Training Tip; Just Show Up

There's an old adage that eighty per cent of life is showing up. When I was younger, I would have said that eighty per cent of old adages are a load of crap, including that one. Or in my (self proclaimed) infinite wisdom, I would have suggested that the problem with our society is that there were too many people convinced that showing up was all that was necessary. But as I grudgingly enter “middle age”, that adage rings far more true than it did as a young man.

Life is busy. There's work. Family. The occasional night out with friends. More work. Learning how to hold a sword properly. Chores. Learning a second language. More work. Other kids. More chores. Baseball. More work. And oh yeah, no sleep. (That's why adults are always annoyed with energetic children. Hey, we'd be energetic too if we got eleven hours sleep every night and other people made our meals.) So with all that, hell yes, showing up matters. Whatever bruised, hungover, exhausted state we might get there, when you're older, getting there is a freaking win.

Next to a terrible diet, the inability to find time to work out regularly is the biggest obstacle for people who want to get in shape. They'll find one long window of time during the week, make the commitment, and have a great workout. They find another ninety minutes in their schedule six days later. Another great workout. And so it goes. Unfortunately, you won't make any progress that way. As a trainer, I feel my clients frustration. After seven or eight hours working with crazy loud Grade Sixes all day, my first inclination is not to go to the gym. (Usually, it runs something along the lines of wanting to pour myself a very strong drink, weep softly as I stare into nothingness and wonder why they insist on shouting ALL DAY.)

Even after twenty five years of working out, the only way I get there regularly now is to make a small promise to myself. I call it the Twenty Minute Rule.

It doesn't matter how I feel, or how much time I DON'T have, I can spare twenty minutes. Let's be honest, twenty minutes is a coffee break. It's a stop at the grocery store or a too long conversation with that guy at work who never stops talking about himself. We can all squeeze in twenty minutes. And we can do it three, four, or five days a week. As long as you get there, you'll see progress.

Two things to remember. One, twenty minutes IS enough. Don't start lengthening out your workouts and somehow change the promise. If you go one day for sixty minutes, you still owe twenty minutes the next day. You can't borrow time. Second, make it a hard twenty minutes. Don't stop, don't wait between exercises, and superset everything. Waiting around is boring, and you won't accomplish very much in twenty minutes if you only do seven or eight exercises.

It still surprises me when these old adages are true. Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I underestimated how busy life would be as an adult. Or maybe I've suffered minor brain injuries working with young people for nearly twenty years. Whatever the reason, getting to the gym after school for twenty minutes has helped keep me fit and (mostly) sane. I can't make any promises regarding your sanity, but you'll definitely feel better.

-Steve

Raptors - Nets Game 4 preview

Finally finished re-watching the tape last night. Here are my post game thoughts on the Raptors Game 3 in Brooklyn. (and my pre-game thoughts for tonight)

1) A word about the officiating. You can't enjoy the NBA if you can't grasp that it's radically different than the college game and the women's game (which is played below the rim). And it isn't officiated the same way. The athletes are too freakish, and there is a foul on every play. Better to get into your mind that you're watching a street game with a dad roughly making sure it doesn't turn into a brawl. That said, that last minute of the game is some of the worst officiating I've ever seen. Three (maybe four, if you count the one Lowry fouled out on) game changing calls. Without those calls, the Raptors win that game. Plain and simple. Before that, except for a brutal call on JV in the first quarter, the officiating was even. The last minute is inexcusable though, and it cost the Raps the game.

2) Patterson was a beast. Forget the missed free throws, as important as they were, he was the reason for the comeback. Next time, double P, just make the freebies!

3) I loved how the Nets attacked JV. Valanciunas is the biggest mismatch on the floor, no one on the Nets can guard him, especially not the remnants of KG. He gets almost no respect from the officials. On one free throw, Blatche literally threw him to ground. No call. If he gets into foul trouble, the other matchups all favour the Nets.

4) Except for Derozan. He had that horrible first game, but what you're seeing is an all star climbing the next rung to a superstar. the only thing holding him back is his defense, but at least he played with energy on both ends, especially in the second half. I like him in the high pick and roll, where the aggressive Nets perimeter defense can give him space once he beats it. He handled Livingston fairly easily.

5) Johnson is playing a hell of a series for the Nets. Damn, he shouldn't have been an all star this year, but you can see why he's been selected seven times. For a wing, he's huge, crafty and can shoot. Raptors haven't been able to stop him, and they probably won't for the rest of the series. Keep running him off the three point line and bodying him, hope he misses. They don't have anyone who can guard him.

