Out of denial!

Okay, so I’ve been in denial, and very deeply so. Fortunately, this time it isn’t the usual denial about food, eating, or exercise. Unfortunately, its about this blog. Because the fact is, as much as I love writing and posting every day, on my upcoming vacation to rural England, it simply isn’t going to happen! My strategic plan involves posting to the blog on weekends while I’m in London (and, ergo, have internet access one way or another). But even in the 21st century I’m guessing that tiny villages and cozy B&B’s are not places where I can automatically expect to tap into the world wide web for my daily dose of “Its All About Meeeeee.” I haven’t really wanted to think about all of this. Because not only do I enjoy writing, but I get so much back from Jack Sprat’s. For me, this blog is a lot like my morning run. My aim is to try for it every day. Sometimes I want to do it, sometimes I don’t. Occasionally I skip it altogether. But, averaged out, over time, it happens to be one of the building blocks of what makes me and keeps me a successful maintainer. By web standards, this little blog is no big deal. With about 200 daily readers, one of the web-ranking sites put us at around 150,000th on their list of half a million or so. We have wonderful commenters, but fewer than most sites. And when my e-mail inbox overflows, its generally only from spam. But in my own life, I’d rank this up there in the top ten of my favorite things. I’d probably keep writing even if I had zero readers. (And from some private comments I’ve been sent, I know not everyone feels warm and fuzzy about my columns). And since I probably only “know” about a dozen regulars, I haven’t a clue as to whether the rest are getting enough inspiration, information, or just plain laughs to hang on. Still this is my harbor of sanity --the one little corner of the world where I get to hang out with other like minded folks and do the whole maintenance thing. And I need to face facts that for a couple of weeks, its going to be only occasionally available to me. And just in case you're thinking "oh heck, its vacation, just relax and ENJOY," I want you to know that writing this blog is one of the MOST relaxing and MOST enjoyable things I ever get to do. For me, a real vacation is never about 'escape.' Because I love my life too much to want to 'get away' from it. In my mind, vacation is about charging my batteries, gaining perspective, and learning. If I ever get to a point where I really need to pamper myself or take a time out, I'd like to think that I have the wherewithal to do that right here at home. The reason being that in the past if I needed those things and couldn't find them, I'd always find solace in the bag of chips, box of cookies, and tub of ice cream. I guess the best thing is, the experience itself is going to give me both exposure to new and different things, but its also going to give me time to think. And just because I can't write or get on the 'net, it doesn't mean I'm destined to gain weight and go out of control. No doubt I'll be back up and blogging in no time. I can only hope that the withdrawal symptoms won’t be as bad as they were that time I tried to give up coffee!

Hot on the trail

As I’ve mentioned, the conference I’m attending in Michigan this week is pretty good. I’ve learned a great deal (feels like I’m in graduate school), I’ve met a few people (despite my inordinate shy-ness), and the food/eating/health situation has been excellent. In fact, the only little criticism I have of my time here is that I’ve had so much trouble finding good places to go running. Now, you’d think that a huge state university campus would be a great location for running. But in fact, there’s a lot of construction at MSU right now, and the one time I attempted to cross campus, I got diverted and lost and ended up running several extra miles before I recognized a landmark. Since Michigan is flat (by San Francisco standards, anyway) I figured I could just look at a map and pick any route that I wanted to (mapmyrun.com is great for this). Unfortunately, almost every route that I picked turned out to either be under construction, or else lacked sidewalks. (Twice I ended up running on the grass beside a four lane highway!). The funny thing is, the first day of the conference someone mentioned something casually about what a great place this is for runners. That comment kept me searching and asking all week. Finally, I discovered yesterday that there is, indeed, an excellent place for runners here – a riverside trail that is beautifully designed to cross over streams (and underneath roads and railroad tracks). I found it on the internet, after several false starts and fruitless google searches, by using different key words. (“river trail” is what hooked it). Oddly, I had a hard time finding it in reality, as there is not one single sign pointing out the trail (and in addition, street parking is forbidden here). Turns out, it was right under my nose! The trail goes right past the conference center!! Clearly, I asked the wrong people! At any rate, I slept late this morning and missed my usual morning run near my hotel. So I trekked over to the conference in a rush. Turns out, the very first speaker at the seminar was a substitute and spoke on a topic I didn’t care about. As a result after just a few minutes, I thought ‘seize the day!’ jumped up from my chair, and hoofed it back to my car. Being a veteran gym-goer, I had my workout clothes in the trunk, even though I had no idea whether I’d have a chance to exercise today. After changing in the back of the car, I was able to get out and go for an amazingly beautiful, tranquil, and pleasing run. In fact, I did eight miles, at one of the fastest paces I’ve ever experienced (the flat part came in handy there). I was back in time for the lectures that I needed to get to, and the rest of the day went fine. The crazy thing is that this has been right under my nose the entire time! Maybe its just me, but sometimes it seems like you can get so worked up about a problem that you spend more energy being defeatist about it and accomplishing nothing. Whereas if you just persist calmly–and most importantly, just keep ASKING—you might find out that the thing you are searching for is right there for the taking. Since I fly home tomorrow (yay!) I won’t run that trail again, but I’m really, really pleased to have found it and enjoyed it. And next time, I won’t let a casual comment slip away from me so easily!

