tricky aging back

Shortly after returning from Philly, I found my back mysteriously tightening up, to the point that it became impossible to sit, stand, walk or lie down without considerable discomfort. I've injured myself plenty of times, but I can usually pinpoint the cause. This came seemingly out of the blue. Within a day I was pretty miserable.

The docs who do backs at my institution told me they could see me sometime in May. So I found another place that could take me in a few days. I was feeling much better by the time my appointment rolled around but was worried about the unknown origins of the pain. So I went and got x-rayed and stuff. Good that I went.

The x-rays revealed that I have mild to moderate degenerative disc disease at the L4 and L5 vertebrae. It's not quite as dramatic as it sounds. But it does mean that I may have to expect some future back episodes like this most recent one. The discs in question are spongy little shock absorbers for the spine but as we age they start to dry out some and the space between the vertebrae shrinks. I have to visit a physical therapist to get the lowdown on working with it in the gym. The doc did say that exercise is the treatment so I guess I've got a head start. But in the meantime I haven't been able to go to the gym for a while now.

This is bad. The gym is my poor-man's Prozac. Without it I get squirrelly real fast. The last week or so has been rather miserable. All of this has coincided with some new projects at work that meant a bunch of work that had to be done quickly. I am now in the 12th hour of a 13 hour day. But most of it is done now and tomorrow will be an easier day. I might even be able to hit the gym on Friday. I am very tired and a little loopy--which is good, as anything that impairs my normal mindset usually results in my feeling better.

Roberto Clemente

My favorite baseball writer Rob Neyer points me to this column by Joe Posnanski, another well respected baseball writer. I note it here because I like its prose poem about Roberto Clemente.

I’m infatuated with Roberto Clemente. And I know very little about Al Kaline. I doubt this makes me very different from most baseball fans. I’ve mentioned this here before — I believe it was while reading an essay by Nick Hornby that I heard about a prose poet whose poems would be everything they could think of (off the top of the head) about some person or some city or whatever. So …

Roberto Clemente

Born Puerto Rico
Had a fabulous arm.
Was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Branch Rickey drafted him for the Pirates.
Was called “Bob” on his early baseball cards.
Moody and proud.
Considered hypochondriac in early years.
Ferocious bad ball hitter. Pitchers couldn’t figure him out.
Wasn’t especially fast, but ran bases with abandon.
Doubles became triples.
Hit with heavy bat.
Hit .300 every year of the 1960s. Except crazy ‘68.
Often had nightmares. Couldn’t sleep at all.
Stood up for Latin players. Was as proud and fierce as Jackie.
Could not say no to people in need.
Wore No. 21. Some want that retired for every club.

Cool bones. I think I'll have to give this particular literary technique a try.

The God of Heavy Things

One of the nicest things about age is having the benefit of experience. I've learned that sometimes the days you really don't feel quite up to going to the gym, for whatever reason, can turn out to be very good days indeed. I've had some good workouts while nursing a hangover, though I try to avoid that these days, and I've had good workouts when I've felt sore or tired or a little sick or whatever.

The God of Heavy Things rewards effort.

Today was a good example. I was still a bit sore in the deep down places from squatting earlier in the week, and I was a little tired, and probably hadn't eaten enough. But I dutifully donned my gear and did my deadlifts in the rack as I do most Fridays and I had a good day. Not my best, but good: 405X2, 430X1, 455X1, 475X1. I felt like I had 500 in me but decided to leave well enough alone so I backed off and did 365X10. A solid effort given recent training patterns.

My sweetie had a good day too, coming within 10lbs of her best.

Now we are bracing for the wrath of the God of tornadoes. He's gearing up for round two of aught-eight.

2/25/08: Unpleasant anniversary

Just about a year ago, I fucked up my foot and ankle pretty good. That picture doesn't quite do it justice as most of the foot turned black, purple and yellow over the following days. X-rays revealed I had not broken anything, but later someone suggested to me that I might have been better off breaking it. All in all, last February was not a month to remember.

I went to the Emory sports med folks, and they were surprisingly bad. The doctor was anyway. His resident was pretty thorough in his examination but he left the consulting to the doctor which was a shame as the doctor sucked. He looked at it, gave me a photocopied sheet of exercises to do once I could put weight on it again, and had another assistant give me a twenty dollar brace that they charged me eighty for. I guess only noteworthy athletes get more than two minutes. Once I found out what that brace retailed for, I refused to pay for it. So there.

When things took a long time healing I eventually took matters into my own hands and should have done so much sooner. Once I researched my own rehab protocols I got most of my mobility back. I would still not say it's back to where it was but it is much better and I can run again. If I go hard or heavy in the gym it gets sore for a day or two and my one legged balance is still not fully restored. I assume that this is an age-related phenomena. Things simply take longer to heal as we get older and that makes me reluctant to do things that have a significant risk (relatively speaking) of injury. So I won't be learning to ski, not in this life anyway.

