Earth Day Garden Investments

Painters love painting but writers love to have written. 

So, where does that leave gardeners? It's full tilt spring this week and, baby, I'm rearing to bust out of this winter hole I've been cooped up in. Nobody loves the idea of and having gardened more than me. And yet, it takes a deliberate act of gardening. Is it harvest time yet? I'm not sure I'm cut out for this.

In my typical devotion to the ideas of doing stuff more than the actual doings of the stuff, I have finally trained my little green thumblings this winter to perform a few small acts of doing-- not just the paralysis of analysis that I normally succumb to.

In preparation for spring, I've poured my heart and soul into fathering about two dinky dinner-sized portions of crops inside my window garden.This week, I introduced them into their new habitat.

Day 1 - the idea is planted. Kale, spinach, radishes, lettuce, and other stuff I can't remember.

Gardening must be an endurance sport, and I must have been born a sprinter.

My new year's goal was to turn my entire postage stamp-size back yard into a salad as far as the eye can see and then eat one big salad per day. Salad is what my friend Patrick calls "poor man's EPO". I think my buddy Tim Van Orden would agree, who's won 9 U.S. trail titles fueled primarily by salad and liquid salad (smoothies) and his calves aren't wimpy.

Where does a vegan get his protein? He must eat his own hairy drumstick-looking legs. Yummy.

I'm taking my next gardening strategy from the playbook of professional garden-neglector Mark Shepherd. He's coined the "S.T.U.N." design technique. S.T.U.N. stands for shear, total, and utter neglect. Mark talks convincingly about how we silly moderners tend to waste our efforts trying to kill the stuff that wants to live and trying to make live the stuff that wants to die. This is part of the reason why it takes an average of 10 calories of fossil fuels to yield 1 calorie of food on your plate. Things that are unsustainable, like conventional farming, are quite good at automatically stumbling into the awareness that they are no longer sustained. 

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.

-Jack Handy

Meanwhile, Mark's having amazing success doing industrial-scale farming in a way that's far more harmonious with my/his desire to be lazy. These kinds of reduced input systems also happen to be a prerequisite of any economic activity vying for relevance on a planet suffering the ramifications predicted by peak oil. Things that require lots of inputs are failing as we speak and will continue to fail at an accelerating pace.

Basically, what I plan on doing is filling my mouth completely with seeds for nine minutes so the seeds can take in all the information they need about me. Then, I'll walk around barefoot or maybe even butt-friggin naked in the yard planting under the moonlight wherever my drool lands. I couldn't get more lazy.

The weakest plants will have to compete against the plethora of weeds and stuff that have already claimed their home there. Many of these so-called weeds happen to be dandelions, which make excellent salads in themselves. If my designed salad ingredients die, they have only cost me nine minutes of sudoku time. But if they live, I just may be reaping an endorsement deal from the Hidden Valley or Newman's Own's triathlon team.

So, concluding thought-- if you want a gardening technique to have a very high efficiency, then you either need to hope and pray and rain dance for really large outputs (harvests) or else limit investments to nearly-zero inputs. Remember--

Efficiency = Output / Input.

Mathematically, the investment is a no-brainer. As the denominator approaches zero...that is, as my investment approaches an act of drooling on the ground, then my gardening efficiency approaches infinity!!!! And infinity is what I demand on all of my investments.

Face the Fucker

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end
- Ursula K Le Guin

I don't know what I did wrong, but I sure do feel bad about it. The angst is probably just coded into the DNA of us Catholics. A business-as-usual approach would have me blogging about the recipe I just reverse-hacked for the world’s greatest $20 nut butter, the current nutrition science regarding fat metabolization and the ramifications it’s had on my ultra-training. That would be a true and marvelous story. Meanwhile, in Vatican City, the College of Cardinals would elect a couple more Bishops of Rome-- Benedict XVII and Benedict XVIII and industrial civilization would march on its merry way toward moral and political bankruptcy. However, that would be yet another tasty distraction from what my gut says I really need to do, and that is to FACE THE FUCKER. I think it could be therapeutic. 

DISCLAIMER

If you go out of your way to avoid cultural taboos, I'm just warning you that you're reading the wrong blog. I'll be talking heavily about religion in this one, so this might be your cue to check out NOW. Yes, I feel like I need to address this whole Pope quitting thing alongside my overdue X-seminarian decompression.

This is THE FUCKER I've been wrestling with for quite some time. It's festered, half-written, for over a decade now. I am encouraged by the words of Emily Dickinson, who would say, How can I know what I think, unless I see what I say? Like her, I am compelled to write something down, because there is a lot of gunk that I haven't fully processed.

On December 31, 1999, I found out I wasn't cut out to be a Catholic priest. I knew this of course, deep down, but the answer seemed to make more sense coming from higher up the chain of command-- the General Director himself, a 78 year old Mexican priest who zipped around by helicopter. He was my hero, and I broke up with my girlfriend and swore off all future girlfriends, in large part, because of him. But that's another story. 

