The Bell

Under certain circumstances I drift into a recurring dream state. Data indicates that some combination of artial fibrillation, exercise induced muscular fatigue, dehydration, lack of sufficient oxygen to cerebral cortex, including prefrontal lobes, hippocampus and hypothalamus. I know when these players have met for a board meeting because the notes are transcribed for me in real time. Immediate response is necessary to balance the symptoms of dizziness, sometimes extreme, heart palpitations, dense brain fog and muscle spasms. In general, the self-help treatments I find as effective as the costly trip to the ER, are threefold: 

1) Make sure food is immediately available as fuel (carbohydrate).

2) Ensure hydration is topped off.

3) Get horizontal, relax, breathe deep and allow the body to regain its homeostasis. 

Often when this frustrating, and as-yet non-lethal situation occurs, as it did yesterday afternoon, I have the choice of toughing it out (when things absolutely must get done or I have a responsibility elsewhere), or some combination of napping, meditating, taking a hot bath, or heading upstairs to read and hopefully fall asleep. 

I chose the latter last night and was interrupted only three times by Saturday night messaging. Once the heaviness of my eye-lids indicated that a segue from the written word to the four dimensional wonderful world of deep REM had been granted the green light, I took full advantage. But first, a relaxing technique I learned while martial arts training. 

Lie flat on back, reach the deepest state of total relaxation possible and take in a series of complete diaphragmatic breaths. Start with your toes and conduct a ‘total body check’, feel, REALLY FEEL, your feet, ankles, knees, hamstrings and quads giving focused energy to each part, sensing vibration, their connectedness, active state of wellness and harmonic balance. Note any imbalances, soreness, pain, inflammation or discomfort. Accept whatever data is transferred during this process with the goal of adding loving, healing, awareness to the therapy. When you have traveled this biological path, finish with a look at the part your soul plays. Are you harboring anger, frustration, dissatisfaction, rage, or masking pain, suffering or fear? What is the rate of your total vibration? Is it clear or muddied, shining brightly of diffused by the darkness? Is your love light on high? 

After the total body check, relax even deeper into this peaceful state and accept whatever challenges become apparent. You will see the prescription and hear the diagnosis. It will be a low hum at first but with practice the answer will ring like Johnny’s guitar. 

I am relaxed now, and can feel the changes brought about by my own introspection and commitment to reaching higher vibrations of non-judgmental acceptance. I sense satisfaction in the progress, not matter how small or slow, along this path. The one I have chosen as the path of my passion and the one I must, as a result, accept the success for as well as the failures from. I feel a balance that whispers to me that it will be OK, and with this I drift into….

…. more challenge. 

It is the dream where I am in a life or death game. My ‘captors’ (but ‘they’ could very well be my sub-consciousness cleverly disguised) have set up an intricate proving ground where I am given a series of tests. If I unlock their secrets I advance to another level and another, more difficult test. The rules are simple. If I correctly answer the question or preform the activity necessary, I move to the next level. If I don’t, I die. Game over. Shut it down. The end. Darkness and eternal sensory deprivation. Hell. 

I snap to attention in the dream awaiting the first instruction. I can feel a power in the awareness I hold fixed in the cross-hairs of my flow. I am ready. 

“Ring the bell,” I hear from an unseen voice.

I shake off the urge to ask the obvious question and immediately look around for a bell. Big Ben, a brass one with a black handle like we used when I was a ten year old alter boy? Did Chuck Berry leave one laying under the railroad tracks? The bell attached to a boxing ring? Is it Thich Nhat Hanh’s bell of mindfulness? 

I wake in a sweat bridging the gap between the worlds but still not seeing a bell anywhere. As I am sleeping on a bed in the house of my clients I am not familiar with all the decorations and furnishings, so I visually scramble for clues. I see a beautiful stained-glass lamp on the dresser next to the bed and process the materials of its construction, its essence, what is it made of, what are its characteristics? What sound will it make….if…I

Snap the glass of its shade sharply with my middle fingernail? I do this with the stress of knowing what will happen if it clunks of plastic. Producing...

