While watching an Animal Planet program about the impact of island ecology and evolution, we learned about a colony of pygmy sloths that lives on an island no larger than Central Park in New York. Somehow the population of sloths that reside there has managed to survive because the vegetation suits their need for food and shelter
There’s just one problem. The island habitat actually consists of a series of islands. That means when it comes time to find a mate and breed, male pygmy sloths must migrate between mini-islands formed by mangrove trees. Which means they have to swim.
As we all know, sloths are known to take life pretty slow. They move about the trees so little that moss literally grows on their back. This actually helps camouflage them in the jungle, and that’s probably a mark of beauty among sloths.
When a male sloth desires the company of a female on another island, they must crawl down the trees and clamber over mangrove limbs to dunk themselves in the water and swim through ocean waters to another island. It’s all about breeding, you see.
Highly motivated to go below
That is called motivation, you see. There are actually all kinds and types of motivations in this world, but the urge to mate is one of the strongest of all. Thus despite the fact that sloths are built to climb trees with long hooked claws at the end of their toes, they can also use them to swim. That’s what happens when hormones take over and the males venture into the water to cross the gap between islands and find themselves some lady sloth. Because in the end, that’s what life’s about.
So for several reasons I feel a strange kinship with the sloth in this video. It will swim for its life to have sex and it also does a pretty good imitation of the way I probably looked when I first took to the pool for the first few weeks. My arms went far too deep in the water to generate much speed. And until I learned better how to breathe, I kept popping my head out of the water while sucking air. I swam like a sloth.
Swim analysis
Over the period of a couple years, I have grown less slothlike in my approach to swimming. This Thursday I’m going to have a video swim analysis done, and I hope like hell it does not much resemble this video of the sloth paddling its way toward sloth Nirvana and a chance to mate with a lady sloth.
We can only imagine what the mating ritual and conjugal act between two sloths must involve. Seems like that all probably happens in slow motion as well. And having a really mossy back is likely considered hot stuff in the sloth world. The slower you go, the more you know, they always say.
In any case, I admire the sloth in the video for getting its swim on. Nothing like having to engage in a new activity to generate personal growth. And more’s the better if it helps you grow a little more moss on your back.
While writing an email to my two children this morning I mentioned how weird it feels to be sixty-one years old. The best analogy I could create was that being sixty-plus is like being a on a long train that is still moving. You can walk back the line of cars to encounter the experiences, memories and friends you’ve made in life, but all the while, you need to remember that the train is still moving.
Some people seem to think it’s possible or wise to park themselves in one car of the train and stay there the rest of their life’s journey. They might fix themselves in 80s music, or some other era, and never change their tastes again.
That’s not how I like to live. While I appreciate how creative and great the artists from Classic Rock truly were, I think it’s inane to turn off the brain to any other kind of music. I try to listen to new stuff all the time, but then Sirius XM stole their best channel for new music, The Loft, and I’ve been reduced to mining the occasional new tune from The Spectrum.
Yet the Classic Rock and Deep Tracks and Classic Rewind stations are all pumping along unquestioned. They must have solid audiences while The Loft, for all its creative energy and eclectic playlist, has been rendered to the dustbin, replaced by single-artist dedication playlists and hosts such as Billy Joel, the Eagles and the like.
It all strikes me as ironic and inevitable at the same time, like the lyrics of Jackson Browne who wrote,
“Make room for my 45s alongside your 78, nothing survives but the way we live our lives…”
Of course, as I write this, the song Good Vibrations in playing over the sound system at the diner called Daddio’s that I frequent one a week or so for lunch. The place is decorated with genuine nostalgia articles from the 60s -80s mostly, with a few chunks of the 50s as well.
Now the song God Only Knows is being sung by Carl Wilson, that Beach Boy with the amazingly clear voice. David Bowie later covered that song in credible fashion, but nothing can touch the Carl version for purity and inspiration.
These songs all fit somewhere in the train of my life. They also often remind me of the things I was doing all those years. If I park myself in the train of the 1970s it brings up a filmstrip of those early years of running cross country and track. Between the running and the music and the girls and birds with whom I was alternately obsessed, there was very little room for absorbing things such as algebra. So I didn’t. And nearly failed the class.
Now that I look back at my life from the ripe age of 61 years old, I’m actually rather proud of that failure in math class. I’m also proud of the stubborn unwillingness to participate in the reading competition where our paper boats moved around the perimeter of the room for every book we read in the SRA program. For some reason at the tender age of seven years old I decided “fuck that” and stopped reading.
That was likely my first DNF in a competition of any sort, but when my mother showed up to consult with the teacher about my lack of progress they both asked why I’d stopped reading. I pointed to the boats of my classmates on the opposite side of the room and told my teacher and mom, “I’m waiting for them to come around to me, then I’ll start again.” What a smart little fucker I could be in a pinch.
I also recall the day that a junior high gym teacher tried to punish me for not wanting to play badminton. “Okay, you can run the whole hour instead,” he threatened. “Good. I’ll do that,” I spit back. And thus, for two weeks straight, I showed up for gym class and ran the whole damned hour. And loved it. The freedom to think and to hurt felt good.