On the bright side my deadlifts are headed back in the right direction and I can sprint pain-free again. So life is alright.

5/2/07 effort and difference

I came across this in an email exchange between Bill Simmons of ESPN and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink. You can ignore the sports references, they are not essential to the point he is making.

Gladwell: This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

I'm still thinking about this.

In other news, I finished a great book last week called In the Little World: A true story of dwarfs, love and trouble. I don't like the title and I suspect that whoever came up with it hadn't read the book. Marketing people no doubt. In any case it's one of those books that I wanted to give to three or four people as soon as I finished with it. It is ostensibly about dwarfs, but that is just scratching the surface. It is about difference, perception, judgment, embodiment, beauty, honesty, and a bunch of other stuff. It's also full of good stories about complex people and this makes it a very compelling read. There's just enough history and philosophy to ground some of these difficult issues but not enough to make it boring. I wish that I had written about the book as soon as I had finished it as it had me doing some serious ruminating. Unfortunately it's been busy at work with the end of the semester and I haven't had the time as of late. Disability and difference are things I've been thinking about for a long time and felt I've needed to sort out in my head and I suppose that's one reason I responded so strongly to this book. More on the topic later I hope. If anyone wants to read it, let me know and I will send it to you.

the days of my lives

Hi friends. It’s been an eventful few weeks: encouraging, demoralizing and busy. A brief list in order, more or less:

1) I bench pressed 300 lbs. A goal I’ve had for quite some time, but it seemed a bit underwhelming because I’ve known I had it in me for a while now. I probably had a shot at 315 but I’m being careful in my old age.

2) Killed a dog. Very fucking depressing. Actually, I wasn’t the first one to hit it when it ran out in traffic but that doesn’t make me feel much better. I generally prefer dogs to people so this was pretty tough for me.

3) My sweetie and I decided that she’s gonna come bunk with me. We’ve been tossing it around for awhile. This is good. Other aspects of my domestic situation having nothing to do with her are not very good at all.

4) I took a week off from work and went to Philly for a few days to see my 91 year old grandmother who has just recently suffered a broken hip. Her second one in the last fifteen years or so. Her mobility is probably gone for good now. Her mind is still awfully sharp and she reads the Philadelphia Inquirer every day. More on this later I think. While in Philly, I pay careful attention to the character of the locals: how they talk, what they talk about, how they carry themselves, what their attitude toward the world is. I come to this conclusion: it turns out there’s nothing inherently wrong with me, I’m just from Philadelphia.

5) I attended my first Hindu wedding. I wonder how many times a Hindu marriage ceremony between an Indian man and a Japanese woman, followed by lunch at an Italian restaurant, has happened in the American south? Actually there are probably lots of similar stories anywhere the gloablized economy is in full effect. A very colorful ceremony, literally—it was beautiful, and a good time was had.

6) Celebrated my ma's birthday last night. She's a good person and it made me happy that she had a good time.

I’ve left a thing or two off but I’ll get around to the rest. Sorry to have been out of touch recently. I hope you all are well.

the other tricky venture

So Gambling. A couple of months ago I happened to read a profile of some dude, a struggling musician, who made a half million dollars in the world series of poker. He invested all of his winnings in his music career. I had my doubts about the wisdom of that decision, but had no doubts about my intense jealousy. Perhaps I could learn to play poker. I’m smart. Shit, I learned to read and write Arabic at an age when, well, I learned as an adult. Surely I could master a card game? That thought lasted for a second or two. I don’t need to be undertaking any major overhauls, and if I’d been interested in poker I would have learned it already. But perhaps I already had some skills, or some sort of knowledge that I could use to my advantage?

I believe it was a Sunday, and some football game or other that I had correctly predicted to myself had just ended, and it occurred to me that I had been watching football for more than thirty years. So I decided to undertake a little experiment. I researched online sportsbooks, started looking at the point spreads for the NFL, and began picking games. Not betting mind you, just picking. Every week for four weeks, I picked every game on the schedule. It did not take long to realize that this was not the way to go. Simply finishing over five hundred (more wins than losses) against the spread was an accomplishment. I would need a different strategy.

There is a misconception about point spreads. The folks who set point spreads for sportsbooks are not evaluating the game and its potential outcome. They are trying to eliminate the risk for the bookie. The idea is to set the line so that you get roughly the same number of people betting on each side of the line. Because everyone who bets has to bet slighly more than he/she stands to win, this ensures that the bookie makes a profit no matter who wins the game. For instance, if the Falcons are four point favorites over the Saints, and ten people bet eleven dollars to win ten on the Falcons, and ten people bet eleven to win ten on the Saints plus the points, then regardless of who wins the bookie makes ten bucks after paying out the winners. Multiply that by much larger bets and a much greater volume and soon you’re talking about a whole lot of money with minimal risk for the bookie. It’s like any other kind of gambling: the system is rigged so the house never loses.