The most beautiful, sensuous and harmonic resonating of peace I have ever heard. 

I fall back to sleep with its echo falling over my soul like a warm blanket. 

Where I hear the voice say to an assistance that there is no need for further testing tonight. 

In the Hunt

I am in the hunt. Looking for the perfect combination. Time, opportunity, money. 

I would like to think that armed with almost seven decades of experience, this should be easy. But it never is. Here is the game plan.

I would like to fill a gap in the cycling tour industry by offering a service to groups, clubs, teams or even the occasional pair of cyclists coming long distances to ride in the splendor of our backyard. The service, while not a novel concept, would be SAG, support and gear, for hire. I think this is a down cedar tree just waiting to be carved into a utilitarian and artistic totem. To the extent that I googled the heck out of it yesterday, the demand seems to be high and the supply low. It has a relatively small start up cost, and could be available immediately. Not to mention the fun, passion and adventure factors inherent in taking it to the tops of mountains, along wild and natural waterways and with the company of vibrant, enthusiastic and adventurous types of all ages, genders and nationalities. 

I have the skills and desire. I see the opportunity. I like the challenge. What I don’t have is the disposable capitol collecting rust or interest in an account somewhere offshore. Making it an adrenaline charged gamble when I could just as easily, and probably way more safely, keep what is accurately called my life savings, ready and available for the emergencies that are almost surely making their way towards my door as we speak. 

This is like putting all your money on red and trusting the creative and benevolent energies of the cosmos to assist with your luck. 

But you know as well as I that luck, while interesting, is not the primary element of success. It is effort, timing, enthusiasm, desire and flow. Oddly, perhaps, the same things we call upon for success in our training and racing, riding and running, walking and sleeping, focus and mindfulness. If I want this to happen with sincere desire, willing to sacrifice my precious comfort zone for its attainment and promise to enjoy the wild ride wherever it will take us, I cannot lose. That little ball will magically and miraculously settle into the scarlet slot. 

And all I have to do is start. Take step one. And then keep going. 

I found a vehicle yesterday that fills the bill. I would love a sixty thousand dollar Mercedes Sprinter but I will be going to test drive and negotiate with the dealer on Monday for a snazzy little 2012 Ford Transit. With low mileage and just four super efficient cylinders. And build it up from there. 

I am mocking up some wrap treatments with the goal of attaching a related corporate logo to the rig. Additionally, as we will be putting on 4K Pacific Coast miles in August, some type of ‘text to enter’ contest on the rear might be a big draw. A bike, vacation, iPhone? 

So here we go. Game on. I am in the hunt. 

Any Subject, All Day.

Of the heels of yesterday’s travesty of justice, where a career felon with a lifelong history of bank and tax fraud was sentenced to significantly less time than standard guidelines suggest for the simple fact that he is a rich, white republican sleaze-ball in the trump crime family, I stand as guilty as Manafort. 

Not on the same charges (I have never laundered Ukraine drug money or lied to the FBI about it) but I have committed crimes equally as heinous. I am plea-bargaining today because of my recent bust, that latest on a rap-sheet going back to the Nixon administration. 

I started lifting weights, adding to an already full aerobic and sport-specific skills regimen, in 1968 when I was the starting shortstop on the defending Camino Real League champions, considered by many to be one of the premier CIF leagues on the talent rich Southern California baseball scene. I was, as later assessed by the San Francisco Giants head scout to be ‘too small to play everyday’. At 5-9 and 165 lbs. So I did that any sophomore would do and took fifty bucks from my weekly pay at a local supermarket (where my first union job provided the minimum wage of $1.65 at the time for retail clerks - and their box-boy assistants) and bought a set of weights. The athletic department at our catholic HS had yet to up-grade the strength and conditioning facility and equipment where the ancient plates, benches and bars were monopolized by the football teams. So I set up shop in our garage at home and began to lift. Nixon had just defeated Hubert Humphrey. I was getting stronger as The Phoenix was being a crooked dick.

