Savage / Zen Newsletter No. 96
“No shot of sobriety will bury your demons that demand obedience in pure self-destruction…”
For much of my athletic career I’ve been cursed in that I’ve had the drive and desire to do hard things. The trouble is that I’ve wanted them to be (or feel) easy, so I tend to skirt the real issue and rationalize my shortcut (or obsession of choice) as more noble or intelligent than others. I’ve mused some on this before, what I call a “silver bullet syndrome.”
This is the seductive idea that elite climbers and grapplers somehow overlooked a simple fix—eat more steak, lift some weights, do some cardio.
This can be quite seductive. Early progress is alluring. In fact, one of the worst things that can happen is for a bad idea to seem like a good one—simply because it worked once. I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t take chances (addressed below). I’m saying false-positives and confirmation bias are ubiquitous in the performance world. We look at elite outliers, the top 0.001% as if they’re remotely as representative as, by contrast, the top 100 in the world.
Many, many times I’ve sunk my teeth deep into something I thought I wanted, maybe even needed, maybe it was helpful to my grappling, maybe not. However, the obsession always seemed a bit misplaced. It wasn’t misguided in terms of intent. It wasn’t misinformed in terms of “evidenced based” and “scientific” training methods.
It missed the point that hard things are supposed to be hard, and their difficulty tempers ambition. When you’re “too confident” in jiu jitsu, the simple solution to get out of a bad situation is “just tap.” The other day I was recounting some near-death experiences from my climbing days (circa 2016-18) and it reminded me just how razor-thin the knife’s edge really is.
I was also re-reading the NonProphet Endurance Manual (now out of print) and it described four tiers of “pacing”:
If I stop now I can’t even consider this training.
If I stop now I can recover within 24 hours (and train tomorrow).
If I don’t stop now I’ll need more than 24 hours to recover.
If I don’t stop now, I won’t do this again.
This generally maps onto the difficulty definitions I’ve adopted. It also reminds me that there is some benefit to naive recklessness. 300FY is a simple test — ride and Echo / Assault Bike for 10 minutes and burn as many calories (output, not metabolic) as possible. The first time I attempted this I scored 158 calories weighing about 180 lbs.
That was in April 2023. The lesson learned and information gained was potent enough that I haven’t attempted that test since then.
There are a lot of times I wish I still had the vigor and insatiable zeal as when I started fighting in 2010, or climbing in 2013. But time has tempered those expectations. It has taught me that energy is a valuable and very limited resource.
I don’t have time to throw it away at things that are irrelevant, distracting, or otherwise useless.
The hardest part is holding tension in transitions. It’s always easier to either fold or go all-in—but neither is a winning strategy. Extremes are seductive because they offer an escape from intentionality, a way to act without thinking for yourself.
“Yeah, I’ve flown on wings of madness. Sure, I’ve had a fall from grace. And, I’m working through the process. There ain’t no easy way out of this. There ain’t no easy road home.”
What I’m Reading:
A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: This is a candid and articulate story of White Oak Pastures and the “coming of age” story of (modern) regenerative agriculture to combat industrial farming.
The editing seems very light in that I can’t read a single line and not hear it in Will’s voice — “profoundly southern” you might say. The rare, but tactfully placed, explicit language also brings a candor you should come to expect.
The book is a great view of every angle of the process of transitioning from the post-WW2 industrialized commodity food system accompanied by genuine reflection on the more complicated parts (business, finances, politics, family drama) that don’t have anything to do with the land or animals but are nevertheless part of the process.
What’s New:
I’m trying to compartmentalize my personal and professional endeavors in health, fitness, and psychology, though they obviously overlap greatly. This site will remain a “living logbook” of my personal essays, reflections, and training sessions / programs.
The virtual counterparts to my professional endeavors (training programs, courses, e-books, etc.) can be found on Thinkific in the future. If you’re a paid subscriber here, I will incorporate discount codes for content on Thinkific.
