“I DIDN’T WANT ANY PART OF MIKE TYSON”

Folks, today is gonna be about boxing rather than lifting, but it’s really all the same.  The quote for the title of today’s post comes by way of George Foreman, in a recent interview.  For those of my readers who only known Mr. Foreman as the guy who sells electric grills, George was a 2 time heavyweight champion boxer, 2 time being significant in this instances as he experienced a 20 year gap between reigns as the champ.  This means that George got to fight in what many would argue to be the greatest era of heavyweight boxing ever: The era of Muhammad Ali, wherein George got to fight Ali, along with Joe Frazier (having beaten the latter twice, both to win and retain the heavyweight title) but ALSO means that, during his comeback era, he was around during the time of a prime Mike Tyson.  Mike and George never fought, despite how amazing of a match up it would have been.  George has been regarded by many to be one of, if not THE, hardest punchers to exist in the sport of boxing, with devastating power in both hands and a total willingness to stand and trade with any man, having weathered the punishing shots from Joe Frazier.  Tyson is a man who needs no introduction, and his rise to the top of the sport was like watching a sentient buzzsaw tear through unready heavyweight fighters.  How did this matchup never occur?  Because, as George said “I didn’t want any part of Mike Tyson.”

Starts at 14m and 45 seconds

https://youtu.be/4-incOaF0dE?t=14m45s

Before I go on, I am not going to hide, nor apologize for, my Mike Tyson fandom.  If you grew up in the 80s and early 90s like I did, you most likely feel the exact same way I do about Mike Tyson as a fighter (reviews are, I’m sure, mixed of him as a person, but it’s not what we’re here to discuss today).  Mike Tyson ruined pay-per-view parties, because his fights ended in 80 seconds.  Fighters could not form strategies to fight him based off fight tapes, because fights did not last long enough to figure out how he fought.  People always wondered if he could go the distance because he NEVER had to.  For the love of God, in the late 80s/early 90s, the most feared video bosses were Ganon, Dracula, and MIKE TYSON.  We were effectively conditioned to be afraid of this man, and in truth, before the UFC became REALLY big the whole world pretty much agreed that the baddest man on the planet was always going to be whoever held the heavyweight title in boxing, and Mike held ALL the titles.  Mike Tyson could be on chemotherapy and men my age would STILL be afraid to fight him TODAY.

HOWEVER, Mike never tends to get ranked as the best of the best in boxing, and it’s due to a fair critique: during his reign as champ, he didn’t fight anyone that was particularly skilled.  He tore through all available opposition: it just so happened that the opposition that was available wasn’t great.   He beat an over the hill Larry Holmes, but that was about it, and his loss in the Buster Douglas fight proved that he COULD be stopped by someone that had a solid gameplan against him.  Foreman, with his many decades of experience, to including against fighting some of the best to have ever lived, means he very well could have put together a solid plan against Mike.  To the point that, when asked, Foreman in the same interview is assured he would have won.  He doesn’t waffle on it, he doesn’t go back and forth, and doesn’t even say that on a good day Mike would have had him: he is very confident that, if they had met up in Tyson’s prime, he would have won.  And yet, within the same interview, he said he wanted nothing to do with Mike Tyson.

Quite possibly due to dialogue like this

Why?  “Because he is a monster.  Mike is something you see in nightmares.  And you just hope you wake up.”  George went on the say “If he misses you with the left, he hits with the right, and if he misses with the right…he bites you!”  And it fundamentally showed what made Mike so much different than anyone else in his era, or really, anyone else in his profession.  Some boxers showed up to box, and some showed up to win, and some even showed up to fight, but Mike, quite frankly, showed up to hurt people.  He had “bad intentions”, to quote Jack Dempsey (who, in his fight with Jess Willard, showcased such brutal domination that, quite frankly, in today’s combat sporting era, he would have actually been charged with assault, battery and attempt murder in the ring).  And even if you are the superior boxer, even if victory is assured, even if you’ve fought “better” people: no one wanted to fight a man like Mike Tyson.

