Category: These Things I’ve Done

Jackson Don’t Surf!

~ Jackson ~ 1 Comment

The WSJ on “the fitness rage of the summer:”

In lakes, rivers and bays where the surf is never up, Americans in skyrocketing numbers are standing on boards and paddling, a balancing act that strengthens the muscles of the legs, buttocks, back, shoulders and arms.

“Stand-up paddle surfing is a valuable new form of cross-training, in part because it’s so low impact,” says Cindi Bannink, a triathlon coach in Madison, Wis.

For an industry long dependent on California and Hawaii, the trend is rapidly forging new sales territories. “Suddenly, our fastest-growing markets are places like Chicago, Boise and Austin, Texas,” says Ty Zulim, sales manager for Surftech International, a surf-board maker and distributor based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

For years I dithered over buying a canoe or kayak until finally, this past May, I pulled the trigger on something else entirely: a Versa Board.

The manufacturer, LiquidLogic, advertises the Versa Board as a hybrid kayak/paddle board, though it might be more accurate to describe it as a stand-up kayak. It’s hollow and made of polyethylene, just like a sit-on-top kayak, with more of a prow and keel than a surfboard. It also has a retractable skeg to help you maintain a straighter course and avoid fishtailing. But it’s also much flatter than most SOTs with barely any gunwales.

Regardless, the end result is stand-up paddle surfing — and I love both the Versa and the sport.

My indecision over whether to buy a canoe or kayak hinged on several factors. I wanted a vessel light enough to port without the help of another adult but also large enough to accommodate my two peeps, each of whom weighs about 50 lbs. I also wanted something that would be equally at home in the salt marshes and creeks near my house and off the beach in Long Island Sound. I’ve done canoeing and kayaking, often in salt marshes, and enjoy them equally. Canoes can accommodate people and gear, but are notoriously susceptible to waves and difficult to re-enter (or even launch) in swell. They’re also awkward to move about on land alone. Kayaks are a better option for my conditions, but are limited in the number of riders who can hop aboard. My best choice for a kayak was to buy a two-person SOT and then try and squeeze my extra son onboard. But I hesitated, unsatisfied.

Then, back in the spring, I was at the beach when a young couple appeared, walked down to the water, launched a pair of paddle boards, and proceeded to serenely paddle across the cove. The third option struck me.

SUP is a phenomenal workout for arms and shoulders but especially the core. As the trainer above notes, it’s very low impact — you’re so distracted by the scenery and getting to where you’re going that you don’t realize until the next morning how sore your muscles are. It’s easy on the back too, unlike kayaking. Whereas in a kayak all power comes from arms, shoulders, and back, on a paddle board the torque of the stroke is diffused throughout the body, easing the strain. And, again, it’s the best core workout I’ve ever experienced. I’ve always had a weak middle without any definition to my abdominals. That’s changing.

Paddle boarding can be tricky. Offshore, you need a good pair of sea legs, and I’ve had several rough moments when the chop has swamped my Versa. The toughest is when the swell hits on the beam, as is often the case when I’m paralleling the beach — and this in the relative calm of the Sound. The Versa is perfect for my needs, but if you intend to spend most of your time on open water and you’re not packing 50 lbs. of chicken nuggets and chocolate milk fore and aft, you may want to buy a more traditional board. It’s instructive that the photo accompanying the Journal story shows Laird Hamilton and his daughter paddling on a river, not offshore. Ditto for Gerry Lopez in this New York Times article.

Paddle boarding is receiving crazy amounts of media attention these days. It deserves it. If you’re on the outside looking in, go get yourself a board and paddle. The water’s great.

FDA Asks the Questions We Already Know the Answers To

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Even with a scheduled appointment to give blood today, I still had to wait over a half an hour just to begin the interview process, which itself takes another 15-20 minutes. Ridiculous, I thought. What’s the point of having a bar-coded donor card if me and other regular donors still have to answer the same 40+ questions about our entire histories? Why waste so much time when they know the answers I’ve given every previous visit? It’s not like the hot-tub time machine has whisked me to sub-Saharan Africa for tattoos, prostitute sex, and dura mater transplants. Why not confine their queries to the past 12 months and get to the leeching?

“Because the FDA is retarded,” said the phlebotomist. That’s a direct quote.

According to her, the FDA requires the Red Cross to ask the same questions every time you donate even though they also order them to keep a database of donors containing your answers. The phlebotomist said she had likewise challenged the repetitive questionnaire during her training courses, but the FDA demands that everyone who walks through the door be treated as if he or she is a first-time donor. That’s why the process takes so long.

I Never Donate… Wine

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Bela Lugosi's dead.A group of Democratic senators, led by John Kerry, are requesting the FDA overturn their lifetime ban on accepting blood donations from gay men. The ban was established in 1983 to prevent the spread of HIV infection through the blood supply. The FDA states the ban also prevents the spread of hepatitis as gay men have a higher rate of infection than the general population.

One website commented on the matter, “If you’re gay, you can’t donate blood. It’s illegal.”