Perhaps these were not signs of a well-adjusted child. Surely there were some attention deficit issues going on, but also some defiance of authority.
As I’ve learned over the years, I was not alone in my inattention to standard classroom fare. Many’s the artist and free thinker that was bored out of their minds by schooling. Certainly, John Lennon ditched a few classes and in some ways, I was as angrily distracted in my life.
Yet by the time he reached forty years old, Lennon was wising up and changing as a person. Then some nutcase jealous of his fame shot him in the head. To me, that’s proof that the supposedly sane world is crazier than any angst I could throw at it. To some, having the right and tools to kill at will is far more important than a well-regulated society. Nutso.
Probably if I’d been thrown in the military in the late 1970s all that obstinant attitude would have been beaten out of me. But then again, I think not. Watch the movie The Thin Red Line. I think I’d have been a lot more like the central character in that movie. Keep your consideration until the enemy surrounds you. Shoot when you must. Then go down in a hail of bullets because your trying to help someone else survive. And what’s the real loss?
Instead of the military, I chose to keep on running, and took that on as disciplined as a goddamn grunt on the war front. That’s how I fought my way through the rolling train and foxholes of my own naivete. We all fight our wars in different ways, and the long train of life keeps on rolling.
Now I stand near the front of life’s long train and think back to all those moments and laugh a little. It is indeed a long train home when you think about it.
Learning to choose your own goals and stick to them is key to becoming a grown-ass athlete.
In one of those social waves that seem to wash over culture now and then, I’ve been hearing the term “grown-ass” thrown around quite a bit lately. Radio talk show hosts are using the term ‘grown-ass’ to describe all sorts of activities where people are either coming of age, or are expected to.
Some of this grown-ass talk is the product of the general frustration with modern life. Thus the term grown-ass seems to mean several things. A person is said to be ‘grown-ass’ in having gone through a few things in life–– and learned from them. It is also ‘grown-ass’ in some respects to be impatient with those who don’t understand what it actually means to become a grown-ass person and deal with some of the crap life throws at you.
Thus the term grown-ass can be used as either a compliment or an insult. It all depends on context.
This teaches us that the process of becoming a grown-ass athlete typically involves both compliments and insults. Once upon a time as a college distance runner, I’d taken to complaining during our winter base training because the pace was way too fast most days. Finally, my roommate turned to me one day in our dorm room and said, without apology, “You know what you need to do, Cud? You need to shut up and run.”
To some degree, he was right about that. My complaining wasn’t really doing much to help the situation improve. So I sucked it up that winter and that spring set all my PRs from 1500 meters to 5000 with the steeplechase in between. I’d gotten my grown-ass attitude in shape.
Yet the very next year my next roommate anticipated the likely madness of winter training. He pulled me aside and said, “We’re not gonna do that. We’ll do base training the way it should be done.” So we trained steady and slow most days, carefully and concertedly building up our base. That winter and spring we both set PRs at all those distances and more. That was some grown-ass decision-making on both our part. Because while I wasn’t grown-ass in the way I complained about the previous year’s egregiously fast training, it was ultimately a grown-ass decision to go it on our own and do it the right way the next time around.
Being a grow-ass athlete means knowing your goals in every situation. Not always easy
That brand of self-confidence proves the value of building grown-ass behavior from mistakes. What you must (most) understand is that many people actually hate the voice and perspectives of people behaving in grown-ass ways. We all know how the subtle politics of group rides or runs can turn into childish one-upsmanship. Some of that is the nature of competition, and people are morbidly afraid of admitting they don’t want to compete every second of their lives. Thus it can take honest and open group discussion to fix what’s broken in terms of communications and the accepted objectives of a group. But if some jerk is one-wheeling or one-stepping the group every week, it pays to speak up. Don’t let one asshole ruin the benefits for everyone.
Instead, a grown-ass leader will find ways to initiate conversations about goals rather than blasting away without engaging the brain week after week. But remember this as well: getting dropped now and then is not necessarily a sign of weakness but of the courage to try. Riding, running and swimming with people better than you is the grown-ass way to improve. And you will eventually get dropped. Dial in and do your best the rest of the way home. Don’t go Dead Frog on yourself. There are still things to be gained while riding on your own.
Also, getting dropped now and then is part of the grown-ass deal of hard training.
To whit: Because athletes can lose perspective so easily, it’s the grown-ass job of every coach to monitor their athlete’s behavior as well as their training.
Everyone wants to be their best and getting there is a great reward and a genuine ego boost. But if ego gets in the way of those achievements, and if an athlete can’t accept the grown ass direction to avoid injury, getting sick or worse, blowing off training day after day and then bitching about why they aren’t improving, then the coach has to kick some grown-ass butt.
Competition brings out the best in all of us. Being out of competition due to injury can bring out the worst in us. Working out a grown-ass plan for return is key to recovery.