Because of this, Mike so often won his fights before they even began.  His opposition was so terrified of Mike that they froze up, abandoned their gameplan, and went limp as soon as they were hit to try to make the pain stop.  Fighting him became like riding a rodeo bull: dudes were just holding on for the bragging rights of longest time.  And now we observe that he even had a shield to protect his legacy built in with this mentality.  There was George Foreman, on his comeback, still a contender, eyeing up the heavyweight title, seeing Mike Tyson there, KNOWING that he could win, and saying “…nah, I think I’ll wait this one out.”  As I wrote about before, Mike became “more trouble than he was worth”, and in doing so, he crushed those that were beneath his skills and even defeated those allegedly superior to him through just sheer, unbridled nastiness.

Every Mike Tyson fight came with free facial reconstructive surgery

I love this, because it shows just how much one can be simply by changing how they THINK about something.  I’ll cop to Mike having not been the best boxer ever.  Hell, he may not have even been the best boxer Cus D’Amato trained.  Floyd Patterson was an intelligent and well regarded student of Cus that obtained Olympic gold and was the youngest man to hold the heavyweight title PRIOR to Mike, having made very effective use of the exact same “peek-a-boo” style of boxing employed by Mike.  However, Floyd never got to win the fights before they started, and, in fact, endured such horrific mockery from Muhammad Ali that some argue that it may have been responsible for the ending of his boxing career as a whole.  Put that same skillset (or a lacking one perhaps) in Mike Tyson and pair it with Mike’s “bad intentions” and suddenly things flip.  Suddenly the boxing “style” takes a back seat to the boxer himself, and now it doesn’t matter if he’s a slugger or a boxer or a puncher or a counter fighter: he’s got bad intentions, and he came here to hurt you. 

You have the same ability.  You are born with your own limitations.  Your genetics, height, structure, etc etc.  There are some things you do not have the power to change.  But you ALWAYS have the power to change how you think about things, and how you approach them.  And if you approach them like a monster, like a nightmare, like a man with “bad intentions”, like someone who came here to hurt people, you’re not just going to beat those that are worse than you: you’re going to beat those that are BETTER than you that don’t want any part of you.  Some folks can make themselves bigger, stronger, faster and better than you: make it so that no one can make themselves nastier than you.              

HIGHER POWERS, FAITH AND IDOLATRY

I’ve written before on how my formal educational background is politics, with an undergrad and masters focused on political science, and that, prior to that, I was the top theology student in my Catholic high school, which was somewhat scandalous being that I achieved that having not been Catholic.  I bring all that up because, as a high school student deciding on what major to pursue in college and having zero interest in going into any sort of theology related field, I picked politics because it appeared to be the next closest thing.  I bring all THAT up because one of the key characteristics of both areas is the determination and control of what one believes in.  The parallels and overlaps are honestly rather fascinating, and a mastery of one tends to allow a significant understanding of the other.  And you, as a trainee, can take the lessons from these two fields to understand the significance of what you vest your faith in as a “higher power” and how it controls the way you think and act.

For instance, now I'm just confused...

What (or who) we believe in is always the most important part of Western religions, and this is easily observed in the 10 Commandments.  Start with number 1 (paraphrased, because it’s funnier that way): “I am your God: don’t have any other gods”.  Ok, cool, what’s the second?  “Don’t say my name in vain”.  Ok, this guy is a real big deal, got it.  Number 3?  “Block off your Sundays (or Saturdays if you’re sticking with the Old Testament…or Fridays if you want something slightly more “modern) for me”.  Alright alright, so apparently this dude is a REAL big deal.  Ok, let’s just skip to the middle here.  What’s number 5?  “Oh yeah, hey, don’t kill people.”  Well f**k me, we spent a 3^rd of our commandments just spelling out how big a deal God is and it’s only halfway through that we find out we shouldn’t be killing each other?  You’d think that would be pretty high up there, no?  But that’s the point: figuring out what and who we believe in is HUGE, and needs to be established before we can move on to the important stuff.

