Protein, especially with good fats, moderates my appetite and keeps my digestion happy.
Dairy
I tolerate it well but I’m careful not use as a sugar crutch.
There can be a lot of added sugar in dairy (especially “vegan” yogurts).
There is information in cravings and binges.
Cravings => usually a depletion signal. High-performance athletes need to train the ability to process food for fuel. Long sessions provide enough depletion, even when eating.
Binges => a sign of too much – too much intensity, too much stress, too much load.
To make progress with your body, and counter your binges/cravings, trade stress for the ability to lose fat.
A stable weight is a sign you have your act together.
Get to a stable, strong weight and stay there.
Effective nutrition is defined by what is not there:
Swings
Cravings
Binges
Injures
Illness
Where to focus:
Eat less sugar – sweeteners are everywhere. Do not restrict whole fruits, they fill you up and reduce processed food intake.
Protein with every meal – all day long
Incremental change – lifetime journey!
Start by improving the quality of your non-training nutrition
Appropriate levels of carbohydrate – fuel the burn
Yesterday, Monarch Mountain, Colorado. My capacity to spend a random weekday with someone I love… an essential wealth metric.
Sometimes, we need to look at information that make us feel uncomfortable. As a leader, I acknowledge “bad” news, as well as my capacity to receive it.
I like simple metrics, especially those that don’t require purchasing hardware or subscriptions!
The first one… can I spend a random weekday with someone I love? Shared experience is a form of wealth.
Another… last year, how often did “yesterday” screw up “this morning“? => hangovers, days without exercising, days without writing, days waking up late… depends on your goals.
Keep it simple.
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High-Performance Tracking
The amount of data coming from wearables has exploded over the last few years.
Like the early years of power meters, the data is best used to make our mistakes visible.
With health, the big ones might turn out to be: alcohol, intensity, salt, carbohydrate timing, inactivity, anaerobic load… time will tell.
In my life, the valuable information is in the mistakes. Most of us know what we ought to be doing. What’s helpful is clearly seeing my errors.
Soon, we will be able to be constantly connected to our physiology (blood lactate, HVR, HR, glucose, breathing rate, blood pressure). If we want then data will be constantly scrolling across our phones.
A lesson of Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness… the less often you check the data, the better the quality of the signal you receive. Nassim was writing about portfolio returns, the lesson applies widely.
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Consider the one thing you are seeking to achieve in 2022, and write it down. The One Thing is the thing, if I happened, that would create a positive cascade in your life.
One things from the last 20 years…
Get a loss-making business to profitability (reduce cash burn)
Launch a new product (make money, while saving time)
Launch a new company (create options for financial wealth creation)
Cash flow breakeven (increase self-directed time)
Write a book (establish expert credentials)
Improve my relationship with my daughter (become a world-class father)
Take care of a dying relative (learn about death)
Become an expert skier (mastery)
Win an Ironman (mastery)
Find love (connection)
Increase the kindness I show my wife (2022 goal)
Before you move forward, look back…
Where did I sleep last year?
How many nights did I spend away from my One Thing?
Where I am… a revealed preference.
Rather than banning video games and strictly limiting electronics… I got my son hooked on Duolingo, a piano teaching app and Word Cookies. It’s easier to work within human nature than seek to overcome it.
Our oldest turns 13 this summer and our youngest turns 9. So we have ~5 years until our kids are fairly independent.
Additionally, I’m 52 => so I have 5-10 years until my next physical transition will begin. I noticed a shift at 45 yo and suspect I’ll see another in my late-50s.
Optimizing For Life
Peloton recently added heart rate tracking to their platform. As a result, I see how y’all are training when we’re on the same workout. 2-3 zones above me.
I want you to know there is HUGE upside from learning to train against your impulses – particularly your urge to maximize your numbers, any numbers!
At some point in the future, all we will care about is the CAPACITY to do fun stuff with friends, (grand)kids and spouses. Spending mojo to temporarily pop our 20-minute bests gives us nothing in our larger lives.
But it’s worse than wasting time. Focusing on athletic top-end generates fatigue that prevents us from creating something useful: relationships, career, a home or sub-max capacity.
What is sub-max capacity? I have two main constraints I place on myself:
No impact on my larger life.
