Hey-ho

I've moved.

This western feeling

Love. Man, love is a fucker. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, after a new friend asked me if I'd ever been in love. Innocuous question, but one that's so loaded with significance. At the time, I hummed and hawed a little, because quite honestly, I'm not so sure I have. I do like that she's the kind of person who asks those sorts of questions, because I like people that make me think.

It's like this - I've been obsessed with girls, plenty. There's seldom been a stage in my life where I've not been permanently thinking about someone. I've obsessed over them, fretted over them, penned horrible poems about them. Done all the lame things people who are infatuated with (the idea of) someone do. Stalked them relentlessly on Facebook. Poured over every SMS, searching for hidden meanings. Analyzed, overanalyzed, everything they say. But that's not love, is it? No, love is reciprocal. You can't really say you're in love if the person is unaware of your affections, or (is it?) worse, is aware of them, but doesn't feel the same way.

Around the end of last year I went through the last of these infatuations, and swore thereafter I was done. Unrequited love, obsessive, fawning love, putting someone on a pedestal and building up every insignificant thing they do into this perfect construct, this avatar of your affection, I'm straight up calling bullshit on that. It's not healthy. It's not good. It's not cool. There is nothing admirable about the hopeless romantic - it's just sad and depressing.

What I'm pleased about is that I've been true to my word. There's been plenty of girls I've been interested in since then, and the ones that it seemed worth it (there's a long list of criteria - maybe I still overthink things?) to go for, I have, and while the results have been mixed, they've been results. And when it ended, for whatever reason, I moved the fuck on, got on with my life, more often than not with them and I still friends, which is great. It's healthy. It's part of growing up. Being stuck in that self-destructive cycle of "Oh my god if only she knew how perfect we would be together" is a terrifying downward spiral into self-esteem genocide. Even just typing that above made me cringe, because I've been there. Was there often.

So this year has been good. There's been no unrequited love (not from my side, but I have now been on the opposite side of the fence and while it's not much better being the object of said affection, at least it was a change of scenery) but there's been plenty of good fun.

But I still haven't been in love. I haven't shared something special with someone - there's been a handful of girls who I could see that happening with, but it never progressed to that stage. And that's a good thing. It's a natural pruning of compatibility as you learn more about people and find out just how fucking crazy they are (most are very, very crazy). Building someone up into this ideal, putting them on a pedestal and venerating their every move, their every Facebook post, every utterance is personally disastrous and enormously, emotionally unhealthy.

I'm glad that's in the past. It has been a long and hard lesson to learn.

So no, I haven't been in love. Not really. Not by my definition of the thing. And I'm okay with that. The same someone who sparked this line of questioning sent me this, and it made everything seem okay:

I couldn't find the perfect song

Keto, as it turns out, is harder than you think. After two weeks, with only one (fairly substantial) slip-up, I've abandoned it. It's just too difficult, and the cravings for a snack other than biltong just get to you. I thought it'd be the desire for something like pasta, or pizza, but it turns out it's the little things, like honey in your tea, or late-night tuna mayo on rye bread, or cheese and crackers with wine. WINE! Man. Anyway, in the continuing saga of my body, the anecdotal laboratory of dietary experimentation, I'm now doing intermittent fasting (IF).

The response from my usual dietary detractors to this latest dietary change has been more vociferously negative than their response to keto, but I'm finding it interesting. In short, IF entails having a 16 hour fasted period, and an 8 hour feeding period. My feeding time is from around 5 PM to midnight, and my fasting period is from midnight to 5 PM. Basically, you skip breakfast and lunch, have a small pre-training meal, gorge after your training, and then have a smallish meal before bed. Also, I get to have a 'feeding time', like a shark. That's awesome.

Today's only the second day, but I'm finding it pretty easy. Skipping breakfast is easy as hell to do (let's face it - it feels like a chore most of the time), and while I get hunger pangs around lunchtime, it's nothing a cup of green tea and getting immersed in work doesn't fix. In fact, if anything, I feel more focused at work, because I'm not structuring my day around food, and by the time I get home, I'm in truth, not even that hungry. Yesterday's pre-training meal made me feel incredibly full during my training, which was something of a blessing and a curse.