The US Bill of Rights has a similarly hilarious bent to it.  First, it should be understood that the Founding Fathers never saw fit to include a Bill of Rights because everything that was in the Bill of Rights was already IN the Constitution: you just had to read the damn thing.  But, just like how folks won’t spend an afternoon reading a training manual to avoid spending 5 years screwing around in the gym, people demanded a “cliffnotes” for their doctrine of government.  And again, what do we see in the first amendment to the Constitution?  Freedom of religion.  The citizens of the United States KNEW the significance of being told what they could and could not believe in, and they wanted to decide that for themselves.  They knew that, once the government started controlled who and what we believed in, the controlled pretty much everything.  This was the FIRST amendment, meaning it was the very first thing they came up with when they were deciding “what protections and freedoms should we be allowed”.  Know where they decided to protect themselves from cruel and unusual punishment?  The 8th amendment.  Meaning they first went “Hey, the government shouldn’t get to tell me what I believe in” and then, several hours later, they said “Oh yeah, also, the government shouldn’t be allowed to rip out my fingernails”.  Know when they decided that humans shouldn’t own other humans like property?  The 13th amendment: in 1865, about 80 years after they wrote the original Bill of Rights.  THAT is how crucial they felt it was to determine what they believe in.

When you can write "all men are created equal" while owning 80 of said men, you get to have a smug look like that

I bring up all this rambling history to point out that for millennia people understood the significance of believing in a higher power and the sheer power such belief held, and it’s why you, as a trainee, need to embrace the significance of this.  Faith is an incredibly powerful tool in the toolbox, and its absence hamstrings several trainees.  Some folks out there are training atheists: they refuse to believe in anything.  In turn, these folks constantly undermine their own progress, because as soon as they read or hear about an effective method, they immediately spring into action to find something that disproves this very same method.  And there’s no shortage of that information out there: if you want to find it, you can.  Soon, these folks exist in a world with no higher powers: nothing to vest their faith in, and they suffer existential torment and an inability to self-actualize.  In their attempt to be “too smart to be fooled”, they’ve robbed themselves of the power that faith and fanaticism grant to so many others.

In the middle of the spectrum, there are those that have faith in “the way”.  This is to say, those that have vested all their faith in the higher power that is their program or coach.  You’ve seen these before, and we’ve had derogatory terms for them as well such as “HIT Jedis” and “Cultfit”, but it’s also true for the Westside or Die crowd, Deep Water, 5/3/1, Juggernaut, etc etc.  And as I wrote above: you can EASILY find something online that “disproves” all of these methods if you were so inclined.  HOWEVER, those that are truly “bought in”, the real deal fanatics and zealots, those that have fully vested their faith in the “higher power” that is the program, simply don’t care.  For sure, those that are simply paying lip service in their attempts to “get into heaven” will always have that lingering doubt and never get to fully realized the benefit of this real deal faith, but we’ve frequently observed the benefits that the real fanatics experience with their faith in “the way”.  If you can find a way that you are willing to give yourself to, you will be all the better for it.

I bet the Mentzer brothers would feel PRETTY silly to find out now that HIT doesn't work

However, I suggest one alternative course of action: make yourself your own higher power.  Have faith in oneself, and a strong, firm, unflinching belief that, no matter what, you will overcome and succeed.  Have an ego, be prideful, be arrogant, all of those things that other entities tell you are sins and evils.  Why?  Because THOSE entities want to have control over you, and they do so by not allowing you faith in yourself.  Nietzsche wrote about this in his Genealogy of Morals, of how the ruled are taught one sets of morals while the rulers another, and what you choose to believe in will greatly alter where you fit in those categories.  If you believe that, no matter what course of action you take, you will somehow make it work, chance are, you’ll be right.  If you’re always doubting yourself, wondering if you’ve made a wrong decision, using “I can’t”, coming up with excuses, examples and justifications for why you will come up short and fail, that’s exactly what you will do. 

You are the only being on this planet like you.  You have so much potential and ability if you choose to tap into it and employ it.  But, ultimately, you need to believe in yourself FIRST before you can do so.  And, specifically, as your own higher power, you have to believe in the thing you can BECOME, rather than the thing that you are.  Sure, who you are now may be small, weak, frail, etc, but that is not who you can become.  So long as the belief is there that there is something great within you that needs to be realized, you have the ability to accomplish great things.  Put your faith in yourself and worship at your own altar. 