6) The Raptors need more from Ross. They're essentially playing a man short. Broken record, but he's their only other wing shooter. Patterson bailed them out last game, but Salmons and Fields are a massive drop.

7) The rotations on defense got better as the game wore on, but that has to start and last all 48 minutes. It's about want. We saw it at the end of the fourth quarter. Need to see it in the first half.

8) How bad is Lowry hurt? He drives this team, and he's too hurt to be effective, particularly on their perimeter defense, Raps are in trouble. What a bulldog.

9)  Turnovers are an issue, and if they can just get to 13 or 14 they'll be fine. Still too many, but didn't think it was the key issue on Friday.

10) Just love watching this team, the way they never quit, the way they work. Love love the mental toughness. They've been disrespected by the league continually, and I'm desperately hoping they can at least make this a long series. That will garner some respect. Oh yeah, Raptor fans are the best in the league. What a crazy awesome sight in Raptors' Square.

Prediction: You have to take the game on the road. It won't be handed to you. So long as Lowry is okay, I think the Raptors win tonight 95 - 88. (If the Raptors lose, the series is over. They won't let that happen.) #wethenorth

In Search of Redemption... Brood X: A Review

I still remember my first love. She had blonde hair, blue eyes and a great smile. I had no idea why she was interested in me. I was a late bloomer, unable to form proper sentences around girls until my senior year in high school. That’s when I met Natalie, a sophomore from the French high school on the other side of town. We dated for three months, and I was convinced that our love would last forever. As with most high school love stories, ours ended badly. When she told me that she’d met someone else, I acted with as much class as I could and wished her well. I cried for days, completely and utterly devastated. Even now, twenty four years later, I still recall those heady moments of first love, the utter absorption of it, the dominating urge to be with her every waking moment. Dan Stockman’s debut novel, Brood X, not only reminded me of what that first love felt like, it drew me back to that time. Back to the times with Natalie at the YMCA and at the drive-in. At my parents’ house and my room in the basement and the hours spent on the phone.

As Brood X opens, we’re introduced to Andy Gardner, a thirty four year old manager in a cabinet making company going nowhere. He hates his life and broods often about his failed marriage, his lame house, his rundown car. If there’s a suburban hell for a divorced single man, Andy has found it. Worse, he’s aware of his failings to the point that he’s not sure why he bothers to get up in the morning. When Scarlett, the pretty single mother from next door comes knocking, he cannot fathom why she’d be interested in him. He surprises himself by not pushing her away, by revealing life and humour, two things he was certain he’d lost.

As their relationship grows, however, he begins to dwell on the most impactful relationship of his life, his summer romance as a seventeen year old with Ashley. They’d been perfect together, in love in the way we are at that age without complications or hang ups or baggage. But she’d disappeared, moved away on the last day of that fateful summer without a word, as if she’d never existed. It had changed him in a way he didn’t understand, had driven him to decisions he’d made later, decisions he’d always regretted.

Andy is certain that if his relationship with Scarlett is going to survive, he must find out what happened. Why had Ashley left so abruptly? Where had she gone? And where was she now? He sets out to find her, knowing that his future depends on this, everything from his relationship with Scarlett to the man he wants to become. He has been given a second chance to rediscover his first love. If he can just make the past right, or at least, make sense of it, perhaps he can figure out his purpose and start over.  

Of all the things that Stockman does well in Brood X, perhaps what he does best is his evocation of young love. There are moments, particularly in the scenes with Ashley and Andy, that you feel their craving for one another, their desperately joyous need for each other, their certainty within the moment. I’ve yet to read another novel that has brought me so forcefully back to my own past, to my days as an awkward teenager when that certainty was needed to overcome my lack of experience and knowledge about the world and the crashing waves of possibilities that threatened to drown me with every choice.

Good storytelling takes us away, allows us to go someplace and visit new people in different places. Allows us to be someone else for a while. Great storytelling provides an escape as well, but also takes us back or drives us forward. Great storytelling not only tells us a new story, but somehow merges it with our own so that when we’re finished, we’re no longer quite the same. That character’s story becomes part of our story. It is in this mingling that great fiction reveals its power.

Stockman, an award winning journalist, hooks you with Andy’s journey, and what starts slowly as a hissing, clattering train, picks up momentum until you’re screeching past the grassy fields in a locomotive, whistling for everything to get out of the way until the end arrives, squealing and gasping, hoping for a moment that everyone will just be quiet so you can catch your breath. And in the quiet after, when your breathing has returned to normal, you’re taken through Andy’s journey again, only this time you are able to move slowly. Contemplatively. Watching for the sights and sounds that are both new and old. This time you can smile at the faded memories, or dwell on the receding sadness of those days.

