I Need to Get in Shape First....

I know hundreds, if not thousands of people from my 18 years of coaching and now the last year of being a gym owner of the top functional conditioning gym in New England. When talking to people, the conversation inevitably turns to fitness and "how are things going at the gym?". Everybody has heard the stories about the gym. How hard the workouts are. The crazy things that people are put through on a daily basis. One of the funnier things I hear from time to time when I ask people when they're going to start working out with us at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning is, "I need to get in shape first". This tells me two things. First, people understand that to REALLY get in shape, they need to be doing what we're doing at Dynamic. They understand that their routines of jogging on the conveyor belt and working one or two muscles at a time on weight benches and machines is doing little more than providing their ego with a false sense that they're actually getting fit. The second thing it tells me is that they really don't want to work as hard as necessary to get in shape. Because if they did, then they would, and they wouldn't spend another second wasting their time "getting in better shape" at Planet Fatness. If you want to get in better shape then you need to do what we're doing. Whether you do it with us, with others, or by yourself doesn't really matter. Whether you use kettlebells, medicine balls, bodyweight exercises, a rowing machine, or some combination of all of it, doesn't really matter. The only thing that will get you in the kind of shape that we're in is to do the type of training that we do. Functional exercise, training full body movements with and without resistance, at high intensity.

In the past week I've realized just how strong my lifestyle has made me. Notice, I'm not calling it a workout routine because it is absolutely not just a workout routine. It is a complete dedication to total health and wellness of the body and mind. It's a lifestyle. The workouts are a subset of the whole package. Anyway, last week I was out on my mountain bike on a loop I created for cyclocross training. Awesome 5 mile loop through single track, fields, fire roads, and some paved section.. Towards the end of the loop, I come out of the woods onto a dirt road with a fast descent. I was coming down the hill at about 30mph and it starts to come into a pretty hard corner with all the big yellow arrows and a sign that "recommends" 15 MPH. But I'm thinking, what the hell, I'm on my MTB with the fat tires, I'm just going to lay into the turn and be fine. So I tried taking the corner at 30 MPH. I laid into the turn and I got my bike to the point where you feel like if you were to turn any tighter your wheels are sure to come out from under you. This point is reached much quicker on a slippery dirt road than it is on paved. Problem was, the road wasn't done turning. I quickly realized I was going to go off the road and immediately started scanning for a safe exit. This all took place in about 10 milliseconds. It was all woods, except the point where I was heading, which was a ditch followed by woods. I started hitting the brakes trying to get as much speed out of the bike as possible before hitting the ditch. I got down to about 20MPH, went straight into the ditch, flipped over the handlebars, landed heavily on my head and hip, had the bike land on my back, did several somersaults for another 10-15 feet and popped right back onto my feet like I did it on purpose. I was standing there and the adrenaline rush felt, and even sounded, like a beehive buzzing in the middle of my head, kind of like where my brain should have been. I immediately realized that I was standing which was a positive. One arm was bleeding from a few places, and my hip was really hurting but other than the quarter sized hole in my shorts that revealed what looked like a piece of cheese pizza with extra tomato sauce, I couldn't really tell how bad the damage was under the shorts. It felt pretty bad. I picked my bike up, checked the wheels, bars, brakes, chain, got back on and rode home which was about a half mile away. The bike was OK thanks to the fact that it landed on me in the crash which did a nice job of cushioning it. When I got home I got off the MTB and jumped on my cyclocross bike for a few laps around the yard. In the yard I've setup some obstacles and chicanes similar to what you find in a 'cross race. This is where I work on my technical skills. I was pretty banged up, but the injury-induced atrophy wasn't going to set in for a day or two so I figured I'd better get the technical work in now while I could. Turned out I was a little too banged up to get anything useful out of it so I gave it up after a few laps. I went inside and got out of my shorts which showed a much bigger piece of cheese pizza with extra tomato sauce on my hip. Got cleaned up, put a healthy dose of neosporin on arms and hips, and ice packs on my my hips and shoulders, sat on the couch and started to dread the fact that I was going to be wrecked for a long time. At 42 years old, it takes what seems like forever to heal from injuries and I figured the impact to my hip and shoulders would be debilitating. This is where the story gets weird....

I know how long injuries used to affect me. I had every expectation to get up Friday morning and not be able to move because I figured my hips would be locked up. But I got up Friday morning and I was OK.. A little tight, but OK. This made no sense. I took the wrapping off my hip and the wound looked half healed. My shoulder had full mobility. The welt on my back from where my bike landed on me was gone and there was hardly a bruise left in its place. I was an X-man. I was healing like Wolverine. It was amazing! I went and ran the morning sessions at the gym. During a break in sessions I did a 20 minute session of 1-arm kettlebell jerks with a 20kg kettlebell where I performed 300 jerks. 13,200 lbs jerked overhead in 20 minutes! I left the gym at 1:00 and did a 75 minute bike ride with a 45 minute tempo interval at 225W. What the hell was going on? I wasn't supposed to be able to move today. Maybe the second day will be worse? The older you get, it almost always takes two days to really feel it, right? Not this time.. The next day I was even better. Shoulder was still a little too unhappy to do more than 10 pushups, but I was able to rip out three sets of 12 pullups pain free.. Took it easy the rest of the day. Sunday I was back on the bike for an absolutely brutal interval session. Wolverine... Except without the really cool foot long swords that come out of his fingers. Those would get in the way of my kettlebell training anyways, so I'm just as happy to only have the healing powers.

Then on Tuesday I was out on the MTB again on a loop that I've done many times in the past. I hit a section a little awkwardly, jammed the front wheel and flipped right straight over the bars again. Jumped up, back on the bike, and finished the loop 4 minutes faster than I've ever done it before. Yesterday I was messing around in the gym on the ropes and a new rope ladder that I just installed...

How many 42 year olds do you suppose can do this? 1 in a 1,000? 10,000? 1 million? Hell, how many 20 year olds do you think can do it?

I'm telling you all of this for one reason, and one reason only. What I have isn't magic and it isn't anything that any of you reading this can't have. It's actually quite simple, which is lucky for me because, really, I'm a simple man who likes simple things. I can do things now that I couldn't ever do before at any age. And it's all because of the choices I make every day and the hard work that I put my body through. It's about eating right and making healthy decisions. It's about working my body hard, and allowing it to recover properly following the hard efforts. These are simple things. There's no pills, no powders, no magic workout secrets that are guaranteed to (insert magic guarantee here) in 30 days!