MIYAMOTO MUSASHI & LIFTING: DON’T FOCUS ON THE DETAILS (OR YOU COULD DIE)

As I’ve confessed many times through my writing, I am a complete and total unabashed nerd.  In addition, those of you familiar with my age and constant references are aware that I grew up in the 90s.  As such, I imagine you’re all just as shocked as I am that this is the first time I’ve decided to bring up Japanese philosophy in the blog, as by all accounts I should be a complete and total Japanophile, steeped in anime, JRPGS, and manga.   And though I admit I do tend to indulge in all those manners of debauchery, I just was never super big into eastern philosophy.  However, irrespective of where you fall in the philosophy spectrum, you have to know and appreciate Miyamoto Musashi, the Ronin that fought and won about 60 duels to the death with a sword in each hand, making up his own style and ending the lineages of many other styles he deemed inferior.  Musashi was so focused on perfecting swordsmanship that he would kill entire schools of certain swordfighting styles so that they would no longer pollute the population with their inferior methods: and you thought I was a fanatic about the signal to noise ratio.  Musashi literally lived by the sword, risking his life on scores of occasions for nearly 50 years, he lived and breathed swordfighting, it was his focus, his life, and his ultimate tome on swordfighting, “The Book Of Five Rings”, Musashi had this to say regarding the fine details of swordsmanship

“If you concentrate on details you will neglect the important factors, and you will become confused.  This will make it impossible to win.”

People will listen to your quotes if you have a sword in each hand

I am reproducing this from the Ashikaga Yoshiharu translation, first published in 2003, so I apologize if your version reads different, but let all of that sink in for you.  Musashi, arguably the greatest swordsman to ever walk the planet, the winner of around 60 duels to the death, who put his very life at risk when he fought, felt like focusing on the details was unimportant.  In fact, doing so was detrimental.  If you focused on details, it is impossible to win.

And what happens when you don’t win?  Typically, that means you lose.  And what does it mean when you lose a fight to the death?  You die.  Focusing on the details was how you die.

Musashi understood this about 400 years ago.  And he understood it without the miracle advances in science, technology, and education we have today.  And yet, somehow, with how smart we’ve all become, we’ve grown so very very stupid, because we all forgot this lesson that he learned.  People WANT to focus on the details so bad.  They want to AGONIZE over every little detail in their training and their diets.  They want to account for every macronutrient, they want to be able to quantify, measure and evaluate every single rep performed and ensure it was an “effective rep”.  They want to make sure they consume their quick carbs in the right window and take out tendo units to calculate their speed and plug it in a spreadsheet to map progress…all for what? Because it’s important?  Motherf**ker what could be more important than NOT DYING?! 

Not all of us get an extra life

Let it continue to sink in!  Musashi wrote a book about how to win in swordfights AND how to win in large scale full on assaults, and his advice was “don’t focus on the details or you will die”, and 400 years later some pubmed glasses pusher is daring to say “Well ACKTHUALLY…”  No, oh my god, shut up, you sound SO stupid right now.  The details are not how you win fights: it’s the foundational guiding principles that matter.  If you read the rest of Musashi’s book (and I highly encourage you do, it’s an easy read, because Musashi was also smart enough to know that it’s important to communicate complicated ideas simply, and it has tons of great little gems in it) he constantly explains that it’s less about fine and precise details of how one holds their pinky and to what precise angle one steps and more about mastering the core concepts, ideas and principles of combat and being able to apply them.  He explains how individual combat is a microcosm of combat between armies, and how the same principles apply universally because they are GOOD principles, and, in turn, you as a lifter/athlete/whatever should be able to ALSO apply them toward whatever pursuit you have.

