SMLR 29 Mar

This morning I’m drinking Thanksgiving’s Ethiopia Halo Bariti coffee.   Tastes earthy with some prune-like flavor.   There’s lemon in there somewhere too if you let it sit in your mouth for a bit.   I know I sound ridiculous.

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How much awareness and investment should you put towards things outside your sphere of influence?    Is there inherent value in staying tied into the news cycle and external events, to keep tabs of what is going on in the world?  Or is it generally better to ignore it, and focus on things that effect you and/or that you can effect?   What is the right level of connectedness?

I think the obvious answer is that it’s somewhere in the middle; there is a golden mean that is probably slightly different per person.   But although each person’s healthy middle-ground is different, I think it’s safe to say that there are unhealthy extremes that should be avoided.    I’m going to tinker with this  a  little  today….not the deep-dive that it  probably warrants, but just some initial thoughts. 

First let’s look at the ends of the spectrum… the extremes of too much and too little.  Person A and Person B.  

Person A has the 24/7 news cycle beaming into their life throughout their waking hours, through various mediums.  The TV is on and has the news stream running all day long, complete with regular interruptions for “breaking news.”  The smartphone dings constantly to notify them of social media or news updates.    All this information is not just coming in and being absorbed, but it is front-and-center in his/her mind, at the expense of the realities of the situations immediately facing him/her.  Attachments develop,  emotions flare, and energy is expended on the rollercoaster of highs and lows that come from following politics, world events, popular culture, social media, ‘trending’ articles, and other info sources that fluctuate hourly.   He/she feels “in it,” and in order to keep up must stay plugged in, or risk missing the latest new flash, update, or meme.

Person B is insular.  He/she worries only about what concerns them, and therefore ignores or blocks what s/he would consider “personally irrelevant” information from the outside world.   Essentially an information hermit, he/she cares only about things that are within the first order sphere of influence.   News, politics, social trends….they dismiss these things with an aloofness that can border on arrogance.  “Why should I care about what doesn’t effect me?” they ask.  Nothing is worth their  time unless there’s something in it for them. 

What person A fails to grasp is the value of presence.  What person B fails to grasp is the  interconnectedness of all things and the virtue of selflessness.  The golden mean to strive for is probably something like this:  foster a connectedness, consciousness, and awareness of the  world, while not allowing it to suck you in.   Open the aperture:  take note of things, extract value and lessons from them, and just discard the chaff.  But don’t jump through the  aperture, don’t become so enmeshed in the information environment that it  becomes the central tenet of your identity.

More to it than that…just some initial  Sunday morning  thoughts.

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Had a bad run on saturday.  My hip was pretty painful, and I aborted the run a few miles in.  It wasn’t intended to be a hard or long run…just an easy hour on the trails.  But instead it was 40 minutes of discomfort.  I aborted my route and took a shortcut home.   It was the first bad run in several weeks.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last couple of years of running on an arthritic joint it’s this:  accept the bad runs.  They’re part of it, they happen, and they don’t necessarily mean anything.   I shouldn’t read into them, and they don’t necessarily mean that I need to reconsider anything.

However, it may still be worth asking why, and this run was bad enough to warrant some forensics.   There were three variables in Saturday’s run that were different from my norms:

1. Yesterday was my first run in shoes in about 6 months.  The skin on my feet was a little scraped up, and the trail was super muddy, so I opted for shoes.  My last two runs in shoes (July and Oct) were also bad.  Coincidence?  Maybe.   While I’m a believer in sandals, it still seems unlikely that wearing shoes would have such acute or immediate effects.   However, my limited data set does seems to suggest it.   I want to experiment with this a bit more before I write off shoes completely, because they have a a time and place, especially in muddy Hawaii.
2. The day prior, my diet had been shit.   For lunch I had two big bowls of pasta.  For dinner I had 2 x PB&J sandwiches, a whole can of spam, and a bunch of cheese puffs.  Then a beer and a couple of cocktails after dinner, enough to go to bed with a slight buzz.    There is some science that shows that sugar, gluten, alcohol, a high carb diet does create an inflammatory response.  From what I understand, however, it varies a lot from person to person.  Some people do well on a high-carb diet, and can tolerate a lot of simple carbohydrates and refined sugar.   Others – and I would say I fall in this category –  have significant and relatively immediate reactions to high-carbohydrate intakes.   My experience of carb reactions goes beyond just muscle inflammation.  When I eat a high-carb meal, within 20 minutes I become extremely sleepy.   Sleepy to the point where staying awake requires a lot of focused effort.  After the aforementioned pasta lunch, I went belly up on the couch for several hours, almost against my will.   If I drink a Coca-cola, I’ll feel ok for about 15-20 minutes, and then the system initiates shut-down.   So, although I don’t have the bloodwork or hard medical data to back this claim up, but it seems that my body has significant and somewhat immediate reactions to simple carbohydrate intake.   It’s possible that this sensitivity may translate to soft-tissue inflammation as well, of which my hip is an acute indicator.
3. A third variable change was the warmup.   I just recently started incorporating plyometric explosive movements into my physical therapy.  I did these movements immediately before the run, as part of the warmup (first time doing this).  Perhaps one of these aggravated the joint.   I will keep doing them though, to see if there’s a pattern or if it was a one-off.

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Sunday PM update:  after I wrote the above, I went for a run on Sunday late morning.  Back in sandals, limited warmup, and on 24 hrs of clean eating.  Hip felt fine.   It was also a much more vertically oriented route, starting out with a 500 foot climb in the first half mile, and then a bunch of uphill/downhill repeats.   Ran for an hour and a half, and I had no significant hip pain.   Could just be random, or there could be something to it.

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Nothing new to report on the reading front, still working on the same books that I commented on on 15 Mar.   More ore less on track to finish Way of Zen, Road to Character, and Order of Time all more or less simultaneously.   Probably in the next week or two.   Once an Eagle is a longer journey.   I also started “Training for the Uphill Athlete,” by House, Johnston, and Jornet.