Monthly Archives: August 2022

Interval Training

The Humbling Lesson

Any regular reader of Daily Ink would know that I’ve been on a health kick since January 2019. After 2-and-a-half years I thought I was in good shape. Well, I just got home from my second morning of playing water polo at Sasamat lake and I realize that I need to reconsider my training regimen. It was humbling playing with players who were mostly between 6 and 20 years older than me and feeling so exhausted so quickly.

The Lesson

My philosophy of 20 minutes of cardio 5-7 times a week has been great. It has proved ‘enough’ insomuch as when I’ve gone on a long hike or bike ride or even a long jog, I’ve been able to keep going as if I trained much more. However water polo and similar games (like basketball) are a different beast. The sprints become anaerobic, the starts and stops are erratic, and the simple cardio I do did nothing to prepare me for a couple days of playing water polo. I was exhausted through the entirety of both practices and now I’m sore in places I forgot I had. 🤣

The Wisdom of Age

A decade ago I would have solved this by trying to add another few workouts in each week. I would have done that for a few weeks, got busy, then fallen off of the training. However, I think I can maintain my current workouts but put some interval training into them. I can go on the bike or treadmill for a few minutes of warmup then do 1 or 2 minute intervals of fast and slow paces, followed by a cooldown. Basically just change what I’m doing rather than how long I’m doing it. And… and this is the important thing, I don’t have to go all-out! I’m just diversifying my fitness level and capabilities.

Lifestyle Health

The focus of my fitness has not been to bulk up. I’m not training for an event. I’m trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The lesson I received over the last couple days is that I could adjust my workouts a bit and be more versatile in my overall fitness. I don’t have to go crazy and change things up a lot, I don’t have to put myself in jeopardy of injury by changing my workouts significantly, I can improve my ability to do things like join a Masters team and play water polo, or join a pickup game of basketball, with a much greater chance of doing so injury free.

It’s my goal that I can be like Gabor, one of the guys on the the Calgary team we trained with. Gabor is 74, healthy, and sharp. I can tell in the short time I met him that he is healthy in body, mind, and spirit. I want my current lifestyle to allow me to get in and play water polo with guys my current age when I’m his age. It starts with a commitment to work out regularly, and it seems that it should include a bit of interval training along the way!

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Practicing the power play

Ross and I getting a few seconds rest during the scrimmage.

Blast from the past

Today I played water polo for only the second time this century, (my playing experience spanned the mid ’80’s to late 90’s). My buddy Ross, who was both my coach, and later who I also coached with is visiting… and he was invited to drop by and play with a masters team visiting from Calgary, doing a training camp before the US Open. And, as luck would have it, it was happening in a lake just 20 minutes from my house.

I was nervous. I haven’t played in years and have not been swimming either, so the idea that I’d be jumping in a lake and playing players that never really left the game like me was daunting. Water polo isn’t a sport you can easily leave for 20 years and then just start back up again like riding a bicycle.

It was so wonderful to play again, the guys were awesome. I got to get in the pool water with my buddy and play with him for the first time in 30 years. I’ve played in many outdoor pools, but we were at Sasamat Lake, which was warm and picturesque, and the entire experience was great.

That said, I thought I was fit, but this was humbling. For the last two and a half years my workouts have consisted of steady cardio on a bicycle, treadmill, or row machine. To switch to swimming, and add in starts and stops, sprints, and the taxing thinking process of doing something I haven’t done in years had me exhausted in no time at all. I spent a lot of time taking deep breaths and trying to lower my heart rate. It’s a whole different kind of fit to play a game like water polo. It also doesn’t help much that I never was a very efficient swimmer.

I used to have a resting heart rate between 35-40 beats per minute and it could get as low as 32 in the morning before getting out of bed. That was mostly because I trained a lot and my inefficient swim stroke meant that I was usually working harder than anyone else to do the same amount of work.

Add to that, I was never a great player to begin with. I was good, but not great. So a 20+ year gap from playing left me unable to do what I though I could do. On this topic, the Calgary team’s motto on their shirts gave me a good chuckle:

The Older I Get The Better I was

We might join them for one more practice tomorrow, we’ll see how my and my buddy’s bodies feel in the morning.

Blog art

The images that go with my blog posts are created with Dall•E. I type a detailed description and the AI (Artificial Intelligence) creates 4 images based on the description. I shared examples here, when Dall•E was newer and shared 6 attempts rather than 4.

It doesn’t always generate what I want, but these are impressive pieces of original art.

