Author: hkraushaar (Page 3 of 15)

Not So Piefect

November 26, 2021 / hkraushaar

It is Black Friday morning, and as I sit here writing this, I am reflecting on Thanksgiving, dipping a perfect piece of mandelbrot into my perfect cup of Peet’s coffee, all the while listening to Arlo mutter about Alice, Fasha and Obie.

Black Friday has been a mixed bag so far. Despite awakening in a food, drink and sleep induced fog, I had a great, though eye opening, both literally and figuratively, workout on my Tonal. I took advantage of a Black Friday sale by buying more Peet’s coffee. I bought some bagels. I ate breakfast. And now I am sitting here reflecting, dipping and sipping.

On the surface, Thanksgiving was perfect, or in the context of my thoughts last night, piefect. It marked a return to normalcy after last year’s small, muted, stunted celebration. We had 14 people for dinner, which may have been a record for us, including our kids, son in law, grandchild and many members of Pam’s family. Everything worked perfectly. Everybody contributed. Everything was done on time. All expressed our gratitude. No one yelled or argued. Portia was happily running around, talking up a storm, and eating lots of pie. Every thing was perfect. And, shockingly, nothing was amiss. Or so it seemed.

I have been taking the lead role in making Thanksgiving dinners for about 20 years. It is a role I never envisioned for myself when I was younger, but one Thanksgiving I told everyone at the table that I was doing the cooking the following year, even though I had never cooked a turkey in my life. It’s worked out pretty well, and no one wants me to stop. It has become a labor of love.

But labor it is. I refer to Thanksgiving as my version of The Longest Day. My day has evolved and my work load has lessened over the years, but it is still stressful and a lot of work. It starts Wednesday evening with pie making, something I am a relative novice at, having made fewer than ten pies in my life. But apple pie defines Thanksgiving, so that is what I make. And this one was damn near piefect, even though I felt it was going to be less than piefect as I fumbled around making the crust and getting it into the pie plate. On Thanksgiving day I make the hors d’oeuvre dish, a vintage egg paste that is an homage to my late mother, Helen, and requires a Foley Food Mill, an anachronistic device I watched my mother use over sixty years ago. Then it’s on to making the turkey, the turkey stock and giblets (wing tips, not neck or innards) to be used in the gravy, the creamed spinach and, last, and most assuredly the most difficult dish to get just right, the gravy.

Thankfully, I have lots of help. Shelby made the stuffing. Kim made the salad and a healthy version of cranberry sauce she made from scratch. Bryan made the macaroni and cheese. Pam continues to make the yams, which are the not candied in the least, the mashed potatoes and the green beans. Andrea and her family, bring a pumpkin pie. Mitch and Dale bring Dale’s pecan bars and drive down from San Francisco. Lois makes and brings the aforementioned mandelbrot and brings Sees candy.

I went to sleep last night feeling great, tired and full, but great. As I was working out this morning and doing a set of iso split stance chops, a fiendishly difficult exercise, it dawned on me that I had sinned yesterday. My sins were not sins of action, but they were sins of omission. And our Thanksgiving was not so piefect after all.

First, and less importantly, I apologize to Arlo Guthrie, as I failed to listen to Alice’s Restaurant yesterday, thereby making Thanksgiving day less piefect, which is why I was listening to it this morning. Alice’s Restaurant is a funny song, but it is also a protest song, a song which is more significant now than it has been in decades.

Second, and much more importantly, and why I am writing this with tears in my eyes, I apologize to Onesimus (smallpox), Edward Jenner (small pox), Louis Pasteur (rabies), Max Theiler (yellow fever), Thomas Francis (influenza), Jonas Salk (polio), Albert Sabin (polio), Maurice Hilleman (measles), Richard Mulligan and Paul Berg (recombinant dna technology), and Katalin Kariko (mrna technology), because I omitted to thank them for developing ground breaking vaccines or technologies which have led to the development of the covid vaccines. I apologize to Donald Trump and Mike Pence for failing to express my gratitude with respect to their efforts in initiating and managing project Warp Speed to combat covid. I apologize to all the scientists around the world, who worked on the development of the covid vaccines, for failing to thank them for their tireless efforts on our behalf. I apologize to Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who spoke the truth throughout the pandemic, for failing to thank them for their honesty, knowledge, communication skills and professionalism during extremely turbulent, stressful times. I apologize to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsome, and Eric Garcetti, who made the distribution of the vaccines a national, state and local priority, for failing to mention their leadership in getting the infrastructure mobilized to get the vaccines distributed. Lastly, I apologize to all the doctors, nurses, support personnel and volunteers who spent inordinate amounts of time putting shots in our arms.