You may know by now that this is not a political blog-site, or a baseball one. Or a right-of-passage one or a criminal justice one. Although if the back-story for one of the 365 posts over the course of this calendar year requires a brief allusion to or a connect-the-dots retrospective mention of facts or threaded connections to events from the past, I’ll try to find a way to fit them in and draw the intended conclusion du jour. You might even recall that way back when we launched this effort, 2008, I symbolically and solemnly placed the thematic medal of ‘the ten thousand things’ upon its digital shoulders. Squarely. 

Meaning that the dots are connected today, however circuitously, from Manafort, Nixon, The SF Giants and Lucky Supermarkets,.. to today’s meme of sports training, by nothing other than…the opportunity that says that I can. Or suggests that I might, or demands that I must. 

This is the same reciprocal freedom that is granted to you - as you can, might or must - read no further and never return. I take full responsibility for either eventuality. And while I will be first to admit that the thread connecting the above persons and places named herein is a fine one, there is more than one path to the truth and sometimes the rope holding everything together is too thin to see. 

Today’s truth is simply this: Even if you have been training religiously since the days of Tricky Dick, and have built a aerobic system the envy of bush-league shortstops from Westchester to Rikers Island, one not found in supermarkets, please consider the wisdom of taking an off-day. Rest is what makes us stronger, it allows cellular recovery and reconstruction of muscles traumatized by intensity. I am looking closely into the chemistry of hormones, steroids and other chemicals released into the bloodstream as a result of the varying zones of training. Some are good and others are not. It was pointed out that all training is good as long as one builds in the appropriate recovery time to heal and grow from our sessions. 

This says to me that we, the collective us who care, should learn from our mistakes with a touch more compassion and a boat-load more of bi-partisan common sense. 

Which holds more truth today than anything you will hear from any republican, on any subject, all day. 

7/16" PM

Back another lifetime ago I wrote an SOP, standard operating procedure, contract for the Navy. As manager for MWR, morale, welfare and recreation at a remote and isolated NSF, naval support facility, in the Indian Ocean, we were opening a new facility at our marina, the new and exciting recreational activity known as jet-skiing. And of course we needed to present a proposal for inclusion into the living, breathing, ever-changing guiding tome known as the BOS, base operating support, contract. Which defines, details and governs just about everything. We had already made the purchase of our fleet of ten skidoos and it was now up to me to provide a maintenance schedule with attachments to justify, or not, additional man power to enact. This is somewhat a game. If I could show that the PM, preventative maintenance, and well as general upkeep and care of the craft warranted an additional staffer to my work force, we win. If not, we lose the opportunity to add value and support to our civilian staff (and must figure out a way to get it done with existing personnel.) 

Carefully pulling maintenance instructions from the owners manual, consulting our existing marine mechanics and then padding the projected labor totals to breaking point, I re-edited my work for the fifth time. The detail was down to the time it would take to remove one spark plug, properly recycle it, open another and insert, tighten and adjust it to specifications. Same with oil changes, air filters, gas lines, exhaust system inspections and every other PM check-up conceivable. I even put in five hours a month for stainless steel screw torque checks. This thing was thorough!

The point of this story is not the fact that as a result of my work we ‘won’ the contractual debate and hired another mechanic, or that I proved, at least to myself, that hard, focused efforts would have a return on time invested, or even that I had taken a bold step away from the nefarious fraud, waste and abuse pandemic of government contractor cost gouging, but that I had absorbed the intricate details and secrets of PM itself. The true value of preventative maintenance. 

I was reminded of the range of applications of this yesterday as we discussed the possible triggers to my A-Fib. Amazed that the head of Cardiology at one of the leading medical institutions in the US was listening to a puny recounting of my personal experiences, we isolated three, along with my responding self-help emergency triage techniques. It became apparent that PM could play a big part in the future of me. IF, a big if, I could do everything up front, prior to, in preparation for and in order to best prepare for the next pending round of the effects of an irregular heart rate, I was being a good patient as well as a good soldier. As I refuse to surrender (to more drugs, more surgeries and less activities.)

The three triggers:

1) Dehydration.

2) Irregular and/or un-balanced diet.

3) Stress. 

The three responses:

1) Hydraion.

2) Top off or restore dietary balance.