Words of wisdom: If indeed you do get injured, it is the grown-ass athlete who learns how to come back from that injury. This must be done under the guidance of good advice. Some of that advice will be medical and some of it must be practical. Trying to come back too fast can result in relapse or re-injury. That definitely is not a grown-ass way to go about things.
In fact, you’re probably not capable of becoming a grown-ass athlete UNTIL you’ve been injured, overtrained to the point of getting sick or failed in some big event. Those are some grown-ass experiences right there. Embrace them. Learn from them. It’s the grown-ass thing to do.
And to be clear, every athlete has the responsibility to respond to the directions of a coach in a grown-ass way. That’s not always easy when life gets in the way. But rather than hide a missed workout or two, hoping the coach doesn’t notice, it is a far more grown-ass approach to own life’s vagaries and admit, “I just couldn’t help it.” No sane coach will blame you for that. Instead, athlete and coach work together to find fitness that works.
Overtraining is perhaps the world’s greatest teacher, if not the best way to learn.
Because frankly, most serious endurance athletes walk around this world a little overtrained and a bit overwrought anyway. Many’s the elite athlete that looks back at their early career and admits, “I could have used a little more rest.”
That’s a grown-ass admission that only comes about through experience. So now that you’ve got some grown-ass perspective you can go out there and do some grown-ass training and racing. You’re certainly wise enough to know the difference if you let motivation and common sense be your balance. You just have to listen to that grown-ass voice in your head more often. And get to it.
The first time I was a full-on commuter to the City of Chicago I was just twenty-one years old. I was also naive and a bit frightened to be working downtown. Our family had not made many journeys from the far suburbs to the City of Chicago during my teen years. Just some trips in the company of family to the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium.
So commuting was different. I was on my own. Traveling on the Metra east to Chicago took us through increasingly urban areas. It was like rolling through a core sample of compressed life. The closer one got to the city, the rougher it tended to look. I seriously tucked my wallet down the front of my pants the first time I rode in on the train. It was uncomfortable, but I didn’t know if I’d get robbed.
I should have known better really. After all, I’d traveled in and out of Chicago, even to the inner city housing projects in my prior job as an admissions counselor for my alma mater, Luther College. We recruited young people from all over the city. Some had never been out to Iowa before. It scared them to think of making that change. That goes to show that what we fear is truly relative to our existence.
Which made today’s Metra train ride that much more interesting for me today. The early 1980s are now a long time ago. I clearly recall how bummed out (back then) I felt that commuting took so much time out of my day. There were times when I lamented my entire existence because there did not seem to be enough time to get my daily run done.
I had my own place by then, renting a coach house where my party friends liked to come drink. Some went out to smoke pot out in the alley. We’d stay out too late and I’d get up too early to run the next morning and be so tired riding the train into the city that I’d fall asleep on my own coat.
That was the plan in those days. Burn the damned candle at both ends until it couldn’t burn anymore. Then we’d get sick, spend two weeks recovering from a cold (or worse) and start the whole cycle over again. We were stupid, horny kids with too much energy and not enough time.
I commuted full time again in the late 1990s working for an interim staffing firm that had promised me they’d train me for two weeks at the office in the Hancock building and then I’d be able to work out of my home and only visit the office once a week to enter my calls and such. But those promises never came true and I wound up having to commute almost every day to the office. It took two hours one way, in and out by car and train. The company never did get its external email and database system set up and that meant I had to leave by 5:45 in the morning and didn’t get home until 6:30-7:30 at night. I toughed it out until the company saw the foolishness of its own ways and the whole thing fell through.
I was miserable up until the moment they let me go. I recall sitting out on the short cement walls facing north toward Oak Street Beach on Michigan Avenue. I was just crying my eyes out, wondering why the break I’d so eagerly hoped for had fallen through. It had all sounded so good at the start. If it had worked out like they promised, I would have been making calls in the suburbs and could have gotten up each day to run before work. That always set my head straight and helped me overcome my anxious nature, especially in the face of sales pressures.
Before it all ended I got a stress headache so bad the vision in my one eye shut down. Optical migraine, the doctor told me. Stress induced. I sat there thinking that my world had come to an end.
Of course it hadn’t. Not long after leaving that job I landed a better position with a newspaper and loved my work. I commuted by car those seven years and didn’t really miss the City of Chicago all that much. I’d come to appreciate that the world actually doesn’t revolve around those people in the city. And while they liked to pretend they knew more than the rest of us, I’d seen behind the scenes enough to know that wasn’t true. To some degree, everyone in this goddamned world is faking it one way or another.
I suppose as we age our worlds tend to close in a little on us. Some people get fearful (again) of things like trips to the “big city.” Today’s commute downtown to a real estate conference and back mostly made me realize how many naive notions and bad self-perceptions I’ve (had to) overcome through the years. One important thing still remains the same. I still like to get home and run or ride or swim.
So I visited the pool after work and plunged into the water with images of the City of Chicago still rattling through my brain. It’s funny what we carry around inside these noggins sometimes, and for how long.
For our Sunday morning run, we traveled over to a facility called The Labs where a bunch of our friends meets each week to train. Some of them are former teammates from triathlon clubs to which we no longer belong. Others we knew from Master’s Swim and cycling rides. But those weren’t the reason why we joined the Sunday morning six-miler. We simply wanted to run with others.