I was a second year Novice at a seminary in Connecticut, washing dishes after night prayers, practicing poverty, chastity, and obedience, and coping with a life that was straight up KICKING MY ASS. I was fresh out of high school. My friends on the outside were traveling, doing beer bongs, sleeping with girls, and playing collegiate soccer, but I had zero contact with the outside world. I kept as busy as possible, careful not to let my mind sit for too long in the awareness of where it was and that the dress code was a black cassock and my hair had a part line like the Red Sea. 

The austerity was pretty badass too. I lived in a new cubicle every month (practicing detachment), where some nights I could see my breath it was so cold. Every morning involved cold showers at 5AM, doing 200 push ups, meditating for 3-4 hours, reading, re-reading, and memorizing entire books of the Bible. My goal was to push a pin through any random word on a page of the Gospel of John and tell you, without looking, each of the words the pin had pierced on subsequent pages.

I worked voraciously in the kitchen and pantry, learning how to cook for 200 men, to palletize donations, and to manage a crew in silence. It easily beat any leadership training my peers were paying tuition dollars for. This is how I justified it to others. But internally, the vanities of beer bongs and a career-track life reeked of phoniness.

We studied languages-- Spanish primarily, so we could read the volumes of letters from our Mexican founder, a “living saint”, but also some Latin and Greek too. On Sundays, we broke silence during recreation, usually soccer, but I rolled my ankle and got mildly-addicted to Percocet. I stopped sleeping, gained 20 pounds on a diet of Hostess pastries and pork roast, and started fainting. I began brewing a lot of inner rage, probably like a wild stallion feeling penned-in, or maybe like a 20 year old dude would feel in a cloister. 

 

It wasn’t the beer, co-eds, or soccer that I longed for most. The soccer, like the Gregorian chant, was something soothing that kept the circumstances somewhat bearable. Actually, what I missed most was investigation, curiosity, discussion, disagreement, dissonance, WILDNESS and FREEDOM. This is quite the opposite of rank-and-file discipline, order, and devotion to transmitting an immutable "Deposit of Faith" from point A to point B as a loyal middle-man.

I wrote letters to the founder, outlining my mental and physical troubles, asking for a sabbatical of any kind-- some time to spiritually regroup and focus on others. I hunched I’d be sent to the missions in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. That's what I hoped for. 

But months later, I got a letter back, denying my request, saying, it would be best if [I] left the seminary and enrolled in a university. Overnight, I was gone, without even saying goodbye to my brother seminarians.

What's strange is that I so thoroughly trusted another man’s reading comprehension, assessment of my inner life, and then judgement as my absolute authority. But that is indeed the way of every religious order, from the Franciscans to the Benedictines—obedience to your superiors. Even nonsensical commands from superiors are opportunities to outgrow the ego and grow in personal perfection as if commands coming from God Himself. That is the Catholic teaching, modeled by Jesus with his submission to his parents. It is also the danger of deference to others. It can be a slippery slope, either towards moral complacence or toward guruism, always looking outside of ourselves for our answers. But when I left the seminary, I still loved and believed the whole of it, even though my hero, the founder, would ultimately prove to be a hypocritical sexual pederast Mafioso. 

My first day home, I called another hero-- my favorite gradeschool teacher, Mr. K, and asked him how he became the man I aspired to be. He told me he was majoring in physics and tutoring the Xavier men's basketball team when he realized he liked teaching, science, and sports. So, within the week, I was a full-time college student, majoring in physics and education, and trying to walk-on with the soccer team whom I also tutored. 

Only slowly and intermittently did I find peace with my new path. I tripped my way through a clumsy transitional period, I call my 20s, intent on preserving my old sense of meaning. I tried to marinade the natural content of the physical sciences with all of my supernatural and metaphysical juices, careful to give preeminance to the spiritual overlay.

Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin,

Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 

-Luke 12:27

Through my 20s, the rancor within me felt like I was constantly chewing a mouthful of sand while breathing through a nostril lined with shit. I spent sleepless nights in the physics lab, tracking subatomic particles and running virtual simulations of chaotic systems, while my inner nature felt truly chaotic and atomistic. I eventually did become a teacher, but I felt a growing isolation and disconnection from the very natural world I wanted to experience, learn about, preserve, and share with others.

There was absolutely no separating my image of God from some of the passive aggression of my closest relatives, from the zealots of religious fundamentalism, from the environmental strip-miners, or from the infinite growth paradigm of the debt collection agencies that I could neither do battle against nor keep pace with. A depression weighed on me that I feared would end my most important relationships, if not my life. I gripped tightly to the life vest of my spiritual heritage, even as its bouyancy frayed from under me. I began to feel like I was actually drowning in an ocean of life vests themselves, smothered by the poisons of the high priests of the technocratic world.

Then March 2010 happened. I met a Russian woman named Anastasia, who showed me some extraordinary things. My wife and I planted a tiny seed together and are now co-creating a space of love that will last forever. It's fucking exhausting, but the harvest is bountiful and nourishing and it saved my life.

