Well, that was a whole lot of nothing. Two visits to the spinal orthopedist (side note -> I have to pay for parking at the doctor’s office? Srsly?) and one MRI later and the official diagnosis is… nothing. The doc and I looked at my MRI images together. He said, yeah, there’s a tiny little …
O. M. G. The CrossFit Olympic Weightlifting course is like the best carnival ride ever. You finish and you immediately want to line up and go back through it all over again and again. Or perhaps I’m just starstruck by having Coach Bergener teach me for a weekend. And a team of assistant coaches that …
Well, we have a tentative answer to the constant back pain question. Facet arthropathy! I feel so fancy now. Or something. This is also the closest I’ll ever get to posting a nekkid photo of myself on the internet. You’re welcome, internet. Basically, it’s 25 years of dancing coming back to bite me in the …
I had the pleasure of watching my friend Suzie compete in her first CrossFit competition today. Suzie is uh-ma-zing. She signed up for the competition without being able to do pull-ups. I mean, wow. You know pull-ups are making an appearance somewhere in this competition, right? Is there any CrossFit comp without pull-ups? So since …
I’m tired. I’m tired and angry and frustrated. I’m tired of constant pain, of modifying every workout. I’m tired of doing 400 lunges every week and still not being able to activate the right muscles. I’m tired of trying to build strength in muscles that I can’t even sense. I’m tired of being betrayed by …
I was helping with a WOD the other day with overhead squats. This chick had a terrible squat. As I was trying to coach her into a better position, she told me she’d been working on her squats for two years. If she’d really been working on her squat for two years, she should have …
It’s Hell Week at the gym! Two WODs per day, one at 5am, one at the time of your choice. You guys, I’m totally on to this Hell Week instructor. He always gives us short intervals to complete stuff – you have 20 seconds to grab a kettlebell, you have 10 seconds to get against …
Ugh. Birthdays. Last year, it was a warmish Sunday. I slept in, ate an early lunch, and went to the Getty for the first time since I moved to California. The Getty was wonderful – until it got crowded. This was my favorite Baby Jesus. He’s got such attitude, all cocky and chillin’ with one arm …
I met a girl the other day at a power lifting class who broke her humerus trying to bench press 300 pounds. Ho. ly. crap. I’ve seen her scars, and I never want to think about that again. It still makes me shudder. I have no need to ever be lifting the kind of weight …
I have a muscle strain in my calf from a well-intentioned-but-poorly-conceived 7 mile hike I did back in January. My usual hiking distance is 3-4 miles, so 7 miles was just too much. It triggered this nerve pain in my lower leg that is quite familiar – I struggled with this pain for years when …
Pain is temporary, pride is forever. That’s a bunch of crap, right there. Pain is an important signal to the body that something is wrong. In fact, pain isn’t even a great indicator of that, because pain is a lagging indicator. You don’t know you did something wrong often until well after the deed has …
Decrepitude. That word scares the poo out of me. The idea that we are all ultimately wasting away, decaying, becoming weaker and less able, day after day. Lately, that word cropped up when I took the Level 1 Crossfit Trainer course. During one of the lectures, the instructor was espousing that if we build up …
I’ve been in training to become a CrossFit coach for a couple of months now. I did the formal Level 1 Trainer certificate program back in December, and have been attending classes on the side, assisting at the box twice a week, and generally trying to become more aware of what I’m seeing when I …
"People don't multitask because they're good at it. They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity."
Ah, Orange County. Land of apartment complexes and strip malls. Plastic women and men in some seriously fancy pants. Don’t wear those, men of Orange County. It’s not a good look. Trust me. This place makes me stir-crazy sometimes. I think that’s why I’ve been feeling the need to hike more often. To see a …
The first time you eat this salad, you think it is lovely. Crisp. A little tangy. Very enjoyable. The second time you eat this salad, the flavors have all blended. It’s really an excellent salad. Now, the third time. The third time you eat this salad, it’s still really good. But, you know. You start …
Like it or not, we remain the posessors of potentially strong muscle, bone, sinew, and nerve, and these hard-won commodities demand our attention. They were too long in the making to just be ignored, and we do so at our peril. They are the very components of our existence, the quality of which now depends on our conscious, directed effort at giving them the stimulus they need to stay in the condition that is normal to them. Exercise is that stimulus. Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort. Exercise is not a thing we do to fix a problem - it is a thing we must do anyway, a thing without which there will always be problems.
I don’t consider myself an especially bad chef, but the stuff I make never looks anything like the photo in the recipe. And not like if-I-made-this-a-thousand-times-it-might-look-better-eventually kind of doesn’t look like the photo. Like the photo and what I make are totally divergent. Not even close. I don’t understand this phenomenon. It’s all just science, …
I’m a quitter. I quit the Whole Life Challenge. But I’ve totally found a way to rationalize it, so it’s all okay. Or something. I made it two weeks on the challenge. Having to really think about everything I ate – asking five million questions when I ate out, looking at every single label – …
I want a beer. A beer and a piece of pizza. Pizza from Magpie’s, back home, with the sourdough crust, the spicy pesto sauce, with pepperoni and jalapenos. Or maybe with a bento box, with the steamed dumplings and the perfect little bite of kimchee on the side. Ooh. Or some moutabal and pita and …