My Favorite Workout

A departure from the usual Cheery Beggar topics . . .

I love to run, and I love and hate (but mostly love) a workout called “40/20s.” It’s the quickest way I know to get in shape, you can do it no matter your current fitness level, and it’s low impact so unlikely to give you over-use injuries like shin-splints.

What you do:

Get a stopwatch. Find some open grass like a soccer field. Jog easy for 10 minutes to warm up. Cross the field as you do this to check for holes, roots, etc. so you can avoid them later on—the workout will be done across the length of the field.

When you’re ready to start, sprint across the field for 40 seconds. Don’t run all-out; go as fast as you can while still feeling under control. Try to run at about 80-90% of your max.

When your watch hits 40 seconds, stop and jog easy in place for 20 seconds. You’ve now completed one set, and it takes exactly 1 minute. Then turn and repeat this for a total of 15 sets—it’ll take you 15 minutes.

After you finish, walk/jog for at least 10 minutes to cool down. With a 10 minute warm-up and cool-down, the whole workout takes just 35 minutes.

Why it works:

When you exercise, your body uses oxygen to break down fat into energy for your muscles. This is called “aerobic” exercise because it all happens “with air” or oxygen.

As you increase the intensity of your exercise, your body struggles to keep up with the increasing energy/oxygen demands of your muscles. At some point, your body starts using an “anaerobic” (“without air”) process to generate the extra energy needed. This process involves breaking down glycogen into glucose. It’s awesome, but it also produces a by-product called lactic acid. The burning sensation you get in your muscles and the Jello feeling you get in your limbs is caused by lactic acid buildup.

This is the lactic acid monster (C3-H6-O3). Look how disagreeable he is.

The neat thing is you can train your body to do more while remaining at an aerobic level, and you can also train your body to better handle and push through the feeling of lactic acid buildup when you do switch over to anaerobic activity. You can do this by training at your anaerobic threshold level—right at that point where you start to experience the burning Jello feeling.

The 40/20s workout is designed to get you working at your threshold level. Quick, high energy demands like sprinting send your body into anaerobic-energy creation mode right away. The short rests (only half as long as the sprints) prevent your body from catching up with oxygen and keep you at that threshold level. Basically, you’re getting a big bang for your 15 bucks. And if you run on grass, you won’t be pounding your body on unforgiving concrete.

Random thoughts:

Try this workout and you’ll experience that time really is relative. Those 20 second rests pass in a flash, and the 40 seconds of sprinting—especially around sets 10-15—can last for ages.

Post-workout always reminds me of this line from C.S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain:

“. . . and, if I may trust my own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day’s walking is, in fact, pleasurable.”

This workout will mess with your mind. Especially when the lactic acid kicks in, you’ll be very tempted to slow down a little and take a little longer rest. But if you just grit your teeth and stick it out for 15 minutes, you’ll find the physical and mental rewards are pretty great.

Do this once a week, DO NOT skip the cool down, and in two to three weeks you’ll notice a big difference.

Free Sex and the City?

In 388 AD, Saint Augustine wrote: “We all certainly desire to live happily; and there is no human being but assents to this statement almost before it is made.” True. But what does it mean to be happy? Season one, episode one of a little show called Sex and the City considers this question as it applies to human relationships.

The episode begins with the four main characters discussing why so many eligible women in New York City remain alone and unhappy. Three of the women seem undecided, but one of them—Samantha—offers this solution:

Look, you’re a successful saleswoman in this city. You have two choices: you can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say SCREW ’EM, and just go out and have sex like a man [. . .] I mean without feeling!

Samantha proudly recounts how she slept with a man and “afterwards, I didn’t feel a thing. It was like ‘Hey babe, gotta go, catch ya later’ and I completely forgot about him.” Samantha is a liberated woman. She tells Carrie, “sweetheart, this is the first time in the history of Manhattan that women have had as much money and power as men plus the equal luxury of treating men like sex objects.” Samantha has freed herself from stuffy social conventions, she does what she wants, and she’s happy.

Right?

Freedom is fundamental to human happiness. The founders knew this—they acknowledged “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—William Wilberforce knew this; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this; Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew this. And so the question “what does it mean to be happy?” points to the more primary question of “what does it mean to be free?”  Does freedom mean radical freedom—freedom to do whatever we want, free from all restraint? Will that make us happy?

Carrie, a relationship columnist and the show’s narrator, reflects on Samantha’s proposition:

Was it true? Were women in New York really giving up on love and throttling up on power? (To camera:) What a tempting thought.

Carrie wonders whether engaging in sex that is free from typical societal constraints might bring her happiness. After all, she’d be free to satisfy physical desire without all the messy complications that come with caring about the other person—no commitment, no vulnerability, no potential for heartbreak. She’d be empowered. So she decides to give radical freedom a go.

But in the scene immediately following her decision to act on this new-found freedom, Carrie arranges a liaison with an ex-boyfriend whom she describes as “scum” and “a self-centered withholding creep.” Addressing the audience in no uncertain terms, Carrie identifies her history with this man as a destructive cycle: she tells us he was a mistake she made when she was twenty-six, twenty-nine, and thirty-one, and that she would be a “masochist” to interact with him again. Yet when they meet, Carrie first lies to a friend who wants her to avoid the guy and then appears utterly unable to help herself from engaging with him. This is freedom? Far from empowering her, Carrie’s radical freedom instead draws her back into a destructive cycle.