The six-mile out and back loop was all on sidewalks and trails. The pack sorted itself out into pace groups of one form or another. The leader of the group, Mike Behr, ran back and forth between pods of people checking to make sure everyone was doing just fine.
Along the way, Sue and I partnered up with a runner named Penoi, a mechanical engineer whose mission is to run marathons in all fifty states. He’s only got ten to go, he informed us. As we ran, he related that he does most of his training alone. We compared and shared locations where he might like to train, especially the trails along the Fox River where we often run. “Are there water fountains?” he wanted to know. We assured him there are.
“This is my first time running with a group,” he told us. That made me snap to attention. It’s hard for me to imagine a running career without ever having run with others. How does that even happen?
I thought back to all those miles run with teammates through high school and college. I even joined and trained with teams well after college. Sure, I did plenty of training on my own as well. But the benefit of running in the company of others I always took for granted. It was part of the gig.
Penoi seemed glad for the company in any case. We talked and joked about the vagaries of running. He related that he has trouble keeping his hands from getting too cold while training in the winter. He hails from India where the weather was typically hot, yet here in the Midwest he trains with no hat and was not wearing running pants or tights on the thirty-one degree morning on which we ran together. But he was wearing gloves.
I suggested that rather than wear gloves, he should get himself a set of running mittens. “That way you can curl your hands up inside, like this,” I showed him by pulling my hand out of a glove to make a fist. “It can really help to warm your fingers.”
A few years a go after surgery on my middle finger, that digit had poor circulation and would turn ghostly white during cold runs. I had to do a ton of maintenance to keep the finger warm enough for safe travels. I also related to Penoi that back in college a teammate once had to run with his hand stuffed down the front of his pants to keep his crotch warm because he’d worn cotton shorts underneath cotton sweats on a day where the temps dropped below zero.
We chuckled =about that, and cruised along just under 10:00 pace. That’s what Sue and I typically run together, and I’m happy with that. On harder days I’ll drop down to seven or eight-minute pace for speed. And if I’m really gassing it on the indoor track, I run intervals in the six-minute range.
While out with a running gang I don’t really think about any of that these days. I’m content to run with whoever fits the pace of the day. My era of leading the pack is long gone.
After the run we all laid around stretching and rolling out the kinks back. The guy next to me was groaning and grimacing as the black foam roller did its nasty work on a tight hip. The gals leaned into the same task, often lying on top of the foam rollers face-to-face with each other. They looked like they were flying over the floor as they talked about what the world has to offer.
I walked over to lie down with Bailey, the dog of a friend who ran the six miles with us. He was at the end of his leash the whole run, a short-legged wonder with big soft ears and a sweet heart to boot. We were running in good company all around. Even the dog knew it.
Sue and I will be going back every couple weeks. There is something good about running in the company of others. The loneliness of the long-distance runner has its purpose, but the good company of others sustains us through many thoughts and journeys.
Watching running videos on YouTube can be a great source of inspiration and motivation. It can also be quite instructive.
Recently I watched a video celebrating a world-class steeplechaser named Conseslus Kipruto. Like many African distance running athletes, he seems to run without fear of limits.
As I was watching this video, I noticed that his form over both the regular hurdles and steeple pit. The barriers on the track each stand 42″ high. So does the steeplechase pit, which starts at a depth of 2.5 feet below the hurdle to a zero depth one foot before the end of the inclined “pit” which is actually a big triangle filled with water.
Conseslus doesn’t really hurdle the barriers. He jumps over them with both legs lifted to one side. Absolutely no one jumped barriers like this forty years ago. We all hurdled in “traditional” fashion with a lead leg followed by a trail leg. Only once in my four years of doing steeple did I drag that leg enough to strike the 4″ X 4″ wooden barrier. Let me tell you, that is something you remember not to do again. It hurts.
I had what most considered fairly elegant form coming over the steeple pit. One of our college track coaches said that I did the water jump better than anyone he’d ever seen. Some of that came from my experience in playing other sports. I had excellent coordination and balance, and I’d even practiced fast-paced hurdling by racing the 400 meter intermediate hurdles. That’s a very tough race to do, running all out for 400 meters and jumping 13 hurdles along the way. Talk about anaerobic debt!
So I studied how other hurdlers did their work, and sometime during college a guy named Randy Johnson (I think) from Wisconsin started hurdling the water barrier rather than stepping on it and jumping off like the rest of us.
It didn’t catch on back then. We all figured you had to be world-class to pull off a stunt like that. Plus what were the benefits of getting even wetter by landing deeper in the pit? With my triple-jumping ability (I went 40’4″ in high school) I could often jump completely over the water and keep both feet dry. Over 7 3/4 laps, that could really help not being soaked on one or both feet.
And yet, among the African distance runners I’ve watched now, many of them side-swing their legs over the hurdles and flat-out hurdle the water barrier. They’re the fastest athletes in the world with the exception of individuals such as Evan Jagr, the American steeplechaser. So who’s to argue with their technique?
