CrossFit at 54

There was a competition underway when I first visited CrossFit St Paul; it had pounding beats, tattoos, (relatively) young people. Something new for an old guy. I felt dorky, but I'm good with that. I decided if I lasted a few months I'd have something worth sharing -- one old guy's experience with the relatively new fad of high intensity workouts.

Four months and one back injury later, I'm still at it. My initial exposure was misleading; I'm usually the oldest person in my regular classes -- but often not by much. There's one guy who might be about 60; he's a lot stronger than me. I'm getting used to the beats, and even wearing short socks and semi-fashionable gym shorts -- though my shoes aren't the right tech. Contrary to my initial impression my CrossFit classes are about half women.

So why did I start with CrossFit, how has it worked for me, and what's the downside?

I started because 50 is not the the new 40. It is same as its ever been -- early old. Among other things that means getting noticeably weaker from year to year. For me it also meant calorie restriction took as much muscle as fat. I need to keep up with my kids, so I needed a lot more exercise.

No problem -- I like exercise. Not running mind you -- I've not done that since undergrad days. Lots of other stuff though - cycling, swimming, nordic skiing, hiking, hockey.

Problem is my version of 54 comes with a lot of family obligations, not to mention (still and for the moment) a job. My life is good, but rich. The only thing I can cut out now is sleep -- and I need more of that. So I needed lots more exercise, but I had only a couple of hours to spare.

So that's why I took a look at CrossFit five months ago. Group psychology to drive effort, coach driven but cheaper than a private trainer, no contract, extreme variety, enough danger to keep me awake (more on that later), lots of sessions I can fit into a packed and variable schedule, facility directly on my weekly commute, engaging franchise owners - it was a good fit.

Ok, Andrew, it was also because you kept bugging me about it.

There was one other motivation - a big one. I didn't believe the late 90s reports that significant exercise delayed dementia onset, but the evidence has continued to accumulate. I suspect it's not as beneficial in humans as it is in animal studies, and I suspect it works better for some genotypes than others -- but it's all we have. Nothing else makes much difference. I need to keep my brain until my youngest is in college - 8 years from now. So moe exercise.

I did a private "on boarding" -- extra cost but it let me work around my schedule and my health status. I learned I was even less fit than I'd expected. After I joined the regular program I experienced three phases over 4 months. In the first phase I had remarkable muscle soreness, which led me to wonder about bursts of apoptosis. In the second phase my muscles did better, but I was limited by my poor endurance. In the third phase I was able to run a few miles for the first time in 30 years, and I was no longer always the slowest or weakest participant.

Sometime around the last phase, I had my first CrossFit injury - a back strain. I'm familiar with that problem, and the rehab routine went well. I'll get back to the injury bit.

I now do CrossFit twice a week; that's about as much as I have been able to safely handle. I currently need 3 days to heal between each session. Between sessions I do my usual 2 hours of bike commuting one day a week, 1-2 hours of inline skating with my #2 son, and 40 minutes of conventional Cybex workouts with my #1 son, focusing on back, abdomen and some base arm strengthening. Time spent with #1 son is considered family duty, so the new regime added about 2 hours to my week. I made that up by spending less time writing on my blogs, I manage my writing compulsion by microblogging with Pinboard, PourOver and app.net.

After five months, despite my back strain injury, St Paul CrossFit has worked well for me. I haven't developed much visible muscle, but I'm significantly stronger and I can handle more exertion. My weight didn't decrease until about month 4, since then I dropped 8 lbs and am close to my optimal weight.

The net effect is that physically I perform and feel more like I did at 44 than at 54. That's a big difference; if I feel at 62 the way I was at 52 I'll be content.

I'm not as keen on CrossFit as some but I enjoy the people, the exercise, and the game of staying within my limits. My two sessions a week are well worth the $135/month I'm paying; I'll probably go to three times a week when ice and snow stop my bicycle commute.

Which brings me to injury risk, and Jason Kessler's CrossFit experience ...