So let's get back to the person who says "I need to go to the gym to get in shape first, before I start working out with you".. In a word, bullshit. There's no amount of running to nowhere on a conveyor belt, climbing stairs to an imaginary 120th floor, preacher curling, bench pressing, or pec-decking, that is going to get you in shape to do anything useful.. If you want to get in shape, you need to train functionally. Train movements, not muscles. With resistance, without resistance. Get active. Hike, bike, kayak. Climb on things. Crawl around once in a while. Most importantly, have fun. Your training should be a means to an end. It is not an end in and of itself. I don't do functional strength and conditioning workouts so that I can get better at functional strength and conditioning workouts. I do functional strength and conditioning so I can be better at functioning in my real world activities. It makes my life better. It makes it so that I can go out and push the limits in my real world activities, like mountain biking, and if I crash, then it's OK. My body can handle it. My efforts make it so that I can throw a 50 pound pack on my back on any given day and hike out in the woods to see the most beautiful, most remote areas of the country. That's what my training has done for me. That's why functional strength and conditioning makes my life better.. If bench pressing and preacher curling makes your life better then I would argue that, first, you need to get a life. Second, you need to start working out with me and the rest of us at Dynamic Strength and Condtioning :)

All the best,

kevin

A Tale of Two Trips...

These two trips happened on consecutive days during a backpack that Michele and I did over the weekend. The two trips, over the same terrain and in the span of less than 48 hours, had so little in common that they may as well have happened years apart in different parts of the world. One day pristine with views as far as the eye can see, the second day a trudge through a quagmire of rain, mud and howling winds created by the remnants of a passing tropical storm.

We had been trying to figure out a time to do a backpack into the Bondcliff region of the White Mountains for at least a couple years now. The Bondcliff region is one of the most remote areas of the Pemigewasset Wilderness that requires more than 10 miles of hiking from the closest trailhead on a main road. It could be done in a 20+ mile day trip with a light day pack and brisk pace but that kind of defeats the purpose of hiking through one of the most beautiful areas in the world. Why would you want to rush it? So we planned a 3 day backpack that would cross over 9 or 10 of the 4000 footers in the Whites including the 3 peaks in the Bonds.. When we saw the forecast that included a day where the remnants of tropical storm "Bill" would be coming through we decided to cut the trip short by a day and head back in the rain on day 2. Nothing destroys a backpacking trip like rain. Having to break down and setup camp in the rain in the woods would take a lot of fun out of the trip and "fun" was the primary reason for us going. If "suffering" or "misery" were our goals, then we would have welcomed the rain.

Backpacking is one of those things that always seems like a good idea right up until about 1 mile into the trail when the weight on your back starts to remind you why you don't spend a lot of time carrying around 50 pound bags of concrete every day. Bill Bryson had a great analogy for it in "A Walk in the Woods". Think about when you pick up your screaming child who weighs about 25 pounds and put him on your shoulders to make the screaming stop. Everything is fine for about 5 minutes but then the shoulders start to hurt and your chest starts to cave in from the weight and finally you're saying "it's time to put you down for a little while", at which point the screaming starts again.. OK, now take two of those children, place them in a pack and strap them to your back and carry that around, up and over trees and rocks and up and down ridiculously steep inclines for hours on end. I don't care how fit you are, this hurts a lot. But there's a reason for that and it's because your body needs to adapt to it. Like anything you're doing for the first time, the body will take some time to adapt to it. This is not unlike the amount of pain people find themselves in the first week of training at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning before their bodies adapt to the demands you're putting on it.. I'm sure that after about 5 or 6 days lugging the pack around on my shoulders that my body would be perfectly adapted to it and I'd be able to draw a full breath out of my caved in chest whenever I needed to. But I only do this maybe once every couple years and even then I only do it for two or three days. So the pain is part of the price you have to pay to get to areas that most will never see unless they're flying over it in a commercial jet at 35,000 feet.

Day 1 was a picture perfect day for hiking. Temps in the 50's, sunny with endless visibility. We parked at the base of the Zealand Trail, strapped on our packs (which I need to figure out how to distribute the weight properly next time so it doesn't feel like I have an ape hanging off my shoulders pulling me backwards) and headed into the woods. Immediately the songs start going through my head. When you're hiking, whether it's alone or with somebody, you still tend to be very quiet and internalized. You think a lot, you talk very little. When you're not thinking about anything in particular, songs or other things creep into your head. Under the load of the 50 pound encumbrance, my head went into an infinite loop of "Beast of Burden" by the Stones.. I think this lasted until we got to the Zealand Falls Hut about 2.7 miles into our journey. We stopped briefly at the Hut and refilled our water bottles. From here we took the Twinway trail which is part of the Appalachian Trail that runs over 2100 miles from Northern Maine down to Georgia. The trail heads pretty much straight up for about 2000 feet of elevation gain over the next two miles. This was a fun climb up rocks and staircases carved from granite.

It ended at a viewpoint at the Zeacliff. The Zeacliff is an east facing cliff with a good 500 ft drop that overlooks the Presidential Range and Mt Washington to the Northeast and Mt Carrigain to the Southeast. It was a stunning view.. This is also where we came across the first AT hiker of the day. You can always tell when you come across the guys hiking the Appalachian Trail. These are soul searchers on a 2100 mile journey that will take them anywhere from 3 to 6 months carrying what they need on their backs, stopping to reload in small towns along the way. It's not difficult to figure out who the AT hikers are. They always have a half-crazed look in their eye, a wild, disheveled appearance, lots of hair, and the smell of someone who's been in the woods for days. Trust me, they're real easy to pick out. From Zeacliff it was up and over Zealand Mt (a peak in the woods with no view), Mt Guyot, which is at about 4500 ft but not considered an official 4000 footer on the list of "The 48 Official White Mt 4000 Footers" because it doesn't lose enough elevation on the back side of it before climbing up to a higher peak (stupid rule), and then off to the Bonds. But first, we decided we would setup camp at the Guyot campsite while it was daylight, drop our packs, and then head out with a much lighter daypack and try to get in the 3 Bond peaks before it got dark. This turned out to be a great decision. We were 8 miles in at this point and the heavy packs were really slowing us down. The Guyot campsite is 0.2 miles off the Bondcliff Trail but has about 500 ft of descent to get to. It is a very cool campsite with a running stream for drinking water, a half dozen tent platforms cut into the side of the mountain, and a 3 sided shelter that sleeps 12. We set up our tent on one of the platforms, filled a daypack with some trail mix, chocolate, and a bottle of water and scrambled back up the 500ft of granite to the main trail.