Something I've noticed about gym during winter - everyone who's there looks like they train. Contrast this with summertime training, where the treadmills are jam-packed with fatties, only the serious fitness enthusiasts are committed enough to make the effort to head out into the cold to train. I realise this sounds incredibly elitist, and I don't mean it like that - it's merely an observation (from an ex-fatty to boot). In summer, it's impossible to get a power cage or squat rack because of the bros queueing up to do brocurls or rack lifts or whatever ridiculous new exercise is flavour-of-the-month, and while there's still a ton of bros working on their biceps now in winter, everyone looks serious about training. There's way fewer of those obviously confused, slightly disorientated people that flock to the gym in summer in a belated attempt to get some sort of beach-appropriate body.

There is however, always an exception, and Flat-in-Front-Fredrick in his bicycle shorts is the main culprit. About a week ago I noticed this guy, immediately, because he was wearing bicycle shorts with a padded front, and looked completely out of his depth.

They look just like this. Just with more padding. A lot more front padding.

Anyway, this guy. I see him because he trains at about the same time as me, but generally in a different section, but I'm always amazed by how androgynous the shorts make him look. There's a lot of padding there, and it just sort of creates this non-descript mound that protrudes out of his loin area that both disturbs me, and inspires a sort of morbid curiosity that means I just. can't. look. away. It doesn't help that he's really rather fat, with these tiny, spindly appendages, and that last night he was sitting on the bench next to mine while I was doing my chest program, and every time I looked left I saw him labouring like some sort of beached whale under the crushing weight of a 20kg bench press, with this perfectly smooth black mound glaring at me like the shiny bald head of a mole emerging from its lair. Again, I realise this sounds absolutely horrible, and more power to him for trying to get into shape, but the bicycling shorts must go man.

I promised you open ocean glow

I had a good weekend and a particularly special Sunday. We went hiking in the Suikerbosrand, and it was beautiful, in an unconventional way. There had very recently been a series of controlled burns, so half the reserve was charred to ash, the other half dry as a bone. It was a strange sensation, to be either walking through so much nature so close to death, everything dry like an enormous natural tinderbox, or the other half already ravaged by fire, nothing but ash. It was like we were walking on that edge of death, where the only thing separating the last vestiges of winter life and their tenuous hold on life from absolute nothingness was a single flame.

And yet, in all the death, a sensation, an idea, just a hint that life struggles on. Not even the first signs of regrowth (it's still too cold for that), but the (almost seditious) idea that life continues, subdued but unabated. The odd gazelle. Sounds of small animals in the sparse undergrowth. The intensely beautiful colour palettes of the shrubs, if you look closely enough. A lizard here or there. An entire herd of skittish zebra.

I positively reveled in the entire experience, if only because hiking is so much damned fun. I suspect I was the only one who really enjoyed it, but I was positively bounding from rock to rock, and pretty much running down the hills through the charred remains of plants, kicking up an enormous cloud of ash behind me and grinning like a madman as I did so. I was sorely tempted on numerous occasions to just break out into a run down a path to see what was on the other side of a group of boulders. I wanted to climb everything, see over the top of every rocky outcrop, explore everywhere. While the people I went with were fun and good company, the expectation was for something less intense, so we did very little running, very little climbing, very little exploring. I'd love to go back, by myself if need be, find the highest hill and climb it. I wanted to take it all in and run until I felt fire in my lungs and sweat in my eyes and feel the pounding of my heart in my hands. I may just.

This is why we get fit. This is why we get strong. It's so we can enjoy these experiences.

On the way back, we saw a controlled burn on a nearby expanse of veld. The plume of smoke it created, tinted pink by the afternoon sun was really quite something to behold. It left me smiling, although the bath I had afterwards, washing the accumulated, caked filth of a day spent in the dirt was probably the highlight of the day.

I spend the next couple of weeks at home, alone. I somehow feel like the timing is fortuitous. I need time to myself. It's been a very sociable couple of months for me, and I need to just disconnect and recharge.

