Grant

I’m in rural Minnesota interviewing Alex and Marion Wilson (formerly Wyszotrawka) about their incredible lives. The end result will be a book for the Wilson family and friends that explains the series of events that took them from an unstable existence in war-ravaged Europe to being owners of a successful business on the Great Plains; all within a few short years.

I fancy myself a bit of a history buff but no book or TV documentary can compare with actually talking with the people that lived through the incredible and terrible events of the 20th Century. Sure, I *knew* about Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Drang Nach Osten, the Tripartite Pact, the Gleiwitz Incident, the deportations to Siberia and so on, but hearing the vivid everyday experiences of a young man and woman caught up in it all imparts a whole new understanding and leaves me with a real sense of awe.

History is, by nature, complex. It’s complexity and nuance are a barrier to it being easily grasped, so we tend to simplify events and the motivations behind them.  Worse, we sort people into broader categories that support any pre-concieved notions we may have. Whether it’s nature or nurture, we humans are pigeon holers and when trying to really understand history, that’s a handicap.

In reading about geopolitical history — at least, the way it’s traditonally been written — it’s easy to forget that nation states, regions, ethnic minorities,  ideological camps often consist of many factions, each hoping to realize their own visions for the world around them, to right the perceived wrongs of the past and strive toward a brighter future. Each individuals’s aspirations and the actions they take to realize them are all informed by their own reading of history; how it was taught to them, how it has impacted their situation and the situation of those around them.

Maybe a better way to teach and learn history is to take several accounts of people who were impact by a particular event and build an over arching picture via triangulation.  By doing so we can peel back the layers and if we get far enough, we can expose the radical truth that the needs and wants of everyone on earth are universal.

In a lab, in Madison Wisconsin, are two groups of rhesus monkeys. Most of them look lean, alert, healthy, vibrant, in the rudest of health. The less numerous remainder look completely shagged out.  The decrepit looking primates are the control group and have been allowed to eat as much as they please since this experiment began around 23 years ago.

The second group have been put on a  calorie restricted diet, eating 30% less than their dead and dying counterparts. The calorie restricted monkeys just don’t have the age-related illnesses that are causing the others to kick the bucket — cancers, diabetes, heart disease, you name it.

This picture says it all.

The picture of Canto and Owen, rhesus monkeys in their late 20s,  is the reason my stomach is rumbling right now. After seeing this picture I pitched a story about a type of calorie restriction that is being adopted by an increasing number of humans because it’s purported to  improve body compostion: the ratio muscle to fat. I’m no scientist but I’ll guess it’ll also do for humans what CR has down for Canto and Owen. It’s called alternate day fasting (ADF) and as the name suggests, involves not eating — at least, not eating much — every other day. Of course, I’m guinea pigging the whole idea for Men’s Health starting today and I’m sort of daunted by the fact that I’m already starving hungry and it’s barely 10am.

Dr. Krista Varady at the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition, University of Illinois, has conducted numerous studies on ADF. One study in particular has shown that while calorie restricted diets  and alternate day fasting programs usually result in the same amount of weight and fat loss, subjects participating ADF retained more lean muscle mass.

I’m going to be following the same regimen Dr.Varady’s subjects followed.  On a fasting day, I’ll be just eating 25% of my normal caloric intake (4-500 calories)  during a two hour window the mid-afternoon. I’ll be drinking black coffee, green tea and lots of water throughout the day too. Sounds rough, right? Here’s the good part. On feeding days, I get to eat ad libitum which is Latin for pancakes, bacon, burgers, chocolate, chicken wings, beer etc.

But according to Varady,  I might not make a dent in that trough o’ badness. She had hypothesized that the study participants (who were all obese or overweight) would make up for their fast by eating  175% of their normal intake on their feeding day. Many of them actually told the doctor that they would prepare a giant (and aptly named) breakfast (break fast) on their feeding day.  But to their astonishment, and the doctor’s, these fatties found that they couldn’t eat it all. She said that on ftheir non-fasting day, participants only ate around 115-120% of their normal calories. This is perhaps due to the stomach shrinking slightly during the fast.