3) Rest. (Breathe deeply, relax, count breaths, meditate, and/or sleep.)

Certainly I could make several sub-categorical additions to this rather broad list, but those are the three plus three that we agreed could act as PM to avoid the frustratingly regular, and potentially catastrophic instances of A-Fib. 

Take a good look at your routines, the things that have become your status-quo, the vices that might have become habits. If they are negatively impacting your health, happiness, fitness or are keeping you from the obtainment of your goals, including longevity, perhaps it is time for you to detail out a preventative maintenance plan of your own. 

The time to change a spark plug was five minutes. Even if pre-gapped and even if your 1/2 drive ratchet was on the bench and fitted with a 7/16 deep well socket. 

Manager of Time

I am sitting in examination room 3 waiting for the head of Cardiology to knock. It has already been a long day. One that I had detailed down to the minute in order to make it work. As is my strange way, I woke an hour early, 0332 to be precise, and rolled into position to count breathes, a minor form of meditation that I do every day. I will not allow myself the luxury of getting out of bed until ten consecutive breaths have been successfully counted (with limited mental distraction.) Down the stairs, the daily med ceremony with hot lemon water, a quick but thorough electric shave, cuppa joe and kit pack (I went with the black, red and white Kiwi kit), and then the ten minute commute to the club.

Where we unleashed Day 1, Set 1, of the dreaded Super Eight protocol. Should you be interested in the details, in instruction form, here is a post from a year ago on the subject. Regardless of the time and place, a set of these dogs are guaranteed to bite. 

Now the details pay off. We finished at exactly 0630, leaving me precious little time to shower, then get over to the house now under my charge as the owners vacation in Florida, walk and feed the dog and haul ass to the last stop on the bus route that offers a park and ride option. I ditch the truck and hop aboard gladly dropping two bucks in the kitty for parking and a ride to the ferry. Easy ride across Puget Sound and since I had the foresight to pack my traveler mug, coffee was a buck. Once on the Seattle side the trek uphill to the light rail station is less than ten minutes putting me at UW Medical center with five to spare. 

A short lobby wait and I am answering questions from the good doctor in as accurate and objective manner as I am able. Everything looks good he finally announces - but we should get another echo cardiogram, it has been five years since the last one. OK, I say, immediately wondering what the Medicare co-pay will set me back.

The return trip on and I am back on the light rail, criss-crossing traffic back to the ferry, a 30 minute walk in the rain to my truck, pick up the dog and run her back here, pour coffee and log on.

That my friends is the life of an Islander (with atrial fibrillation) who insists on health and fitness preventative maintenance and taking as many matters into his own hands as possible to keep the Q in the quality of life acronym as robust as possible. 

I might even have time for a 20 minute nap before heading out for the PowerBarn and the evening 2x20 set. 

Thou Art That

Vision captured. 

You see it fully manifest in the instant of inception. The idea, that magical creative spark of illumination, hangs like the capolavoro, the masterpiece of your collective energies. It is the twinkle in Mona’s dark eyes and the non-judgmental powerful and serene visage of the marbled shepherd boy. It is Spielberg in the screening room, Garcia with headphones and Kerouac transcribing Cassady. 

Every surfer, skater, skier, sprinter and singer knows about it. Every runner, swimmer, climber, wide-receiver and keyboardist dreams of it. Every actor, drummer, author, shortstop and world traveler has heard the legendary tales. 

It is that magic moment when it all, everything, comes together so magnificently intense that we finally see. That is its power and promise. It, and we will explore what ‘it’ is shortly, is strong enough to cut through the thick, stifling fog of your consciousness and flood the spotlight of inspiration upon your soul. 

Some of us get glimpses on the rare occasions when we have completed the prerequisites and prove prepared to move to the next level, when heart rate, focus, extrinsic circumstance and opportunity all collide. Nine times of ten this prompts a ‘what was that?’ response. 