What this tells us, and what it can inform you in all your pursuits, is that conventional methods are not always right. I well recall the revolution that occurred when high jumper Dick Fosbury invented the method called the Flop, and everyone in the world now uses that technique for high jumping, whose record now stands over eight feet.
Which means that some of the things you might be doing “right” these days in swimming, cycling or running might not be as efficient or smart as you think. Certainly swimming strokes have evolved over the last forty years. Cycling techniques have as well, with high cadence cyclists such as Lance Armstrong and Chris Froome winning major tours against “power” cyclists who might be faster in some respects, but whose endurance ultimately wears out.
As for running form, the basic biomechanics of the mid-foot or forefoot strike are preached as vital to greater speed for many in the distance world. And yet watch a major marathon and there are African runners clearly heel-striking while tearing along at sub 4:40 pace for 26 miles.
That’s what you can learn from people who don’t let convention confine them to a certain way of doing things. It pays to experiment and to challenge your perceptions by watching a wide spectrum of athletes in all the disciplines. Many personalize their approach in order to maximize their performance. That’s the lesson we can all afford to learn.
My wife turned to me this morning and said, “The new Muslim Congresswoman is being sworn in with a Quran.”
Makes total sense of course. We all want to abide in our respective faith traditions.
Yet we also know that the presence of the Quran in an official swearing-in ceremony probably makes some politicians crazy with religious fervor knowing someone isn’t vowing loyalty using the book of their god. But you know, three of the most common faiths in this world actually share quite a bit of history, at least in terms of the archetypal characters they admire, such as Abraham and Moses.
This means we all need to consider the commonalities between our respective belief systems rather than using selected passages from one scripture over another to declare absolute providence.
But what if, in order to compete in triathlon, you had to actually be sworn in to get your USAT license? You could certainly choose a Bible or a Quran to do the deed.
But you could also be a lot more creative. So here’s a few suggestions and reasons why these books might work quite well as texts on which to swear your fidelity to the sport and the cause:
No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre. This novel addresses themes of existentialism. The plot centers around a room with three people inside, and for all of eternity, in alternative fashion, two of the people in the room do not get along with the third. This often holds true for the three disciplines included in our sport as well. Why can’t they all just get along? No Exit maintains: Hell is other people. Triathlon maintains: Hell is at least one of the three sports.
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. This classic Beat Generation book chronicles the travels and travails of a road wanderer searching for meaning in life, but also some fun. That sounds enough like triathlon, does it not?
The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda. For those who like a little transcendental mysticism in their pursuits, the entire series of books by Castaneda challenges every perception of reality you’ve ever had. Reading the books in order dissolves what you consider “normal” about life and makes you wonder if you can actually fly…If you put your mind to it. Perfect for those who want to live outside the pain and reach another level of performance.
The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker. This book is written in a first-person narrative in which a solo naturalist follows and studies the lives of peregrine falcons on the far reaches of England’s loneliest coastlines. The descriptions of raptors taking their prey in thrilling stoops will make your heart pound. Yet there are quiet moments of consideration as the peregrine dines on its feathered meals. Perfect reading while lying on the couch in recovery.
The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson. This book came out during the height of the big running boom in the early 1980s. Thompson was sent by Rolling Stone magazine to cover the Honolulu Marathon. He discovered a culture more obsessive and manic than the worlds of drug users, Hell’s Angels and politics he covered in his Gonzo Journalism personas. No matter how crazed you think you are about your sport, this book will make you feel positively normal. We all need that from time to time.
Hunter S. Thompson’s manic classic starts with the Honolulu Marathon
And there you have it. A Starter’s Guide for books on which to place your hand and make your oath to succeed in the sport of triathlon.
You’ll notice there aren’t actually any books about triathletes, or triathlons, in this mix. That’s because I don’t believe in literalism for inspiration. Those gripping life stories about triathletes who went from being low-paid dishwashers to winning Kona may seem inspirational, but they’re actually depressing. Who wants to compare themselves with that?
Thus it’s far better to disassociate through crazed books of fiction than associate and grow weary reading non-fiction accounts of people so much better than you are. Because if you’re going to swear you existence to anything, don’t let it be someone else’s life. They’re way more weird and obsessive than you could ever imagine.
My father (foreground, in wheelchair) and our family members.
As a young athlete I was typically motivated by two strong emotions: anger and the need for approval. If those seem contrary, you’re correct about that. I was angry at the world for its injustices and at the same time craving attention and satisfaction from the compliments of others.
In a classic case of nature vs. nurture, this internal conflict was due in part to my anxious character. Some of it was also due to contrary aspects of my upbringing. But in any case, it was a long and often furious engagement trying to prove myself to others, and to myself.
In some ways, that inner conflict worked to my advantage. As a competitive person, I used that inner turmoil to drive my athletic pursuits. That produced success to the level of my natural ability. I can honestly say that during the peak years of my youth from age 13 through the age of 28, I trained as hard as I could and raced as fast as I could. I have no regrets. Looking back at training journals from those years, there weren’t many places where I slacked off. If anything, I overtrained and raced too much at times.