Feed myself with real food (outside of training) and water (inside of training)
I spent my pandemic being very consistent and got my performance to 3 watts / kilo in my comfortable zone (<122 bpm, my HR max is low-170s). Good enough.
Push a bit and I can generate 900KJ in a hour. Much above that output I need to start adding sugar to my diet.
Pay attention to the habits that nudge you towards adding sugar (or alcohol, edibles, sleeping pills, pizza… you get the drift).
I have made a decision to LEAVE MYSELF NUTRITIONALLY UNDERTRAINED FOR SPORT. This is tough to do.
I used to be a Jedi-Master of oxidation and carbohydrate uptake. It’s tough not to use a key strength, especially as I really, really like to eat! 🙂
Why? Choosing a higher-sugar lifestyle does nothing for my health, life and body composition.
Also, enabling a higher-output lifestyle reduces the energy I have available for my strength training.
Strength Training
Since I turned 50, the bulk of my fatigue comes from strength training.
Three reasons…
Efficiency. Strength training is the best fatigue generator for minute invested – better than running, with no range-of-motion cost. I can keep my aerobics “good enough,” ride everyday and maintain my capacity to do fun stuff.
Invert! If I don’t challenge myself with strength training then a weaker future will happen sooner.
Error avoidance. If I challenge myself with strength training then the urge to “maximize the short” is held at bay. The “short” being short-duration and short-term.
Finally, if three hours of my week generates most my training fatigue that leaves a ton of time for working on key relationships, writing, reading => things that might be useful tomorrow.
Ask older friends, and the oldest members of your family, what they value (and what they lack).
Lifestyle
Choosing certain race goals implies certain training protocols.
Certain training protocols imply certain lifestyles.
Goal => Protocol => Lifestyle
Metabolic and work-rate training // beyond an hour, beyond comfortable tempo efforts… imply nutritional habits that prevent me from optimizing my health. Something to consider.
Related, look around at the causes for “things going wrong” => injuries, burnout, chronic fatigue… basically anything that causes us to lose consistency.
The Pandemic forced us to be reasonable. Sanity worked way better than I would have expected.
1/. Consider your 1,000-day protocol.
2/. Understand the lifestyle implied by your goals.
A desire to achieve can be a powerful incentive to overcome ourselves. My son’s quest for his school’s beep-test record has taught him a lot about human nature in group situations.
Sport is a wonderful place to equip ourselves with skills we can use in our daily lives. I’m going to take another swing at sharing some ideas about anxiety.
First up, the feelings most of us label “anxiety” are useful. They are not a problem to be removed and anxious people aren’t flawed. In my life, these feelings provide little nudges towards better.
When might my emotional state become an issue? When I make quick decisions based on unlikely fears.
I was chatting about this with one of my kids and they stated flatly, “I’m never anxious.” I smiled because this kid has some of the highest baseline anxiety I’ve seen. However, like many of us, they do an excellent job of living with it.
We were on a chair lift. About four towers out they started to get twitchy about raising the bar. This rapidly progressed to mild hysteria, “we are going to get caught and hurt!!!” After we got off, safely, it gave me a chance to introduce the concept of being worried about a future that might never materialize.
The feared future can be adaptive => better behavior nudged by a fear of getting caught.
It can make us miserable => fear of loss, resulting in never taking a chance on improving one’s life.
It can cost us money => fear-based selling in the face of price-volatility
Body composition, friendships, portfolios, marriage, business relationships… all are damaged when we train rapid action based on our fears.
How might we use sport to build useful emotional skills?
Don’t train the startle reflex => endurance sport is filled with opportunities to notice, rather than act on, our instincts. ALL our deepest habits come to the surface in the face of competition and fatigue.
With my athletes, we’d start with bike pacing, and using their powermeter to give them visual feedback (when they had lost their minds!).
We’d progress to getting bumped while swimming, holding personal pace in groups and, finally, letting other people make mistakes.
Letting other people make mistakes => letting others deal with the consequences of their actions…
…this habit leads naturally towards “let it go.”
On the bike, in a race, on a zoom call, at the meal table… notice when the startle reflex is triggered and pause.
As a father and husband, my victories are invisible.
Conflicts not triggered, confidence not damaged, relationships strengthened by not-acting on my fears.
The moms who interact with our family (pediatricians, teachers, coaches and tutors) notice our kids have a different attitude towards work.
Recently, my wife was asked “How do you do it?”