To this day, I continue to work through some version of survivor's guilt about abandoning my brothers and students. I have weekly nightmares that I'm stuck in a situation where I have to choose between being with the woman I love, co-creating the world I dream is possible, or else imprisoned in a typecasted role shackled by "shoulds." I wrestle with God...or rather, with my image of God. I'm pissed that there's cancer. I'm pissed that there's a war on cancer. And I'm pissed that there's a war on the war on cancer. So, I'm DEEPLY suspicious of my conception of God or an old book's conception of God, or a pedophile priest's conception of God, or any other person's conception of God. And that's why I decline Bible group invitations. (I don't hate you.)

So, when the Pope DNF's, I don’t blame him for being a quitter any more than I blame myself for what some have called “abandoning the vocation.” In fact, I’m damn proud of myself and the Pope for our revocations. To "revoke" something, literally means to "re-call"...as in, election results can be re-called when they're botched, quarterbacks can re-call an audible when the game's momentum demands new tactics, and girlfriends can be re-called and dated again with newer and hotter romance.

The process has been painfully slow for me, but sometimes relentless evolution trumps revolution. I hope Ratzinger takes up permaculture and yoga in a revolutionary new way, in his spare time, but he too can do whatever the hell he wants. I hear he likes piano, so I would imagine we'd all be better off with him doing what he loves.


For the sake of our humanity, I sure hope we are never defined by the worst thing we've ever done. We are merely human, ever in search of giving and receiving love and coping with suffering. Even if Michael Jackson committed horrible atrocities, I love his music and his message, and we probably don't understand his inner workings. Even if my hero, Fr. Maciel, siphoned millions in donations to pay off mistresses and his molestation victims, it's always an opportunity to look in a mature way beyond simply blaming one person. No man is an island. We are the sum total of our relationships. Each person is also an organelle of a larger system that feeds us with both poisons and nutrients, with a net output we can only hope to harvest as kindness.

I’m not sure what religious or spiritual label I’m attached to at the moment—the religion of gardening holds promise, so I'll continue to journey in that direction. The best spiritual practice I’ve found so far involves hanging out with my loved ones, riding my bike, and running through the woods. Sometimes I’m fueled up hills by anger at the state of cancer-prevention or geopolitics, but mostly I’m slowly learning how to live in the spirit of the gift. 

We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The underlying connection between beauty and function suggests a parallel harmony between survival and the expression of our gifts. The old divide between making a living and being an artist will crumble, is already crumbling. So many of us, more and more of us, are refusing that divide. No object will be too insignificant to merit our care, our reverence, and our effort to make it right. We will seek—are already seeking—to embed all things in wholeness. All of the movements I have described in this book are carrying us toward a world that beautiful. The social dividend, the internalization of costs, degrowth, abundance and the gift economy, all take us away from the mentality of struggle, of survival, and therefore of utilitarian efficiency, and toward our true state of gratitude: of reverence for what we have received and of desire to give equally, or better, from our endowment. We wish to leave the world more beautiful than we entered it. 

-Charles Eisenstein

Full Moon, Full Year - 2013 Goals

What you think and what you feel 

and what actually manifests is ALWAYS a match.

 No exception. 

As Friday approached this week, I felt a looming pressure to have REALLY BIG PLANS-- like really cool life-adventure plans, Earth-shaking developments on my half-baked New Year's goals, self-enrichment evolutions, contributions-to-history ideas, and new save the planet strategies. But I came home from a business trip to a tsunami of dishes and laundry that looked like it might wash my plans down the drain. My self-defense reflexes kicked in and I realized, Aha! Make a list, Chris. But I couldn't find any paper or pens to flesh out my thoughts. So, I decided to take voice annotations with my phone before the inspirations disintegrated.

When I hit the record button, the awkward sound of my own voice tripped me up.

Take 1

Do I really sound like this? OK, let's start again. 

Take 2

Um...#1... [long silence broken by sound of brain farting]. 

Reverse-engineer my favorite $20 nut butter. 

[crickets chirping...recording ends]

I could barely believe my own ears-- NUT BUTTER?! That's it. That's the best you could come up with?!!!! 

All of a sudden, it became apparent that my so-called "big" plans were calling into existence the most neutered weekend of all time. What happened to the boldness of 2013 I had been rearing for?

Nutzzo - $20 nut butter from Whole Foods in all her delicious rip off glory

Now, I'm not sure if I believe in the Law of Attraction as one might formulate it from reading a book like The Secret, but since I started paying attention to stories about manifestation and the examples of the people in my own life, I approach the act of dream-crafting with fear and trepidation. I have come to a humble reverence of not only the power of positive thinking, but more generally, in the power of any kind of thinking-- very respectful of its power to set things into motion. And so, for me, to spend time thinking, dreaming, and feeling deep desires is playing with fire-- I don't do it lightly. Perhaps that explains why I commit first and foremost to wimpy tasks like nut butter analysis. 

Dwyer's Nutz-tastic - my own homemade nut butter has all the same ingredients at a fraction of the cost-- cashews, almonds, pecans, Brazil nuts, pumpkin seeds, hazelnuts, flax seeds and chia seeds. No pleasure is a guilty pleasure. 