We can go down to the streets and follow the shores...

I tend to blog fairly infrequently, but when I do, I feel like it ought to fulfill one of two purposes: catharsis or signposting. Occasionally both. Take my last blog, on deadlifts (of all things). When I did that, back in May, I was lifting like a little six-year old girl, in all fairness, but I felt the need to signpost what limited progress I had made. My progress had been minimal, in retrospect. I was doing a single or double lift of 170kg and was happy with average form. Six weeks later and I'm doing 10 sets of 180kg singles with significantly better form. I'm now working on cracking a 200kg lift. It's still pretty light, all things considered (maybe I should stop using Willem as a strength benchmark though), but it's functional strength and it's in a state of improvement. That blog played an important part in the improvement - it was me planting a signpost in the ground saying "I'm here now, but I want to improve. I must improve."

Anyway, that's signposting for you. This blog is similar. I had a very interesting weekend. Friday was nice enough, I went out with some new(ish) friends and had a good time. Or I thought I did. No, I did. I just felt... unfulfilled afterwards. I didn't know why - I put it down to a general malaise and perhaps tiredness. I attempted to rectify it on Saturday by going out to lunch with a girl who I've been keen on for a few weeks, and I made a move. Man, I'm glad I did, but I got shot down. No, I got massacred. I got a world-ending barrage of anti-aircraft flak. I went down in flames. I'm writing this with something approaching a wry smile on my lips, which is good, because I wasn't feeling particularly amused afterwards, but I guess that's progress.

You see, I used to be a hopeless romantic, but by virtue of the fact that human beings are cruel and heartless bastards all, that has since changed. In fairness, by Sunday I was over it and had a bit of a chuckle about it. And that's a very good thing. It's important to take those shots. It's also never been in my nature to do so, but I have this year, and while the results have been mixed, I'm glad I did. It's also important to get over it when it doesn't work out, and that's something I'm a lot better at nowadays.

The truth is, there are few things as depressing as being a hopeless romantic. I would never go back. It's just a load of horseshit. You don't have to be the opposite either - the hard, cynical, forever alone bastard, but emotional extremes are just an unhappy and unfulfilling place to be. You don't want to be there. Emotionally unstable people are my anathema right now - few things tire me more than people who are captive to their emotional whims.

Anyway, does this blog have a point? Perhaps. In the course of thinking about this whole thing (perhaps something I ought not do - after all, I got shot down, I should just move on? Maybe...) I came to realise that I've had a pleasant break from what Gordy affectionately calls 'my bullshit', but I need to get back into it. I've been having people over, eating whatever the hell I felt like, drinking, smoking and generally acting like I'm where I want to be. Which I don't. And perhaps that's why I have this sort of general malaise - while work is going well, I haven't been approaching my training and diet with the Spartan-like discipline I need. But that has since ended. My capacity for tremendous discipline and tremendous hedonism never ceases to amaze me.

Anyway, starting Saturday, I went on keto, and while it's still early days, it seems promising. I am consuming satisfying quantities of green vegetables and meat, and nuts, which is keeping me pleasantly full. I did feel a bit of fatigue this afternoon, but that might just be the lack of carbs. My ketostix are varying between 0 and trace amounts of acetones, so I haven't gone into ketosis yet, but it ought to be soon. I'm back on creatine, I got a small tub of Jack3d (if my heart explodes in the next three weeks, someone sue them on my behalf) and I'm going to continue working on my goal of a 200kg deadlift and being able to run a sub-1 hour 10km.

Life is good when I'm disciplined. It has structure, and purpose. I have a fantastic bunch of friends right now, some of which are introducing me to new and exciting things like Dungeons and Dragons (*snort*), as well as expanding my musical, film and book horizons. And as of this weekend, for the first time since the beginning of this year, there are no active prospects on the horizon when it comes to eligible, dateable women. While I realise to someone else this might be somewhat depressing, considering my abysmal track record (I am not good at relationships, clearly), and in light of what success I have had this year, I'm quite okay with it. I've had fun, but it's time to get back to business. So I'm hoping that stays the same, at least until summer, when I can cut loose a little bit.