In fact, Musashi has an entire section dedicated to debunking those schools that DO focus on the details: demonstrating exactly how and why they fail in their pursuit of doing so.  And Musashi wasn’t blowing smoke: he knew their stuff didn’t work because he KILLED THEM when they tried to use it.  Could you imagine a world with such scientific rigor!?  Think about how many self-proclaimed geniuses are online cranking out numerous evaluations on programs they’ve NEVER run, simply because they think they can look at a pirated e-book and measure effectiveness by how many sets and reps a movement is performed at a certain intensity.  These folks aren’t out there winning swordfights: these dudes don’t even own a sword.  How about we take up arms and see who survives before we start saying what does and does not work.

Pretty sure Musashi would have slaughtered everyone in this town for good measure

How about we get things back in perspective, shall we?  You folks that “live training”: do you really?  Is the consequence of you not achieving your goals actual, literal death?  Because that’s what it was for the dude who was one of the best ever at killing other dudes with a sword, and he said that focusing on the details was how you die.  If your passion doesn’t result in death if you fail, you DEFINITELY don’t need to be sweating the details.  Whatever fate your failure has could not possibly be worse than death, so maybe you can quit worrying about getting all the details right and focus more on getting your principles and fundamentals squared away.  What’s the worst that could happen?   

GPP: DON’T OVERCOMPLICATE IT

In light of my most recent post, wherein I discussed my concurrent training for a strongman competition and a half marathon and praised the value of General Physical Preparedness (GPP) as it related to both, I’ve received numerous questions regarding how one goes about acquiring this GPP.  And right away that question just confuses me.  Folks, it’s in the name: GENEREAL physical preparedness.  We used to just plain call that “being in shape”.  That’s what GPP is.  When you have good GPP, you’re in good shape, and when you’re in good shape, you can do things that people who are in good shape can do: run, jump, throw, climb, swim, etc. You’re “physically fit”, you’re ready and able, you have GPP.

If you grew up in the 90s, this was already in your head.  And, if not, you have no idea what this means.

Short post right?  No, I suppose we can talk some more on the subject, because there are still more questions.  Much like “The Tao Te Ching”, the GPP that can be written of is NOT the true GPP.  What I mean is, inevitably, someone wants to know what program to follow to develop GPP and what metrics to use to evaluate their GPP.  This mentality is proof of concept of how vital GPP is, because everyone has become a specialist and the notion of simple unquantifiable fitness eludes people.  It’s a weird thing too.  I remember growing up and you could see a dude and flat out say “he’s in great shape”.  AND we could even tell the difference between guys that were in good shape vs guys that were specialists. I remember being able to look at gym rats with 500lb benchs and 50” guts and going “Yeah, that dude is strong, but he’s not in good shape”, but apparently, now, we are confused.

And so, if you’ve been afflicted with a terminal case of specialization, that’s a sign of exactly what you need to do in order to start developing some GPP: do something DIFFERENT than what you’ve been doing.  If you need a start, do something COMPLETELY different.  That doesn’t mean go from low reps to high reps in the weightroom: it means go from lifting to swimming, or running, or cycling, or hiking, or anything that isn’t standing in one spot and lifting something.  If you are a rower, go wrestle someone. If you’re a fighter, go skating.  Just go do something DIFFERENT that you’re bad at.  If you’re bad at something, it means you have room to improve, and typically one observes RAPID and exponential growth when they first begin a new activity.  Lifters call these “beginner gains”, but they exist with all physical activities.

That guy in the first lane has LOTS of room for improvement

But how long?  And what program?  And reps and sets?  THIS is why your GPP is bad: you keep wanting there to be rules.  This is GENERAL physical preparedness: it’s your body’s preparedness to perform general physical activity.  When you need to have everything planned, structured and organized, you’re defeating the purpose.  You need to be able to respond to situations on demand, irrespective of what or when that demand is.  Can you jump when you need to jump, or do you need 14 hours of foam rolling and a slingshot before both feet leave the ground?  If someone throws a ball at you without warning, are you going to have a broken nose?  If someone takes a swing at you, are you going to block it with your face, or can you bob and weave? 