Painting titled Transformation by Christopher Cudworth
By the time I got married and we had our first child, it dawned on me that perhaps my formula for success was a bit out of balance. That combination of using anger as a motivator and having the need for approval was not especially constructive in the work world. For one thing, anger has no place in professional life. Yet neither does the need for constant approval. People just don’t have time for that. “Do your job,” is more often what managers and executives will tell you. “That should be satisfaction enough. “
But it took some real life crises and a number of years to breed that anger and need for constant approval out of me for good.
During years of caregiving for my father, a stroke victim, and taking care of my late wife, who died from ovarian cancer after eight years of survivorship, I was invited by a local cancer resource center to take part in some counseling. I’d shared the challenges of taking care of my father and all the family relationship management that had to go into that. There were old seeds of anger still rooting about our family that would crop up in moments of frustration from him. It took every ounce of patience I had to manage some of that.
Meanwhile I perhaps desperately wanted approval in how I was taking care of my wife. Some of that I poured into journals and blogs, and ultimately published a book comprised of those explorations titled The Right Kind of Pride: A Chronicle of Character, Caregiving and Community. But mostly that work turned out to be a record of all the vulnerability we experienced and the blessings we received. The algorithm of vulnerability–being open and honest to the point of being powerless–– is what I mean by the right kind of pride. Authenticity is critical to relationships, that includes one’s faith in God, and in others.
The smallest tendril of vulnerability and forgiveness can sometimes work wonders.
During one of the counseling sessions I was talking about the cycles of difficulty and reconciliation with my father when the therapist leaned forward and asked, “You seem good at forgiving others. How are you at forgiving yourself?”
I was floored by that question. It made me think back on all the ways that I’d beat myself up in the past for what seemed like failures, but were in fact just experiences that contributed to my life just as much as the successes. And once I looked at each of those situations through the lens of forgiveness, life itself began to take on a new appearance.
It’s no cliche to say that giving and accepting forgiveness is liberating. Until you’ve tried it sometime, it can be hard to imagine what it means to forgive or be forgiven. But when you do that for yourself, it frees you from the ruminative chains that bind you… and how you think about the past.
When that happens, it opens up new thinking processes for the present and future. Living with the ability to forgive yourself enables you to make small or even large mistakes and forgive yourself in the moment. Then you truly learn from them. It is thus far easier to correct the situation and move forward. And when you aren’t beating yourself up for the supposed failures of the past, present or even future (expecting failure…) it is much easier to believe in your ability to achieve what you set your mind to.
Getting to the source of core issues can be an empowering force in life.
Thus it is vital to understand the power of forgiveness when setting goals for yourself or making resolutions. I recently happened upon a journal from 2008. In its pages I noticed that I’d made a notation in goals for the year: “Cut carbs and replace with fruits and vegetables.”
That was depressing to read in some respects. I’d forgotten how long I’ve been trying to accomplish that goal. So why hasn’t it happened? The most honest answer is that I’m somehow not reconciled to certain aspects of my behavior. Some are still emotionally-driven, and it’s easy to collapse into those patterns. So perhaps, like so many people in this world, I’m still eating my feelings rather than eating for reasons of health and fuel.
It’s the same thing with athletic pursuits. If you’re taking too much time in transitions during triathlon, it’s a simple process to figure out how it’s happening. But it’s a much more powerful examination to consider the question of why it is happening. What is holding you back from wanting to get through transitions quicker? Is it fear? Laziness? Pressure? Questions worth asking.
But to get there in terms of better eating––and this is my main goal for this year––I’m going to take a hard look at my eating habits and assess the emotions that must be driving some of them. Consuming comfort food and anxious calories is a real thing. We also eat to cope with feelings of depression, uncertainty, boredom and perhaps worst of all, self-pity. Worst because that indicates a lack of gratitude.
But first, I’ll have to forgive myself for the lack of commitment in order to open up those patterns to examination. After that, a more honest emotional framework can be applied and the motivation to eat better attached to objectives rather than buried under layers of non-constructive carbohydrates.
I hope this helps you take a better look at yourself both in the mirror and in the context of your life. Forgiveness is a powerful thing. Let it work for you, and grow.
This morning while Sue was off at swim practice, I kept hearing an odd thumping sound downstairs. It was intermittent, so I reasoned that one of our 20-somethings was up making breakfast or fulfilling some other mission on their often unpredictable agenda.
Instead, I learned, once Sue got home, that our cat Bennie had caught and captured a mouse in the basement. He apparently played with it a while and then deposited it on the landing where it could not be missed. A gift, it seems, for the woman that he loves.
I’ve seen before what happens when Bennie plays with his prey. He bats it up and down the central hallway in a fit of feline joy. This was perhaps the fourth mouse he’s discovered and dispatched in our two years of living in this home. He patrols the basement, which is where mice tend to show up. But they don’t stand a chance of survival in our house.