Sweet and Sour

Sometimes I think “I’m not getting older, I’m getting bitter.” At the conference I’ve been attending, I’ve been struck by the fact that not only are there a number of very bright, talented and accomplished people in my field, but there are also some folks who, in my not-so-humble-opinion, are rather mediocre, incurious and confused. And while that’s no surprise (and probably can be said about any profession) it has made me think a lot about the two years that I was unemployed and looking for work. All of those many discouraging months that I was desperately working part time, interviewing, trying to get more interviews, and just fighting off depression (and the bill collector), really took their toll on me. Its hard to get rejection after rejection after rejection without beginning to think everyone in the world must be better, more employable, more successful. You can only hear “we didn’t think it was a good match for your skills” so many times before you begin to believe that perhaps you should have gone to vocational school and become a welder. I can remember when I used to take the streetcar or the subway downtown to my part-time work for an early morning shift, that I would look around the train and think “how is it that every single other person in this vehicle is going to their full time job while I’m dancing as fast as I can to make just above minimum wage?” Or the time when I was working folding clothes in the retail store stock room and my teenage boss told me to “stop talking and work faster.” Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. A better, wiser and more generous person than I am would reflect upon his good fortune at never being turned out of house and home, of having staggered successfully back on to the career track at age 45, of being sound of body AND of mind after such a long and difficult period. Here I am, traveling again, working in my field again, using my intellectual capabilities again. Why don’t I feel more grateful? For the many people who read this blog and have never met me, I would imagine that I sometimes come across as prideful, a bit of a snob, and self-absorbed (all of which, to some extent, are quite true). But hopefully anyone who’s met me in person also can see that I’ve got a good heart, I’m sometimes funny, and I have a well developed sense of empathy. At any rate, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that the one accomplishment of which I am most proud and the one aspect of my life for which I am most grateful, is that for an old guy, I don’t look half bad. Throughout that darkest period of my life, even when my Father died, I never threw in the towel and just ditched my health. I kept running, and working out, and eating right and doing what little I could that was within my control, rather than settling down with a tractor-trailer load of oreos and chowing my way into oblivion. So who says it isn’t pretty being bitter?

Win Some, Lose Some

I’ve been doing pretty good during my two-week stint in Michigan. The seminars I’m attending are pretty decent, I’ve made some good professional connections, I’m getting plenty of exercise (running and working out) and having a kitchen in my hotel suite has allowed me the flexibility to eat what I want, when I want. This morning, however, I was in the supermarket looking for some low-calories muffins and bagels and striking out. I tried a couple of different places where I’d seen them before, thinking that they would be good snacks to have around – esp. during ‘coffee breaks’ at the conference. What I found instead were some low calorie snack-cakes. They weren’t what I wanted, but they ended up in the trunk of my car anyway. And subsequently, they ended up in my mouth. Repeatedly. All day. Yeah, so I know I’m not ‘cured’ and I’ve written before about the pitfalls of supersweet baked goods for me. Most of us have our trigger foods (or “yellow light foods” as I sometimes call them) and they can be most anything. From kim chee to donuts, I’ve heard it all, and I completely understand. For me, the key word should probably be ‘icing.’ Which is to say, if its got icing, I need to put on my asbestos gloves and walk away, unless I’ve got moral support or am in a situation where the quantities available are severely limited. I’ve avoided the iced brownies at the conference (iced brownie… now THERE’S a combination that sends chills down my spine!). And I’ve been pretty careful about other kinds of treats and desserts. So when I bought those snacks this morning I’m sure in the back of my mind I was telling myself that it would be fine – after all, I don’t feel particularly stressed, anxious, nervous or depressed (my usual red flags for overeating). But with some things, I guess it doesn’t really matter what frame of mind I’m in. At any rate, I got two positive things out of the experience: (1) they tasted really, really good to me, and (2) After I ate half the box … I threw the rest away.