You know who has great GPP?  Children!  Or, at least, they did.  Sedentariness is sadly affecting our youth as well, but if you remember back in the day, kids played all the time, and they played a diverse and WIDE range of games, exposing themselves to physical activities.  In any given day, a child could be expected to go swimming, climb a tree, go across monkey bars, play a game of football, and ride a bike, skateboard or scooter.  Think about if you tried to make an office drone live that kind of day: they’d chalk it up as some sort of Instagram victory and talk about “living that life”, demanding a free t-shirt and a medal.  We drift so far away from the things that we all KNEW made sense when we were kids. 

Somewhere a bunch of adults are doing this EXACT same thing, except covered in mud and calling it "obstacle course racing"

And those kids didn’t approach these activities with a fixed and rigid training program.  Have you ever tried to train a kid?  They have ZERO attention span: they just wanna do what seems fun at that moment and then move on to the next fun thing.  Allow yourself to be afflicted with the same attention span.  Carve out some time in your schedule for GPP and just go find something to do.  Hell, go to a dollar store and grab a handful of cheap sporting goods.  Get a Frisbee, a football, a softball and some cones, and set up obstacle courses and throwing stations.  Throw in a jump rope somewhere.  Go shovel a few extra driveways this winter and mow a few extra lawns this summer.  GO FOR A WALK.  When’s the last time you went walking just for the experience of walking?  And hell, you can do it in a mall like an octogenarian: malls have air conditioning and a food court, it’s awesome.  But just go out and have some sort of fun.

And yeah, you’re never going to be good (or even decent) at EVERYTHING out there.  I’m an awful athlete: full stop.  My throwing and catching skills are terrible, lateral movement is poor, skillwork is lacking on anything that isn’t fighting, but I’m “good enough” at enough skills that I can fake it with something else when the need arises.  It’s one again about GENERAL physical preparedness, so as long as you’re creating a broad spectrum of physical excellence to pull from, you do yourself some favors.  As soon as you settle in to a rut and decide “this” is going to be your GPP, you’re missing out on some of the benefits.  Go find something different and weird and go try to suck less at it.

HALF MARATHON WRITE UP

BACKGROUND

This is the soundtrack of my life

As I wrote earlier in my strongman comp write-up, I’d been plagued by boredom and apathy during my most recent bout of training, and was losing the spark from strongman.  Somewhere in the midst of all of that I had the bright idea to run my first half-marathon.  My wife is a distance runner, having run something like 26 half marathons and 2 fulls, and having been around her during all this time, I had absorbed a lot of distance running through osmosis but never really participated.  Slowly, it worked its way into me, and eventually I found myself wanting to do a half marathon of my own.  In truth, the seed got planted about 2 years ago, when she ran a race in the middle of a snowstorm on a mountain in Montana, because, in truth, that looked awesome and something right up my alley, but logistics prevented me from being able to participate until this point.

And as I mentioned: I was still training for a strongman competition while also training for my half marathon.  I’m very good at making bad decisions.  But it also meant that my running training was pretty limited.  I settled on running twice a week on top of lifting 4 times a week and an events day 1 day a week.  This shook out to needing to have one 2 a day per week, which ended up being on my press day on Monday.  I’d run in the AM and lift right after lunch.  I’d then squat on Tues, Bench on Wed, do a long run on Thurs, day off on Friday, Deadlift on Sat and events on Sun.  This was, of course, on an ideal week.  Life occasionally gets in the way, such as working the night shift 3 weeks in a row at one point during the training.  I had a lot of time during the day to train, but since I wanted to walk my kid to school and pick them up, things got compromised.  In addition, I know I’m not the first strongman to run half marathons, and that there were most likely better plans out there, but I’m having more fun doing things the way I want to do them versus the “best” way to do them.

Of my 2 runs, I’d do a 6.55 mile run on Monday.  Math whizzes will note that this is half the distance of a half marathon, or a quarter marathon.  This initially started because I wanted to see if I could even do that, because there very well was a possibility I bit off more than I could chew.  Prior to starting this endeavor, the furthest I had run in about 10 years was 4.5 miles, and that was the week before I started the training process, going out with the Mrs on a day when we both had the day off.  It’s something that re-lit the spark to try for the half marathon.  About 17 years ago I was running 8 miles a day, every day, and in the summer I bumped it up to 16…but again, that was 17 years ago…and 50lbs ago. 