The take home is  that over a 2 day period — including one day in which they had license to go nuts and pillage the fridge — they were eating over 25% less calories. We might have predicted that they’d lose weight from the calorie deficit but surprisingly they retained muscle.  Which is good.

This was all over a 12 week trial. If they managed to keep it up we can extrapolate that they’d live longer, healthier lives, less prone to chronic diseases and looking a little bit more like Canto than Owen.

Last year my knee pain got intense enough that I had to stop running and seek professional advice. My lovely physiotherapist Bridget gave me some exercises, an icing regimen, suggested a diet that seemed to be 50% ibuprofen, ran electric current and lasers through the afflicted areas and after 6 sessions, the pain was more or less gone and I was out running again. The cause, she guessed, was that I was hitting the trails for too long, too often, and in worn out cross -training sneakers. (I was putting in fairly spry 9km runs about five times per week before the pain got the better of me.) She said that there was pronation, supination: basically I was doing it — running — all kinds of wrong. At her behest, I went out and got a gait analysis (the video playback wasn’t pretty what with my right leg swinging out from the hip), an expensive pair of Mizunos and a decent set of supporting inserts for my high-arched feet. (Luckily I didn’t plunk down $400+ for custom orthotics, but I was ready to.)

I went back to my runs and, for a while, I was alright. Then the pain started again and I sought some tips from the billions-strong peanut gallery that is the Internet. On the advice of the masses, I tried shortening my stride and since then, the pain has not been much of an issue.

Then, a few days ago,  a friend loaned me their copy of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run.  Embarrassingly, I’d been recommending this book to all and sundry since it came out in 2010, despite never actually having read it myself. You see, I’d been slow in getting around to reading it because it was very similar to the premise of a book that I wanted to write about persistence hunting with the Khoisan people of Namibia. It always smarts when someone a) has a markedly better idea than you do and b) quits procrastinating and actually goes out and does it.

I had read a synopsis of Born to Run however and could tell that the book outlined what I already knew to be true: that while we’re a pretty feeble species compared to all other mammals, when it comes to running long distances, no other creature can touch us and that we, as the book title suggests, are perfectly anatomically adapted to this particular activity.

Before big brains and opposable thumbs, came effective sweat glands and sizable bums.

So, yeah, I’ve known this for a while. A year before the success of Born to Run started getting huge amounts of runners thinking about running with minimal shoes or even no shoes at all,  I’d already purchased a pair of Vibram Five Fingers. Despite the ridicule (remember, this was way back in 2009 and few people had seen them) I went out in them a few times and found that my calf muscles were screaming after just a few minutes of running. Given the choice of starting the lengthy process of re-learning to run in minimal footwear and running for miles in the precious BC sunshine in my trusty old cross-training sneakers, I chose the latter and of course, ended up hobbled.

So now I’m burning through Born to Run and I’m furious with myself for not taking the time to adapt to running in minimal foot wear and/or developing a fore or mid-foot strike. I’m figuratively slapping my forehead as I turn each page of McDougall seamlessly threading the now-obvious reasons for not running with an overly padded heel into a ripping yarn about a tribe in Mexico who started running as the Conquistadors began the brutal pillage of their lands four hundred years ago and haven’t stopped running since.

Like most people who have read this amazing book, I felt inspired to run with the lightness and joy of the Tarahumara. Sadly, I threw my hardly-used Vibrams out last year. I wore them on an assignment for Men’s Journal in the Louisiana swamps and they very quickly started to smell hellacious. I decided that before I looked into buying another pair of minimalist rubber foot shields, I would simply try and run in the Tarahumara fashion as described beautifully by McDougall, albeit in my expensive Mizuno sneakers.

At its root, the prescription is: back straight, head high, shoulders back, elbows high and pumping, toes downward, small, fast strides using the natural springs that come standard on the ends of our legs,  heels barely touching the ground and wearing a big smile on your face as if you actually enjoy running. That’s exactly what I commited to doing as I ran out of the door this afternoon.

I wasn’t sure how long I would make it given how running on the front of your foot engages different muscles in different ways. 2, 4, 6, 8km into it however I was still smiling and having a great spring-assisted run. I suspect that how well I coped with it is partly down to the rope jumping I’ve been doing throughout the winter as an alternative to running in the elements. I’ve been putting in 30 minutes to an hour per day and I think it’s put me in good stead. Maybe jumping rope for a few months is a good way to transistion to barefoot?