Even such a tiny success as this weekend's nut butter plagiarism is more than I began the weekend with. So, I'll definitely take what I can get. But it also leaves me wondering what to do with my timid desires for grander things-- or really, what to do with my desire to desire grander desires... and how to desire them with more courage. Perhaps this is the secret to leveraging the power of the universe's proverbial Genie's Lamp. For, any fool knows what the first wish must be-- more wishes!  Even if I'm not sure what to ask of 2013, I can begin with the small step of asking for the courage to ask courageous things. 

Changing Gears a Bit

Yesterday we went to a Dude, Where's My Thyroid party for our cancer-bitch-slapping friend AJ, who's always been a tremendous example of joy and toughness. We played the ol' time party game, Pin the Thyroid on AJ, and man!...I didn't even attach the thyroid to the right zip code. I completely missed my goal. Nevertheless, it was a great celebration. 

As you can imagine, AJ's plight got me thinking about death and life in a more urgent way than usual. On our way home we found some extra transcendence as we got to see the first full moon of 2013. It had me taco-necking out the car window, staring at the beautiful sky in awe, far removed from thoughts of nut butter. I was thinking about how cool the moon's natural rhythm is and wishing I had a better rhythm of my own. I thought about how the moon is ever-attracted to Earth...and yet she never reaches the object of her attraction. Instead, a different kind of law of attraction keeps the bodies apart, an yet, in a constant dance together. That somehow felt like a consolation to me-- that even though I may muster the courage to commit myself to hefty goals that may never completely materialize, the fact that I have committed myself to attracting them, may, if nothing else, set in motion a beautiful dance.  

Example of a moon calendar in my office. So beautiful. So rhythmic.

Example of a moon calendar illustrating the beauty of her cycles. 

Other 2013 Goals 

- definancialize my life

- live up to the awesomeness of uncle-hood

- eat a big ass double rainbow salad every day

- do 30 pull-ups in a row

- study world religions and incorporate their meditation practices

- build a Passive House out of my garage

- replace my roof

- build a greenhouse

- turn my yard into a kitchen garden

- make friends and allies with my neighbors

- other personal stuff that I might share when I'm feeling more courageous...

Races & Adventures

- Louisville's Lovein' the Hills 50k 

- Flying Pig Marathon

- Triple T Triathlon

- DWYRMAN's revenge

- Leadville Marathon

- Burning River 100 mi

I knew there was some reason that Ursula the Sea Witch was my alter-ego. 

Things are working out according to my ultimate design. 

Soon I'll have that little Mermaid and the ocean will be mine.

Ursula the Sea Witch and Ariel

Accelerating My Personal Collapse

Be joyful, 

though you have considered the facts... 

Practice resurrection. 

-Wendell Barry 

In the past month, I've put about 5000 miles on my 1995 Honda Accord. In car-years that's like 5000 x 7. Like a sturdy mule, she's taken a pounding, visiting construction sites across the county. But her most recent ailment was the exhaust system. First, her good looks started to fade but then the sound and smell thickened and then finally her underbelly ballooned into a neighborhood biohazard. My Golden Child, as I call her, turbo-aged into The Kraken in just a few short years of faithful service.

In previous years when I had more fragile mental health, I would have broken down in tears and paralysis as I often did in the face of these kinds of mini life crises: cloogged drain, toilet paper drought, utility shut-off, flooded basement, cat pee on the briefcase, rolled ankle. Practice makes perfect, right? I am reminded of my uncle Ed's sage advice for me when I started my biz, You'll make an excellent entrepreneur if you can map out the worst case scenario and then be okay when it happens, because it probably will. 


The Kraken has one good eye, just like my Honda.



Release the Kraken!!

Luckily, I knew a guy and called in a favor. So, my mechanic friend, who fixes cars in somebody's girlfriend's back yard for cash, really helped me out of a jam. It only took ten days of his procrastinating and me without my car. I spent those ten days riding my bike to the office, reminded once again that Cincinnati is a cool river town, rather than a cruel traffic town. Of course it was only fun once I learned to dress for rain and make peace with the Metro bus drivers. This episode of feeling helpless actually turned into an excellent dress rehearsal for The Collapse, much like the No Impact Experiment that I had planned on participating in anyway... as soon as it was convenient. 

By Collapse, I'm not totally sure what I mean-- no one does. But I'm convinced it is inevitable and already happening. All my hours spent in the car have hammered the point home. I've spent them listening to podcasts by various economists and futurists talking about the big brew of funk that is bubbling over, like the insolubility of the American balance sheet, looming hyperinflation, collapse of the dollar, the ramifications of peak oil and other resource depletion issues (topsoil, phosphorus, uranium, copper), not to mention 200 species' extinctions per day and global weather weirding.

Reluctantly, I've converted into a collapsitarian. This really just means I believe... No... "Believe" is the wrong word-- rather, I finally acknowledge the mathematics, biology, and geology-- that all exponential functions on Mama Earth have their limits. Historical precedent agrees. It just so happens that the point on the curve that I used to acknowledge as collapse happening "way out there" is suddenly right HERE affecting my commute to work. Instead of calling it The Collapse, we might do ourselves a favor by calling it The Transition. That sounds way more fun.