 Why I Quit CrossFit (Jason Kessler)

On my very first day of CrossFit, I threw up. It happened my second day, too. And the third. And pretty much all of the first month...

For the next three years, I squatted, pulled, pushed ...

… CrossFit was unlike any workout I had ever done before. It throws out the traditional-health-club model of machines and isolated exercises and replaces them with a whole-body approach rooted in the real world. Calisthenics, Olympic lifting, and gymnastics combine to form a workout that emphasizes ten basic physical skills: cardiovascular and respiratory endurance, flexibility, stamina, strength, speed, coordination, power, accuracy, balance, and agility. Every day, a new workout (called the Workout of the Day, or WOD) is written on a whiteboard, and everyone in a class completes the same workout no matter what fitness level they’re at.

... Your typical CrossFitter wants to zap his fitness tank down to zero by the end of a workout. He’s not content to be just sweaty — he wants to collapse into a heap on the floor...

…. quickly amped up the frequency of my visits from three to four, then five days per week. Without even realizing it, I became that evangelizing asshole who makes people think that CrossFit is a cult...

… Not everyone gets injured to the point where he has to get knee surgery, but I did. I also developed a chronic shoulder injury that to this day, eight months after my last CrossFit workout, is still a constant reminder ... the penalty for not executing movements with perfect form, but I’ve come to believe that having perfect form 100 percent of the time is literally impossible...

Jason was lifting an awesome amount of weight but even for less ambitious athletes the injury risk is real - largely because of the focus on technique-critical Olympic style free weight lifting and on continuous improvement. At 54 I'm into managed-decline rather than improvement, but at 34 I'd have been tempted. CrossFit workouts are intense -- and I'm not sure five or even four workouts a week makes sense for most 35+ bodies.

My gray hair means I get gentle encouragement that I can use or ignore, but younger, keener people could get in trouble. I think CrossFit could do a better job of teaching early recognition of injury and ways to respond to it. Since we pay based on our use rate there is a bit of a perverse incentive at work here, but the St Paul franchise has added Yoga and other lower intensity programs that can round out 2-4 high intensity workouts.

For me the risk feels less than pickup hockey (head, knee, face, laceration) or serious downhill skiing (knees), but a bit higher than inline skating (head) or road biking (cars -> infrequent but serious injury). In other words, it's in the risk range I'm used to, even though it's higher risk than traditional gyms or high intensity Pilates. Honestly, for me, managing the risk is part of the appeal. I suspect as CrossFit evolves, however, there will be tracks that deemphasize the riskier weight maneuvers and more focus on early response to injury.

Will I still be doing CrossFit at 64? It seems unlikely, but it's not impossible. I'll let you know.

Update 9/23/2013

Still enjoying CrossFit and staying injury free, but I do wonder if our gym is a little atypical...

Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You - New York Times 12/2005

... For his first CrossFit session, he swung a 44-pound steel ball with a handle over his head and between his legs.. ... That night he went to the emergency room, where doctors told him he had rhabdomyolysis, which is caused when muscle fiber breaks down and is released into the bloodstream, poisoning the kidneys. He spent six days in intensive care.

... The short grueling sessions aren't for the weekend gym warrior. The three-days-on, one-day-rest schedule ... "Murph," a timed mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats and then a second mile run. (A weighted vest is optional.)

Mr. Glassman, CrossFit's founder, does not discount his regimen's risks, even to those who are in shape and take the time to warm up their bodies before a session.

"It can kill you," he said. "I've always been completely honest about that."

... "If you find the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck so foreign to you, then we don't want you in our ranks," he said.

I rather doubt I'll be doing "Murph" in this life, and I like 1 day on, 2-3 days of something else. Good thing I've never run into "Coach" Glassman.

Roger Ebert and Iain (M) Banks

Two days ago I learned that Iain (M) Banks, one of my favorite writers, had months to live. He should have had decades. He announced he was marrying his partner.

The same day I read a blog post by Roger Ebert. He announced that a recent fracture was "pathologic" -- meaning related to a cancer recurrence and his new plans...

