What are you trying to prove?

I got a different and somewhat mean-spirited question a couple of weeks ago. “What are you trying to prove?” What do you mean? “I mean all this biking stuff and it always seems like you’re doing something…hiking, traveling. It seems like a man your age should start slowing down.”

Before I could craft an answer, he added “and another thing—isn’t it about time for you to retire?”

I really don’t think this person was being terribly unkind. I think it is a cultural thing. I believe that in his culture, that’s what you do: When you hit a certain age, it’s time to slow down. Sit on the porch. Watch life go by.

“I mean, don’t you think it is time for you to get out of the way so some younger person can have your job?” OK. That one hit all my buttons.

I wasn’t unkind in my response but it was a bit awkward. How do you defend a lifetime of being active? How do you defend 41 years in your job without plans to end it any time soon? So I didn’t. Sort of.

A few days later, I was mountain biking with a best bud and told him the story. His life mirrors mine in many ways. He definitely lives a robust life, unencumbered by candles on a birthday cake.

We chatted about the “why” of leading an active lifestyle. For me, it started with my dad’s first heart attack. If you read this space often, you’ve heard the story before. I tell it too often. But it’s also what has driven me along the way.

On days when I might not feel like exercising or making the right decisions about my health, I remember my dad’s life after 45—limited because of a bad heart. I knew for certain that I didn’t want that.

I can remember the stories of my dad, unable to attend my football games because of that bad heart, sitting by the radio listening to the game and crying because he couldn’t be there.

This grief about an active lifestyle isn’t something that is new to me. I can remember the lunch room at the factory where I worked during college summers. The guys there would make fun of my insistence on whole wheat bread, lean meat, fruit, and vegetables. And it was almost sacrilege not to drink sodas.

To be honest, I discovered that it was a lot easier to stick with it if it was fun. I had a serious Basketball Jones (ask somebody who grew up in the early 70’s). I’ve pretty much always owned a backpack and a bicycle. When my kids were growing up, we did everything. We were outdoors all the time.

I remember thinking that it would be cool to be playing basketball until I was 50. I kept playing until my right knee wouldn’t let me. I was 59. My wife loves to hike so I love to hike. The bicycle…well, you’ve heard that story too much.

I have health issues. I couldn’t escape my gene pool. I see my primary care physician regularly and take a handful of pills every day. But that doesn’t slow me down unless I let it.

So the obvious answer to the “why” of an active lifestyle might also be “because I can.” But that’s not exactly true either. My bike buddy put it best while we were deep in the woods on mountain bikes, having a great time. “It’s not because we can, but because we want to.”

I’m not out to prove anything. I’m doing the things that I want to. I can do those things because I have led an active lifestyle. I can do those things because I refuse to allow birthdays dictate what I do.

I do things like fly down a mountain trail on the back of a bicycle like a 20-something because it is fun. Because I want to. And I’ll continue working until I’m ready not to work anymore simply because I want to.

Junk in the Trunk

I cleaned out my truck last week. Even ran it through one of those car wash things. I do that about once a year, whether it needs it or not. The accumulated junk is massive.

I started with all my medical stuff. I have a big suitcase-looking thing that holds most of my athletic trainer supplies and tools. I keep a red backpack thing that is for real emergencies. It also holds the AED that I always carry. And then there is my splint bag to use in the event of broken limbs.

Then I pulled out bicycle gear. There were things in that part that I had forgotten I even had. I laid everything out on my garage floor and stored away the winter things. Just organizing all that stuff should help me find what I need.

There were three umbrellas in there, two of them broken. A mostly broken folding chair. A variety of clothing items. Several empty coat hangers. Way too many food wrappers. A booster chair for the grandchildren that still need it.

Then there was the loose change and food scraps. More than one bit of orange peel. A dried and blackened banana peel. Too many Frito (my main diet vice) bits—I needed the vacuum for all that. And more than a few of the turf bits from the artificial turf that I find myself on regularly.

I recycled what I could and trashed a bunch of stuff. Bought a new, full-sized umbrella. That cleanup and some sermon notes that a friend shared with me got me to thinking about how we need to clean up our lives from time to time, get rid of the junk.

So what junk do you have that you need to get rid of? You probably clean your vehicle on a regular basis but what junk do you have in your life that you need to discard?

Trying to please others all the time? The pursuit of perfection? Busy-ness? (Those came from my sermon-sharing friend.)

For me, the answers fall into two categories, deep and shallow. On the shallow side, I’ve always got work projects that need my attention. I don’t need to discard them…I need to finish them. I’ve got a presentation to do in June that is going to require a lot of attention. I just need to put those things behind me. I probably should sleep more. Well, yeah, I definitely should sleep more.

On the deep side, I need to give up some bad habits (oh, you didn’t realize I had some bad habits?). I eat too much junk. I work too much. I take on too much. I shortchange some important people in my life because of my tendency to overcommit.

So let me put this in a sports perspective (since this is the Sports Page, after all). What is getting in the way of your sports performance? What is getting in the way of your training?

Is it a lack of full commitment? Is it habits that you need to let go of that are keeping you from being the best that you can be? Are you eating right? Do you find excuses too easy to come by? Are your priorities in order? Are you too well acquainted with your snooze alarm?

Empty those things from your trunk. Get rid of what you don’t need. Lose those traits that are keeping you from being everything that you can be. As for me, I’m going on vacation.

What is the Best Diet?

Diet and nutrition. Are there any two things in the world where there has been more conflicting information put out there than these?