So the point spread is in no way an objective evaluation of the potential outcome of a football game. It is about the perception of a particular football game. Who do the betting public think will win and by how much? Now this does require an awful lot of knowledge of, and evaluation of, football because there are lots of smart bettors out there who know the game very well. Hence the lines often seem to be right on. And anyone trying to pick every single NFL game in a given week is going to have a really tough time. But I figured that out of a weekly schedule of fifteen or sixteen games I might be able to evaluate the games and the lines and find three or four lines that I believed to be not quite right. So I set out to pick four games a week for four weeks that I thought could be winners. If at the end of that period I came out far enough ahead that it could not simply be explained by chance, then I would risk some actual money.

Well, I extended the experiment to six weeks just to be sure that I wasn’t fooling myself. I went 18-5-1, the one being a push, or a tie, wherein neither the bettor nor the bookie wins or loses. Pretty damn good and more than good enough to risk some small bets. I felt I had been demonstrably conservative and if I had been betting those games it would have been a very merry Christmas indeed. So I took the plunge. I bet four games, relatively small bets that I could afford to lose. I went two and two. A bad week for me, after six weeks of success, though it did not really cost me much--just the small extra percentage of the bet that the bookie takes to ensure his profit. I was a bit discouraged and wondered if I had in fact just been fooling myself. But I knew as well that one week is just one week and I needed to stick with the plan. I then proceeded to roll off five straight wins in a row and have made enough to satiate Sallie Mae for a couple of months.

I’m not so sure about this week though. Nothing jumps out at me in the lines so I may have to take a pass for a week and see what comes up next week. But I haven’t done the homework yet, so we’ll see how my initial look accords with the reality. Thus far my new ventures are treating me well.

Thanks Charles Atlas!

The new regimen is definitely doing something!

I've been going back to the gym now for a few months after a lengthy hiatus. I'll let you be the judge of the results. I have time to workout again now that I work a cushy forty hour work week like most everyone else. I'm especially happy with my new and improved abs. (For those of you who did not grow up watching wrestling in the 70's: that is not actually me, it's Ivan Putski. I am hopeful though that with a little dieting and some cardio I can someday be as svelte as the Polish Hammer was in this pic.)

...sayeth the meathead

I have been bench pressing for a long time. Not quite as long as I have been squirreled away in my room, brooding and plotting my revenge against the world, but almost. Long enough that pictures from the era when I began benching are uniformly humiliating. Without question, God and/or genetics did not intend me to be a good bench presser. In fact, both intended me, I believe, to die a sickly child. But thanks to the medical knowledge of the 1970's and my general disposition (both too lazy and too stubborn; I'll die later when I feel like it and quit fucking nagging me) I lived to be a piss poor bench presser.

A natural born bencher is barrel-chested and has thick arms. The shorter and more flipper-like the arms the better; he or she should have to stretch and strain in order to masturbate. The short arms in combination with the barrel-chest provides advantageous leverage and means the weight doesn't have to go very far. I was not born barrel-chested and short armed. As a child I could turn sideways and render myself invisible. Helpful when playing hide and go seek, a distinct disadvantage for a gym rat. Like many monkeys and some apes I have long, hairy arms. When I started working out you could've shaved my arms and easily mistaken them for those of a pubescent ballerina. Long and lithe, perhaps even graceful, but not especially helpful for routinely moving large amounts of weight off one's chest for no apparent reason but the mistaken belief that this somehow translates into revenge against the world.

Rather than admit that I was not suited for the bench I chose instead to spend year after futile year trying to improve my bench press. After some six years of concerted effort I had reached the point a typical meathead might get to after about a year or so. Now I at least had the option of lying and saying "well my bench isn't that good yet, but I haven't been doing it very long." In the meantime, I had at least made progress in other areas. Long, hairy girl arms are well suited for picking things up as one doesn't even really have to bend. So I worked hard at deadlifting and despite nearly disabling myself on more than one occasion, I got pretty good at it. Unfortunately meatheads rarely, if ever, say "hey dude how much can you deadlift?" And I have yet to hear a girl ooh and ahh lasciviously over anyone's spinal erectors (calm down perverts, they're the muscles of the lower back). So I continued to labor away at the bench, with pitifully little to show for it. Ok, if the truth be told, were you to shave my arms now (and sandblast off the tattoos) you might mistake me for an adolescent little leaguer rather than a ballerina. And I had convinced myself to be content with such "progress" in the gym. Add to that a dozen or so years of failed, demoralizing relationships that sapped what was left of my virile and manly drive to show the world, and the gym was little more than a habit and the sole, remaining impediment to my becoming a slovenly barfly.

But, ohhhh boy, I went ahead and dragged my sickly ass to the gym yesterday and for no good reason at all was rewarded with what I believe to be a full blown bench press epiphany. If I'm right, in about a year my man breasts will be so big I will no longer be able to pat myself on the back. And then, you'll see, I'll make them all pay.