As I finished my set of iso split stance chops, I was stunned, not to mention somewhat disturbed. While we were waxing poetically last night about our gratitude over our return to normalcy, our collective health, our happiness to be with family, and our joy at consuming massive quantities of piefect, fat laden foods, I did not adequately thank those many who provided the foundation for our piefect evening. Sadly, I did not even note my failure. A failure I will ensure never recurs.

Happy Thanksgiving.

47

August 28, 2021 / hkraushaar

47 is an odd number, literally. It is close to 50, a nice round, even number that is worth commemorating, but 47 is not 50. So why am I writing about 47? It has nothing to do with the number of the next POTUS. It is not the number of years I have been married to Pam, my saint of a wife, which is only a paltry 41. It is not the number of years since my high school graduation, which is 48. So WTF am I writing this for? Frankly, I could have just written about the number 1, which is the real significance of 47 for me.

In the summer of 1974, 47 years ago, I began my first physical, not spiritual, rebirth. In the summer of 2020, 1 year ago, I unknowingly began the rebirth of my physical rebirth. Simply put, I changed my exercise regimen dramatically in my 47th year of exercising. That is why 47 is so significant to me. And that is why I could just as easily have written about the number 1.

I did not expect this change. I did not seek this change. I did not even understand that I needed to make this change. Nor did I understand just how important this was going to be for me. The reality was that I had been in an exercise rut for years, smugly thinking that I was fit. And to some extent in one dimension I was.

As the summer of ’74 began, I had just completed my first year at UCLA, and, frankly, I was overweight and out of shape, having skipped most forms of exercise for the prior couple of years. I don’t really remember what prompted me to step foot onto the red clay track at Beverly Hills High School, my alma mater, but I did. It was not pretty. It was not pleasant. But at least that first outing was brief, possibly only a single lap, a lap during which I probably walked more than I ran. And while my start was inauspicious, that single act was the catalyst for the commitment I have made to exercise ever since.

Running became my go to form of exercise. My raison d’etre in the exercise world. I could never explain why. I was never more than marginally good at it. But I was that guy. The one that everyone got irritated with. I ran. Not because I had to. But because I liked it. I liked to run without music in my ears, as I just loved the sound of my heart beating in my chest and of my feet slapping the ground. I felt bad if I didn’t do it. Yeah, I was that guy for 46 or so years, while covering about 25,000 miles.

Of course, running was not the only form of exercise I did, but it was my favorite. During the rest of the 70s and through all the 80s and 90s, I did other things along with running. I spent lots of time playing pickup basketball until I realized that it was too easy to get hurt and keep me from running for months. On a whim in the mid 80s, I decided to check out a Masters Swimming workout at the Jonathan Club. It turned out that if I liked running, I was actually naturally good at distance swimming, despite having never done any organized form of it. So for the next 17 or so years, I swam with a Masters team, logging somewhere over 6,000 miles in the pool and ocean. In the late 80s, I dabbled in cycling and did several international distance triathlons and, later in the 90s, bike centuries.

But since I stopped swimming in ’03, I became much more one dimensional. I ran. I sort of lifted a few weights, but there was no organized or thoughtful or consistent approach to my lifting. I didn’t realize it, but my body was changing in ways that were not positive. My running stride was shortening. My mobility and balance were waning, and most of all my core and glutes were pretty much useless. But I still smugly believed I was fit. And in a cardio sense, I was. I just assumed that my physical degradation was due to aging. I began to wonder just how much longer I could run.