Anyway, today was just my first attempt at approximating the Tarahumara method. If I can do a few more 10km runs up on the balls of my feet and have it feel as joyous as today’s jaunt did, I’ll likely be buying a pair of minimalist shoes in the very new future.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to whip through the last 80 pages of this book.

It’s been two months since I began using myfitnesspal — the calorie/nutrition/exercise app and website. My progress is illustrated below.

I started off at 142lbs on Jan 16th. I was relatively slim but was sporting a navel bagel and handles. I set a goal for 135lbs at a rate of losing about one pound per week. I remember that I got down to 135 a few years ago and that it just felt right. Basically, I could jog on the spot and when my skeleton stopped moving, my flesh did too.The app told me to have a net daily intake of 1440 calories, meaning that I could eat 2040 calories if I wanted but to stay on track I’d need to burn off 600. That’s roughly an hour of jumping rope or running 10KM for me — enough to make a guy think twice about having a few beers.

As you can see by the steep drop off, most of the weight loss took place at the outset which, from what I’ve read is fairly typical as it’s the water weight you’re getting rid of.   Then, just as it began leveling out I spent 10 days in NY and a further two weeks visiting my parents. I did pretty good in NY as any lapses were offset by my jogs around Manhattan from Canal St on the Hudson to Grand St on the East River and back. Once I got to England however, I was fighting a losing battle. Beer and wine at every meal, bangers and mash, cottage pie  rhubarb crumble and custard. And that was before we went on a day trip to Belgium and France and hauled back a van-load of cured meats, olives, cheeses,  bread and more beer and wine. The damage would have been catastrophic if I hadn’t managed to get in a few 7km runs and some rope jumping. Anyway, the UK portion trip is represented by that steady climb and then the return to normality when I got back to Vancouver.

Though it doesn’t show here, the wheels briefly fell off again this weekend. Aki went to SXSW leaving me in the house with a giant bag of Chipits, complete buttermilk pancake mix, maple syrup, butter and my favorite “Harvest” brand bacon. When I wasn’t gorging myself on pancakes I  was out to dinner and lunch on Thursday,  Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday at Nicli Antica, Marika’s place AKA the Bird’s Nest, Acme Cafe, Tableau, Phnom Penh, L’Abattoir,  Two Chefs and a Table and Hawksworth. Decadent!

Point is, inspite of the recent gluttony, myfitnesspal has kept my dream of not being a fat skinny guy alive. It’s just made me aware of the energy that’s in our food and the energy required to ensure you don’t get to wobbly.  Check it out if you haven’t already.

While I’ve managed to make a decent living since leaving college in 1998, I’ve never really had a job. Y’know, a job job. Well, there was the 6-week period back in ’05 in which I temped as a filing clerk;  the 2 months as “Managing Editor” at a soft porn mag ostensibly aimed at women but almost exclusively read by men; and a series of manual labor gigs I undertook to fund my initial leap to the US right after college. But other than that, I’ve never done anything that really felt like a job.  Sure, I was a customer service rep at a digital music company for a while at the turn of the century and that was sort of fun, though I spent most of my days spluttering in disbelief as the CEO tried to make me believe that within a few years CDs would be entirely obsolete. What a kook! Then there was the two years I clocked in at Nerve which mostly entailed writing about all the sex I was suddenly having at my employer’s behest. Again, it didn’t feel like hard graft.

I realize that on the face of it, earning a living without having a job sounds ideal, but at the grand old age of 35, I’m starting to think that I would actually like a job. I think I could be really useful to someone and I think I’d benefit from clocking in and grinding it out for the foreseeable future. The way I see it, I’ve had my retirement years first and now I’m looking forward to putting my feet down and having myself an honorable 9-5.  It really sounds appealing. The regular paychecks, the benefits, a 401k of course but also the lifestyle: getting up at a decent hour,  brown-bagging a tasty lunch, getting a whole new slew of friends, reading 10-minute chunks of a co-worker-recommended book on the subway, celebrating co-workers’ birthdays with cake,  not losing entire days — who am I kidding, WEEKS — to onanism. But mostly, I want to feel challenged, be part of a team, show my value on a daily basis. All those words I’ve heard people use but never really imagined were genuine feelings.