She gave an excellent answer explaining it’s a mixture of leading by example, high standards and routine.
To gain useful insight for you, I took her answer and flipped it.
What’s different about my household?
How does my approach vary from what’s used by excellent parents in my community?
For 25 years, I have acted on this belief…
Only rarely will the biggest problem in my life coincide with what I need to be doing.
Problems, toxic relationships, habits of self-harm – intractable issues and people.
Let them go.
Stalkers, trolls and neurotics – I ghost without seeking to prove I am right, without seeking to justify my actions, without seeking to turn their community against them.
COVID and things I do not control – eliminate their ability to cause further harm.
This saves energy and frees my mind.
That extra energy…
That lack of distraction…
…is the difference between success and failure.
I have another quirk.
I enjoy inconveniencing myself to do what I think is right.
Now, the sensation inside of me is not enjoyment. In fact, I spend a lot of time feeling pissed off.
However, I’ve been around long enough to know there is a hidden payoff in every repeated action. Perhaps, I’m hooked on being true to myself. Frankly, I don’t know the cause. I do know it’s useful.
I believe both of the above are trainable. They’ve played a key part in my successes.
Let’s rephrase… if you’re prone to fixating on your problems then you need to let that stuff go. Letting go is what’s going to help you get past the distractions that prevent you from consistently moving your life forward.
I’ll end with an observation on 360-degree fatherhood. It’s how I choose friends, mentors and coaches.
Spend time sharing positive experiences with exemplars, while they sustain their good habits.
Our youngest told me our cat needs a Halloween costume. I laughed while realizing that my home-school internet monitoring system might need improvement.
Most of us will be “adulting” for 50+ years.
Half a century is more than enough time for choice to impact outcome.
Here’s how I stack the deck.
Understanding three things greatly simplifies decision making:
Payoff function
Worst-case scenario
Who bears the worst-case scenario
In most cases, knowing the above eliminates the need to make any prediction (of an unknowable future).
In investing, you can bet big when someone else bears your downside (non-recourse leverage, other people’s money). At home, you will want to be more careful.
You are going to be tempted to spend most of your time predicting an unknowable future.
Don’t.
Instead, figure out the payoff function, what’s the worst that can happen and who bears that downside.
Previous writing touched on the payoff functions for fame, financial wealth, strength training and personal freedom.
Tim’s blog did a great job of laying out on his worst-case scenario – shot in his own home as well as a brain dump of everything that can go wrong, and right, with fame. It was an enjoyable read but life is too complex to perform cost-benefit analysis for every choice.
Sounds good, doesn’t scale.
One of my favorite shortcuts is to teach myself the areas of my life where I have a lousy track record, and defer to my expert advisor(s). I look for advisors with domain-specific experience and a temperament different from my own then… …I do what they recommend.
There’s deep wisdom in stepping outside ourselves => What Would Jesus Do, or Buffett, or your coach, or whomever you think knows better than you.
Each time I choose, I open the opportunity to make a mistake. To reduce unforced errors, there are filters I use to eliminate the need to make a choice and to make the correct choice obvious.
First level filter => repeat my choice for a decade, where’s this likely to take me?
The first three are obvious, but that doesn’t stop many, many people from surfing close to the edge, or getting an emotional rush from having charismatic risk-seeking friends.
Sometimes I need to phase out a relationship, sometimes I need to adjust my own behaviors.
With marriage, specifically, it’s impossible to “see” just how challenging your life will become if you have kids. You’re going to be really, really stressed out for a decade. Every single one of my prior bad habits tried to make a re-appearance in my life!
There’s no easy way around it but you can significantly reduce your chance of disaster if you pay attention to how your potential mate approaches risk.
Personally, I like to drive with people. You can learn a lot about someone by chatting, and watching, while they drive in traffic.
It is difficult to let charismatic sociopaths out of our lives. These people are a lot of fun to hang around with, especially when we aren’t the target of their ire. It gets easier with a few bad experiences.
When you need to make a change, resist the urge to justify your choices.
Learn to ghost with grace.
What if we are the person that needs to change?
Owning my choices and considering where they might take me.
Mountaineering, peer choice, alcohol use, cigars, bike racing… as my life changed from “just myself” to “my young family” the following became clear to me…
The people who were bearing the downside had no choice in whether to take the risk.
