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.