In the book Limits to Growth (1972, by my hero Donella Meadows (et al)), a team of systems analysts ran a "business as usual" simulation which predicted a global collapse between the 21st and 22nd century. Simulations with rosier outcomes required drastic interventions to stem aggregate growth and system overshoot. Those drastic interventions never saw the light of day according to the Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update (1992). Remember Kyoto Protocol? Neither does anyone else. 

Since 1972, the "business as usual" data just keeps piling up. Damn those dotted lines!

At this point in the conversation I can feel my brother bitch-slap me, C'mon dude, I'm just trying to have a beer. And he's right! I'm sorry-- I'm not here to proselytize doom and gloom or even educate. It's here that Dimitri Orlov would remind me that anyone who has the time of day to research The Transition is the kind of person who won't do so well in a collapse, anyway. (Which means my candy ass is fried in its current shape. But I'm working on that). Instead, it's the people busy fighting to survive day-in and day-out that are going to continue to survive. These people confront their own personal collapse daily. Never has the misfortune of others felt like such a comfort-- we're in it together boys!

In the sprit of hastening The Collapse and transitioning into a post-petroleum future, I've started crafting my 2013 goals. I've been drafting my Christmas letter, which after a 3 year hiatus, is soon to be the most fucked up Christmas poem anyone's ever received. Neither has anything to do with being naughty or nice or peak coal issues. Both revolve around starting a better conversation around what Charles Eisenstein calls "living in the gift".


The Christmas Letter Uncensorsed Draft 1.0
First, I want to let my neighbors know that we exist as neighbors despite our awkward avoidance of each other over the years. Everyone gets automatic forgiveness of for bad manners, dangerous driving and their politcal yard sign allegiances.


Secondly, we've got your back 24/7/365, in a sort of New Yorky post-9/11, "true spirit of Christmas" kind of way. You want room for your teenage domestic partner and immigrant baby Jesús at the inn? We've got it, baby! In fact, my brother Matti will be moving into our garage. Please don't call the cops and please don't kill us for our tomatoes or gold. We have neither, but together we can work on both. Plus, how could they kill us if we are their go-to source for value-added guacamole or its post-petroleum/ post-Super-Bowl replacement-- Thunderdome Salsa? We may even include some Mad Max Hummus in their care package.

Post-apocalyptic. Thunderdome (with Tina Turner). It could happen to you, but in a good way, hopefully. 

Third, I'll ask for forgiveness for saying something like this Santa Claus character is a big hairy bullshit. What kind of wacked-out out cultural psyche dreams up a superhero who anonymously sneaks into our houses at night, reverse-theiving us into owning junk we don't need, leaving us no opportunity for reciprocity or to thank him or let him know what our real needs are? He's very careful not to leave any trace of connection, which is a sure sign of a society whose members have no need for each other. Ok, the fact that he eats our cookies is his saving grace. But is the Santa Claus fetish the spill-over from the collective fear we have of someone sneaking into our homes to leave us interest bearing debts for all the stuff we actually do need like motherhood, clean water, good health, and education? Should the highest acclaimed moral virtue really be to give anonymously and ask for nothing in return? That sounds more like a poisonous attitude of someone who feels the recipients of their ultra-pure gifts have nothing to offer-- no relationship, no interdependence. Without the need to need each other, we have no community.


Fourth, I'll ask the neighbors if we can use their yards for planting A) a calorie dense staple foods like potatoes, beans, and squash and B) a nutrient dense food like kale, chard, and herbs. Then, I'll gently plant the seedling of an idea that eventually we will need to rally together and guerilla-garden the ample green spaces around our neighborhood like the local golf courses and baseball outfields. How cool would it be to turn them into fruit orchards and food forrests? I got dibs on the Kentucky bananas.

Have yourself a Needy Christmas and Transitiony New Year!

I feel the need...the need for NEED.

"You can be my wingman anytime." "Bullshit, you can be mine."



Cold Weather Running Gear Hacking

Procrastination makes easy things hard and hard things harder. 

-Mason Cooley

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the laws of how to dress for cold weather running. Following my laws can be daunting if you're not prepared to scavenge, skimp, or splurge. So, today's edition is all about different strategies applied to proper (or improper) outfitting over here at the Dwyer household. 

This blog almost didn't happen. I wanted to write it on a better keyboard. I wanted wiser input from more knowledgeable friends. I wanted my running wardrobe anchored by sexier items to talk about. Of course, all of these procrastinations are silliness in the same way as are my winter running wardrobe laws (recapped below). 

My Laws for Winter Running

0th Law - Do as much daylight running as possible (~lunchtime, ~sunrise, ~sunset)
1st Law -  No trench coating
2nd Law - No cotton (It dries poorly, rubs the nipples into bloody popsicles, and makes you feel cold, and accumulates weight)
3rd Law - Using 60 °F as my balance point, add one layer to any body part for every 10 °F drop in temperature. 