To make myself feel better, I took out a long-term care policy. The insurance reduced the financial burden if I was disabled but didn’t address the mismatch between who was taking the risk and who was bearing the downside.
In my 40s, severe permanent disability could have been worse than death. In 2013, with three young kids and an impaired balance sheet, I was in a very different place than I hope to be when our youngest graduates high school (in 2030, or so).
Perhaps I’ll add back risky stuff in my 60s… right now, I doubt I’ll have the energy.
🙂
Divorce, violence and self-harm => the bottom half of the list.
Nobody gets married hoping for a divorce.
Nobody starts a drive hoping to get their car shot up in a road rage incident.
Nobody repeats a pattern of justified rage hoping to create a crisis.
But these things happen, and their seeds are small choices, repeated.
I try to be alert to habits that can lead me astray.
Anger remains a challenge for me.
I pay attention to situations and habits that reduce my faults.
I focus on better.
My definition of winning has changed over time. However you define it, success is more likely with a plan, a couple well chosen peers and a habit of referring to a clear filter.
Making a habit of the first-level filter, tosses all kinds of stuff into the forget-about-it pile.
Reminder about the 1st Filter => repeat for a decade, where am I likely to be?
The first filter very quickly gets rid of (most of my) bad ideas.
Then what.
Here’s how I set priorities and shape my “to do” pile.
When I was an elite athlete, every decision I made was passed through a filter of, “Will this help me win in August?” At that time, the filter worked very, very well.
August 2007, with my real 1st Place Trophy. Before kids, we took ~1,000 days for ourselves. Highly recommended!
In 2005, I married and quickly realized my filter (of winning) would, if applied over many years, make a second divorce more likely. Deeply seared from my divorce, I really, really, really didn’t want another divorce.
I wanted a different result so I needed a different approach.
I needed to change my filter to…
“How will this impact my marriage?”
Your situation is likely different, but your need to know, and direct, your filter is the same.
Baby, or COVID, arrives… “How will this impact my family?”
Allocating time week-after-week… “What’s my real priority?”
Trivial irritations, the opinions of strangers… “Who gets my emotional energy?”
Every single person we meet has a filter => victory, vanity, external wealth, fame, likes, validation, please the person in front of me, attention, minimize conflict, how do I feel right now, what is the last piece of advice I heard… lots of people, lots of different filters.
Monday marks the start of Birthday WeekGuess who won the lap swim lottery?
In response to my observation that I need to challenge myself to avoid sliding towards mediocrity, a friend asked, “where do I start?”
Ask yourself, “What one thing, if it happened, would change everything?“
Simplify all the BS and focus on your thing, first thing, daily, for a long time.
My last 20 years can be summarized as a series of “one things”
Get out of this town
Do the plan
Find more love
Be the brand
Stop Using (beer, anger, fear, self-pity, sugar, bread…)
Break The Chain
Get Up Early
You must keep it really simple – life will constantly throw stuff at you, while your habit energy pulls you towards your status quo.
The true cost of the status quo is hidden.
Bella had a substitute teacher for PE today
Choose wisely => pick a “one thing” that sets up a positive cascade when you get it done.
I’m going to get a lot done in June. Everything I accomplish will track back to my core goals:
wake up by 4am
don’t complain
Here’s how the positive cascade will work:
Up by 4am
Up… well, I might as well workout
Working out… well, I might as well do it right
Finished, showered, feeling good… What’s important now?
Home school the kids by executing the schedule
Looks dirty over there, mini-cleaning break
Within that work flow, I calendarize fixed blocks of time to meet my outside commitments.
My calendar (my life, really) is 100% transparent to my wife. I remind my kids to leave me alone immediately before I start.
I get interrupted a lot – just the way it is, don’t complain… don’t retaliate.
Amphitheater Loop, Boulder Mountain Park
So if you’re struggling then consider…
1/ Am I picking the right stuff? My ability to execute is much stronger when I’m doing stuff that matters to me. It takes uncommon honesty to own the fact that you’ve spent most your life trying to impress others.
2/ Keep it simple. Before you can put two people into orbit (Space X in the news this week), you must master in the basics. What might those be? Save some money, exercise daily, keep your house clean and always keep small promises to yourself.
Still having trouble?
Simplify, lower the bar and let compounding work in your favor.
Feel The Byrn 
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