When we got to the Bonds we immediately understood why it was rated in a backpacking magazine as one of the top 3 most beautiful areas in the country. As far as the eye could see there was not a hint of human interference. No roads, no buildings, no cell towers. Just mountains, valleys, cliffs, and trees....forever in all directions. It was awesome. On our way

down from Mt Bond as we headed over to Bondcliff I recognized a view that can be seen on the cover of the Appalachian Mt Club's "White Mountain Guide" (you know you're in a beautiful part of the world when the AMC puts a photo of it on their guide cover ;) Here's a recreation of the photo, except with Jake in it instead of some random hiker... The experience from the top of Bondcliff was absolutely amazing. We were standing on the top of a ridge with the most incredible views in every direction. But the really incredible part of it was the 1/4 mile length of ledge with a sheer, vertigo inducing drop of over

1000 feet. When you stand out on a rock where one false move means a 1000 foot plummet into an abyss (as beautiful as that abyss may be) it makes you dizzy with adrenaline. I do handstands at the top of every mountain we summit and this mountain was no different. But in places where if I fall out of the handstand it means I will die, I opt for a pistol. This is a rule that was put in place by Michele.. With a 1000 ft straight down drop on 3 sides of this rock, it was the scariest pistol I've ever done :)

I found a safer place to do my handstand.... You get bonus points if you can find Jake's head peaking out from the rocks up there...

After coming off the incredibly impressive Bondcliff it was off to West Bond and then back to camp. We hit camp at about 7p and had been out hiking for about 11 hours at this point. Michele and I are both in excellent physical condition but we were pretty beat up from the long day. And really hungry. One of the worst parts about backpacking is the food choices you have to bring. You have to bring things that are packed in calories and come in small sizes. Lots of nuts and seeds. Not much fruit because it's too big for the amount of calories it contains. You eat dehydrated meals that you need to add boiling water to. In most circumstances you wouldn't feed these meals to a homeless person. But to a backpacker, these meals are unbelievably delicious. We ate some mish-mash of dehydrated potatoes and chicken rib meat followed by a "Santa Fe" chicken dinner that has pinto beans, rice, corn and bits of chicken and looked kind of like vomit.. It was unbelievable how good this hot meal tasted. We finished the meal with a cup of hot chocolate (sooo good) and went to sleep.

I slept really well for about 2 hours and then went into my "sleep 15 minutes and turn to try to relieve the discomfort of laying on a wooden platform" routine. I did this for the next 6 hours until daylight. If you were to catch this on a video camera and replay it at high speed I would look like a rotisserie chicken on the spit turning slowly over the flame.

The rain started at about midnight, a good 12 hours before the last forecast we saw had called for. Ugh. It wasn't just showering either (like the forecast predicted), it was dumping big heavy drops that seemed to explode off the tent. The wind was howling and we knew we were in for a pretty miserable escape the next morning. We got up, packed as much as we could while inside the tent to stay dry and then got out in the rain to break down the tent and pack everything else up. This is where everything gets kind of soaked and is the reason we decided to cut the trip a day short. Breaking down and setting up in the rain soaks everything and the only thing that fixes that is a full day of sunshine which wasn't in the immediate future. I didn't even bother making coffee because it just wasn't going to be worth the bother in the mud and rain, crouching over a collapsible stove the size of a softball trying to heat up water. This seemed to bother Michele more than it did me, which surprised me because coffee in the morning is easily one of my top 5 favorite things in life and I know she can do without it fairly easily.. It occurred to me later that what bothered Michele was not that she wasn't getting a cup of coffee, but that she was going to have to deal with me not getting a cup of coffee :)

I thought I had prepared myself mentally for this. I knew it was going to suck. I spent 6 hours thrashing in the tent listening to the rain and wind knowing I would get soaked and have to hike for about 7 hours in miserable weather to get out of the woods. I was OK for a while too but eventually it took it's toll and I became really irritable, miserable, and in general, just a real joy to be around. When we left camp, the first thing we had to do was climb up an over Mt Guyot, which was going to be the only really exposed section of our hike for the day. At the top of the mountain it was like a mild hurricane. Rain whipping with sustained winds that were in the vicinity of 50-70mph, gusts that had to be 80+. With heavy packs on our backs we trudged along the trail weaving like drunken sailors as the wind toyed with us knocking us around like rag dolls. I thought Michele was going to fly away a couple times with her backpack acting as a kite to pull her into the sky. To me, this was the most enjoyable part of the day because it was a real challenge to the body and spirit and I like challenges. Once we got up and over Guyot we were sheltered by the woods and it became less of a challenge and more of a major annoyance. My pack was killing me. It was heavier than the day before now that I was lugging around a waterlogged tent, amateurishly secured off the lower back of the pack which made it seem about 3x heavier than it actually was. I couldn't draw in a full breath because of the way it was pulling my shoulders down and caving my chest in. The gloriousness of the previous day quickly vanished into the mud, fog, rain, wind of a new day created by the producers of "A Perfect Storm". Happy songs that went through my head during the hike yesterday were replaced with things like the theme from Gilligan's Island ("The weather started getting rough...." etc.), and the marching chant that the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz used to do in subserviance to the Wicked Witch... Honestly, that chant was in my head for the better part of a half hour.. I spent a couple hours hating the hike big time. I was irritated that all kinds of things out of my control were conspiring against me to make me miserable. It irritated me that I didn't find the conditions challenging, just irritating. It made me think I would never want to do this again because it's just not worth the aggravation and pain. It made me forget, briefly, what an incredible experience the day before was.. Finally we got back to the Zealand Falls Hut. We took off the packs, got some hot water from the caretakers of the hut and made the best cup of coffee I've ever had in my life. Blood started to flow through my chest and shoulders again. I could take a full breath for the first time in what seemed like days. I ate a cinnamon roll the size of a basketball that the caretakers of the hut and had baked just that morning. It was still raining and it was still windy and we still had about 2 hours to go but things were looking considerably better. I apologized to Michele for being a petulant, miserable prick for the last 4 hours. She acted like she didn't know what I was talking about which is exactly the type of thing that makes her so special :)

I fixed the loading of my pack a little bit and strapped it back on. 3 miles to go, no big deal. The last few miles are a flat stretch of dirt path, roots, rocks and bog bridges. We cranked and covered it in about an hour and a half. With the misery of the last 7 hours behind us my mind turned back to the positives of the trip. We got to see a part of the country that is easily one of the most beautiful in the entire world, untouched and sublime. We started to talk about options for our next backpacking adventure.....