A Leave of Presence - Roger Ebert's Journal 

... I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI. Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects under the Ebert brand in the coming year...

I assumed, reading it, that he was preparing, as quickly as possible, for the end. That came today. I will miss his wisdom and compassion.

Hints that your heart needs checking - in memory of Jim Levin

Nobody's perfect. The Jim Levin I knew was pretty good though. Smart, kind, wise, generous, honest. A family man. He had a lot of talent, and he used it to make the world better.

Jim was 54 when he died suddenly, apparently of a heart attack.

Heart attacks in relatively young people are notoriously lethal. Sometimes the first symptom is death. A soft plaque sheers off, and a major vessel is suddenly obstructed. Smaller vessels may be fine, so there's been no slow development of backup "collateral" circulation. A healthy conduction system propagates bad signals. The heart fibrillates. 

There's a good chance Jim had no warning symptoms, or at least nothing meaningful. If he'd had symptoms though, he'd have been worked up. Chances are the problem would have been fixed.

So, because it's the only meaningful thing I've thought of to mark this loss, this post is an informal review of the warning symptoms of heart disease.

I'll start with the set of symptoms that the American Heart Association describes as the Warning Signs of a Heart Attack [1]...

• Chest discomfort. Most heart attacks involve discomfort in the center of the chest that lasts more than a few minutes, or that goes away and comes back. It can feel like uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain.
• Discomfort in other areas of the upper body. Symptoms can include pain or discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach.
• Shortness of breath with or without chest discomfort.
• Other signs may include breaking out in a cold sweat, nausea or lightheadedness.

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends calling 911 -- "Don't wait more than five minutes"

I think you can see the problem here. I was very short of breath at the end of my swim sprint yesterday. I've been lightheaded or nauseous several times in my life (flu, etc) -- and I'm don't think any of them were heart disease. Taken out of context these symptoms aren't terribly specific. [4]

The AHA doesn't want to get more specific because they'd rather err on the side of over-diagnosis than under-diagnosis - and because they're writing for a wide audience.  I think they can do a bit better for this blog's audience though [3]. So here's a bit of context:

• If these things occur together it's more likely to be heart disease. So shortness of breath AND "cold sweat" [2] AND jaw discomfort all together means more than one of them by itself.
• It's one thing to feel short of breath when you're a healthy person running a 5 mile race, another if you are short of breath doing stuff that is normally easy (like watching TV).
• If symptoms like "arm discomfort" and " nausea" come on with exercise and get better with rest -- that's ominous. (Exercise means the heart needs more oxygen, so it can expose an underlying problem.)
• If your parents died of heart disease in their 40s and your LDL cholesterol is 250 and you smoke and you're male ... Ok. You get the point. Most of us have some heart disease by age 50, but some people have a lot. Weird pains at rest may not mean too much in a low risk 30 yo woman but in a "high risk" person they might be bad news.

In some cases, such as a man in his 50s with chest pains on exercise that get better with rest, the likelihood of serious heart disease is so high there's not much point in doing studies like an exercise stress test - nobody would be convinced by a negative result. [3]

Now you know some things to watch for. In memory of Jim.

See also:

• Cardiac testing: the classic application of Bayesian math to interpreting test results
• Remembering an Informatics Pioneer and Compassionate Friend: Memorial from UPMC.

[1] Technically this is the crummy way our body tells us that the heart is malfunctioning - most often due to lack of oxygen delivery with or without muscle damage (muscle damage = "heart attack").  It doesn't have proper pain receptors because there wasn't any point to it during the past billion years of cardiac evolution. There was no bypass surgery in the paleolithic.

The symptoms may also go completely away by themselves -- which doesn't mean the problem is gone.

[2] Autonomic nervous system freaking out.

[3] There are big debates about how doctors should investigate for ischemic heart disease, but that's way beyond the scope of this post.

[4] Really what we all want is a low cost highly predictive test we can do on everyone aged 50 that will tell us how bad their heart disease is. Or a set of cheap screening tests that we can put together with a risk factor profile to decide how should be imaged even if they have no symptoms at all.