Bit of a difference

After the success of that 6.55 mile run, I wanted to see what I could really push for on distance.  I set my first long distance run for 8 miles: my previous max distance.  Having experienced success with that, I went to 9 the next week, then 10, then went back down to 8, as it was the week of my strongman competition and I did not want to go too stupidly far, and then back to 6.55 the week of the race.  I was told that, if I could run 10, I could finish the race, so I was going to put that theory to the test.

I picked a pace of 6.3 mph to start, which was a 9:30 mile.  I’ve run faster miles before (to include recently, during Murph, while wearing a weighted vest), but I needed a comfortable pace that would allow me to get in the miles without dying.  Each week, for the 6.55 mile run, I’d up the pace by .1 mph, while the distance runs remained 6.3.  In addition, I had the treadmill incline set to 1 until my very last run, at which point, I set it to 2.  My wife’s treadmill is naturally at an incline, so this meant I was running up a pretty decent incline in training.  And yes: aside from the initial 4.5 mile run and 1 run on a weekend, all of my training was on a treadmill.  With me missing 20% of my meniscus in my left knee, the treadmill cuts out a lot of pain. 

GOALS

Yeah that about sums it up

Lots of folks asked me if I had a time goal for this, and I did not.  My goals were simple: I wanted to never stop running, I wanted to take no water breaks, and I wanted to keep up with my wife the whole time.  This was ultimately a way to spend time together, and it did me no good if I couldn’t keep up.

RACE DAY

We all draw inspiration from somewhere...

15 days after taking 4^th out of 10 in a strongman competition while weighing in 15lbs under the weight limit, I stepped up to the starting line of my first half marathon, with my wife beside me.  It was a brisk 40 degrees and I made a spectacle of myself by being the only person in shorts and a t-shirt (technically an underarmor style compression shirt), but I would rather be cold at the start and breathe easy during the run than warm at the start and fading from heat during the run.  I stole a page from David Goggins playbook and wore a knit cap and some gloves, to keep my ears and fingers warm.  I also made sure to fuel up with a zero carb Rockstar, 2 poptarts and a quest bar.  You know: the good stuff.

My wife asked what I needed from her, and I laid it out that I needed her to keep pace.  I knew that my first instinct would be to sprint out the gate and then spend the whole race dying.  I don’t do well with other runners in front of me, and I always want to overtake them to get them out of my field of view.  She did awesome, as our first mile was a 9:40, and it felt very sustainable.  Apparently, we moved much faster after that first mile based off my wife’s watch.

My wife could tell I was having trouble finding my rhythm for about the first 2.5 miles, and was adjusting her speed to help me maintain my pacing.  She wasn’t wrong too: within the first 2 miles I was already wondering if I had made a mistake.  I felt very good physically, but the mental weight of having to run for so long was intimidating.  I’ve done a lot of hard workouts, but I’ve never flat out moved for 2 hours nonstop before.  Just a new kind of suck.

Rest assured: it can always be worse

Once mile 3 hit, I seemed to be in a better place.  The view was great, we were running by a lake, there was a nice breeze, and we were away from the crowd.  I was able to take in the sights and experience what I was experiencing.  I also could be more aware of how I was running.  The treadmill taught me how to lengthen my stride, and my wife kept giving me quick pointers, like keeping my head up on the uphill portions, letting gravity carry me on the downhill, keeping my arms loose, etc.  She was basically a quick reference running encyclopedia, and incredibly helpful for a first timer.

From here, it was a pretty enjoyable experience, at least as enjoyable as running can be.  I settled into a good groove of fast enough movement while still being sustainable as far as the heart and lungs go.  I had to contend with my right foot up to my knee going numb and then coming back constantly.   I imagine my shoes burned through their padding and my thudding stride wasn’t helping.  But even that was just a minor annoyance.  My wife and I seemed to be pacing off each other at this point, where sometimes I’d catch up to her and sometimes she’d catch up to me.  She’d grab water at the stations and drink it on the move and I’d slow down a touch so she had a chance to drink.

