, my wedge has completely split a person's dreams, hopes and aspirations in two."

The latest issue of Tyler Hass' Power Rings newsletter asks, "What is Exertainment?":

Okay, I made the word up, but someone had to do it. The term infotainment, which describes the conversion of news and entertainment, is now an accepted term. Even my spell checker did not complain. The combination of exercise and entertainment is the future of the fitness industry. Right now, the first baby steps are being made in this direction by mainstream companies. They are adding TV screens to treadmills, CD players to stationary bikes and mandatory lattes to aerobics classes! I think they are headed down the wrong path. First of all, how effective of a workout is a guy getting when he is sitting on a bike and reading the newspaper? My guess is that his life and well-being are not dependent on his fitness level. Secondly, they are trying to disengage your mind from the workout. Unfortunately, becoming fit is a process that requires full physical, mental and emotional engagement. I don't mean emotional engagement in a hippy, new-age way. I'm talking about toughness, perseverance and commitment. If you can't decide whether you want to train or watch Will and Grace , and the only solution is that you must do both... then fitness might not be for you.

I agree, but with some qualifications... When I started off trying to get my game back, exertainment was a great ice breaker. It wasn't until I had established a good base, and discovered for myself that exertainment (and moderate aerobic exercise) wasn't going to take me nearly far enough that I abandoned it for more committed workouts.

So this raises the question: does exertainment serve as a good stepping stone to more productive workouts, or does it keep people from fully embracing their commitment to fitness? Personally, in my exertainment phase I liked the TV and resented the exercise for distracting me from enjoying it as much. The TV was the carrot, the exercise was the stick. Once I turned off the TV, the exercise became the carrot. But I have no idea if this was because the exercise habit had finally taken hold naturally, or because the harder workouts were more rewarding and producing more obvious results (and were too demanding to do in front of the tube), or because the TV itself was keeping me from embracing the exercise for its own sake.

But the bottom line is this: if you are able to focus and enjoy whatever is on the TV while you exercise, then you're just doing aerobics, and really should mix in some intervals. If you're already doing intervals and still enjoy TV at the same time, you aren't doing your intervals hard enough.