This is why staying healthy, active and fit is so important to us and why we want it to be important to everybody. Everybody needs to experience the type of trip we experienced this past weekend. This is why we were put here. We weren't put here to abuse our bodies, our environment and each other. When you get out in the mountains and you realize on such a magnificent scale, how really small you and your problems are in the grand scheme of things, it makes you re-think your priorities. It makes you want to leave a positive imprint on everything and everybody you touch. That's why it's worth the trouble, aggravation, and pain of loading 50 pounds of clothes, food, and shelter on your back and hiking up and down unforgiving terrain to get to places like this. Places that make you feel very small and at the same time make you think very big :)

Who Are You?

Ever ask yourself that question? Who are you? Who are trying to be? What are you trying to achieve? What are you doing to get there? I do it all the time. I was just doing it on Saturday on my bike. I was on my trainer in the cellar doing a brutal interval session. The session went something like this:

warmup with an easy spin for about 10 minutes, then:
- seated surge at high power output (350W +) for 10 seconds
- pedal at endurance power (~180W) for 20 seconds. This is not easy spinning, it's pedaling hard enough to know that you're working so it's really not a break.
- Repeat 90 times (not a typo, I did 90 consecutive intervals)
- cool down for 15 minutes

This interval session was specific to cyclocross races where you need to surge and pull back, surge and pull back, repeatedly. A race lasts 45 minutes in the elite masters field which is why I did 90 intervals. Doing 20 or even 50 intervals would be OK, but it's not going to be as beneficial as going for the full 45 minutes. This interval session was one of the more brutal sessions I've done on a bike. About 20 intervals in, and with 70 to go, I start asking myself why the hell do I do this? Why do I have to work so damn hard? What am I trying to accomplish? It's not like I'm making any money racing. Is it really worth the amount of pain I put myself into? Who am I trying to be? These questions continue for the next 30 or 40 intervals. For the last 30 intervals the soul searching stops and is replaced by an overwhelming desire to just do whatever it takes to finish and get off the damn bike.

It would have been so easy to stop after 20 minutes of intervals. After all, 40 intervals is quite a bit, isn't it? It would have been so easy to let my power output reduce after about 50 intervals, to maybe 300W on the surges. What the hell, 300 W is still a pretty good amount of power for a guy my size to be pushing out. I could have really rested during the 20 second endurance power phase of the intervals and let myself spin out at about 120W or easier like in a recovery ride. Why not, the important part is the high power part of the interval, isn't it? There are about 1000 different things that I could have done to make it easier (I know this because about 999 of them went through my head over the course of the 90 intervals), but I didn't choose any of them. It's not who I am.

When I ask myself, "Who are you?", I want to be satisfied with the answer I come up with. I want to know that I am doing whatever it takes to get to where I want to be. Where that is will always be changing. That's because I'm always setting new goals for myself. The thing that doesn't change is that I continue to have a lifestyle and a training plan that supports my goals. I don't work out hard during the week and then go out and get hammered all weekend. I don't eat healthy for two weeks and then spend a week eating the new Angus burgers at McDonalds. When I go on vacation, it doesn't mean I spend a week becoming a different person that sits around on the beach with a drink in one hand and a chili dog in the other. Why would I?

We are all as strong as our weakest link. It's the weakest link that will limit your ability to perform. In physical terms this may be some part of your body that is weak relative to everything else. In the bodybuilder types down at Globo Gym we see this all the time, they spend hours benching and curling weights and they have two little peg legs to support their massive upper bodies. Kind of like a tick. But it goes beyond the physical part. The lifestyle is even more important. If you want to be in the best physical and mental state possible, then it is the lifestyle that will determine how far you can go. Your lifestyle needs to support your goals. If your goal is to be disease free, healthy, and strong well into your 80's or 90's, then your lifestyle needs to consist of healthy choices and lots of vigorous physical activity. It's important to understand what it is you want to be. You can't be like the old Chevy El Camino which couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a pickup truck or a car and now finds itself up on blocks in the backyard of your redneck neighbor's house :) You can't be undecided and try to be many different things that are often contradictory to each other.

Let me give you two examples using imaginary people (if they resemble somebody you are or somebody you know, then it is completely coincidental)... The first imaginary person we'll talk about works out at least 4 days a week at the local Chrome and Fern Palace. He can bench press almost 2x his bodyweight and back squat almost 3x his bodyweight. He does sets of biceps curls with 100# barbells. For "cardio" he jogs on the treadmill or rides the stationary bike at an aerobic pace which is just high enough to sweat out all the toxins that he spent putting into his body over the weekend. On the weekend he hangs out with friends, works on the house, watches football games, sometimes goes to the bars with his buddies. He gets hammered and eats pizza and cheese steak subs. But it's OK because he's going to be back on the treadmill on Monday sweating all the shit out of his body. He plays football with the kids and is sore for three days because his workouts don't really help to do things like play sports or function in real life. During the week he drinks at night after work, 2 drinks, maybe 3 or 4, maybe more if Monday Night Football has him up to midnight. He drags his ass out of bed every morning and his energy levels suck for the most part. He realizes that his body feels worse as time goes on but hopes it's more to do with age rather than lifestyle. But, hey, he can bench almost 2x his bodyweight and look at the guns on him! Fkn awesome, dude!

Imaginary person two works out practically every day but rests once or twice a week to recover depending on the intensity of the workouts during the week and the phase of his training plan. This person has a training plan. He has goals. He knows where he is with respect to his goals. His training is targeted at performance, it's not used to flush toxins out of the body because for the most part there really aren't any. He eats clean, he doesn't drink alcohol, he doesn't smoke. His energy levels are always high and he's almost always happy. He is active all the time. When he vacations it's in the mountains, in the woods, on the lakes, in the ocean. He experiences practically everything there is to experience because that's what his training and his lifestyle allows him to do. He knows no bounds and is always optimistic about what the future will bring. He doesn't care about age because he knows that he feels great pretty much all the time and is stronger today than he has ever been in his life and there's really nothing that's going to change that for him as long as he sticks to what's working for him now.

