LFC, and a Mild Promo

So, gotta admit. I'm kind of a loner.

Not the cool kind of loner that you want to know, the one with the bike and the leather jacket who just needs a hug or something. Nah, the other kind, the nerd kid who sits in the corner reading. Because stories about Buddhist ghosts setting Catholic nuns on fire just makes more sense to me than the real world.

The Cool Loner

Yours Truly

When you live in that kind solitude, it informs a lot about what you do. That's especially true with regard to how you train. I'm often left to my own devices to determine not only how to train, but also how to eat to fuel that training.

And if you're good at it, you should ultimately be able to prove it, not only in terms of your capabilities but also in terms of your 'look.' Athletic capability does not, or should not, coincide with a paunch. I mean, okay, you'll see marathon runners with some extra on the belly, but that's a cortisol/hormonal-stress issue that they don't mind anyway (it's just one more reason to not worry about getting good at running all the miles).

I'm a martial artist. Martial arts are a hybrid form of athletic discipline. You need to be strong, yes, but you also need to be able to fight for a long time without getting 'gassed,' as they say. It's a balancing trick, and it doesn't help any that the things you use to train those qualities both require different kinds of fueling to work.

Honestly, I don't think I'm very good at it.

Why not?

Well, because I can't seem to find the balance between one kind of training and the other. I can do more push ups and pull ups than I used to, but I can't do as many as I think I can. I can run nine sprints in ten minutes at the end of a hard hour's workout, up a freaking hill and everything. And I'm carrying a belly.

It shouldn't matter, but it does to me, and I don't know how to be okay with the dissonance between what I can do and what I look like.

All my study, all my knowledge, all my practice, and I still haven't solved the problem. And as I reflect on it, I think I'm probably too close to see the answer. So I've decided to follow the coach's tip and find a coach of my own.

Now, obviously, I'm too poor to actually find someone to coach me. But good coaches have a tendency to create programs that work. More importantly, they tend to be good at diagnosing which problems you have and which programs will work to solve them.

It's tricky, in my case, because my great enthusiasm is for body weight work - harder versions of push ups and pull ups and things like that. Because it doesn't involve (much) equipment, there's not a lot of research done into figuring out how diet works with it, whether you should be high-carb or low-carb or anything like that. (Can't sell a machine to a guy who doesn't need it).

But I found a gent and I've started talking to him. No idea what will happen. Don't see how it can hurt, though.

(By the way, if you're wanting more about ghosts and nuns and the like, you should check out this story by Lauren Harris. Good stuff).