As much as I loved Brood X, it does have its faults. The chapter spent from the perspective of the cicadas doesn’t work, and while I appreciated what the author was trying to do, it comes too late in the book and feels unnecessary. There are prose issues in the first few chapters, sentences that don’t work or needed another pass, and the dialogue falls flat at times, particularly within the first half of the novel. This is not a literary work of beautiful grammarian construction, though it does have a few stunning moments of lyricism that suggest this is an issue of time, rather than ability.

In the end, however, the criticisms are quibbles. This is an astonishing debut. Somewhere in its juxtaposition of accessibility, excellent storytelling and poignancy, Brood X shakes us with surprising power. That moment we all feel when we have witnessed a great story, when we wish only to sit and reflect for a while. Think about who we are and how we got here. Think about the future and where we’re headed. And when the journey is complete, we know, as Andy does, that everything will be different when we reach the end.

****(Out of five) 

Highly recommended.

Steve 

The Benefit of Trying

           

            “I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”

            The class was loud. Thirty two students jammed into a tiny room, the space between desks so narrow that winding your way through them often felt like you were navigating an obstacle course. I patted Michael on the shoulder and repeated what I said at least once a day at school. “I know. Just do your best, okay?”

            I was chatting with my wife later that night, and reflecting why there were so many things we told kids that we didn’t tell each other as adults. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had told me to just “do my best.” Oh, we offered encouragement sometimes, usually phrasing it in an “adult” manner, like the suggestion we “pursue excellence.” And jobs required results, didn’t they? It didn’t matter if a person was allegedly ‘doing their best.’ If they couldn’t cut it, then changes needed to be made.

The more I thought about it though, the less sense it made. Most of us had jobs that were somewhat protected. As a self-employed youth worker with no benefits, and before that, a self-employed trainer, I was one of the few working in an environment with almost no protection. No union to cover for my mistakes, no recourse if someone fired me. And yet, my chances of getting fired were still slim. And if that was the case, why didn’t we encourage each other more often by telling people – our friends, our employees, our co-workers, our family – that all they needed to do was put forth their best effort. That it was enough.

            Aside from it sounding like something we say to kids – and heaven forbid we sound “childish” – it seemed to me that people felt adults needed to be motivated differently than children. That they needed to be prodded and measured and disciplined without needing simple reassurances. That applying childish axioms was just that, childish.

            And yet, in repeating this simple idea to the kids over the past year, lately I started repeating it to someone else. Me.

            Did I do my best today?

            Yes.

            Am I getting better?

            Yes! Today I learned something new, something I’d never seen before in my writing.

            You did well.

For me, the last five years had been challenging. Writing a book and sending it out, only to see it rejected over and over and then willing myself to get up the next morning and keep going even as my dream slipped further into the Netherland of nothingness. At the best of times it was a psychological slog, a long distance race without a finish line. It was the life most artists faced, one we chose (and in some ways, had chosen for us), and one we did not regret. And yet, when faced by this profound and utterly simple idea, I found strength gathering within me, settling over my shoulders like a cloak of warmth.

           

            The Takeaway

             

You don’t need to give more than you can.

You don’t need to carry more than you’re able.

You don’t need to bear a weight greater than your own. 

            Of all the things we forget as we get older, perhaps the most prevalent is our understanding of “getting better.” Or perhaps I should say, our LACK of understanding. We speak often of attaining things, like a new car or a new house. Or, we speak of possible achievements: a promotion at work, a gallery showing, writing a best seller. And in so doing, we forget about the simple beauty of improvement. Of doing our job more efficiently, regardless of who notices. Or learning more about our loved ones so we can be a better dad or a better friend. Why is it that society tells us to measure our life by achievement and accumulation when we tell our children to measure their success by their effort?

            Perhaps it’s time for us to do the same. This week, take a look at the areas in your life you find most frustrating, whether it’s your job or a relationship or something else. Ask yourself this question: am I doing the best I can? Forget the past. Forget the mistakes we all make in our lives. Just be honest with yourself.

            Am I doing all I can do at work?

            Do my kids get my best effort?

            Is my wife getting all I can give her?

            I say I want to be a writer. Am I doing everything I can to make it?

            If the answer is yes, then take a few minutes to congratulate yourself. Buy yourself a treat. Take yourself shopping or something else that you would consider a reward. Be aware of your effort, and notice how different the world seems when we recognize our humanity. When we acknowledge that there is only so much we can do. How much brighter the days are when we don’t spoil this beautiful life with unattainable expectations. 

            You did your best, now celebrate. It’s time for recess.

            -Steve