Wayback machine: My 2001 web site

The Wayback machine archived at least part of my old web site in 2001...

It was just a personal site, I think it is cool that a shade of it lives on, and of course for me it's fun to see the old page.

The menu on the right side included things of interest over a decade ago

• A "starter" page for family physicians (used to teach net use)
• FrontPage (97) esp: how to use
• WiFi for home
• MORE and GrandView - old beloved apps
• My personal medical notes
• Our Family News page (still active and updated)
• Commuting bike page (still gets many hits, but it's archived)
• Palm and "WWAN" - which back then was wireless wide area networking -- a bit before the BB, much less the iPhone

The site was dependent on a robust wysiwyg personal web site editor, and that technology died around 2001. On July 19, 2002, when my brother was lost, I wrote my first blog post. Almost ten years ago.

I archived the site in 2011, but the old links still work (they're simply not exposed) and I still search the site. If I ever find a replacement for FrontPage 97 I would at least like to resurrect the bicycling page in my Kateva.org domain. (When I retire I can go back to hosting pages under my "real name".)

The Wart Blog

This is my 7420th published post since July 16, 2003.

Of all 7,420, the comments and hits on one whimsical post about duct tape treatment for warts far exceed all other comments put together.

That post is my legacy.

Oldest web news portal - refreshed

For about 340 web years (@ 17 human) Emily and I have used the same web news portal. It's a basic HTML 2.x table based layout link page. The links change very slowly - the BBC World link may be original. It may be older than the Yahoo news page.

I did the first version in a text editor, perhaps BBEdit. Then FrontPage 95, 98, 2000, 2002 ... and back to FrontPage 98. FrontPage 98 lives in an old XP VM on my iMac; I start it up every few months to update the page (my old web site is archived). There's still nothing like FrontPage that will run on a Mac, so perhaps I'll go back to BBEdit next.

I've updated the page again - Yahoo and Salon broke some links and I finally replaced my defunct iframe embedded Google Reader Shared Posts. Instead of the GR Shares there's a somewhat awkward embedded Pinboard Mobile page (my microblog/GR Share replacement).

Feel free to bookmark it if you're looking for a simple news links page -- the URL hasn't changed in over 250 web years. It will probably last as long as me.

What I do

I have written about 10,000 blog posts, but I've not said much about myself. This is an exception. Please feel free to skip it.

I'm writing about myself because a classmate from eons ago asked me what I do now, and in particular how I use up my brain reserves.

First of all, I'm a father and a husband. Emily and I have 3 children and we share our home with a dog (Kateva of kateva.org) and a school rescue-gerbil (Kangaroo). For reasons I won't go into here our parental duties are very rewarding but also above-average demanding. Running over, around and into some of those challenges uses up a good bit of brain space.

Then there are hobbies, of which the most intellectual one is blogging and reading and sharing and so on. Excluding sports teams I write on three blogs including tech.kateva.org and notes.kateva.org.

Lastly there's work. This comes in a minor and major flavor. The minor flavor is that I'm adjunct faculty at the U of MN Health Informatics department. This has involved teaching courses over the past decade, but more recently we've a full time teacher who has taken this on. So its pretty light duty at the moment.

The major flavor is my work for a publicly traded corporation that, among other things, develops software products that are used by physicians and nurses. There I am a variable mixture of a working informatician (industrial ontologist I used to say), a domain specialist (less so as my aging medical knowledge obsoletes), an executive (more or less), a knowledge worker (more), a manager, a designer, an analyst, a project manager, an inventor, a cautious* disruptor, a fixer, a product owner, a librarian and whatever else is needed. It's a good job for anyone who gets bored easily and likes solving problems**.

In a past life I was a country doc. Emily and I worked in the same practice.

I have worked in the bowels of a publicly traded corporation for over ten years; longer than I've worked anywhere else. I do not think of myself as a very corporate person, and I find my continued survival bemusing and a bit puzzling. To a significant extent I have persisted there because it's been a great fit for our parental joys and obligations.

And that's what I do.