Media Hype

I’d like to think that I take terrorism as seriously as the next person. So when all the worries about air travel surfaced last week, I took note of them and changed my plans accordingly. But I tend to get my information from the internet version of newspapers and from the BBC, so most of what I read or heard about the situation sounded serious but survivable. I didn’t panic. By contrast, everyone at the conference I attended last week had whipped themselves up into a frenzy. People were glued to their televisions and all kinds of mad speculation surfaced and rippled through the group sessions. An economics professor even interrupted his talk on regulatory reform to remind people not to take any liquids on the plane!! People could hardly sit still in their seats. Still, I’m a good citizen, so I duly reported to the airport for my flight home the two hours in advance that had been recommended. And after all of that hullabaloo and worrying and angst, there was, exactly ONE SINGLE PERSON in line ahead of me at security. It took me all of three minutes. I think this is just symptomatic of American society. Perhaps I’m a little holier-than-thou about it, because I don’t have TV. But seriously, people seem to have forgotten that television is, first and foremost, an advertisement-driven entertainment medium. Its to the advantage of the networks to frighten everyone to the point where they don’t feel they can turn off their TV’s, because that’s how their money is made. Similarly, when I read the latest research about health and obesity, I often have to roll my eyes. Of COURSE I am interested in the science and of COURSE I care about the possibility for new therapies or treatments that could help people lead better lives. But the *WAY* this information is presented to us, is so often in the form of entertainment. Certainly it has got to be true that there are some important medical discoveries being made about how some people metabolize calories, how some genes/hormones/etc. can predetermine our reaction to certain foods or ingredients, how our physical and psychological environment alter the way we process energy. But I can’t help thinking that the vast majority of us became overweight not due to some frightening and mysterious (and news-byte-worthy) condition, but rather because we took in more calories than our bodies needed over an extended period of time. Even an article in this weekend’s NY Times magazine about the potential role of microbes in obesity was, to my mind, overblown. Because after you sift through the data, the scary conditions they described affect only a tiny fraction of healthy adults. So yes, when terrorists threaten us harm, we need to react. And yes, when there’s news and good research about healthy eating and weight we need to read and investigate. But people, let’s not panic. (And please, no liquids, gels or creams in the security line!)

On the road again!

This weekend my travel materials arrived from the company in England that is arranging the two walks that I'm going to be taking. I was both thrilled and a little scared to see the fat white envelope in the mail. I'm excited about taking a vacation, yet feeling a little trepidation about the idea of going for two such long walks (each is 3 days long, walking 15 miles a day). As long as I had only thought about it and made my reservations, it was just hanging out there as a date on the calendar. Now that date is fast approaching, and I have those wonderful British ordnance maps and two travel folders to remind me that its about to become very real! What's cool is that I have readers of this blog to thank for the inspiration for the idea of taking a vacation that wasn't just about travel or food. And I've had some wonderful tips from "London Slimmer" about places in that capital where I can grab some provisions for the trips. When they tell you 'it takes a village' they really aren't kidding! Of course, more immediate is the fact that I'm taking the overnight flight back to Michigan tonight to complete the second week of my training course. I'm not super excited about a 4.5 hour plane ride, landing at 5:30 a.m. and then having to drive two hours to the conference site, but that's what I signed on for and that's what I'll be doing. The one thing that is so fantastic about all of this is that, for once, I'm not in a panic about the food / eating / weight aspects. As I've written about previously, on many trips and vacations over the past three years I have, at one point or another, slipped on that slope and fallen into the choco-vat. But I love travel and I need to take vacations. So I have to face this and work through it. My desire is to have a good time while I'm on the road (or in the case of work travel, at least not have a bad time) while at the same time maintaining healthy eating and exercise habits that keep me at my current weight. I suppose for the majority of people those concerns would seem silly. "Oh, why worry?" I've heard. Or "Just relax, who cares if you gain a few pounds?" Such lucky people! Worry is a part of my life! And based on the past, its not paranoid or neurotic for me to be thinking of strategies to stay (or get back) on track. That's just how I operate. So, I'm ponying up all those frequent flyer miles and hitting the (not as) friendly (as in the old days) skies. I believe in myself and my ability to balance the goals in my life. Even an old dog like me can learn new tricks. Right? Wish me luck!