The whole affair ends badly for Carrie, and the episode ends with another (much more attractive, eligible, and honorable) man telling Carrie (who’s still pretending that her radical freedom approach to sex will make her happy) “I get it, you’ve never been in love.” He drives off, leaving Carrie alone in the dark saying “suddenly I felt the wind knocked out of me. I wanted to crawl under the covers and go right to sleep.”

A solipsistic tendency lurks at the root of radical freedom. Defining freedom as the power to do whatever one wants to satisfy one’s own desires leads a person to subordinate other individuals to those desires. Carrie’s misguided conception of freedom causes her to treat her ex-boyfriend as a means of satisfying her desires and not as an end in himself. She describes him as an object of an experiment — something to be manipulated — and not as another fully human being. In doing this, Carrie also cuts herself off from any possibility of true communion. She’s running the experiment, she’s the puppet master, and so she’s alone. Radical freedom degrades the relationship between human beings: it encourages us to see our neighbors only in terms of their material use and not encounter them as fellow souls whose worth surpasses any ability to quantify. Radical freedom also degrades our own view of ourselves and our purpose in life. Not for this were we fearfully and wonderfully made.

True freedom and happiness flow out of the significant bonds between human beings. These bonds are the opposite of those that radical freedom establishes. The slave to radical freedom tends to see people only insofar as they might serve his selfish ends — an extremely narrow vision. But the person who tries to see his neighbor as an end in himself opens himself to the fullness of the other person’s being, and so opens himself to receive the other person as a gift. This creates the bonds that radical freedom would seek to destroy: mutual respect, concern for the well-being of others, a willingness to sacrifice self-interests, and a genuine desire for surrender and self-giving.

In future posts, I plan to look more at works whose characters reject radical freedom and instead honor the significant bonds they share with family and neighbors. This often causes the characters to suffer. Yet they also experience a degree of happiness which I think, sadly, the Sex and the City women never get to know.

Adventures in Elfland

I had no plans for Labor Day and decided to find some woods to wander in. I checked Google Maps for green patches near my house and found one I hadn’t yet visited. After a short bus ride, I cut through neighborhoods new to me—wide rolling streets and small brick houses, vine clad and overshadowed with huge trees I don’t know the names of—and made my way into the park.

The park follows a meandering river through a developed and densely populated area. I was surprised, then, by how quickly I got away from the traffic noise and houses. Pretty soon it was all brown undergrowth and tall trunks and sweeping vines and purple leaves pressed into mud on the path. I crossed a creek and saw a family of deer upstream. One doe kept a nervous eye on me as long as I stood there, but the younger deer went on jumping around on a rocky bed in the middle of the creek, nosing each other and the doe that was maybe their mother. More deer grazed on the bank, and I caught sight of a few young bucks further off, their budding antlers blending in and out of the tree branches.

Roads cross through the park every few miles, but for the most part, you hear only wood sounds—crickets and the low hum of other insects, wind in the tree-tops, gravel crunching underfoot, scattered bird calls, and maybe the rush of water over some small rapids. A kind of silence fills the forest—not the silence of an empty room, but a richer and livelier kind of quiet.

The longer I walked, the more the quiet settled in. I am thankful that I live in a place where trails like this are so accessible. Sometimes, the brain just needs a break from all the bustle. My thoughts wandered with my feet, and I started imagining these woods to be woods in different stories. Maybe that mossy patch is like the one where Tom Sawyer sat, plotting his adventures. Or those gnarled roots along the river bank: they look like the ones Frodo fell asleep on, under the spell of Old Man Willow along the banks of the Withywindle. Black riders could be peering down that hillside. Or maybe Rat and Mole could go punting down that little creek, and find the island of Pan hid in the tall grass ahead.

When I first entered the park, I was trying to shake off a little of that moving sidewalk feeling—where you seem to be slowly and mechanically propelled forward through neutral, non-committal space. But imagining stories happening in the wood helped to wake me up. Suddenly, the wood became mysterious. And full of things to notice and be surprised by. The act of imagining these stories did not serve as an escape from reality—instead it helped me see and wonder more at what surrounded me.

This all reminded me of something G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy. In a chapter called the Ethics of Elfland, Chesterton describes what he calls “a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been ratified by the mere facts.”

Chesterton observes that “all the fire of the fairy tales is derived” from a kind of “elementary wonder.” We all like love stories, he says, because they appeal to our instinct of sex. And we all like astonishing tales because “they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.” The primacy of this instinct is proved, he argues, by the fact that “when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we need only tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.”

Astonishing tales—hobbits talking with Ents and Rat boating with Mole and Hansel and Gretel escaping the witch and Jack climbing the beanstalk and Curdie confounding the goblins—help us remember and recover our elementary wonder at the world:

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

For Chesterton, the ancient instinct of wonder contains “a positive element of praise” which comes prior to any specific religious formation. He says it is a difficult feeling to express, but that nursery tales and fairy tales gave him a sense that “life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity . . . The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom.” Chesterton concludes that life “is not only a pleasure, but a kind of eccentric privilege” to which the proper response is humble thanks.

And that’s where my wandering mind ended on Labor Day: in thanksgiving for our lives that are puzzling and precious and take place in a world as mysterious as any fairy tale.