-fn-

* I learned the cautious bit the hard way, but still I am. Corporations are interesting entities.
** One of the most important lessons of my professional life was learning the difference between problems that are mostly important to solve and problems that are mostly interesting to solve.

Ghost story

It's not hard to do the numbers.

There are billions of people in the world and trillions of stories. Every day someone has a one in a million weird event.

Today was my turn.

It happened while I was using Google maps to visit my aunt's new residence in San Francisco. I clicked the zoom button for more detail.

Suddenly I was looking at dark green forest. I wasn't in San Francisco any more.

I zoomed out, and I found I was visiting the wilderness of British Columbia's Mount Garibaldi. It look something like this:

I zoomed in and out and suddenly I was back in San Francisco.

No big deal, just a glitch in the maps.

Except I have a connection to that part of the world. My brother Brian Faughnan vanished not far from there in July of 2002. He left his Whistler youth hostel room to go high alpine exploring - solo, off trail. Yes, that's at the far end of the risk spectrum.

There was a search but we never found a body. We searched Rainbow Mountain, because he could walk to that and he'd spoken of it. We did make a few inquiries about Garibaldi though. It's a beautiful destination, and he could have hitched a ride there.

So perhaps I was visiting his grave. It is certainly a beautiful and dramatic resting place.

Curious, I googled Garibaldi and Faughnan and tuned up a journalist's story I didn't remember and a post by Matt Gunn who met him in Vancouver before he was lost:

RainbowMountain - Missing Person/Fatality

Brian Faughnan went missing in the whislter backcountry in the summer of 2002. An extensive search failed to turn up any evidence about what happened. I met brian a few days before his disappearance while working at MEC and answered some questions he had about good hiking and scrambling destinations. We discussed rainbow mountain, which is where the search team believes he went missing. This story is a real tragedy and reminds me of the inherent danger of hiking alone.

There is a sequel to the story. I still wear a technical shell we found amongst Brian's gear. It's very faded, but it works. Tonight I thought I'd left it at an ice rink; so the kids and I went to look. We found it in my gear, but, for the first time in a while, we talked about my brother.

My 14 yo was five when Brian was lost, but he remembers more than I thought. He even mentioned Rainbow Mountain. We spoke about my brother for a while.

One of the very hardest things I've ever done was to call my 5 yo son from Vancouver and tell him we hadn't found his Uncle Brian.

These are tales for the dark nights of winter.

Update 12/6/11: I shared this story on Facebook the night I published it. A friend of Brian's, who lives in Vancouver responded that she new Matt Gunn. Then Matt Gunn replied.

My G+ Profile - open to connect

My blogs are pseudonymous, but it's not hard to find my true name if you click around a bit. I just prefer that my corporate colleagues and customers don't suffer the full range of my opinions and speculations.

Which means, since G+ is open, I'm good with sharing and corresponding there. I typically share with my "extended circle" (circles and one removed) -- just a bit short of public. I use LinkedIn for purely corporate and teaching connections, Facebook is where I tell kid stories, so G+ is the intellectual slot. It's a good match to the blogs.

If you're interested, here's my profile [1] and my "John Gordon" circle.

[1] Note the URL has the number of this beast: 113810027503326386174. Just call me 113.

(cross posted to notes and tech.)

Beating the odds - a software story

For the second time in my career I had the great privilege of imagining a software product and seeing it through to release. It started out as a key toolset for another product, then ended up, at the end of its initial product cycle, being repurposed for a significantly larger role.

This isn't the kind of software story you usually read about. We weren't a startup group of young developers, we were a small group of grizzled veterans in a large publicly traded company. We didn't have to worry about VCs, but we had our own version of funding uncertainty. If 37Signals is Superman, we were Bizarro. In a mirror world of software development, we faced our own set of grim obstacles.

Frankly, I'd rather face the obstacles of my startup days but, still, we did succeed. We succeeded because we had a great team (seriously great) and, at critical times, we had close collaboration with a great customer.

Here are a few of the things I learned in the process, in no particular order. In a small way, they were a recursive version of a far more ambitious project I read about many years ago - The Data General Eagle ...