Up close and personal with Bennie the Cat
I know how astute this cat can be at mouse-catching. I play a game with Bennie when he’s up on our bed. I reach below the covers and make the smallest scratching noise possible. Bennie tracks it down and pounces. Sometimes I’ll give him a tussle by wrestling with him through the covers with my fingers. He’ll use all four paws at that point to fight back.
Sue doesn’t mind the ‘mouse in the house’ thing all that much. She once lived in an Oak Park apartment where mice were a consistent presence. Neither were dead things uncommon in the Batavia house in which I lived for 20 years. I’d often come back from runs carrying a dead bird or some other interesting creature to be placed in the freezer for future study as part of my wildlife art.
I know: that’s illegal as hell. Wildlife protection laws, especially those governing migratory birds, are designed to prevent people from possessing dead creatures without a license. My claim was to an artistic license. I used those bird skins to create my paintings, thus celebrating the life of that bird in ways that educated others. So there.
People have suggested to me over the years that picking up dead animals holds a risk of contracting a disease, infection or infestation. But I’ve not had a single problem with handling dead creatures. That dates all the way back to 1976 when I studied field biology at Luther College and stuffed several dozen animals, birds and fish.
Many birds die during migration.
Yet a few years back I did get a disturbing infection from the bite of one of our cats. It turned into cellulitis. That required treatment with antibiotics, which killed my good gut bacteria. That led to a dangerous condition call C-diff, which required even more medication. So don’t lecture me about handing dead mice. A live house cat can be much more dangerous.
The strangest aspect of doing taxidermy back in the day was the close resemblance between the smell of cooking the flesh of the skulls of wild creatures and the similar odors coming from the cafeteria food I’d make at the college union. We’re not so civilized a race of creatures as we’d like to believer.
And talk about wild experiences. One day while working dish I was at the front of the line taking glass items off cafeteria trays when my friends from biology class placed the head of a dead squirrel head on a plate with salad garnish and sent it into the dishroom. When that squirrel with its orange teeth pried wide open to be clamped around a bright orange carrot came rolling into the dish room, the girl standing next to me swooned and fell away from her position.
All I could do is laugh and brush the ghastly squirrel head into the trash bin before the grumpy old lady dishroom manager named Gladys could see the prank.
The point of these stories is simple: Most of us are so separated from the realm of dead things in our daily lives we take for granted that our food is killed for us by someone else. Thus I get that people who like to hunt for game are a bit disgusted by the fact that people are critical of their pursuits. I’m admittedly no fan of trophy hunters who shoot rare animals, but for people who hunt deer or shoot geese I find no complaint. There are plenty of those to go around.
One of my Resident Assistant dorm managers at Luther was a hunter who annually cooked up a delicious wild game dinner each fall. We’d eat pheasant, grouse, squirrel, rabbit and a few other wild critters. It was fun.
Thus I’ve hesitated to take mice away that our hunter Bennie catches in our basement. Typically I let him play with them for a while. There’s certainly no harm in that. Cats are hunters by nature. The thing I do protest is people letting their cats roam around outside where they kill billions of wild birds each year. That is wasteful and frankly, a human travesty.
A wild mink struck on the road. Did the driver ever see it? Or was it at night?
So is the waste of wildlife caused by road kill. Recently I stopped during a run to photograph a wild mink that had been struck by a vehicle while trying to cross a road between two wetland areas. The mink may well have been hit while crossing the road on a dark night. No chance of a driver ever seeing it in those conditions.
Yet distracted drivers have also almost hit me while riding my bike. Cyclists seem to be viewed by some motorists as a form of wildlife that is beneath their province. If a cyclist gets hit on the road, so what? It’s inevitable, right?
“Just stay out of my way” is the uncivilized death chant of the terminally selfish in this world.
Most people likely never know how close they truly live to many species of wildlife. The animals that live near humans are typically adaptable creatures by nature, know how to hide and prefer to avoid us by any means possible. Yet almost every American suburb has its share of skunk and rabbits, opossums, raccoons and armadillos. Over in Australia there are kangaroos and koalas living near people. In other countries it might just be rats. That’s certainly the case right here in Chicago, Illinois. I’ve seen rats as big as cats in the city.
In all these cases, the benefits of living near humans ultimately outweighs the risks. Until cats intervene, that is, and there are far too many feral cats in this world. That’s one of the tarsnakes of keeping cats as pets. Some of them escape or are born into the wild. That upsets the natural balance of an ecosystem of many places in the world.
Yet is why it is fascinating to watch one of our cats sitting by the back door watching chipmunks chip and flick their tails at them two feet away. There’s a boundary between the domestic and wild worlds that is best kept intact.
It is however poignant that crossing that boundary as human beings is perhaps vital toward taking care of our mental health and well-being. Getting our ‘nature fix’ is one way to relieve the stress of modern living with all its fake and fractured modalities, information overloads and perversions of reality and unreality.
Yet for some folks, the act of petting a cat or a dog on the sofa is enough wildness to satisfy that need. For others, and that includes me, it is important to get out where the rules are not so well-defined and contained by civilization. I crave the wild call of a sandhill crane over a marsh. I love the tracks of a deer in the spring mud, and the haunting hooting of a great horned owl in the dark. These things fulfill me.