Then Covid happened, and I was not lifting at all, not even sporadically. That was when my Tonal entered my life. I had no expectations for it other than replacing my disorganized, unthoughtful and sporadic approach I had towards weightlifting and for keeping me away from Equinox. It enabled me to do both of those things admirably, I was wrong in thinking that was all I would do with it.

I recently celebrated my 1 year Tonalversary. It is shocking to me just how much fitter I am today than I was a year ago. Let me be clear, I will never be the guy who focuses on building big delts, lats, pecs or biceps or getting super strong. I am not interested in those traits. On the other hand, at 66, I am totally interested in maintaining muscle mass and bone density, in training all the muscle groups in my body, in improving my balance and mobility, and in maintaining my cardio fitness levels. When I got my Tonal, I had no idea just how important all of these goals were going to be to me. Nor did I realize how effective it would be to enabling me to achieve them.

I breezed through the first program I tackled. It was a pure beginner program, and I kept my weights low to ease into using the machine. Then I started the second program, and all my illusions of fitness evaporated when I tried my first Bulgarian split squat. After lowering the weight to the bare minimum and falling out of most of the reps, I realized I needed to press reset. My mobility and balance were awful and my glutes apparently had not been used in years. That was about 11 months ago. Suddenly I was not so smug. In fact, I was pretty depressed. All I wanted to do was to avoid doing another Bulgarian split squat. I mean, who needs them, I asked myself.

Then I got mad at myself for being so lame. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed them. So I decided to incorporate body weight versions of them into my pre-Tonal warmup stretches. At first, I was happy doing one on each leg. Then two. Then three. Since then, I have done about 1,000 of them. They are now one of my favorite movements. They have become the poster child for the rebirth of my physical rebirth and the genesis for restoring my belief in incremental improvement, despite being on Medicare.

With the help of the Tonal Coaches and community, I have transformed myself. Over the past 11 months, I have mastered many, many movements that I would have thought impossible to do a year ago, movements that have enabled me to focus on my core and my glutes and on a lot of other muscles in my body. I have lifted over 850K pounds in that time, a low number compared to most Tonal users, but a significant number to me. I cannot even count the number of burps, burpees, mountain climbers, squat jacks and other body weight exercises I have done. Sure, I still have limitations and physically cannot do a goblet curtsey lunge consistently right, but mentally I believe that I can and will master them.

Due to a running induced metatarsal stress fracture in January, I stopped running. I began to believe that I would never run again. I could not exist without cardio and had no interest in returning to Equinox, so I bought a Peloton bike, which I have used for cardio for the past six months. But spinning is not running. I will continue to use the bike because of the ease in which I can get a great cardio workout. But returning to running has been lurking in the recesses of my mind for the past month or so. I miss it. So much so that the other day, I put on my running shoes after doing a core workout on Tonal and went for a run. My pace was slow and easy. My distance was short, under a mile. My cardio was a bit labored. But my stride was remarkable. It felt long and fluid. My glutes were firing. My core was stable. I realized I would still be doing some form of running for years. I thanked my Tonal the whole way.

Pilates and the Super Model

July 23, 2021 / hkraushaar

Forgive me guys for I sinned about five years ago in the middle of a Pilates class. I actually told a Victoria’s Secret model clad in spandex doing Pilates on the floor next to me that I thought it would be better if she was not there. Shocking, I know. Maybe even unbelievable. I know that, too. Most likely I was in a fugue state. Nope, I think I was still sane. So what was I thinking?

As I leisurely walked to class, I had no idea I would be sinning within 30 minutes. All I was thinking about was that I hoped that I would not be the only person taking the class. That sounds weird, too. Right? Everyone wants a private lesson for the price of a group lesson. Right? Well, not everyone.

I had started taking Pilates with my wife a year or so prior to that night. We would go together. That is, until she decided that she needed her own workout and migrated to barre classes, classes I knew better than to attempt. So I kept going to Pilates. Alone. Sometimes my friends, John an Kris, would be there. Other times my friend, Daryn, would be there. And still other times some of my neighbors would be there. But many times it was just me.