OK, so you're thinking the second person is me, right? You'd be right... Would you be surprised to know that the first person is me too? Well it was.. Except I was actually worse than what I described there. So if you think some of these blog entries are preachy from some guy who doesn't know anything other than some crazy super healthy lifestyle you'd be wrong. I've been on the other end and I know better than most how it feels. And I can tell you from experience that the lifestyle that I'm living right now is about 1 billion times better than the one I had before. And if you think you can't get to where I am now you'd be wrong. I have yet to see one person step through the door of Dynamic Strength and Conditioning that was anywhere near as bad off as I was as little as 5 years ago. What we're doing at the gym is life-changing. That's not an understatement. If you commit to what we're doing then you are committing to a complete lifestyle that will absolutely change the way you look and feel about everything.

First thing you have to figure out is who you are. Second is figure out if that's who you want to be. If the two answers contradict each other then it's time to start working on the first one. It's never too late and there is always somebody that can guide you to where you want to go.

Best,
kevin

So Now What?

It's a confusing time for a lot of people when they reach the point in time that they've set for any specific goal. There's a huge buildup that culminates in some kind of event, and once the event passes there's a huge emotional and physical release. There can be elation from having crushed the goal, satisfaction from having achieved the goal, or dissapointment from having come up short. Regardless, you have come to a point where the question is there... Now what?

Doesn't matter what the goal was, this will always be the case. You could have set a goal to be able to do an unassisted pullup or lose 2 inches off your waist or be able to fit into that bathing suit that's been sitting in your drawer for 5 years and is sooo out of style by now :) Or it could be to climb your bike up Mt Washington in 1:10. The date that you set for yourself to achieve this goal will come and go and you will be faced with a "what's next" scenario.

I've set many goals for myself over the years. It's what keeps me focused. It drives me. It's a huge part of who I am. This last goal for me was a big one and I ended up coming up way short of where I had initially hoped. I'm OK with this for a number of reasons. First, I put everything I had into the race and could not have gotten a better time on that particular day under those particular conditions. Second, there were several positives to come out of the race. I achieved a top notch time and will start with the elite field next time I do the race, I ended up 16th out of 106 finishers in my field (there were many DNF's that day), I came in ahead of almost 20% of this year's elite field. These are all positives. There are also several negatives that I need to learn from. My training needs to be better. I need to be even more focused than I have been in the past. I need to get stronger both physically and mentally.

When I reach this point in time when I'm asking myself "what's next?" I already have a list of things I want to work towards. I don't rest. I don't take it easy for a while. Why should I? I've reached a certain point and it's time to work to get better. I will always be able to improve on something until the day I die. I raced my bike up Mt Washington on Saturday. At 10:00am on Saturday morning that race was in the past and it was time to look forward. Sunday I hiked up Mt Jefferson. Monday I rested because my body was beat to shit. Tuesday I was in the gym doing an intense bodyweight workout and on the bike doing sprints. Yesterday I was in the gym doing kettlebell work and on the bike doing threshold and high tempo work. My immediate goal is to have a good cyclocross season in the elite Masters field. "Good" can mean many things, one guage I have for "good" will be whether or not I can finish in the top half in points in the Verge New England Championship series. This is a lofty goal. But I'm going to work my ass off to do it. It's what I do. In the back of my mind is the Mt Washington race next August. I'll be back again and I'll be shooting for 1:10 again.

I guess my point is this... If you reach a goal that you've set it doesn't mean you've come to the end. It means you've reached a new beginning. If you've lost the two inches you wanted to lose it doesn't mean you can let up on the workouts and start eating ice cream every night. It means you have to up the ante and decide you're going to run a 5k... If you can finally do an unassisted pullup, it doesn't mean you can stop training. It means you have to shoot for 5. Maybe set a goal of being able to do a handstand.. Why not? Handstands are fun, they require great functional, full body strength, and a super strong core.. It's an awesome goal. You've been placing top 10 in your sprint triathlons. Time to go to the Olympic distance.. There's always another level to take it. That's what it's all about. Strive for excellence. Dedicate yourself to continued improvement in all aspects of your life.

My first cross race is Sept 19.. My first Verge series weekend is Sept 26-27. I am going to be as ready as I can possibly be. Oh yeah, and I'm going to have a ton of fun doing it :)

Best,
Kevin

Careful What You Wish For....

Leading up to the Mt Washington Hillclimb race you wish for perfect weather. Low winds, mild temperatures. Perfect weather for a bike ride. Earlier this week I looked at an extended forecast for Mt Washington and it looked about as perfect as you could possibly ask for. Clear skies, low winds, temps in the 50's. I started thinking about whether or not I could achieve my goal under these ideal conditions. The goal I set in January was to hit 1:10, but my training for the year wasn't consistent enough for that to be realistic today. Life and a new business kind of get in the way sometimes. But in the last month I made a huge push to get my fitness level better than it's ever been. My conclusion (and the expectations I set for myself), based on the training I've been doing and the numbers I was able to hit on Mt Ascutney and the practice ride up Mt Washington a month ago was that, realistically, I might be able to get to about 1:14 with an outside chance of 1:12. This would make me very happy all things considered.

I woke up this morning at 5:30. Actually, I woke up at 11pm, 11:40, 12:05, 12:20, 1:30, 2:15, 2:45... you get the picture.. By the time I actually crawled out of bed I had spent the better part of the night tossing around like a sock in the dryer agonizing about how badly I needed to be sleeping. Whatever, this is nothing new for me the night prior to a race. I woke up with nasty butterflies, did a joint mobility routine, choked down about 600 calories worth of fuel, 20oz of water and 12oz of coffee. I had two hours till showtime and I was feeling nervous but strong. It was about 52 degrees outside with a forecast of 87. "Ummm, I hope they're not talking about the mountain. That would really suck."