I’ve heard it all. You have too. The Watermelon Diet. The Adkins Diet. Paleo. Low fat, low carb, high fiber, vegetarian, Mediterranean. The Purple Diet (really). It’s impossible to keep up with them all. And it’s just about as impossible to know which one is right for you. 

Let’s start with the basics. Everybody is different. Everybody processes what we put into our body differently. Look at gluten. Twenty years ago we knew nothing about it. But a glutton of gluten (I had to go there) has pushed a lot of people into a nutritional crisis.

Genetically modified grains have increased the gluten content in much of our foods to immense levels. And that overload of gluten has resulted in a lot of folks who might have been a bit gluten sensitive into a full gluten overload. Maybe there is part of it that is that we are more aware of the potential for a problem but the amount of gluten in our foods is still, in my opinion, the reason for the current state of affairs.

Before you condemn the agriculture industry, please keep in mind that all this work in genetic modification was to make our farms more productive…if you will, to produce more food per acre. In light of the fact that nearly 800 million people are undernourished in the world today, that is an admirable pursuit.

My late friend Sam Beall, proprietor of Blackberry Farms, taught me a lot about good nutrition. Sam was known for taking simple foods, locally grown, and preparing them simply with spectacular results. Sam’s advice to me on the back of a bicycle one day was that when you go to the grocery store, everything in your basket should have a simple name. Asparagus. Apples. Butter. Milk. Eggs.

Simple stuff. Bread that would last on your shelf for a month because of preservatives is, by its nature, a bad idea. Long a label reader, I now focus just as much time on making sure that what is in my grocery basket is simple. And it’s important to know where it came from, when that is possible.

Shrimp from a farm in Vietnam? Really? Check into that one. Chicken from a mass production facility? Beef raised in a factory, fed grain-based feed, and injected with drugs to help them grow bigger? Think about it.

Let’s talk about red meat a bit. Much maligned, red meat can be a great source of a lot of good things. For much of my adult life, I avoided red meat, believing that the fat content would contribute to heart disease. Only after adding good red meat to my diet, grass-fed and farm raised, did I start to realize the benefits.

Red meat is loaded with nutrients, vitamins, and essential minerals. Personally, my energy levels increased considerably. Fish (wild caught) and chicken (not from factories) are still the staples of my diet but occasional red meat has a place too.

The biggest dietary change I’ve had was several years ago when I went to a low carb diet. It was difficult at first, as so much of my diet was carb loaded, but after a period of adjustment, I discovered huge health benefits. I no longer had bouts of hypoglycemia, where my blood sugar would drop and I would get shaky. And there’s lots of evidence that a low carb diet is better for your heart.

I will tell you this—a low carb diet is difficult for an endurance athlete. So when I’m going on a bike ride, I adjust my carb intake up a bit and then find that I’m not nearly as hungry on a long ride as I used to be.

The bottom line is still that everybody is different. Everybody has different nutritional needs. There is no single best diet. Nutritionists and dieticians are great resources to help you discover what is best for you with the ultimate goals being better health and a better life.

Looking Beyond the Horizon

“Go as far as you can see and then you will see farther.” I like that quote. It speaks to me on several different levels.

To paraphrase, go as far as you can go. And when you get there, what do you find? Do you find that what you thought was all you could do wasn’t all you could do? Or do you find new horizons, new opportunities?

What are our limits?  What are we capable of mentally? What are our emotional limits? And from an athlete’s perspective, what are our physical limits?

I’m going to go way off on a tangent here. I find that when we attempt to console someone that is going through a tough time emotionally, maybe it is a moment of extreme grief, that our words mean very little. My opinion is that our presence, our friendship is what helps someone the most.

“I know what you’re going through.” No, you really don’t. And if it is the loss of a loved one, I’m not going to tell you “with time, you’ll get over it.” No, you’re not. You are not going to get over it and it’s not going to get easy because you can never really get completely over the loss of someone you love.

But it does get easier. And you will be fine. Just not today. And probably not tomorrow. Maybe that’s too dark for this space but I’ve seen extreme grief over the loss of a game so maybe it does belong. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more tears shed than in the NCAA basketball tournament this year. Lose your last game and turn on the tears.

You’ve put all you had into a game and it didn’t end the way you had dreamed. The only people that can really help you at that point are your teammates. The people that you have trained and worked with for so long. They know. They get what you’re going through because they shared your dreams and your heartbreak.

We really have no idea what our physical limits are. I’ve been near the top of a tough climb on my bicycle and wasn’t sure that I could even get there. But then I get there and I find that I have a little bit more. That I’m ready to take on the next hill.

We ask this sort of thing from our athletes all the time. A pitcher is doing their best and we ask them to dig a little deeper and come up with just a little more. A runner is exhausted but the finish line isn’t close and we ask them to find something within themselves to finish the race.

Go as hard as you can go and then see if you have a little more. A few more lifts. A few more sprints. A little farther. A little faster. A little harder. Work as hard as you can work, and then work a little harder. Athletic excellence is the product of that attitude. 

Some of you know my personal story. Underachiever. Never encouraged academically. Most kids where I’m from were glad to graduate from high school and get a job. I got there and saw another horizon.

I get to college and there are horizons all around me. People from lots of backgrounds exceeding boundaries every day. I graduate from college and I find new horizons out there, new opportunities.

I get out into the real world and find a bigger and bigger world. Opportunities everywhere if you just look and then have the fortitude to chase those opportunities. A life without boundaries. I’m personal testimony to all that. All because I got to the horizon and found more.

When you go as far as you can see, all the way to the horizon, you see another horizon. Go chase that one.