At first, that was cool. After all I was getting private lessons at a bargain price. Eventually the allure of private lessons faded when I realized how much I was being scrutinized by the instructor. Every move. Every rep. Everything. It was unnerving. To some extent it was annoying, not because she was wrong, but because I was never going to get it right.

Anyway, as I was walking to class that night, I just wanted to have someone, anyone, in the class with me. The more the merrier.

So I walked into the studio and saw the teacher. I did not see anyone else. My heart sank. Then the teacher said those fateful words, “Harry, I think the super model will be in class with you tonight!” My heart leapt. “A super model? How super?” I asked. She said, “Think Victoria’s Secret!” I did. My heart leapt higher.

The clock wound down to the start of class. No super model. My heart sank again. Soon I was in the opening movements of the class. I heard a stream of corrections. “Harry, straighten your legs.” “Harry, point your feet.” “Harry, slow down the movements.” You get the point. I was under the Pilates microscope yet again, and there was no super model or anyone else to deflect the teacher’s attention.

After about 10 minutes, the studio door opened and in walked the super model. My jaw dropped. My heart leapt, more because I was not alone than for any other reason. Well, maybe not more than any other reason. The teacher introduced us. Her name was etched into my mind. Mine never permeated her consciousness. I told her I was really glad she was there. Most likely that did not penetrate her consciousness, either. None of that mattered. I was not alone. I could have a few moments of peace. I would not hear the steady stream of form corrections, or at least not as many. Actually, it was better then I thought it was going to be, as the teacher sort of forgot I was there. I heard nothing. Yippee.

We continued to work on the reformers for about 10 more minutes and then the teacher said it was time to do floor work, something I never did. Apparently, floor work is reserved for those that are good at Pilates and had cores and buns of steel, which I did not. So we got on the floor and the workout continued.

But it was not like any workout I had ever done before. Apparently, super models are really good at Pilates, or at least this one was. The teacher could not push her new prize student hard enough. Of course, the teacher was indirectly pushing me way past my abilities. I was dying. I was schvitzing. My moves were becoming more and more spastic as the sets and reps wore on. The only good news was that the teacher ignored me.

Eventually, we took a break. That was when I looked over to the super model and said, “I really wish you were not here!” Maybe, by that point I was in a fugue state afterall.

Time

May 29, 2021 / hkraushaar

To quote the Chambers Brothers, “Time Has Come Today.” I have always liked that song, even if I was about 12 when it was released, and even if I could not relate to it at that time. Most likely, I would have needed a dose of Timothy Leary to “get it” anyway. Now fifty-some years later it is beginning to weigh heavily on my mind.

Time Has Come Today is a call to action. When it was released it was about social justice and ending the Vietnam War. In a broader, world wide context the song is just as, or maybe even more, appropriate today than when it was first written, but that is not why I am writing about it now.

At 66, I am staring down the gun barrel of my own mortality. Well not really, but I am reaching the age where my QTR, or quality time remaining, is rapidly diminishing, leaving me with a host of long ignored and perpetually postponed life decisions. Decisions like how do I want to spend the quality time I have remaining. Like what will make me happy. Like what will make me feel good. Like what will keep me healthy. Like… Like…. Like…. Like…. While the questions are easy to pose, the answers are elusive, or, more likely, obscure.

I am a very fortunate guy. Despite my generally grumpy, curmudgeon-like outlook on life, I am actually pretty happy. Thankfully, I do not have a host of major issues to deal with. I have a great family. I love the work I do. I enjoy pursuing healthful activities. I enjoy my friends. My body and mind are functional. I do not have financial stress. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I have very little free time to spend on anything else. Which leads me right back to the question of the day: If I had free time, what would I want to do with it? In other words, how do I want to spend my QTR. Frankly, I have no idea.