The organizers pushed the start of the race back an hour this year to allow people more time to chill out in the morning before having to get all the cars up the mountain. Seemed like a good idea at the time. We got to the mountain, I got my numbers and made sure my bike was in perfect working order. The atmosphere at the base of the mountain on race day is like a festival. In fact, there was one woman there who must have thought she was at Woodstock as she stripped down naked in the middle of the field to get into her bike kit. That was a new one. Pretty sure the 12 year old boy a couple cars over from her broke his fingers texting his buddies about the peep show he just got.

I started my warmup ride with a guy from Philly named Jay that I had never met before. He was on a gorgeous Italian bike, a Colnago. I looked at his gearing and was a little surprised at the fact that he appeared to be riding with regular road gearing. I said to him, "Never did this before, or are you just really pissed off at your knees?".. "What do you mean?", he asked. "What do you have for gears there?". "34-25", he said....I laughed... "What?", Jay laughed back. OK, so if Jay was a pro, that would work. You can tell a pro when you're riding next to one. Jay was not a pro. "This isn't the type of mountain you ride with the gearing you would use in a crit" I tried to explain. We had a good laugh about it and he told me about all the crap his buddies gave him back home when he started talking about gearing down for the race and how he decided to "man up" and just ride the 34-25. I saw Jay later after the race and all he had to say to me was that next time he didn't give a shit what his buddies said, he's gearing down for the race. Still, he had a big smile on his face and was really proud of his achievement of finishing the toughest hillclimb race in the world.

The race had about 680 registered with a Men's 40-44 field about 120-130 strong. It was a massive field full of some of the strongest climbers around. They come from all over for this one. Colorado, Canada, up and down the East Coast, other parts of the world. This is an international event full of people who are willing to put their bodies into unimaginable amounts of pain to achieve a goal of getting up one of the nastiest mountain roads in the world. I got to the staging area early and positioned

myself right at the front of the field so I wouldn't get caught up at the start. Not that it matters much since you hit the climb about 200 yards into the race, but it probably saved me about 10 seconds, and every second counts.

At the start of these races I'm so nervous that a calm actually comes over me. It's like my body is buzzing and my head is in a cloud. My heart rate just sitting there waiting was at 90bpm which is about 45 beats over my normal resting heart rate.. The ideal conditions that I had expected turned into 70+ degrees at the bottom and getting hotter by the minute. I was sweating just sitting there, thankful that I took a sodium tablet before leaving the motel. Heat was not going to be my friend today.

My group was the third wave, we started 10 minutes after the "Top Notch" group which was made up of all the racers who were either pros or had done the race before in under 1:20. A select group of the top climbers around, a group that I was determined to join... The cannon went off and we blasted out of the staging area. I led the pack into the climb and then settled into my power zone I needed to stay in for the next 70+ minutes. Riders started passing me, but not many, and not for long as most of them would blow up from going out too hard. I was trying hard not to go out too hard which is tough at the beginning when you're feeling really strong and people are passing you. I just kept telling myself you have a power number you need to stay at. Go too hard and your day is done early.

Damn was it hot. I was 1 mile into the race and I could feel the onset of dehydration and my heart rate had already climbed to 173 bpm. My max HR is 179 bpm (as I found out at the top of the mountain) so I was already above where I wanted to be. To maintain my threshold power I do best when I'm at about 168-169 bpm. But it was really hot and my body was working extra hard to try to cool itself down. I was sweating a lot, which was a good sign, since it proved I wasn't too dehydrated yet. 2 miles in and we hit the first extended section of about 18% grade. Crushing. I'm under 5mph and I'm passing people. My heart rate is 174 and I'm maintaining 270W output. But I'm thinking that there is no way I can sustain 174bpm the whole way and continue to push the pedals this hard. For the life of me, there is nothing I can do to bring my heart rate down. I'm 3 miles in and I'm hurting. The only way to bring the heart rate down would be to stop. There are no breaks on this climb, it is straight up for 7.6 miles at grades that they don't allow cars to pass on in the Winter. At 4 miles I stop sweating. This is bad. My power numbers are dropping. I'm barely half way there and I decide that this is the stupidest thing I've ever done. I'm on pace to hit a PR, but my heart rate is pegged at 174-175 and it won't drop. My power numbers? They'll continue to drop. Mile 5 I hit the gravel section. 15-18% for over a mile. This is absolutely devastating. I'm going 4.5 MPH. I'm still passing people though. Everybody is suffering in the heat. It's excruciating. At this point we're completely exposed, we have about 2.5 miles to go, and I'm in as much pain as I've ever been in on a bike. Every time I take a hand off the bars to grab my water bottle for a quick drink, my heart rate spikes to 176. I'm about 45 minutes in and I have absolutely no idea how I've been able to maintain this heart rate for this long. At this point I'm passing people who are walking. I don't walk. My brain pleads with me to walk. But I don't walk. If I'm off my bike at this point it's because I'm dead.. Think I'm kidding? I'm not..... 6 miles. Geographically, I know I'm almost there. 1.6 more miles feels like 160.. At this point every second feels like an hour. It absolutely sucks beyond belief. Heart rate: 175. Power: 220 at best. I'm fucked. My goal is out the window. I'm completely blown up. 1:14 goes by.. 1:15 goes by... 1:16. Power barely hitting 200W.. I have under 4 minutes to get to the top before I lose my chance at Top Notch. I come around a corner and hear the screaming from the crowd. I look up the road and see Sandy with Jake. She's screaming at me to dig deep, telling me I'm so close. There's about 1/4 mile to go and I absolutely turn myself inside out. There...is....no....fucking.....way....I'm .... not ......getting..... Top.......Notch!!!!

The top of the auto road is a joke. It's a wall. It's 22%. I've been climbing for 1:18

and I see the wall. There's a guy in front of me who just passed me about 1/10th of a mile back and I was kind of pissed about it. My race has come down to this. This one guy. He wasn't even in my group, he started 5 minutes ahead of me and I caught him just like the 100 or so other people who started in front of me that I caught. But this last one had to be beaten. I put everything into it. I was absolutely gasping. People were screaming like we were sprinting for the win. I dropped him and kept pushing as hard as I possibly could. I see the timer and it's ticking up 1:28:57... 1:28:58 (it's 10 minutes more than my time because my group started 10 minutes back)... I'm getting Top Notch!! I come across the line at 1:19:06. I'm starting to black out. I can't really see, everything just kind of goes white and spotty. Two officials hold my bike up as I fall off and out of the way. It takes a long time before I get up..