Oh, and one last thing. I was struck by two distinctive memories this weekend, but they came, as memories do, fragmented and discordant. The one was of going to an apartment in Parkhust when I was very young (maybe six?), and the other was when I was older, playing in the pre-pool mud pit that we had at our old house. What's special about both of these is the recollection of a unique tactile experience I had with each. The recollection was so profoundly strong, so overwhelmingly vivid, I could feel the curtains in the first memory as if I were touching them now. The sensation of the fabric, the evening light, even the smudges on the glass, although hidden somewhere in my subconscious came flooding back bright and brilliant. In the second memory, the feeling of mud between my toes was so real, it was all I could do to not look down to check if I wasn't in fact standing in mud when I remembered it. The granularity of the sand, the squelch-squelch sound, it was like my brain had locked up those sights and sounds in an airtight box for 20 years, and now they came flooding back, as clear and distinct as if I'd experienced it this morning.

I'm not sure what this means, but perhaps I'll write about them. In both cases, they are very good memories, and I'd like to have them written down somewhere for posterity.

Memories are very fragile things.

Fail early, fail often

My personal philosophy when training, and in many other areas in my life has been to fail early, and fail often. Simply put it, it means not being scared of failure, but giving it your best shot all the same. It's been a good approach so far, and there's very few exercises where it's more fun to fail than on deadlifts.

Unlike squats or a bench press, where a failure can often be catastrophic, you're unlikely to hurt yourself on deadlifts if your form is correct. Actually, no, I lie. That's true for all three lifts. Failing on a bench press attempt when you're properly spotted with proper form is in no way dangerous. However, take this idiot for example, attempting a 1RM max on bench but with a 'suicide grip' (the thumb isn't wrapped around the bar, so it rolls off his hand). I know it sucks, but he pretty much got what was coming to him:

Or take this guy for example, doing his 2 inch squats, again, if he'd be doing proper deep squats with about 1/3 of the weight, he'd probably have had a much better day over all:

So actually, scratch that. I'm all about failing, but failing safely when you've got 150kg over your head is probably important. Anyway, back to deadlifts, which I really enjoy. I had my training partner, housemate and homie Steyn take a video of me doing some deadlifts this week at the gym, and compared them to a video of myself from six months ago, and I was really happy with the progress, not only in terms of the strength gain, but considering I've worked hard to get my weight down as well.

Here's the first video, taken around the end of last year. At the time, I was about 115kg, and this was a 1RM attempt on 170kg.

So a couple of things, form is pretty horrible. At this point, I was still very much a novice, and I'm lifting 170kg and struggling my ass off on a single lift. Interesting, it was around this point people first started really noticing the weight loss, but I'm still tubby as all fuck. At this point, weighing 115kg and lifting 170kg, it's only a 1.5x bodyweight lift. That's not particularly impressive - it's barely makes the grade for basic functional strength. For what it's worth, I'd define basic functional strength as the following: 1.5x BW deadlift, 1x BW squat, 0.75x BW bench press, 0.35x BW overhead press. Anyway, so yeah, not amazing.

Fast forward to this week, and I rocked a 170kg double with significantly better form, and off a 95kg frame.

Form is still nowhere near perfect, and thanks to a thread I left on the Fitocracy Fittit group, I got some excellent feedback. My back is still rounding an unacceptable amount, and I need to work on that, but generally speaking, it's looking less like the deadlift performed by someone with a debilitating muscle condition and severe lack of co-ordination.

I like progress. It makes me joyful.

Last known surroundings

What a completely unforgettable weekend.

I made up my mind on Thursday night that I'd drive down to the Drakensberg 'when I woke up'. It just so happened that I woke up at 5 AM, and by 5:30, I was fuelled and on the way. To say that the traffic was horrific would be an understatement of the highest magnitude. It was an absolute abortion, and coupled with the mist and the sheer volume of cars, it took me almost three hours to put 100 kilometers between myself and Jo'burg city limits. Once I was was past the second set of tolls, things got a bit better, but what should have been a relatively quick four hour drive was almost eight. Not fun.