My laws are fool-proof. But like all good laws, the magic sometimes happens when breaking them. If you want to run in cotton, then run in cotton. Heck - run in a cotton trench coat!  Just don't run only in a cotton trench coat. There is simply no use in procrastinating on our adventures. So my laws should be regarded more like speed limit signs - that is, they're generally good ideas, sometimes annoying, always disregard-able as long as you're prepared to handle the consequences. 

As the temperature drops, you can immediately see from my laws how if one plans on running more than a couple of days per week, then they might need a pretty size-able wardrobe, wallet, or list of excuses about why they shouldn't go outside in the winter. That just doesn't have to be the case. In fact, I've gradually evolved my strategies, finding somewhat of a balance between being a Skimper, a Scavenger, and a Splurger. These three archetypes can be likened to primary colors with which the runner can paint their own personal style. What you will NOT see below is a LIST of items you "need" to go out and buy. That would be an example of clothes defining you rather than the other way around. 

The Skimper

A winter runner who skimps either doesn't stay a winter runner for long or doesn't stay a Skimper for long. This is the larval stage of runner development. The next morphological stage is growing dosage of Splurginess or Scavengerness or both. 

But metamorphosis from skimping usually takes place one body part at a time until there are only one or two holdout body parts remaining. On any given winter day you can see evidence of those holdouts - those brave souls who will wear shorts no matter how cold it gets. Perhaps they have no nerve endings in their penis, thighs, and shins. Others skimp on gloves - they cleverly turtle their hands up into their sleeves. Others (myself included) skimp on socks - perhaps relying on blister friction to warm our toes up or are training our feet to run barefoot in the snow. 

The Scavenger

On a good day, I'd like to call myself a Scavenger, but realistically, I'm still stuck trying to evolve from being a Skimper at heart. Growing up with four younger brothers, we were all sort of good at making do with less. If I owned anything nice, it could easily go missing, or euphemistically "borrowed". We learned that hand-me-downs had a circle-of-life of their own. We also learned to shop at Goodwill, and what's cool is that Goodwill is still cool. Their return policy is non-existent, but the consequences of lousy purchases are less damaging to your budget. 

A winter runner who goes from Skimper to Scavenger may have a wardrobe with some of the following characteristics that my wardrobe has:

*It looks a lot like a soccer wardrobe repurposed. Three of my brothers played collegiate soccer and are now soccer coaches. That means expired sponsorship gear. I've recently scored some great cold weather gear from them, that they are simply not allowed to wear any more. 

*It has base layers that look a lot like women's clothes. That's right - I've reclaimed lots of technical shirts that my wife no longer wears. I use them as base layers (invisible to others) since they fit closer to my body (trapping heat). Similarly, TJ Maxx has a huge selection of cheap women's technical shirts compared to the men's section. I've found many for less than $5. 

*Higher end sports stores usually have an end of season clearance rack. You just have to have a little bit of foresight to anticipate next year's needs.  

*It has my friends and family's old gear. Sometimes barters can work too. I have a surplus of old ties and dress shirts from my teaching days. My brother Dan has surplus warm up pants. The swap serves both our needs. 

*It consists of gifts - let's face it, if you let your loved ones know you're into this or that sport, you immediately become easy to shop for. You're kind of doing them a favor by putting your wants and desires out there. 

*It has multi-sport redundancy - that is, many articles serve multiple functions and many functions are served by multiple articles. It's kind of a permaculture principle, but really it's just universally good system design. For example, I use my cycling windbreaker also as my running windbreaker and the windbreak function can be served also by my fleece shell or emergency windbreaker. My fleece cycling pants are also my fleece running pants are also my sub-zero long-johns for construction site inspections or for skiing. The long-john function can also be served by several other articles - be they running tights or actual cotton long johns.  

*Entering races usually comes with a race t-shirt and other swag that proves you were there. Rather than regard the Ironman finisher T-shirt as a $600 article of clothing, it can equally be regarded as a free perk from a clever scavenger. Entering races is a great way to build your wardrobe. This is how I came to own my first pair of arm warmers, which are surprisingly practical, (but could equally be hacked from a pair of old soccer socks). 

The Splurger

If you can think of your favorite article of clothing you ever bought for yourself, I'm pretty sure it was something that felt like a splurge at the time. Maybe you felt like you were spoiling yourself, which I think is healthy to do every so often. My favorite piece of clothing I ever bought was a fancy red Goretex rain jacket I got for the "great American road trip" in college...that just never materialized, unfortunately. But other adventures are now destined to manifest because I psychologically committed to them when I bought that red jacket. And that jacket became the prequel to the second greatest jacket ever which is the orange one below, busy kicking ass. 

There are definitely merits to having really nice gear. And by nice, I don't necessarily mean expensive. Sometimes that's the case, but it doesn't have to be (see The Scavenger). The quality of the gear may be the mental catalyst needed to embolden us to get out the door at all, to tackle the rain or cold or the mountain.  Saving up to buy quality stuff can make you appreciate it more. It feels softer, warmer, lighter, cozier, shinier, [enter superlative here]. It can make an important fashion statement. It can be a form of reward for our hard efforts. It can make us feel like we are "playing the part". It usually lasts longer (more uses, not necessarily more years). It might come with a warrantee or a good return policy. It might enhance or extend the life of other gear (I'm thinking of jackets especially). 