So a touch of wildness in the downstairs hallway is not some offensive notion to me. The fact that a mouse knows how to get into our house is not a surprise either. They can compress themselves to a mere centimeter at times, and find every crevasse in the construction of our home.
But then Bennie finds those mice and puts an end to their adventures in domestic invasion. That’s a fair tradeoff if you ask me, and it’s been that way for thousands of years it seems.
Our dog Chuck has been a solid companion for more than a decade
During his senior year in college, my son Evan was coming home from the bars with a buddy late one night when they noticed a small dog peeking out from underneath a car. He was covered in white paint and huddling in a brown paper bag. The poor thing was all wet, lost and alone on a cold spring night.
So they scooped him up and brought the dog back to the Psi U fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. They cleaned him up the best they could and he slept the night in my son’s room.
A couple weeks later they held a Beer Bash and charged a cover fee to pay for the dog’s veterinary bills. Evan named him Chuck after the man that owned the building because there was a No Dogs Rule. Yet my son, ever the politician, knew that some heartstrings needed to be pulled.
And it worked: “Well, I can’t kick him out if he’s named after me,” the landlord admitted.
This little story may not be historically accurate in every fine detail. Yet it’s the story I’ve shared with dozens of people over the years. My son provided the core elements of its truth. He rescued a stray dog that most surely would have died somewhere in a dirty alley had the events I just described not take place. From that point forward, that little dog crept into the hearts of many people.
My daughter Emily with the Chuckster
Upon meeting Chuck the first time, my daughter Emily fell for him and when Evan landed a job that would require some travel, she begged my wife to take Chuck into our home out in the suburbs. So Chuck came to live with us. That pup quickly won over the heart of my late wife who’d long sworn we’d never have a dog because she was concerned that she’d get stuck with all the care, walking and training a dog requires.
Luke with my wife Sue (foreground) and Chuck with Evan.
It didn’t work out that way, as that little mutt took over my heart as well. I became the Chuck Walker and after my wife passed away, he lived with me until my daughter got out of school and found an apartment of her own.
In truth, Chuck has proven to be an able companion to everyone. On occasion he’s stayed with my sister-in-law, and now she’s fostering other dogs until they find a good home. So Chuck has had a grand effect on all of us.
To be truthful, he’s always been a bit possessed by separation anxiety. He prefers, above all things, to huddle next to one of his human “tribe” whenever that circumstance presents itself. He’s a Grade A snuggler.
The two “rescues” that my son Evan has brought into our lives, Luke and Chuck.
Until this year, he was the only dog in our extended family. But this Christmas he got to meet the dog my son adopted this year from a shelter out in Venice, California. That dog is named Luke Skybarker. He’s a Chihuahua-Corgy mix with cute ears and a pleasant little soul. Following the initial humpfest that occurs between small dogs trying to establish dominance in a new dog relationship, things settled down and the companionship between them was a pleasant surprise.
I’m relating all this not because Chuck somehow slots into my running, riding and swimming. He’s never trained with me and frankly hates cold weather and rain. The only running he’s done with me has been short sprints in which we take off for fifty or sixty yards. His ears fly back and his hair flows over his body during these sprint sessions. We both wind up panting at the front door from the anaerobic effort.
Once in a while as a pup, he’d take off on running in crazy circles to work off pent up energy. I’d given him a bath one day and decided to walk him before leaving for work. We went to a local park and he proceeded to take off running in circles on a wet, sandy baseball field. He was orange-brown on the lower half of his body.
If we don’t watch him closely, he likes to wander off on journeys of his own,, following his nose right wherever it leads. Fortunately, he’s never truly gotten lost because we watch him closely. But he is a subtle little bugger and at a yard party with other dogs present he snuck off and wound up nosing around the garage of a neighbor, who brought him back with a grin while saying, “I assume this guy is yours?”
His only real flaw over time has been a bit of leash aggression toward certain dogs, especially big, dark dogs that are also on a leash. Something about that sets him off. And he’s quite protective of my daughter as well. I worked with Chuck and a trainer early on, and she knew how to get him to behave better. But my own wrestle with authority and the methods required to truly train a dog made me anxious. I can’t help it. I’m too sympathetic.
What I’m really trying to relate in all this recollection is the realization that this Schnoodle or whatever his genetics dictate has been in my life for ten whole years now. That’s one-sixth of my entire life. Anything that lasts that long in your existence truly deserves a ton of respect.
He’s still healthy and not showing many signs of age, just yet. But I realize that things can change fast with pets of any kind. For now, I’ve been paying attention to him in the ways I always have. There’s the daily big greeting at the door, a kindness he extends to all. He’s slept on the bed some nights when my daughter and her boyfriend who live with us are not home yet. My wife Sue has learned to love Chuck’s quirks and the rest of the household too.
He’s a good, good dog. That’s all I’m trying to say. And thank goodness that little bugger came into our lives. If you’d like to share a few words about your doggo or kitty I’d love to hear them.