Typically, it takes me weeks before I decide to do the race again. It's so miserable, so unimaginably awful, so brutal in so many ways. There's no good reason to ever do it more than once. This time I decide to do it again before I even catch my breath. I'm dissapointed with my time. I have unfinished business. I'm going to finish it next year, re-focused and re-committed. I'll be starting with the pros in the top notch category..

For the day I ended up 16th out of a field of about 120-130.. I was 95th overall out of 530 finishers and probably another 100 that DNF'd. I was 10th out of all the racers in the state of NH. The top times for the day were all off by about 4 minutes. Hardly anybody had a good day, and on average, everybody I talked to was off from where they thought they would be, or where they had been in the past, by about 3 or 4 minutes. It was my 5th time up the mountain and it was more painful than any of the previous times. My average heart rate was over 97% for the last 70 minutes of the race. I looked at my heart rate data and at the top of the mountain my heart rate hit 100% max at 179bpm.. The sprint at the top was the most pain I've ever been in under any other set of circumstances in my life. Next year will be no different in that regard. What will be different is the time on the board. Next year I'm hitting 1:10.

Here's a video that Michele took at the top. This is me turned inside out (in case you were wondering what that might look like)

The Hay is in the Barn...

This is a saying that my buddy Bill's coach once used with him in the week leading up to the Mt Washington Autoroad Bicycle Hillclimb. The race known as "The World's Most Challenging Race" which, of course, they couldn't say if it wasn't true since that would be false marketing :) Bill is one of my best friends who initially inspired me to attempt to climb this beast of a mountain on my bike. One of the craziest things I've ever done was agree to it, but it was also one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had.

The hay is in the barn.... What this means is that the training is over. There is no further possibility of getting stronger prior to the event. The reserves are full. It's time to sit back and take it easy. Get full recovery into the muscles while still giving them short efforts to remind them of what they need to do come race day. Today was one of the most beautiful days we've had this Summer. About 75 degrees with relatively low humidity. What an amazing day for a bike ride. I thought about this as I pedaled my bike on the rollers in the driveway watching a cyclist speed past the house. I was on the rollers because it's too hilly where I live and I can't go out for a ride and keep my power output low enough to where I need to for the type of ride I needed to do today which was a recovery effort. So I sat there turning the pedals at somewhere between 130-140 watts of power output (half what I need to generate up the mountain) sweating my ass off in the driveway for an hour. That's dedication and focus. Or so I tell myself to rationalize pedaling to nowhere in my driveway on a gorgeous Summer afternoon.

I'm 63.5 hours from heading up the mountain for the 5th time in my life. Each time up I've been a little faster than the time before. I'm stronger than I've ever been on the bike. In the past month I have made ridiculous gains in strength. I've been eating super clean. Tons of fruit and veggies, fish, chicken and eggs, nuts and seeds. Hardly any processed carbs or refined sugars. I just finished my recovery ride and ate a half canteloupe and 2 hard boiled eggs. (Random interjection: why do cage free organic eggs come in a tri-fold plastic container with non-water soluble CFO markings on the shells? Seems counter-intuitive to me).

I'm not as nervous as I thought I'd be. In fact, I am so looking forward to doing this on Saturday that it's surprising even me. Although I know when I'm in the staging area I'll practically be ready to puke with the butterflies. My goal that I set at the beginning of the year was 1:10. Very aggressive considering that, at the time, my best ever time was 1:20. 4 weeks ago I did it in 1:18 at the end of a hard training week, the day after a brutal race up Mt Ascutney, and into a 50 MPH headwind for good part of the last couple miles. I would have to have an absolutely incredible day under absolutely perfect conditions to hit 1:10 on Saturday. If I hit it I will be the happiest man on the planet. My secondary goal was to do better than 1:15. My level of happiness at the end of the race will be relative to how far in front of 1:15 I am as I cross the line. A time greater than 1:15 is not an option.

One thing is for certain, I am going to absolutely crush myself trying to achieve my goal and there will be no doubting whether or not I could have done better. I am going to leave everything on the mountain. I'm ready. The hay is in the barn.....

When I'm 100....

I'll get up in the morning do 10 Hindu pushups, 10 Hindu squats and a joint mobility routine to get loosened up for the day. Make a triple shot of espresso, maybe blog a little bit about how cool it is to be so old and still be in better shape than people a quarter my age. Figure out whether we're going to head out for a hike in the woods behind our log cabin in Vermont, Maine, or British Columbia (Michele and I are still trying to figure out which), get on the bikes for an easy trail ride or maybe go do a little canoeing. I'm going to be lean, I'm going to be fit, and I'm going to be sharp. I'm going to be "that guy" that local people talk about to their visiting friends and relatives when they say "Did you see that guy in front of that log cabin chopping wood? Guess how old he is?". Their friends will respond, "I don't know, in his 60's?". They'll be choking on their Angry Whopper when they hear the answer come back "100!".

I won't be on 12 different medications. I won't be assigned to the bed in room 1204. I won't be wearing diapers. I'll be eating organic. I'll be active. I'll be living. I'll be smiling.... A lot.

Last weekend we were at Acadia National Park for 5 days. Hiking, biking, swimming, walking around, playing, eating good food. One day we were at Echo Lake, swimming. An older woman came down to the lake that had an aura about her that really left an impression on me. She was in her bathing suit ready to go for a swim. Her body was tight with lean muscle. She had a huge beaming smile on her face. Not smiling at anybody in particular since she wasn't with anybody. She just walked through the crowd, head high, really happy to be there. The wrinkles on her face gave her age away to be well into her 70's, maybe 80's, possibly older, she seemed ageless. Regardless, she moved better than most people half her age. She went over to a rock, dove into the lake and started backstroking out into the middle, away from all the people closer to shore, the smile never left her face. It was inspirational.

This woman made a commitment much earlier in her life, 30, 40, 50 years ago, to be swimming at Echo Lake on this particular day last weekend. I will guarantee you that she didn't spend the last 40 years filling her body with refined sugars, processed carbs, and saturated fats, leading a sedentary lifestyle, hopping on a treadmill for 30 minutes every couple days for "exercise". A long time ago she made an investment in herself. She decided that she was going to take care of herself, eat right and stay active so that when she was 80 she was going to be enjoying her life to the fullest with a permanent smile on her face that would require plastic surgery to remove. She would hike up mountains on the weekends, ride her bike at lunchtime, go cross country skiing in the Winter. She didn't waste her time in 1974 lifting weights and walking on treadmills because she knew then, just like she knows now, that it wasn't going to help her enjoy the things in life she enjoys and it wasn't going to help her swim across Echo Lake when she's in her 80's. I can guarantee you she wasn't 60 years old at 45% bodyfat with a counter full of medications wishing she hadn't spent the last 25 years eating at Pizza Hut and Wendy's because she just didn't have the time or money to eat right and exercise.