And therein lies the challenge. To move courageously towards improvement, the recognition that our personal percentage should, MUST, seek the nine of ten in welcoming the muse instead of wondering who it is knocking at the door. This is lightning in a bottle folks, a secret of immeasurable power and potential. After all…

…I can tell you until I am blue-faced and flat-lining about the ways to improve your speed. Same with your strength and even more so for your endurance. I can, anyone can, create a template with the only requirement necessary for completion, e.g. success, being mindless adherence. And this is fine. Obviously anything that makes us better, in one or many of the skills we seek, is positive energy. But at some point along that path we eventually begin to feel the absence of something bigger than simply compliance. The means to an end has to have more meaning. With more meaning the end is not the end, the end is now. Always now. The end is the beginning, full of presence, vibrancy and overflowing with cracking energy and joy. The end is now. Making your effort, here and presently, a hundred times more valuable than any simple victory could ever match. 

Why then do we try so hard to discredit the reality of this magic, citing dummy-down cautions like a republican cynic on anything threatening capitalism? Because what we don’t completely understand (like compound interest) we fear. And fear is the best motivator to gaslight the population you wish to control. You can’t handle this magic! You cannot be truly happy and alive thinking that you alone are responsible for it, it must be purchased, sold, rented, and taxed or the system, the one that protects you, will collapse into chaotic socialism. Oh my. 

You have it. It is in you. It is accessible right now, and right here. It is free. It does not pollute, oppress or exploit. It does not discriminate, profile or restrict. There are no walls. There is one requirement, however.

You must open your heart. And trust that by tapping into the possibility that all your dreams, every one of the snapshots of your desires and all the selfies of you in peak experience will create a package that, by design, is nothing other than the game of you finding you. The best you. The ultimate, optimal you. At your highest. In dynamic flow. Moving with the sacred harmonies and vibrations of universal energy. Seeing that moment as the brightest, most colorful and stunning portrait of life as art. 

The art of you. Thou art that. 

More Leaders

Because those are the types of people you want on your side. Could just as easily read because those are the types of athletes you want on your team. We are taking the metaphorical route today in comparison of the common traits that both parties exhibit. The habits of highly successful human beings, be they managers of commerce or competitions. There are commonalities. 

The CEO shares the same skill set with the athlete of extraordinarily high ACQ. She must be savvy - not necessarily in conventional rankings of IQ, but more in terms of street smarts. He must understand and hold mastery over every detail of his business - be that manufacturing widgets or maintaining dynamic flow in the heat of competition. Leadership qualities,  (as we discussed this morning in class) can be grouped into three broad categories:

The Trailblazer. Willing to take the lead and go first, to explore, to risk. 

The Ferryman. Helping others cross the Rubicon of doubt, fear and the obstacles thereof.

The Shepard. Willing to keep the flock safe and engaged while grazing towards improvement.

These three, taken from Buddhist teachings, illustrate three potential paths of successful leadership. I will make the allegorical leap of faith and assume that you might be interested in assuming leadership of your group, company, community, team or for starters, your fine self. For as every true leader knows, the better his or her team does, the better his or her chances of goal obtainment. 

Should I, as leader, work to become a better one? Is my primary obligation to myself to demonstrate the habits, the arts, the methodologies and wear the visage of leadership in the hope of developing more soldiers, sailors, servants or sergeants? NO. My sacred duty is in creating more leaders. Giving them the skills, the practice, the techniques and the training necessary for them to assume similar responsibilities with others. All three prototypes lead by example. I will go first and show the way. I will take you there. I will oversee your safety as you labor and study. 

Which camp are you currently in? Are you still a fired-up trailblazer of human potential, relentlessly moving towards a dream of passion and peace? Have you committed to the safe transportation of your peers to higher ground? Are you protecting those whose who seek your benevolence and bravado, as they toil at their own pace towards continual improvement? 

If you selected one of the above you are a leader and people look to you for direction. Accept this. Own it. Show the way. Lead by doing. Learn more. Travel. Ask good questions. Be patient (not everyone is ready for the responsibility and power of leadership.)

Those who have the desire to move towards the light, who will sacrifice for the common good, who will fearlessly defend the oppressed and see the truth, are the people I want on my side and on my team. 

Blaze the trail, pick up the oar or guard the flock. 

We need more leaders.