One of the unintended consequences with really nice gear, however, is that it drives the second and third-tier gear out of circulation. The nicest gear is the first to get picked out of the clean laundry pile. It effectively shrinks your wardrobe, increases your laundry duties, and could put upward pressure on you to covet more really nice gear. Be prepared for those consequences - want more, wash more, or buy more. 

If you are a disciplined launderer, you can get away with a smaller wardrobe, whether it consists of really nice gear or just stinky normal clothes. And if you're not a disciplined launderer, then never underestimate the greatest invention born in a college frat house.

Necessary gear I either splurge on or scavenge the heck out of include:

*Socks - This is a hot zone of my own evolution. Even though I'm traditionally a sock skimper, I'm gradually being won over. I have socks that Santa brought me that have taken the abuse of 10 years of pounding and trucking garbage cans to the curb without shoes. I still have my first ever pair of Smartwools. I've been gifted a couple of pairs of Smithwick cycling and running socks which are always the first pairs I pick out of the laundry. I even chased down a Smithwick van on my bike once to tell him how great his socks are and he ended up giving me a free pair. 

*Shell - the outer layer's water/wind/thermal resistance protects and leverages the value of the base layers. It's also the most visible. It needs to be the most durable and versatile. That's a tall order to meet without a splurge. I'm currently on the hunt for the greatest running jacket ever. I keep seeing nice jackets on sale, but I'm actually going to hold out for this one to be my best splurge/scavenge ever. When I find it, you'll know. 

*Fleece tights - necessarily fleece and necessarily tight despite the ridicule from my brothers who think I look like a "candy ass mama's boy". Those boys are just used to baggy soccer warm up pants, which are great for training, but not for racing. They just don't know and won't know until they've run a 20 miler in sleet. 

A good pair of fleece pants might cost $150.00. While that sounds like a lot to pay, if you divide the dollars per mile, you'll actually find that you'll be getting far more pleasure AND VALUE out of your splurge or scavenge. You'll never go back to skimping again. Of course, this "never go back " law is also a vanity I plan on breaking when I do an Ironman in my denim jorts and sleeveless flannel shirt.

Cool dude from the Jorts Athletic Club 

I'm interested in other people's strategies, their best scavenge triumphs, their most indulgent gear splurges, and their most regrettable skimps. Leave your comments below or send me a message. I think we'd all benefit from the exchange. If I can get my schizer together, maybe I can post a vid next week, or maybe someone else can. 

What is Clo? It's Good for Mo. Fo Sho!

You can prevent your opponent from defeating you through defense, but you cannot defeat him without taking the offensive.

- Sun Tzu

If you’re like me, then once Halloween is over, you find that Cincinnati can be an oppressive place to live right up until about Opening Day. There was that one time when I was 8 years old when the Bengals marched their way to a Super Bowl (defeat). But since tumbling down from the pinnacle of those glory days, once our clocks “fall back” from daylight savings time, every year it becomes a psychological battle for me to stay positive. If I’m not positive, I stop moving. And if I stop moving, I lose positivity, and end up staying indoors, where it's dark... and not so positive. My mind-body system gets caught in a reinforcing loop acting to drag my system in the 9th-ring-of-hell direction. External darkness begets my internal darkness.

I’ve heard it said that “an un-medicated depression may be the first step toward enlightenment.” So, on those days where I suffer more sharply than others, I try to look for some value in the darkness. It can be an opportunity for rest…mindfulness…stillness. It can also be an opportunity to deeply feel the need for others and work on my connectedness, while I’m busy mis-believing in my personal isolation. However, once I attain my “right-minded” version of myself, I realize that “otherness” and separation are, in fact, tenuous and temporary illusions. Until then, I just sit with it, like the way of the warrior,  chewing on the darkness like a rancid cud. 

Meanwhile, another part of me doesn’t believe in or practice un-medicated depressions at all. I go on medicating. Actively and aggressively, I try to counter that negative reinforcing loop with a balancing feedback loop. Over the years I’ve found only one solution. It’s basically Buddhism, but in the way my father-in-law has summarized it for me—“Face the fucker."  That means a showdown with my fears-- with Ol’ Man Winter. Sometimes he's kickin' me in the balls and sometimes I'm kickin' him right back. 

Specifically, for me, it means running in cold weather, biking in cold weather, composting in cold weather, and when I can handle it, swimming in cold weather. Treadmills are complicated medication. They are kind of like chemo-therapy. Sure they kill cancer, but they kill the good stuff too. So, I try to avoid them. Maybe that's why I signed up for the Burning River 100 this week-- my first ever 100 mile trail race. 

Running on the trails in the local parks, however, is the closest thing I have to a silver bullet for the winter blues. The colors and contours of the forest change by the day and hour. Small creatures still scurry around, being cute and tough as crap. Over the course of a year and a couple thousand miles of running, I'll have only three or maybe four runs that I completely regret doing. Inevitably, it's the ones where I've dressed poorly. Improperly understanding how to dress for winter can lead to soggy, frigid, depressing runs. But happy running, or at least depression-management running, requires a rudimentary understanding of clothing technology. In other words, what is Clo? 