• The core of our team was local, but we had key contributors that were remote. Our collaboration technologies were phones (and teleconferences - 1970s tech) [6], email, a Sharepoint 97 wiki [2], LiveMeeting screen sharing [4], and Rally [3]. When I ran meetings with remote contributors I had everyone dial in. We developed some good techniques for managing remote discussions, including sharing MindManager maps to record and organize discussions. The main lesson here is that you can get good results out of some very limited tech tools -- if you thing hard enough about how work around their issues.
• Early on I spent a lot of thought solving problems we never got to. Some of those imaginings led to patent applications [1], but they didn't have much impact on the product. In a few cases though, those solutions were critical. It was time well spent, but it's worth remembering that the real challenges are likely to be surprises.
• What we ended up with had a lot in common with my earliest designs. I don't know if that means they were good designs, but they did persist.
• The curse and joy of software is that there are so many different ways to solve a set of problems. The trick was figuring out what compromises to accept, even when two good alternatives combine in a troublesome compromise. This wasn't hard within our group, but it was challenging when we had to fit into other models. A mediocre compromise, however, is better than a breakdown in critical partnerships. We threaded the needle.
• Our best decisions weren't coming up with solutions to tricky problems, they were deciding what to keep and what to drop. We had to choose between throwing the seats overboard, or the luggage, or dumping fuel. We couldn't afford to get those choices wrong and we mostly got them right.
• Everyone contributed everywhere. I did everything but write Java code. Our engineers did designs. We were all analysts.
• I like Agile. We couldn't do it fully for several reasons, including the world in which we lived. I think though, we stayed true to the sprit of Agile. Rally helped, though I fear the developers have been too responsive to their customers. There are quite a few rough corners left over. Nothing's perfect, but Rally is pretty good.
• I liked the Agile philosophy of just enough architecture. The key for us was deciding where we needed solid foundations and where we could put up a low cost shed that we'd happily tear down when it decayed.
• There's a trick to choosing between a range of reasonable options. It doesn't matter so much which one is chosen, only that we don't spend a lot of time choosing.
• In the absence of proper resources, a well crafted email with an edited thread attached to a Rally story can be a reasonable stand in for a requirements document.
• Inbox Zero was very important form me. When I cleared my inbox and scheduled my Rally tasks [5] into my calendar I was usually in good shape. When either fell behind I was in trouble.
• No emotion. I worked hard to stay balanced. Things were tough when we were repurposed [7].
• No death marches. We are too old for death marches, it's not an option when you're over 40. Quality goes off a cliff. We rescoped or invented easier solutions rather than pulling all nighters.
• I reported out probabilities of success to management rather than predictions like "we'll do it" or "we won't do it". Somehow that worked better.
• I kept a complexity budget in my head for everyone on the team. We spent our complexity capacity carefully, targeting high value work.
• We kept moving. When we bogged down we stopped and moved on an easier path. There were quite a few obstacles we couldn't control, rather than try to knock them down we went around.

We had fun. It's satisfying to beat the odds.

--

[1] Software patents are a curse upon civilization.
[2] Once you figure out all the traps (don't paste rich text into the rich text editor!) and the trick to embed images, you find out the search is pretty good and that SP's wiki isn't all bad. SP as a document management system is pretty bad, though less intolerable with Office 2007 than 2003. This project made me a Wiki convert. (See also: Gordon's Tech: Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki)
[3] Also, alas, StarTeam. I try not to think about StarTeam.
[4] Only the screen sharing.
[5] I got to write the stories and the tasks then do them. A bit inbred.
[6] I tried very hard to get Google Video Chat working. It failed for us. Partly due to bugs, partly due to a remarkably poor UI, but mostly because the corporate net connectivity was overloaded. This is a more common problem than most realize.
[7] Would have been helpful if I'd done the Conversations - From emotional confrontation to dialog class a year ago, but I'm not sure it would have made that much difference. Managing genuine conflicts and power struggles by phone is less than ideal. We had no travel budget.