Her investment paid off big time. She absolutely nailed it. I could feel the confidence and happiness as she walked by me. Contrast this to most people you see nowadays who are between the ages of 35 and 60, are seriously overweight and deconditioned. If I walked up to 10,000 of these deconditioned people and asked them "When you're retired, would you rather be living on medications, fighting off chronic diseases and feeling like shit for the better part of the rest of your life, or would you like to be lean, healthy, unmedicated and fit enough to be able to do anything you want?", I'm pretty sure I would get 10,000 responses affirming the latter. Yet, they do nothing about it. Why not? Why don't people make the investment in themselves to do it? There's lots of reasons, but I'm going to focus on two of them (maybe three, not really sure where i end up going with this yet...).

Reason #1: I'm not feeling that bad yet so why do anything about it?

It can always get worse, right? There's always somebody worse off than you to make you feel better about how badly you let yourself go. You weigh 350 lbs, but at least you don't weigh 450 like the guy in front of you who just super-sized his order of fries. And here you are ordering a diet coke with your Triple Decker Bacon Burger. Good man!

You have too much to drink 3 or 4 nights a week, but hey, look at that homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk. I'm not that bad.

You smoke a pack a day, but you cut back from two packs and you're now smoking wicked-ultra lights which are so light they're almost good for you (said it on the pack so it must be true), and at least you're not hooked up to an oxygen tank like that guy you saw at the oncologist's office last week.

So let me give you some advice, instead of trying to make yourself feel better by comparing yourself to people who are obviously worse off than you, why don't you start comparing yourself to people who are better off than you and make a goal to get there. Compare yourself to the woman I was talking about before. Compare yourself to the group of people you see riding their bikes on their Saturday morning group ride. Compare yourself to the people hiking up Mt Monadnock. Compare yourself to the people shopping at the local farm stand for organic fruits or vegetables. Yes, it can always be worse, and if you don't do something about it now I will guarantee you that it will be.

Reason #2: I can't afford it.

This is the investment part. People buy processed foods and low grade meats because it costs more to buy organic, nutritious foods. If you look at the implications of filling your body with non-nutritious crap, then you will find that it will cost you a lot more money down the road in doctor's visits, medications, hospitalizations, surgeries, and nursing homes, then you could possibly spend on eating healthy. Same goes for exercise. I've put together a lot of training programs for people that get them the best results they've ever seen and put them on the path to living a long healthy life. We're more into helping everybody commit to a healthy lifestyle than just giving a workout routine. We want to get your body working properly and pain-free with full range of motion, maximum mobility and functionality, great strength and endurance. We want to help you with your nutrition. We'll give you workouts to do while you're away on business travel or vacations. We've developed an atmosphere of like-minded, supportive individuals who all want to be spending the rest of their lives in the best shape possible. And yes, it costs more than going to the traditional gym, but there is no comparison in what you're getting. It costs more, because it takes a lot more time and effort to give you the experience that we give you. We care about you. If we don't see you for a while you're getting a phone call or an email. We're never going to be the type of gym with 3000 members, 80% of which stop going after a couple months, and the other 20% doing useless bodybuilding type exercises that do more damage to their bodies than if they did nothing at all.. Ever see a 70 year old who spent too many of his younger years bodybuilding? Not pretty. We're a gym who will have about 100 members who all know each other, support each other, work towards common goals, work their asses off to get in great shape, and commit to a healthy lifestyle. These are the people who are going to be beaming with confidence at 85 years old while they're out playing in the back yard with their great-grandkids. So if I told you that to feel that way when you're 85 would cost less than the 2 bottles of wine you buy every week, or about the same as a good dinner out and a movie every month, or a couple lunches out with colleagues every week, would you still say you can't afford it? Is it that you can't afford it, or that you won't afford it? And like I said before, it will cost you a whole hell of a lot less now than it will later if you let yourself go. I've said this before and I'll say it again, I could not put a price on how I feel now. Being healthy and fit is the single most important thing in my life because without it everything else goes to shit. With health and fitness comes happiness, solid relationships, confidence, the ability to cope with difficult situations.. The list is endless. Some may be able to put a price on that, I can't. Next time you're trying to decide on whether or not you can afford something that is an investment on your own personal well-being, you might want to ask yourself how can you afford not to...

Reason #3: It's too ________ (fill in the blank with your favorite excuse)

Some popular ones that I hear are, "It's too late", or "It's too hard"... It's never too late to start taking care of yourself. And just because you may have spent a lot of time abusing yourself, it doesn't mean the right thing to do is to continue. That would be stupid and is the most illogical excuse of all. Everybody has a starting point to work from. Doesn't matter where that starting point is, the important thing is that you start. One of my favorite quotes is from Lao Tzu, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Well, in the case of Dynamic Strength and Conditioning, it starts with the 63 steps to the 4th floor. But we will definitely take you on a journey that you will never regret :) For those who say it's too hard I will only say this, it's easy to be fat and out of shape, anybody can do that and you can see it everywhere, everyday. It's tough to stay in shape and make the right decisions about what to eat and how to take the best care of yourself. That's why it's so key to find something that you enjoy, keeps your mind from getting bored, and gets you awesome results. That's why what we're doing at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning works. The workouts are hard but fun, challenging and always different to keep the mind stimulated. They're short and intense and they get you in phenomenal shape.

We have a bunch of new exciting programs starting up in October, the Dynamic Performance program, the 90 Day Fitness Challenge, Combat Conditioning for combat athletes, and a program that Michele and I are very excited to be offering, "Boomers", that is targeted specifically at those 55 and older that are ready to commit to spending the rest of their lives in the best shape possible.

When I'm 100 I'm going to get up every morning and I'm going to be smiling. I'm going to make a decision every day about what I'm going to do with my time that day. I'm not going to have decisions made for me later in life because I made the wrong decisions earlier in my life...

All the best,

Kevin