flame-broiled unicorn and dragon drenched in awesome sauce
Category: Writing
I am not the writer in our house; my partner is. Nevertheless, from time to time I find myself writing a bit of flash fiction or even poetry and vignettes in a series I call The Sparrow Story.
I truly have no pretensions around the craft of the written word at either a sentence or paragraph level, let alone at something as grandiose as stitching all of that together into a written story. Can you imagine all those words to write? Crazy!
Nevertheless, given my obvious insanity and lack of sense of my limits, I do have aspirations of someday producing a written story or two that may not be a complete waste of another human being’s time to read.
Today was one of those days. You would think that maybe the gods would have let me pass unfettered, but sadly they seemed to have thought I needed to learn of hubris when they locked me into a porta-potty. Yes. Porta. Potty. Of the kind that is permanently placed at a certain trailhead off exit 45 on I-90 and named, ironically enough, for an Ira Spring, an avid photographer, who single-handedly helped to put trails in Washington quite literally on the map. I do not think it was Ira’s intent that I get locked into a porta-potty but nonetheless I did. There were some folks on the outside kind enough to state the obvious by quipping, “I am glad it is not me” as if me or anyone anywhere in this world is interested and frankly jonesing [sic] to get a few hours or even minutes locked away in a porta-potty with a large tank of human “remains” with only a crappy plastic toilet and hole in the floor to separate them. Thanks, whoever-you-were. But my favorite “helping elf” may have been the thankless bravado of one person who told my friend to “get out of the way and I will show how it is done” and then proceeded to basically shake with delusional veracity the crap out of the door for 30 seconds. I was impressed. Truly and deeply. At some point my friend and I thought to try and use credit cards to get the door latch to open. But credit cards were too big. But not too big, and ironic as it is, was my GameStop membership card that fit perfectly into the latch: so goes my video-gamer cred.
Epilogue. Yes, just as I freed myself and as obvious as it was to everyone that I had just emerged from the porta-potty after being trapped inside, the wife of ever-so-manly-and-shake-it-till-it-opens-stuck-porta-potty-man went inside. Yes; she entered the porta-potty, and as only fate can have it, closed it behind her. And like every good samaritan, after I kindly but firmly got her husband from shaking the door with his still delusional veracity, I slid my GameStop membership under the door and explained to her what to do.
This is not the kind of post I normally make; there are no snarky comments here today. Instead, I thought I might share my own story and in so doing inspire someone who may be considering a life change around your health. Take me and running …. and I appreciate that for many there are a variety of reasons not to; however, even I found some of my results startling. And whether it is running or walking or cycling or hiking or swimming or whatever sport you might enjoy, I believe the core truths are the same.
The first half of this story is exercise. And for me exercise means running. Running was for a long time best summed by a quip my HS coach made to me: “Ward, running for you is a race between the commercials from the couch to the fridge and back to get a twinkie.” How very true he was. Some 5 years back I was 300 lbs and about 44″ in the waist and with body fat somewhere in the mid 30s. I was more than husky, more than fat, I was clinically obese. I decided enough was enough and started to seriously weight lift and cardio 5 times a week which got me to 215 lbs, 14% body fat (BF) and skeletal muscle was 34% and visceral fat around 11 with a 34″ waist.
Enter a very bad of gout (my family is predisposed genetically to it and I further have a physical injury to the area that got inflamed that make my susceptibility to it even higher). Toward the end of two weeks, holed up in my house, I woke one night to sweats and a pain that was beyond anything I know how to describe to you other than in this manner. I recall vividly the few minutes where I sat on my bed while I considered going out to my tool shed to strap my leg into a miter saw and cutting my foot off. I seriously believed that that pain would be better than the pain of the gout. It was that very next morning that I got truly and deeply serious about my health which till then had been, by way of comparison, a mere hobby. No more; health become my life, Health is my Life.
I dropped another 25 pounds and got myself to 185lbs and 32″ waist. I was happy with the results. I stopped weight training about 12 months ago to prove to myself that with diet I can maintain myself at 185lbs. But my BF had climbed up a bit to 18%. Before returning to weights I decided to try to shed the BF and opted to up my running. Now I run 6-13 days in a row, 5-15 miles at a run. I am still 185lbs but my BF is 12% and my skeletal muscle is 42% and visceral fat at 7 and 30″ waist. How? Running and eating healthy. Even I did not think these kinds of results were possible with running alone. And yes, all of this running on Vibram FiveFingers. 🙂
The other half of the story is diet. Diet is now a four-letter word to me; it is much abused and very much maligned from its true denotational form. Diet is not something you do to lose weight, it is something you do to maintain your weight. And not even maintain your weight but maintain your health. (By the way, body fat—not to be confused with BMI which is another abused metric that is best ignored—and not weight is a key metric in your health.) Diet is not measured in weeks or months or even years, it is measure by a lifetime: your lifetime. I have naturally fallen into localvore habits and dietary inclinations similar to, albeit deviate in keys areas from, paleolithic diet through listening to my body and its reaction to the foods I consumed. Ironically, exercise became a key means of understanding the impact of the foods I ingested since I could measurably see and physically feel the difference the next morning as I went out for my morning run. I know now that salads are my best friend in the evenings. While I love gluten products I am better off keeping them to a minimum. I changed from cow to goat-based diary products because I went from feeling bloated and irritable to feeling refreshed. And I can tell you there is a marked difference between 1 glass of wine and 2 glasses of wine on how you feel after even 5 short miles, and better yet no glasses of wine unless very early in the evening. I know that omega-3s and vitamin D do wonders to my temperament and without them I feel a morass deep in my bones that is hard to shake. I went from a cholesterol level in the mid-200s to now the mid-100s with my HDLs making up nearly half of that number. I went from a resting heart rate in the 70s to the low 50s and high 40s. I look younger, some 10 years younger according to many, now at age 37 than when I was 32 when I looked closer to 40. And besides a vitamin D and omega-3 supplement to help balance out my nutrition this is all done without aid of other medicines. Food is my medicine.