What I used to do was go to Pixabay and search for Royalty Free stock images, but I’d often have to do 3 or 4 searches to get something that fits. Sometimes I’d see the same image shared by others. Now, every piece I share is an original, and 9 out of 10 times I’m picking one of the first 4 options given to me.

This is great for me, because the images are more personalized, and I’m spending less time worrying about finding the ‘right’ image. In fact, I find choosing from only 4 images, rather than a selection from dozens of results from Pixabay quite liberating.

As an aside, I put in a request for my blog’s email subscribers to see the accompanying image, but have not received a response:

Is this actually a @jetpack thing? The email says ‘Powered by Jetpack’ at the bottom. https://t.co/Ap4Koj4fS3

— Dᴀᴠɪᴅ Tʀᴜss ∞β (@datruss) July 30, 2022

When I made a previous request to WordPress, not only did they respond, they changed the App, they added the little blue button you see below, to speed up publishing.

And in the end, these little changes make daily blogging easier, and more visually pleasing… and allow me to continually express my creativity.

Old friends

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen each other for months or years, when you connect with long-time friends both time and distance melt away. There is no awkward silence, no getting up to speed, the friendship just moves forward as if it was just yesterday that you last connected.

I don’t have many friends like this, but I cherish the ones that I have. They are my family, just not by blood. As I get older, I value these connections more… Maybe because they happen less frequently, maybe because I see how precious such friendships are. Moments spent with good lifelong friends are moments that accumulate to keep life feeling rich and fulfilled.

The trick is not to wait for special events to get you together. Find opportunities to meet, to holiday, to connect for no other reason than to be together. Special events don’t happen often enough, and while distance and time may disappear when you connect weather it has been a short or long time apart, the longer apart you spend, the less time you’ll have together. So, make the time for the friends that matter.

Quite Quitting

I stumbled across the idea of #QuietQuitting which led me to this TikTok video.

The premise is that you don’t actually quit your job, you still perform your duties, but you quit the idea of going ‘above and beyond’. You view work as something you need to do, not something that defines you or determines your self worth.

There is a part of me that struggles with this idea. I can’t see doing the job I have and not wanting to do more, to give more, and to give myself over to my job. Then there is a part of me that totally gets it. I have a job where no matter how many hours I put in beyond the work day, my salary doesn’t change. I’ve fallen into cycles where I’ve dedicated so many hours to my job that I’ve had nothing left for myself or my family. I’ve left work late, and then stayed on my phone working, then gone to bed thinking about the things I still needed to do.

I have recently found a good balance. I get up very early, write, meditate, and exercise so that I feel I’ve accomplished something for myself before I even start my work day. I will stay at work an extra 30 minutes or even an hour longer than planned, but then I don’t do work when I get home. These things provide me with some balance and help me enjoy work more, and still feel like my whole life isn’t work from late August until early July.

But going back to the idea of #QuitQuitting, I see the appeal for people. I don’t think I could do it, but I understand the desire to separate work life from life, and to compartmentalize the two experiences. There are companies now that are seeing the value as well. They are doing things like telling employees what their expectations are and not requiring 8 hour days, (‘This is what you have to do by the end of the week and we don’t care how long you spend doing it or what hours of the day you choose to do them in’). Or, giving employees 4-day work weeks, or ‘Friday optional’ days if work is completed. When you think about it, for many jobs a 40 hour week is completely arbitrary, and a 60 hour week isn’t sustainable for healthy living.

Now in education, where you are responsible for the care of students, a shift to a 4-day week would take a major shift in a culture to adopt, and unlikely to be seen any time soon, but in many other jobs, this is a very likely possibility on a large scale. That said, I think our school, Inquiry Hub could do this. For example, we could make Wednesdays completely optional days, and I could have half my staff there on those days to support students doing their projects. Or we could have Grade 9’s and 10’s off on Mondays and Grade 11’s and 12’s off on Fridays, and focus our learning and support on half of the school on each of those days.

My point is that there are options… and these options can provide a balance for people that give them more time to live their lives outside of school/work, and thus reduce the desire to ‘quit quit’. Because this isn’t just something people are doing at work, I see kids doing this at school too, showing up just to do the minimum.

Maybe the 5 day work week is the problem. Maybe it’s time for us to reevaluate the way we distribute our time between work and the rest of our lives and then maybe people won’t see the need to be #QuietQuitting. Maybe quiet quitting is a signpost that we need to create more work/life balance rather than people trying to unsuccessfully do it on their own.

A broken system

Here is the opening of the following article: Economist explains record corporate profits despite rising inflation

“Prices are up all over the place – at the gas pump, at the grocery store, at the car lot. This week, the [US] federal government reported a 7.5% increase in the cost of goods all across the board compared to a year ago. The consumer price index showed a 4% rise in housing, a 12% increase in the price of meat, and the cost to buy a used car is up more than 40%.