I arrived at roughly lunchtime in Bergville, where my queries regarding the location of the nearest hospital were met with more than a little curiosity from the locals. Apparently, there are no hospitals for 'white people' in Bergville, and I had to make it abundantly clear that I was looking for a rural hospital. That particular phrasing, I'm sad to say, didn't come to me immediately. I tried 'black hospital' in my head for a second before abandoning it, likewise for 'Zulu hospital'. I almost went with 'provincial hospital', which would have actually been quite correct, as I found out later. Anyway, I find it highly enjoyable to make my brain think somewhat outside its comfort zone from time to time, and between pulling over at the side of the road and asking pedestrians for directions (it's been a long time since I've done that) and some furtive guesswork via Google Maps, I eventually found myself at Emmaus Provincial Hospital, a level 1 care facility located smack-bang in the middle of fucking nowhere, KwaZulu Natal. You get urban, peri-urban, rural, fucking rural, and Emmaus. For a city boy like me, it was a bit of a shock. I loved every minute of it, from the goats and children in the road to potholes the size of small swimming pools. Rural as all hell.

Anyway, I was greeted with a fresh quiche, and I quickly found out that Laurene is every bit the chef she claims to be. Will wonders never cease? There's certain things you take at face value, but when someone claims to being amazing in the kitchen because they spent a year in an Irish five-star hotel you don't necessarily get your hopes up. After a bit of quiche we snuck in an afternoon nap - I was, after all, pretty tuckered out. Friday night is very much for the nightlife, and I'm well aware of Laurene's propensity for excessive drinking, smoking and partying. She has a zest for nocturnal mischief that has all but fled from my other friends, and I find it invigorating being around her if only for this quality (although there are many others). Needless to say, there's not a whole lot of options for drinking in rural KZN, which meant we ended up at Amphitheatre Backpackers drinking quarts with her male nurse friend Ayanda, laughing at the chubby American tourists, the dour German backpackers and playing pool, badly.

Eventually just before midnight we decided a change of scenery would be nice, and Laurene 'knew a place'. Cue a dramatic and highly exciting round of getting slightly lost in the Drakensberg looking for a place to go drinking. In Jo'burg, club-hopping is something that one reasonably allocates a few minutes' worth of time to, perhaps half an hour at most. Almost 90 minutes later, after at least one wrong turn that ended up with us on a road surrounded by corn fields (creepy) we find this place, and make a beeline for the bar and some hard-earned libations. At this point, I'm well and truly loose-tongued, and start chatting to a very cute Australian girl named Hannah as I'm setting up for a pool game with Ayanda. Laurene's at the bar getting us a round, and as Hannah asks very sweetly where I'm staying, I use the opportunity to introduce Laurene, who is sauntering back with drinks. "With my friend, Laurene. She's this amazingly talented doctor - oh look, here she comes." One look at Laurene, blonde locks and pouty lips and this poor girl scuttled off, no doubt massively intimidated and more than a little crestfallen. Cruel perhaps, but highly amusing. It was a scene that repeated itself not an hour later, except this time, the perpetrator was an obviously camp young chap named Tom. Fortunately, Laurene was there to save me from his advances, and she ended up dragging me out of the bar in a very protective and amusing sort of way.

After dropping off Ayanda in the middle of fucking nowhere in the middle of the goddamned night (seriously, we stopped in the middle of the road nowhere near civilization to drop him off), we were both starving, so on getting home, while I proceeded to pace about the kitchen, Laurene made what can only be described as the 3 AM steak roll to end all other steak rolls. If this steak roll was a historical figure it'd be Adolf Hitler - massively charismatic and the progenitor of a master race of steak rolls, custodians of a reich that'd last a thousand years. It would enslave and oppress all other steak rolls it deemed to be unworthy. It was that good. There were onions and cream and butter and a mushroom reduction sauce that made me question not just my sobriety (limited) but my very sanity (hopefully still intact). I realise my faculties were somewhat impaired, and in fairness, at that point in the night a petrol station pie would be arguable as well-received as a risotto prepared by a master chef, but this steak roll was perhaps one of the crowning achievements of my culinary life, a true high point not just in drunken cuisine, but in my long and varied (sober) gastronomical journey thus far.