I put numbers there for you to appreciate what making a lifestyle can achieve. But numbers do not tell the real story. There is not a means to measure happiness other than in the lift in my smile and the crows feet next to my eyes, nor can you see but only feel what is like to sit comfortably in your haunches, resting deep in your bones and knowing that life is all about living with yourself, mind and body … for what it may be worth so I share.
Me and my foe foo row ramma. I dish and you dash and I know I got to go hoe and come on to do all that. I have no idea. No clue. Notta respectability, neither nor all there or even some that. But still I here while you but there. And you ever so wanna correct me. Because you got that standard stick and schtick and a sense that says there must be a sensibility to this sentence, a sentience to this my sentiment. Might that I entertain? And might more that you over contextualize this and this and then all more that? You think you know me, do you? You think you have the cliff and that ever so brash cleft to find in your own shadow my mingled mo’ matta? You do not know me. And you sure as hell do not know him, any more than I know that whore of a bastard on 2nd street selling the smell of sunday streets slick with salaried succubus sweaty on her own way to salvaged service. These are just words. And still here you are, you who jingle and then jangle like Dylan and his bo’ dangle, a rhymeless tune to a hairless tongue. I ain’t no nothing and I ain’t more than not these words. You never will find me here anymore than in there, in your mind and its blind eye that from syntax thinks it snaps shut on semantics and so knows my synapses. I wanna help you, really I do. But you ain’t going to understand this, is ya?
Here under weight of suspended waters in crushing lightness I lay buoyant drowning. How sublime this that blankets an existence in brine turning bone to gelatin mass and rubbers tallowed skin, deforming into elastic tendrils seeking up to the green green light above. I would that I might swim in waters warmed but instead relent and sink back into craggy darkness, a sleep enriched coldness seeping into tendons raw and tight from a life long of running out front doors onto streets all doors locked, no light escaping from windows shuttered to wash out shadows made under enfeebled stars roaring possibilities, embers in breasts heaving to suck air, a light touch knocks with plastic consequence one chance at a time waiting for nothing but to move on and on and on ever anon.
I took a little over a week to go and visit my friends and family back East in western and central New York including a quick trip up to Niagara Falls while there. My parents, having been married for now fifty years warranted a celebration by the family. My sisters and their children all converged on Skaneateles, New York to quietly celebrate and reminisce under the humid warmth that is central New York. The humidity of New York cannot be fully described; it is better left to the uninitiated to experience. While the humidity saps you of your strength the heat and light breeze under the shade of a tree nestled into a hammock soothes and sends one into a bliss that cannot be simulated by spas or any other proxy: sun’licious.
As I meandered down Route 20A from Orchard Park to Skaneateles I was reminded of how much of western and central New York are places of rolling hills, small villages and independent farms. On my morning runs from my parent’s home it took me less than 90 seconds to be running along farms and up over hills with vistas that stretched over miles and miles of tilled earth. My father’s former office is within 2 miles of the house making me envious to think that sans the 190+ inches of snow they got this winter one could easily run to work every day; the only dissatisfaction is that it is too short (a quick 2 miles) to make a worthwhile morning run. Equally surprising to me is I could have circumnavigated all of the town and some of the surrounding farms every morning in one of my middle distance runs of 15km; back in Seattle I barely get out of my neighborhood with one of these runs.
On my return from far afield I found myself yet again under the less than welcome long hand of overcast clouds that have become my personal scourge over Seattle. While I had hoped to camp at Olympic National Park for a few days I opted instead to drive down toward Bend, Oregon to Goldendale, WA for an overnight camping trip. I love a good roadtrip and the vistas once you get over the passes on I-90 are well-worth the first 90 minutes under the pending hazy gloom of rain and clouds. The near eastern side of the Cascades is one of arid color and a valley irrigated with farms both independent and incorporated. I must confess that the campground I hastily found was not one I can recommend to anyone, but even still I did find a quiet meadow a few miles from the campsite that allowed me an unobstructed view of Mount Hood while enjoying many, many hours before and after the sunset at 9pm. I had hoped to get some astrophotography done that night, however I had neglected to note it was near full Moon and thus there was little in the way of crisp dark skies to photograph. Nevertheless, the hours by myself in the dark reminded me I have an over-active imagination: I was quite certain aliens were on their way to abduct me.
I woke early on Friday to drive back to Seattle. Instead of retracing my steps I instead took Highway 410 out of Yakima to drive through both Wenatchee and Mount Rainier National Parks. It might surprise people outside of western Washington that much of the mountain trails are still inaccessible to hikers due to the some 80 or more inches of snowfall resting on trails. And while there is a warm front that has settled itself over all of western Washington melting much of this as I write and you read and which means that Mount Rainier is primarily covered in clouds, the drive is still worth the time and $15 park fees. In some ways seeing Mount Rainier shrouded in clouds is paradoxically a better way to appreciate it. Clouds come and go within minutes and sometimes tens of seconds. The view now obscured will snap into shades of snow blue and sky azure that require you to remain ever vigilant. And it is not just the moments waiting between and amongst clouds that deepen your appreciate, but even on the road itself can surprise and even transcend the ordinary. As one point when Mount Rainer in the near distance, two crows broke off from a tree and flew in front and above my car. For a mile or more we glided in formation down the road while we three enjoyed a quiet moment with Mount Rainier framed by trees appeared in front of us.