Technically, no. The act of donating blood while gay is not illegal. What is illegal is for the donation center to knowingly accept blood from donors who meet certain criteria issued by the FDA. From the FDA website:

FDA requires blood centers to maintain lists of unsuitable donors to prevent the use of collections from them.

This may be splitting hairs, but if the act of donating or attempting donation was criminal, local jails would be bursting not only with gay men but with many other altruistic offenders as well.

I’m O negative, the universal donor, so my blood is a hot commodity — so valuable I have to give it away for free! — and I donate fairly regularly because that’s how my species reproduces. When you donate, you first have to answer a lengthy and tedious verbal questionnaire not only about sexual behavior, drug use, blood transfusions, tattoos, piercings, and hepatitis, but also about brain-membrane transplants, living and eating meat in the British Isles (worries about mad-cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases), travels in Africa, Lyme disease, and — most terrifying of all — Babesiosis, which one phlebotomist/Countess Bathory described to me as a “super Lyme disease” prevalent in southern New England. Answering yes to some of these questions may result in temporary deferrals from donating; others will ban you permanently. None will result in arrest. The worst that could happen is if you lied and then perjured yourself by signing the paperwork.

Also according to the FDA, the questionnaire filters out “approximately 90 percent of unsuitable donors,” though of course only a portion of them actually have dirty blood. The FDA is discriminating against whole swaths of people based on their experiences, not just gay men. This suggests to me the nation’s blood supply isn’t in dire straits as we are sometimes led to believe.

As a universal donor, you can see how my blood is doubly desirable because of my wholesome clean living. I’ve never gotten a tattoo, never banged another dude, never traveled in sub-Saharan Africa, never lived abroad…

Jeez, my life is really boring.

Seemed Like a Good Idea

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Once upon a midnight dreary, a friend and I decided that with our fortieths upon the horizon it was finally time to impress some meaning on our existences. After several glasses of Woodford Reserve we decided this could be accomplished by running the 2009 New York City Marathon together. For charity.

The Hole in the Wall Camps allow children with debilitating illnesses and conditions — cancer, burns, spina bifida, you name it — to attend a summer camp and still receive the care and treatment their situations require. Campers swim, canoe, do arts and crafts, and all the other things kids are supposed to do in summertime. The camps are completely free of charge for the attendees and their families. Paul Newman co-founded the first camp in 1988 in Connecticut; today there are eleven camps across the US, Israel, and Europe.

Each of us has committed to raising $3,000 for the camps. I ask that you please consider giving, which you can do here. Keep in mind that almost all of this money goes into the camps; while they do guarantee an entry spot and give me a running shirt, I had to pay my own entry fee.

If you want to know more about how great the Hole in the Wall Camps are, watch this video. Good luck getting through it without bawling your eyes out. And thanks.

Smorgasbord of Yore

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Over a recent dinner, I learned a buddy of mine has become a proponent of the Paleolithic Diet, an eating system allegedly based on that of our Pleistocene ancestors. We’re both exercise buffs — me mostly aerobic, he anaerobic — so we traded notes. Yet his wife worried that his stringency in keeping to the diet amounted to an eating disorder.

Having read Loren Cordain’s book several years ago, the paleo diet’s emphasis on protein (from lean meats and nuts) resonates with my skepticism toward the carb-focused diet advice usually directed at runners (e.g., this 2004 article where it began to dawn on the Runner’s World editors that maybe we need something beyond spaghetti to heal and build muscle). Unlike Atkins’s meat-and-dairy-heavy, vegetable-light diet, Cordain advocates lean meat, fish, and as many fruits and vegetables you can stomach — all of which wash down easy after a run. I lean toward paleo but with some carbs (mainly rice) thrown in to supplement my running. Which maybe means I just eat normal.

Where Cordain and I diverge is his emphasis on agricultural products (grains, beans, dairy) as the root of modern ills. He can ramble on about the faultlessness of the peer-review process all he wants but the trap I see most people falling into is eating more carbohydrates than they burn and then acting surprised when they gain weight. The demonization of carbs in the media is strong. But they’re not the problem; the problem is some people’s imbalance between consumption and exercise. Running a marathon? By all means eat as many bagels as you want before, during, and after.

I further learned my buddy had added a twist unknown to me: he refuses to eat before 2 p.m. He explained that prehistoric hunter-gatherers wouldn’t eat until then because their morning was spent searching for food. Apparently this is based on the experience of an anthropologist studying the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay. I took him to task, warning him there’s no way to know from the archaeological record what time of day archaic Homo sapiens ate (my guess: any time they had food); and that proxy measures — that is, using a modern hunting-gathering culture as a stand-in for those 20,000 years ago — may be useful for, say, determining how to make and use an atlatl but become uncertain when studying ephemeral and transitory cultural practices. If the Aché don’t eat before 2 p.m., that’s just what the Aché do, not what everyone did during the Ice Age.

It should be duly noted that said dinnertime conversation took place after four pitchers of rum swizzles and several rounds of margaritas and beers — which shows you where our priorities were whilst communing with our ancient forebears.

Publicity shot of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.E. B.C.