Clo is a standard unit of measurment like the pound or calorie. It is defined as the amount of insulation required to keep a resting person warm in a windless room at 70 °F (21.1 °C). For my fellow energy geeks, this comes out to be equivalent to an R-value of 0.88 °F·ft²·h/Btu [1]. For some perspective, a naked person is wearing 0 Clo. In case you need a visual, here is what 0 Clo looks like. 

Visualizing 0 pounds or 0 calories is much harder to do. 

Energy research from the 1970s revealed that a man dressed in a business suit for work is wearing ~1 Clo. Women tend to wear about 0.75 Clo to work, and are thus more prone to turn the thermostat up in the office. (Or perhaps the researchers were 70s men biasing their study to focus only on scantily-clad women). In either case, Clo is a low-tech solution for an energy crisis that was well studied in the 1970s, but is even more appropriate to pay attention to nowadays.  

[3]

If a person is running, their internal metabolic reaction rate increases, so there is much more "waste heat" produced, warming them up from the inside, decreasing their need for Clo. Also, the radiative effects of sunlight further dimish the need for Clo. Once you get moving, even on a winter day, staying cool rather than warm could quickly become the dominant matter of business, so you have to be strategic with your outfit. Additional factors like wind speed and humidity further complicate matters. Balancing metabolic core temperature with ambient comfort is really about finding your own personal sweet spot-- a bandwidth of comfort. 

As a rule of thumb, I've found that 60°F is my body's general balance point when I'm active. If it's
 >60 °F, I could run naked, but below 60°F is when I start to need Clo. When it gets down to 40°F, I know I need to wear about 1 Clo. Anyone who's had to chase down a taxi or dance at a wedding knows that a suit can get uncomfortably hot unless it's 40°F. Then, it's perfect. 

At 20°F, I'd need a trench coat to find my bandwidth of comfort. Of course, the only man who could pull off the trench coat look can fly, knows karate, and how to hack the Matrix. So what use would he have for running?

Is that air you're breathing out of your rear end real?

So here are my strategies for winter running:
0th Law - Do as much daylight running as possible (~lunchtime, ~sunrise, ~sunset)
1st Law -  No trench coating
2nd Law - No cotton (It dries poorly, rubs the nipples into bloody popsicles, and makes you feel cold)
3rd Law - Using 60 °F as my balance point, add one layer to any body part for every 10 °F drop in temperature. 

Examples
60 °F - shorts and a technical shirt = "minimum base layer"
50 °F - shorts and a technical shirt + one layer (pullover or long sleeve shirt)
40 °F - shorts and a technical shirt + two layers = pants, technical shirt, pullover = shorts, technical shirt, pullover, hat & gloves
30 °F - pants + technical shirt + pullover + pullover 2 + hat & gloves
20 °F - pants + technical shirt + pullover + pullover 2 + hat & gloves + shell
10 °F - the mathematics start to break down at these temperatures and we get a singularity as we approach 0 °F, and all bets are off. The run may or may not even happen. 

This is all fine in theory, but affording all the technical clothing can be an epic task in its own right. With some help from some running friends we will be blogging next week about how to scavenge for our favorite cold weather running gear. There are certainly different strategies involved, depending on your budget, fashion sense, and networking skills. 

In the meantime, have a happy Thanksgiving with your loved ones! 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_comfort
[2] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/02/body-insulation-thermal-underwear.html
[3] http://www.blowtex-educair.it/DOWNLOADS/Thermal%20Comfort.htm

Gettin' Krunk on Kvass (Part II)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my friend, neighbor, and bacterial co-father, Dan, who showed me how to make kraut and beet kvass and keep it klassy. I'm happy to report that our children have reached maturity! Time to get get krunk, baby!

Maximized handy-manliness himself, lifting the skirt of the kraut jar to download our baby

5 jars of kraut from two 5-lbs heads of cabbage

It looks like toilet water and vomit, but that's a sign of the DELICIOUSNESS.

Beet chunks, brine, turmeric, ginger, and garlic = Orgasmatonic

After straining out the chucks, it yields a 12 oz and a 16 oz bottle of kvass

Anya and Dan were both sick when I came over for harvest time, so they were feening for the kvass. I would have been sick not to have a shot too. While preparing the kvass, Dan and I had our first domestic dispute over whether to put any turmeric in the kvass. Dan said, "We got it put it in, Chris. We have to try it." And I said, "You've gone too far. That bell can't be un-rung." Dan is the Marine, so he won the argument. And I'm glad he did.

A shot is pretty potent. I'm not sure you'd want to drink much more at a time.
It would make a great salad dressing, though. 

OO DAG! Best kvass I've ever had. Could the Orgasmatonic be as good as Dan's famous Bubonic Tonic? I'm going to make it my mission to find out.

Recycled beet chunks-- after harvesting, Dan refills the jar of beet chunks with more filtered water and will let it sit for another week or so of fermenting. It's a the "re-fried beans" of the raw fermentation world.