Fitness

A Finnish friend of mine (also paleo) recently told me about a new workout he's been doing.  He shoulders his wife using a fireman's carry, and then does squats.  No joke.  Works his strength and balance, and her abs too.  

Apparently, there is a whole sport around "wife carrying" in Scandinavia.  Seems to have begun as a joke in Finland, mimicking some past time when men ran off with women.  Here's a Village Voice article that describes wife carrying as what cave people used to do, but the much more recent Vikings were probably much better at it.  (Practice makes perfect.)  Regardless, what began as a joke now has national and international competitions.  Still small, but growing.  My buddy and his wife want to compete.

There are different types of carries: the fireman's carry, piggyback, or Estonian-style: "the wife hangs upside-down with her legs around the husband's shoulders, holding onto his waist."  See the picture.  Pretty awesome.

Check out the rules at Wikipedia.  Here are two I like:

• The track has two dry obstacles and a water obstacle, about one meter deep.

Kind of like a mini Tough Mudder, but for couples.

• The wife to be carried may be your own, the neighbor's, or you may have found her further afield; she must, however, be over 17 years of age.

Now really.  There should be a prize for couples that are, in fact, married.  And just like you have age/gender groups in road races, you could have anniversary tiers.  You compete against other couples that have been married for 5-10 years, 10-20 years, 20-30 years, and so on.

Because don't forget the most important thing that wife carrying strengthens: your marriage.

Ever notice that it's nearly impossible to sprint at max speed on a treadmill?

This week I wrote about how refrigerator design reflects (and influences) what we eat.  Well, so too with our gyms.  The rows and rows of treadmills and ellipticals are a sign of our chronic cardio habit -- and the treadmill itself reinforces the habit by making it hard to do anything other than jog in a straight line at a moderate pace.  Spend too many years in a gym and you almost forget that sprinting is even an option.

I actually sprint on a treadmill sometimes.  Other people in the gym get nervous because nobody ever sprints on a treadmill.  There must be rules against such a thing!  They get worried that I'll wipe out.  And I do hold back just a little, just in case I don't find the Stop button on the first try.  (But only a little.)

Probably better to just go to the park and do some sprints.  Of course, I rather enjoy blasting the zombie joggers out of their treadmill stupor.

Ultra-marathoner and vegan Scott Jurek was recently profiled in the NYT.   For those who aren't familiar with Jurek, he's a crazy sick ultra-marathoner who dominates many of these 50 mile, 100 mile, 100+ mile races.  The piece is unique in that it ignores the ethical aspects of veganism and just talks about athletic performance.  Let's see what they have to say.

In college, his diet began to improve, and as he “saw how much disease is lifestyle related,” he began eating “real food, eating the way people have been eating for thousands of years.”

I'm all for real food, but claims to history in favor of real food is not an argument in favor of veganism.

“None of this is weird,” he said. “If you go back 300 or 400 years, meat was reserved for special occasions, and those people were working hard. 

Go back 300 or 400 years?  The 18th century is the benchmark of healthy eating?  To the extent people ate less meat back then it was because they were poor.

"Remember, almost every long-distance runner turns into a vegan while they’re racing, anyway — you can’t digest fat or protein very well.”

There are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't know where to start.

• You can get fat or protein from plant sources, so that's just a non-sequitur.
• Just because you're eating carbohydrates while you're running doesn't mean that you're a vegan.   It means you're momentarily a vegetarian, I suppose.
• And even that assumes that you body isn't using it's own fat or protein stores.  That's kind of like eating an animal.
• Also, most of these distance racers are eating heavily processed energy gels and bars -- not "real food", much less vegan food.

All it takes is one look at a long-distance runner's body to see that they have little muscle mass and they're all skin and bones.  Hence my choice of picture.

He said he needed 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day, “and I get that all from plant sources. It’s not hard, either. I like to eat, and I don’t have to worry about weight management. All I need is a high-carbohydrate diet with enough protein and fat.”

My emphasis.  If you're eating 8,000 calories a day, good luck getting it from fat and protein -- you'll be too full.  Interesting...to maximize caloric intake, eat a high-carbohydrate diet.  Wait, isn't that what we're told to do to minimize caloric intake too?  Which is it?

I'm not saying that Scott Jurek is eating the wrong way -- God, no.  He's a super-star athlete, his achievements are mind-blowing, and if he says a vegan diet helps him achieve that, then I'm not going to suggest otherwise.  By eating a high carbohydrate diet, he's training his body to use carbohydrate as fuel, which is probably essential for his type of long-distance exertions.

But should we eat like Michael Phelps, with his 12,000 calories a day of chocolate-chip pancakes, energy drinks, and pizza?  No.  And we shouldn't eat like Scott Jurek either.

#1:  This was a fun wooden hurdle near the end of the race.  Most racers were physically capable of vaulting the hurdle going at a decent clip, but many didn't.  They pretty much came to a stop and climbed over.  Why?  Because they never actually move this way at the gym, and so lacked the confidence to pull off an easy maneuver over a relatively low barrier.  This was Day One basics at one of Erwan Le Corre's MovNat clinics -- remembering that you have a body and that it moves in ways other than jogging, push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups.

#2:  Notice my bare feet with Vibrams in hand.  Focused on my landing.

#3:  Off to the races.  But notice anything funny?  Look closely.

The guy in black is only just landing!   He was ahead of me before the obstacle.  If you look at the first picture I'm only slightly ahead of him, but by the last picture, he hasn't even landed yet.   And he looks totally off balance and unsure of himself.  He looks trim and fairly muscular, but he's thrown off by an obstacle he's never encountered in the gym.

I work out at a gym too.  There is a railing that separates the stretching mats from the machines, and I sometimes use it to vault over.  Back and forth, back and forth.  You can find ways to move even in a gym. You'll get looks, but hey, that's half the fun.

(Thanks to Lisa for the screen grabs from her filming.)