But here’s another reality. While families are dealing with sticker shock, profits for companies that put these goods on shelves – well, those are skyrocketing. Data from the U.S. Commerce Department shows that corporate profit margins are the largest they’ve been in 70 years…”

Essentially during the most difficult economic times we’ve seen in decades, companies have gouged consumers in order to maximize profits. While car owners pay dearly for transportation, oil and gas companies are recording record profits for their shareholders. Meanwhile the price of gas remains painfully high.

The shareholder model of capitalism is broken. The corporation might create or distribute a desired product, but neither the product nor the end user is what is being served. The customer is the shareholder, and their desire is profit; Not a great product, not a value to the end user, just profit per share.

The CEO does not meet bonus numbers due to end-user satisfaction surveys. The CEO does not answer to anyone except a board, who themselves want to see high profits. The middle managers knows that their main job is to manage and care for the people under them, but their incentives are almost always number driven, and they know that profit is the priority.

It’s the tragedy of the shareholder: self interest for personal profit, without consideration of anything else. Profit at the expense of common good. Maybe there was a time when companies cared about the end user, when customer satisfaction trumped shareholder satisfaction, but stock prices and shareholder greed are the only things capitalism seems to feed these days. The idea that during a pandemic, rampant inflation, and supply chain shortages, a company will seek maximum profits and gains is capitalism at its worst. The almighty dollar is all that matters.

Meanwhile, what are these companies doing with the excess cash? They are buying back shares which a) keeps the prices of shares up, b) pays their shareholders who get to ‘sell high’, and c) make themselves look more financially attractive to new investors. The high profits create the promise of still higher profits, providing wealthy shareholders a chance to see gains in a market that the people they are gouging with unnecessary price increases can’t afford to participate in or gain from.

The system is rigged so only the shareholders win. Oh, and will these companies share the windfall with their employees? Only the upper echelon who already earn healthy 6 and 7 figure salaries will see bonuses, but not the majority of workers who face high inflation and cost of living increases and are actually falling further behind. Their wage increases, if they get any, won’t match inflation.

I don’t know how to fix it, but the system is broken. While stories like this show promise, for providing fair wages to employees, the stock and shareholder model doesn’t really provide avenues for this to happen. Instead, while the vast majority of citizens around the world are poorer now compared to before the pandemic (with respect to buying power), shareholders are seeing the best returns in decades.

Feeling the earth spin

This morning I sat in my gazebo for my meditation. The sun was shining and I took my shirt off to enjoy the the heat and natural vitamin D. Where I sat, the sun rose to the point that the top of the gazebo ever so slowly shielded my face from direct sunlight. I felt my face cool. I saw the brightness diminish through my eyelids.

It occurred to me that I was experiencing the rotation of the earth. I wasn’t witnessing the rising of the sun… Instead, I was feeling the earth revolve. My positioning allowed me to have both a visual and tactile experience of our massive planet making it’s 24 hour spin on its axis. Even as I write this, my chin is no longer in the sun and the shadow of the gazebo is slowing making its way down my neck.

This morning I got to feel the spin of the earth. At once I am simultaneously reminded of how insignificant I am in the universe, and how unique I am to be sentient and to be able to experience such a beautiful moment, which only I had and no other sentient being had at that moment.

This morning I felt the earth spin, and it was magnificent.

Holiday decompression

We arrived home yesterday from a wonderfully relaxing Kelowna holiday. Today just disappeared. It’s already almost 5:30pm and I’m left wondering where the day went?It doesn’t matter that the holiday wasn’t a run-around-fun holiday, and that most of what I did was relax anyway. Day one after returning home from a holiday feels like a recovery day.

Is it just me or do you often feel like you need a holiday to get over your holiday?

Bear Creek Falls

Yesterday was our last full day in Kelowna, and while we did a hike around these falls every day, I finally followed the creek into the falls that we could hear at a lookout, but couldn’t see. I didn’t think I’d see the falls, I was just curious.

The white-dotted trail was our usual, daily route.

It’s a fairly easy walk along the creek, but when I asked people coming the other way they said getting wet along the way was unavailable.

The first bend, you can already hear the falls.

This 20-25 foot section was too deep to walk, and a little eggbeater kick was required to pass through.

Getting in, and feeling the force of the falls.

This was too good not to share, so I came back with my daughter and her friend.

I didn’t know I was going to be able to make it to the falls, I just wanted to check out the stream… this was a wonderfully unexpected, and special experience!