The next morning I drifted in and out of sleep for quite some time, but eventually came around to the sounds of breakfast being fried in the kitchen for me. There are few things better, and Laurene's skills in the kitchen are capable of reducing a grown man to tears. If she's as good a surgeon as she is a chef (and I know she's better) she's going to immortalised in medical textbooks, probably for inventing some highly technical procedure that revolutionises a surgical method. I guarantee it. The woman no doubt resorts to some dark witchcraft to make a plate of eggs, bacon and toast so delicious (she feigned ignorance to any deal with the devil, and instead credited copious amounts of butter and cream) but I was in heaven all the same.

I wanted to take in some of the 'Berg that day, so we headed off to a local hotel which served as a departure point for some of the more scenic hikes in the area. Because she was recovering from pneumonia earlier during the week, we limited our hike to a fairly easy two hour affair up to a local waterfall. Yes, she's fucking hardcore. She works 80 hours a week, sleeps three hours a night, had pneumonia earlier that week but was still up for a hike. Anyway, reflections on her testicular fortitude aside, it was honestly one of the most profoundly enjoyable afternoons of my life. Easy conversation, albeit about very intense and varied subject matter, staggering, breathtakingly beautiful scenic vistas and nature all around us. I had an enormously good time, and was tremendously sad to hike back down the mountain to the hotel. We did however enjoy a decent snack before we headed back, which was nice. I had a French onion soup, and although the croutons were oversized and soggy, it was hard not to enjoy the view.

Saturday evening was always going to be a lot more chilled. Supper was a prawn noodle soup, lovingly prepared entirely by hand from fresh ingredients. I learned the secret to amazing pan-friend prawns (the butter needs to be slightly burnt) and watched in no small amount of awe as what was quite possibly one of the most finely crafted, subtle dishes I've ever eaten was prepared from scratch in front of my very eyes. It's a real treat to watch someone so talented work, and enjoying a magnificent bottle of Rupert and Rothschild while I did so certainly didn't make it any less of a pleasure. The end result was a dish as picturesque as the Drakensberg itself, artfully crafted with the skill and passion of a true artisan, full of complexity and subtle flavours that danced across my palette with a such a sense of uniformity of purpose I was honestly emotionally moved. I may have proposed marriage. I'm fairly sure I did. Apparently, it's a fairly common reaction to those fortunate enough to sample the dish. I am in rare and distinguished company then.

We moved fairly quickly from supper to a blanket in front of the fireplace along with a further two excellent bottles of red wine I'd brought down from Jo'burg on a recommendation from a friend. By happy chance, the Kanonkop was her favourite wine, and the conversation flowed easily on all manner of topics as varied as scrotum splints (she's going to be a urologist, so there was more than a little discussion about the subject) and Jazz and modern art. At some point, we started running low on firewood, which prompted a highly amusing foray into the wood behind her house in the pitch dark to forage for firewood. "After all, we are in rural KZN, we may as well make like the locals and forage!" she grinned before bounding off into the darkness, leaving me to breathlessly run after her, more than a little tipsy, laughing and tripping in the mud and generally behaving like a raucous child under the most majestic night sky I've seen in many a year. When we ran out of the good wine, we made Gluwhein (and when I say 'we', I mean her, naturally), and by the time we ran out of Gluwhein we were both exhausted, the fire was mere embers, and it was already early morning. We still chatted for hours afterwards and eventually fell asleep to the sounds of some musician, now long dead, playing the piano and the saxophone. It was an entirely surreal experience, and I suspect I'll never forget it as long as I live.

I had to break myself away today after breakfast (croissants, preserves, coffee, cheeses). As I drove back, I put on the new Explosions in the Sky album and savoured the afterglow of an entirely majestic weekend. Despite the fact that all the goodness of that weekend was limited to that weekend (I don't know when next, if ever, I'll see her again), I wouldn't change it for the world. Sometimes it's worth taking a shot just for taking it, and it was great.

No, it was glorious. There are no other words.