The problem is, when you’ve been out of the workforce for as long as I have,  – 8 years — and have spent that time having lurid adventures with fascinating people and writing about them, your resume starts to look a bit wacky.

I happen to think that I could do most people’s jobs after a short orientation.  I think most people could. This thinking has led to a series of conversations with friends about the seemingly ends list of occupations that I could successfully turn my hand to.

While watching a rerun of Seinfeld tonight however, I witnessed a conversation between Jerry and George that made me realize that my friends may have been humoring me.

The conversation below seemed incredibly familiar…

George:  I like sports. I could do something in sports.

Jerry: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. In what capacity?

George: You know, like the general manager of a baseball team or something.

Jerry: Yeah. Well, that – that could be tough to get.

George: Well, it doesn’t even have to be the general manager. Maybe I could be like, an announcer. Like a color man. You know how I always make those interesting comments during the game.

Jerry: Yeah. Yeah. You make good comments.

George: What about that?

Jerry: Well, they tend to give those jobs to ex-ballplayers and people that are, you know, in broadcasting.

George: Well, that’s really not fair.

Jerry: I know. Well, okay. Okay. What else do you like?

George: Movies. I like to watch movies.

Jerry: Yeah. Yeah.

George: Do they pay people to watch movies?

Jerry: Projectionists.

George: That’s true.

Jerry: But you gotta know how to work the projector.

George: Right.

Jerry: And it’s probably a union thing.

George: (scoffs) Those unions. (sighs) Okay. Sports, movies what about a talk show host?

Jerry: Talk show host. That’s good.

George: I think I’d be good at that. I talk to people all the time. Someone even told me once they thought I’d be a good talk show host.

Jerry: Really?

George: Yeah. A couple of people. I don’t get that, though. Where do you start?

Jerry: Well, that’s where it gets tricky.

George: You can’t just walk into a building and say “I wanna be a talk show host”.

Jerry: I wouldn’t think so.

George: It’s all politics.

Jerry: All right, okay. Sports, movies, talk show host. What else?

George: This could have been a huge mistake.

Jerry: Well, it doesn’t sound like you completely thought this through.

Apparently, one yule-tide East Village night a few years back, a girlfriend and I posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a third party to get up to no good with.  She and I must have  talked about the possibilities long and hard enough to gamely send our lascivious bat-signal up into the New York sky.

There was plenty of interest because, well,  most of the pictures would have been of her.

But by the time the generally lurid replies had started coming in thick and fast, the booze had worn off, the blood had cooled down, itches had been otherwise scratched and the insomniacal paramours’ turgid boasts fell on deaf ears.

Soon afterward, the girl and I stopped seeing one another, we lost touch,  I dated several other girls — it’s likely she did too — I moved away, got married and, until today, I hadn’t given a thought to that heady evening of December 20th 2006.

Then, tonight, I get this:

“Hey there. I’m not sure why we never met up, but let me know if you are still around.”

It boggles my mind that this guy is going back five-plus years into his email archives in the hopes of spit-roasting some random guy’s girlfriend with him. I mean, think of all that’s happened since then — in your life, in the world. Furthermore, think of the thousands of Craigslist posters trying to recruit a third since then. But something about OUR post must have touched him and has lingered with him ever since. It’s kind of sweet.

It’s a testament I suppose to the comeliness of my girlfriend. Or less-probably the savvy charm and grammatical correctness of the original post.  The thing is, I cannot for the life of me, remember who she was.

I just emailed this guy requesting he send me the original pictures as they weren’t attached to his latest email.  It’ll be fascinating to have some random guy I’ve never met show me a glimpse of a sexual past I can barely remember.

When my first book came out in 2007, authors didn’t have the ability to see how their books were selling across the country in real time. Man, I miss those days.

Behold: Amazon’s new tool for displaying the stark reality of publishing in the 21st Century to its legions of guileless word-monkeys.

The silver lining? Someone in the greater Denver metropolitan area is getting effed good and proper next weekend!

Knowledge = power.