Roger Ebert: The Balcony is Closed.

Wow, I thought The Onion was for laughs, not dead-on predictions. From 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'. Spooky. Via Waxy.

It will be nice to have a president (with any luck) who reads.

And, to get off of politics, I'm sure this is old news by now, but I just saw this today, and I can't stop watching and smiling: Where the Hell is Matt?

In regard to six weeks of doing everything right, a friend asked me how it was going in the comments, and I thought I'd reply here rather than there. Anyway, here's how it's going:

It's going okay-ish. I just finished my second six weeks, and am now in the midst of a four day break before signing on for a third six-weeker (happily, the break coincided with a long vacation weekend visiting friends and playing in a tournament). Friday was quite a few Ella-safe blondies (my daughter has allergies, so these had no dairy, but sugar galore). Saturday was pretty good, just chocolate mousse for dessert. Sunday was a bunch of Oreos on the ride home and a Blizzard from DQ. Not sure what poison I'll pick today, and then it's back on the wagon tomorrow.

I can definitely feel a change though. The desire for sugar, while still there quite powerfully, feels like it's more in my head than in my gut. It's the memory of how great it tastes rather than the deep-down craving (most of the time, sometimes the tough one is still there). And I have found myself slightly ambivalent about my current little sin siesta, with more feelings of "do I really want to do this?" than I had last time. I even find myself toying with the idea of jumping back on the wagon today rather than tomorrow, but man, I haven't made Ella-unsafe brownies yet, and there's that "Endangered Species" brand dark chocolate with toffee chips with my name on it lurking out there.

So, three months in and I can feel changes, although the beast is far from licked. I really feel like any health or fitness plan that tells people "stick with it for 3 weeks and you'll stop wanting it", or "exercise for 6 weeks and it will becoming a habit" are doing their adherents a disservice. For me, the exercise habit took probably TWO YEARS of fighting for it before it became a habit. And my sugar battle is in its infancy at three months. To tell anyone they just have to make it a few weeks before it gets easier is setting them up for failure when that inevitably turns out to be untrue. Of course, the truth might be too discouraging, so I don't really have an answer.

Coincidentally, the friends we were visiting called this very interesting article on leptin to my attention: Can't Keep the Weight Off? Maybe Leptin is the Culprit. (and here's a brief postscript). In a nutshell, there may be a powerful hormonal response to weight loss that suggests to you (in much the same way Tony Soprano might suggest something to you) that maybe you should think about putting that weight back on. And this hormonal response can last for YEARS. Sucks. But you gotta love that last paragraph:

How do some people manage to overcome the leptin effect and keep weight off? Generally by watching their food intake very carefully and continuing to increase their physical activity. "Anybody who has lost weight and kept it off will tell you that they have to keep battling," says Dr. Rosenbaum. "They have essentially reinvented themselves, and they are worthy of the utmost admiration and respect."

Yeah baby.

Pretty interesting read over at Powering Muscles: 10 Ways to Train Your Brain for Better Performance:

The best evidence that muscle fatigue starts in the brain comes from studies involving sensors that measure electrical activity in the muscles. The amount of electrical activity in the muscles is a direct indicator of how hard the brain is driving them to perform work. In a recent French study, researchers found that an involuntary drop in performance during repeated bicycling sprints was accompanied by a comparable decline in electrical activity in the muscles. These results clearly showed that fatigue was not caused by acid buildup or any other factor within the muscles themselves. Instead, it was caused by reduced drive from the brain.

There is no spoon.

Bonus link: over at Salon a writer decided to give Charles Atlas' 1922 "Dynamic Tension" course a go. You know, the one you saw advertised in comic books as a kid? Pretty funny stuff. Not all crazy (but some very crazy).

I guess I'm running a real fitness blog now, promising to reveal "secrets". The shame. Anyway, another Ultimate post. The conditioning stuff should be of interest to everybody, at least, so I'll mention that first:

Awesome new Ultimate resource The Huddle just posted a feature: Training For Ultimate. Lots of good stuff there, including a little bit of nostalgia seeing Tully Beatty contributing. Used to lose to his team routinely way back in college. Class act, that guy (and his post is excellent).

As for forehands, I've thought a lot about Idris Nolan's flick advice off and on for awhile. Not so much for myself; as a 20-year split-finger thrower, it's too late for me unless I take a season off to rebuild my grip, and I might not have that many seasons left! More for my daughter, who's 10, and just starting to show an interest. I'd like to teach her right.

So I e-mailed Idris, and he kindly shared more thoughts with me on the subject. In the end, it's pretty much as he described, as counter-intuitive as that may be for we split-finger throwers. For the throwing action, picture delivering a karate chop to pretty low on somebody's midsection (your palm would be up, your forearm/wrist/hand all in a line).

But if a picture is worth a 1,000 words a video's worth a million, and Matt Mackey provides it. The revelation, for me, comes at 1:40, "these two fingers almost become superfluous". Superfluous?! Stunning, as my flick depends on those very fingers. This explains, finally, why my flick suffers so mightily in the rain, while others are barely affected. Give it a try. Very interesting. Those fingers still play a role, but it's definitely a supporting role rather than the lead.

P.S. Okay, so you don't want to rebuild your grip, and the wet (either sweat or rain) still messes with you. Here are the best (by far) solutions I've found in my 20 years:

• For sweat: wristbands and Tite-Grip.
• For rain: forget football gloves, Ansell Hyflex Machinist's Gloves (for handling small oily parts!) are the closest thing you'll find to a bare hands feel even in driving rain. And at three bucks (!) a pair, you have nothing to lose but your pride.

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?!

UltiVillage has a great Clip of the Day up: Chase in 04 Finals. A colossal effort to get over a guy making a merely great effort.

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.

Healthbolt on pumpkin seeds (and what your body does with all the tryptophan they pack):

...tryptophan works by morphing into seratonin, (which is known for fighting depression, reducing anxiety, and minimizing anger), making tryptophan pretty much the Wonder Amino Acid. In fact, in a recent study, folks who were asked to give a speech after eating a pumpkin seed bar had much lower heart rates and anxiety an hour later than those who didn't have the seeds.

Quick Googling turned up Dagoba's Seeds chocolate bar (68% cocoa, plus hemp, pumpkin and sunflower seeds). Mmm, something to indulge in come mid-July, after my second sentence is up.

Funny, came across two fun, completely unrelated "Teach the Controversy" links this week: one on Barack Obama, and the other to these intelligently designed t-shirts.

I try to keep this more of a fitness blog than an Ultimate blog, even if it is my sport of choice. While the post, Ultimate, Refs, and the Fallacy of Objectivity is ostensibly about refs in Ultimate, I thought it was an excellent meditation on sportsmanship in general, and would have some appeal outside my little niche sport. An excerpt:

Like all sports, even team sports, Ultimate fundamentally comes down to a competition with the self. Opposing teams provide a foil against which to test oneself, and maybe the memory of being beaten by other players contributes to your motivation while training, but really, sports are about struggling to facilitate the emergence of your best, at the right time. The level of one's play comes from within; while the presence of the other team challenges a player in new ways, the idea of beating the other team and the externality of that goal is secondary to the ascendancy of your own strength. When teams win championships, they're celebrating their own victories, not the other teams' defeats. It's an important distinction.

I'll feel a bit silly when this doesn't work, but I gotta try it sometime anyway: bag 'o water frightens away flies.