Reality Laughs

The early efforts at being a beast in my own mind (free the mind, your ass will follow, as G. Clinton would say) are showing interesting results.

I am capable of so much more than I gave myself credit for. Previously, I did not allow myself to try, and therefore did not achieve.

Case in point. Previously I thought a 5k was just fine. But when I started being a beast my default minimum, even after not running at all for months, was 6.3k (4 miles, more or less, given Apple Watch errors in measuring distance).

Case in point. Last night I started running the neighborhood and decided to run the long blocks in a southward pattern until I hit 4 miles. Then, wherever I was, I would turn north and return home. Total distance 4.75 miles and I felt good.

What is my limit?

Meta. In what other areas of life should I ask the same question?

Unrelated: I am resolutely keeping it simple. The Apple Watch is unreliable in measuring distance or route: even when I stay on the sidewalk the route shows a wildly swerving path. It reports 1,000 feet of altitude gain when the true altitude change for a loop is more like -50 feet for the downhill stretch and +50 on the return.

I nerded out on the internet and found better and more accurate devices, but decided to not buy them. They are unnecessary for my current intentions.

I don’t care about distance, time, cadence, or any of that. I care about choices made. Commitments kept. Discipline.

Electronic devices are not necessary for discipline: all I need is a mind that makes a decision and a body that follows through.

The benefit of exercise is not really the fact that you are physically better off. Yes, that exists. No, the real benefit is in the mindset that causes you to exercise. Seneca, as usual, has something to say:

For when I don suitable attire, or walk as I should, or dine as I ought to dine, it is not my dinner, or my walk, or my dress that are goods, but the deliberate choice which I show in regard to them, as I observe, in each thing I do, a mean that conforms with reason.

Letters, 92.11.

The “deliberate choice”. That is where the value exists.

The pursuit of happiness/peace is in the choices I make, not in the fancy clothes I wear or how buff I am or the elaborate steak dinners I eat.

When I set “I am a savage, a beast, an animal” as my objective, I am setting myself on a disciplined course. I am making choices, simple choices based on simple and eternal principles.

Choices that create known results. Choices that are known to create peace.

The new me just does. Beasts do not think, debate, analyze. They just do. Peace does not require analysis, intellectualizing. Peace requires deliberate action and choices.

Those actions and choices must be aligned with higher principles.

[I]f I have the choice, I shall choose health and strength, but that the good involved will be my judgment regarding these things, and not the things themselves.

Letters, 92.13.

Strive to understand the eternal principles. Make choices consistent with them.

I’m here. It’s time. Let’s do this.

I have always been mostly an intellectual guy, an academic guy, a cerebral guy. Always in decent physical shape (backpacking, rock climbing, fitful efforts at physical training) but basically a dad-bod guy. Not an athlete by any definition.

So why do I now aim at being a beast? This conjures up images of steroid-inflated men, one-dimensional, not deep in intellect or spirit.

Which I am now convinced could not possibly be more wrong. My own ego and prejudice turned against my own enlightenment.

This enlightenment started with seeing a few Joe Rogan and David Goggins clips on YouTube. Those men know something. They know some truths. And they gained that knowledge through disciplined, hard physical effort.

I want what they have.

I’m a bit sheepish, even now, to proclaim my objective. Somehow it contains (for me) equal parts attraction and revulsion. It is attractive to see someone in beast mode. I want to have that power, focus, determination, discipline. Not really as a tool to get something, but for the feeling itself.

Right now when I set a decision to run a four mile loop and I run it, I don’t give two fucks for calorie burn or building strength or building endurance or any of the physical payoffs from running. What I get is the deep emotional satisfaction of “I did what I set out to do, and what I set out to do was big and important.”

That feeling. It will not, I suspect, change of my run is 10 miles or 40 miles. The feeling will be the same, because the accomplishment will be the same: satisfaction (which doesn’t begin to describe the feeling) of setting and accomplishing something you don’t think you can do.

Now, four miles is easily achieved. But four miles day after day after day after day after day? That is the mountain I climb. And every day that I run I get the happiness of stacking another day on the pile. The four mile distance itself is not the point.

I believe I can do four miles daily. No excuses, no bullshit, just do it. My mantra as I run, which is where I want to go next, is “10k, every day”.

Yes there will be injuries. Externals don’t count. Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics: externals are not in my control.

Back to seeing myself as a beast.

Where I went off the rails was with the revulsion. The instinctive response (“That’s not for me”) to seeing someone in beast mode was an internal doubt that I could achieve such a state.

I doubted that I could be a beast. So it was easier to ridicule the man showing beast mode drive and determination. I can’t do what he can do, so he is stupid.

