Reality Laughs

I run 4 miles a day, every day. At the moment I do this at night when I come home. It’s working, so no changes will be made until this schedule breaks.

The list of gear needed to run is modest: shoes, shorts, shirts, socks. Hat is nice but optional. I am under-stocked on shorts and hats seem to disappear in our household.

Today is the day that I permanently solve that problem.

The Path of Least Resistance. Admonishment to self: “Remove all friction you perceive between you and your heart’s desire.”

In this case I can remove friction by spending a modest amount of money to buy some shorts and hats.

Today is the day.

Memo to self: Solve nagging irritation decisively and permanently with violent immediate action.

Don’t worry about overkill. Overkill is rare, usually easily corrected.

Fear of overkill is usually an excuse for inaction. “Oh, I can’t do that. Something bad might happen!” No it won’t. If anything, fear underkill.

New experiment.

Up to now the M.O. has been intermittent fasting with a time box for eating between noon and 8 pm.

I have stated almost entirely inside the lines. The times outside the lines have been travel, or scheduled events with friends and family where I don’t want to be some sanctimonious fucking asshole and refuse to eat just because. In those situations, eat modestly and STFU. There is no reason to parade your virtue in front of others. There is no benefit to you or them.

The number of discipline lapses? Probably two or three over several months.

The intermittent fasting choice built discipline and helped me understand the value of hard boundaries and when to stop being a hardass.

My best hours for work, productivity, ideas? Morning. These are the last few hours of the fasting cycle, and I would power through those hours with coffee and water. By noon I would be noticeably drained, mental acuity dropping.

So I’m starting today with a new experiment. I will keep the hard end for consuming calories at 8 pm. But I will add in a normal breakfast. It’s no longer intermittent fasting. It’s just life.

The breakfast will be oatmeal with a dollop of peanut butter. Oaymeal because fiber, and I need that. Peanut butter because it makes everything taste better and in theory it has some dense, valuable nutrients.

Oatmeal is defined as one cup of dry oatmeal, cooked.

Dollop of peanut butter is not currently defined. Today it was a heaped soup spoon scooped out of the bottle. I need to figure out how to get a consistent quantity so I can watch the results.

Interesting observation: I finished off the bowl and was ravenously hungry. Eating triggered a desire to eat to satiation.

Instead I went and washed all of the dishes to let the food start to digest. The impulse to eat more went away. I have a French Press full of coffee waiting for me as I start the day.

That’s a lesson. In order to reduce calorie intake, eat an appropriate amount of food and then get away from the table for a while.

This whole thing of running 4 miles at night makes me get up a bit slower than before. Seneca: read a couple of Letters. Coffee while reading. Shower, then foam roller for my quads and calves.

Off to work.

I think this is the beginning of a good system. The next part of the system is the food part. The 16/8 intermittent fasting thing may not be what I need to do.

It’s time for some intelligent experimentation.

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.