Once I hit the 10 mile mark, I had reached uncharted waters.  I had literally never run further than that in my life.  I said out loud “alright, almost there”, and my wife offered a sound that I’m pretty sure was laughing at my naivety.  She was right too, because it’s amazing how goddamn far those miles after the 10 mark are compared to the rest.  10 to 11 wasn’t awful, but 11 to 12 felt like forever.  I never experienced the infamous “wall”, but I definitely stopped having a good time at one point.  At the 12 mile point, I started grunting and growling a lot, trying to get the pain out of my body.  I was experiencing muscle cramps in my quads, which was a new one for me.  I’m sure my lack of water was at play there, but I made my choices.

We ended up crossing the finish line at 2:00:36.  I was honestly very impressed by that.  With the pacing I had set, I was anticipating a 2:10:00 finish, but somewhere along the line we had apparently picked up speed.  I never asked my wife how fast we were running because I didn’t want the mind-screw that came with it and I knew my stupid competitive side would come out at one point.  I just wanted to experience this run.  That said, I think we had a sub 2 in us that day if we set out with that goal.  A little frustrating in that we actually passed the 2 hour finish pacelead, but apparently he’s like one of those taxis with a “not in service” sign up, because he was apparently done pacing at the time we passed him.  But a minor inconvenience really.  We were ecstatic with the finish.

TAKEAWAYS AND LESSONS LEARNED

The big thing here is the value of General Physical Preparedness (GPP).  So many folks in lifting just plain don’t get what this is, but it’s your ability to perform when the need arises, irrespective of what that need may be.  I may compete in strongman, sure, but I keep myself fit across a bunch of different domains, and it meant that, when the time came to prep for the half, I didn’t need to spend much time focusing that general fitness toward a specific task.  And I’m not saying this as though I crushed a half marathon and set a record, but considering people need a 9 week plan with 3 running workouts a week to get from the couch to running a 5k, I think that I could go over 4 times that distance training in fewer weeks with less workouts is saying SOMETHING.

I also got to continually appreciate the value of nutrition as it relates to recovery.  And as much as I would love to say I ate super clean this whole time and it was all chicken breasts and salads, that just wasn’t reality.  I still kept carbs on the lower side for my day to day meals, but on my long run days it was common for me to hit up Taco Bell and get the $5 Nacho Box just to mainline calories and carbs.  Having to focus on getting bigger AND stronger AND better at running meant that overrecovery was better than underrecovery, and I put on about 7lbs in the process, some of it muscle, some of it fat.  But hey, guess what: that means you CAN get bigger and stronger while running.  But those of you that want to use running to lose weight are crazy.  You need to recover from running, and that means eating MORE.  If you want to lose weight, eat less and dial back the activity, because you’re hurting without those calories.

Good socks go a long way.  I was wearing some cheapo cotton socks and got some bad hotspots in my first run.  My wife immediately identified the issue and found me some decent running socks.  Went a long way toward letting me continue in my training.  Similar experience too with cheap t-shirts and nipple chafe.  It’s why I wore underarmor on race day.

Pain tolerance is a skill that translates across disciplines, and can compensate for a lack of ability as it relates to endurance activities.

Having a good running partner is HUGE on race day, especially if you’ve been primarily relying on a treadmill.  There’s no way I woulda had the results I had without it.  I got pushed when I needed to, and I held back when I needed to hold back.

THE FUTURE

Considering everyone already thinks I'm an Ironman when I say I'm a strongman...

I genuinely have no idea if I’m going to run another one of these.  It will always depend on how my schedule is looking.  I have a strongman competition coming up in April, and at some point I also want to run the Deep Water Badass program, neither of which is conducive toward distance running, and though I proved that you CAN accomplish both at the same time, it’s also true that dedicating yourself to one or the other will make you better compared to splitting your attention.  Still, like everything, this was an experience, I recommend everyone have it, at least once.