That’s why I want to be a beast: it directly challenges my previous surrender prior to engagement. My view of other men was wrong, and my view of myself was wrong.

Objective: be a beast.

How: through physical training, where external signals (fitness, weight, body fat, whatever) help me see progress.

Explanation: age and genetics are fixed, and the only variables are diet and exercise. Diet and exercise are controlled by discipline. Do I seek truth (the knowledge of what works and doesn’t work)? Do I apply that truth relentlessly, to the best of my ability, every day? Discipline means doing.

But where to begin? How will I know, in my heart, that I am a beast?

I am beginning where I stand now, which is running. It is the most accessible, lowest friction way to simultaneously expend effort and reinforce discipline. I walk out of my door and start running. Shorts, shirt, socks, shoes. Nothing else matters. Discipline says run four miles. I do it.

My daughter mentioned someone she saw doing handstand push-ups – a man in his 40s. She asked him how she could get there. He said yoga. So she went off to a yoga class.

Davis Goggins runs. I’m sure he does other things, too. That man does yoga. I’m sure he does other things, too.

For the moment I will run. The discipline muscle will be the “no matter what” muscle. Run no matter what.

Next week we have a prediction for rain. I’m already debating in my head what to do. Answer: run. I will be wet. I will be cold. Yet I will run.

I’m not concerned about distance. I’m not concerned about speed. I’m not concerned about any skills. All I am concerned about is the crux: the “just run” discipline.

When the gyms open up I will add something to the equation.

I will slowly experiment with adding discipline to diet.

But for now, I am a demonstrably a beast, today, when I run — no matter what — my four miles.

That’s my beginner’s yardstick.

What do I know and what do I not know?

Seneca:

Meanwhile it is foolhardy to condemn that of which you are ignorant.

Letters, 91.21.

Just a reminder to refuse to have opinions ungrounded in experience.

For a good essay on this topic, see Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small. That essay is why I titled this entry the way I did.

My aim is, given my age and genetics, to be a beast.

The only thing standing between the me today and the beast me . . . is discipline.

What I eat today makes the beast me. My workout today makes the beast me.

Upstream of diet and exercise . . . is discipline.

The only variable in this equation is discipline.

Four miles.

I’m on a shopping expedition, picking up an online order. There’s a long queue and I’m at the end of the queue.

I’ve done this before. Routinely I have been busy until they text me to say it’s my turn.

This time, I’m sitting on a bench in the January sun, listening to the freeway, the store’s piped-in music. Smelling the kettlecorn stand 25 feet away. Watching the shoppers come and go.

Do nothing. Be bored. Feel the sun. Check the queue progress periodically, and wait.

No podcasts. No information or exhortation from my phone. Just sit.

For several months I have followed the intermittent fasting practice of eating only between noon and 8 pm. This has been successful: the number of times of broke this practice must be only four or five, and then during travel.

The primary benefit for me has been the setting (and respecting) of behavior boundaries. The secondary benefit has been the easy maintenance of weight at 180 lbs, given normal variations plus or minus a pound.

Now I am going to revise that plan and create a new plan. The objective: to be, physically, a beast. This means that I am as strong and fit as, given age and genetics, I can possibly be.

It also necessarily means that I am already a beast, by mindset. I cannot achieve mastery without knowing that I am, in fact, already a beast. And I always have been.

I will take the clear boundary philosophy of intermittent fasting and now apply it to the types and quantities of food I eat. Up to now, it has been an “anything goes” practice during the noon to 8 pm timeslot. I want ice cream? I eat ice cream.

The terminal hour for eating will be respected. This means no late-night snacks and no indigestion and heartburn to wake me up at night.

The morning: I am going to start mornings with cheese. Specifically I will start with four slices of Swiss cheese from one of those pre-sliced packs.

Lunch is still free-form.

Afternoon snacks: there is a copious amount of crap at work, for the taking. I successfully stopped eating chips and crackers. Now it’s time to stop the candy bars masquerading as healthy snacks / protein bars / health bars.

I will take cheese to work and keep it in the fridge.

Theory: cheese, because of the fat and protein, will be better for nutrition and satiating hunger.

And of course, physical training continues with the objective of installing hard boundaries (“no matter what”) in that practice, in the same way I have installed hard boundaries in other areas of my life.

Hard boundaries are good. They stop the debating society in my head.

Beast. I can thank David Goggins and his YouTube videos for making this an admirable and worthwhile objective.

And it’s the best kind of objective: as soon as it is set, you achieve it. I am a beast even though I run four miles, not fourteen or forty. The physical me will catch up with the mindset me. It is inevitable, an irresistible consequence, that a hard physical man will be caused by a self-perspective of being a beast in all areas of life.