Sporadically, in life we face times like these. Times that are watersheds in retrospect. Times where big decisions are made. From birth to our late teens, we have very few such decisions to make. Then all of a sudden, we have to pick, and get accepted by, a college. That was pretty easy for me, as it was UCLA or junior college. Even worse, we have to pick a major. For me, that was a simple choice, as I hated to read and—ironically—write when I entered college. Thus, it was easy to choose a major like mathematics. A paltry four or so years later, we have to pick a career or decide to stay in school. Again, that was pretty easy for me, as I opted to get an advanced degree. But unless we are lucky enough to be born with a significant trust and gobs of family money—which I wasn’t—sooner or later we have to pick a career, go to work and earn a living. Oh, yeah, we also have to decide if we want a spouse and family. But once those big choices are made, we generally have a long time to just stay the course, with periodic mid-course corrections. Until the specter of QTR looms large. Then it is time for the biggest life decision of all.

So here I sit, writing this and mulling over my life and how I want to spend what is left of it. So far, I have really enjoyed my day. I was up at the butt-crack of dawn because I don’t really need much sleep. I worked while it was still dark. I threw balls to Jake, the dog, after it got lighter, which is why at 12 years old he is still a spry guy. I did my 45 minute Peloton Power Zone ride, getting my heart rate into zone 4 and schvitzing enough to leave a puddle under the bike. I fed and walked Jake. I ate. I worked. I did my weekly personal banking and credit card reconciliations. I helped Pam unload the groceries. And I sat down to write this. All before lunch. All in all a pretty normal Saturday for me. And that is the problem.

I have been on the treadmill, literally and figuratively, of life for quite some time. It feels normal for me to do some work almost every day of the week—at all hours. Frankly, it feels good to be mentally engaged 24/7. It gives me purpose. It fills up my time. I am never bored—unless I have nothing on which to work. Again, that is the problem.

Sometimes I wonder if I am a workaholic. I know I have compulsive personality disorder in my genes, as my mom was a compulsive gambler. No doubt I enjoy a routine and find it hard to change it. Work enables me to stay in my rut. In the past when I have pondered this, I would re-read the definition of workaholic, and I realize that I did not work to avoid pressing or emotional issues. I worked because I had too much to do. Or so I told myself then. But more and more I am coming to understand that I am so inured, and that my soul has become so psychedelicized, to working long hours that I have accepted them as being the norm, or the price I pay for loving what I do, with the result being that I have suppressed my desires to do other things. Covid only made the situation easier to ignore, as there was not much else to do anyway. But now as we are beginning to open up and do more things and as my QTR continues to diminish, the true cost of those hours has become more apparent. But is it high enough to cause me to act? I think it is.

Which brings me back to Time Has Come Today, and its call to action. I need to change my life now. I need to work less. Not because I have a pressing need immediately, but because I will never know if I have a need until it is too late if I don’t. I have to give myself time before I have any clue as to how I want to use it if I ever want to have the time to use it differently. In some respects it is like creating the space to build a field of dreams, but that is a topic for another post.

DOM Me

April 25, 2021 / hkraushaar

You’d think that after 46+ years of cardio, I would know better. But then you would also think that after 46+ years of running, I would not have run myself into a metatarsal foot stress fracture in late January, causing me to rethink my dedication to running now that I have aged sufficiently to take Social Security without a penalty. If you thought either of those thoughts, you would be wrong, very wrong.

While Covid has been a devastating year for so many, it has been a watershed year for me, especially as it relates to my exercise routines. As I have written about before, I am now more focused on strength training than cardio for the first time in my exercise life. Most of that switch relates to my weight training on my Tonal, but part of it relates to my stress fracture, which caused me to skip cardio for about six weeks, as I was waiting for it to heal and was waiting for my Peloton Bike to be delivered.

So here I am in late April after my first Tabata workout on my Peloton, with my heart rate still high as my body tries in vain to return to homeostasis by metabolizing the lactate in my muscles. Of course, I am also waiting for a serious amount of DOMs to hit me tomorrow. DOMs, more accurately known as delayed onset muscle soreness show up between 24 and 48 hours after the workout causing them. I have had them many times over the years. As I mentioned above, you would have thought I would have known better, but sometimes shit just happens.

I have been spinning on my Peloton for just about eight weeks, long enough to graduate from the beginner and advanced beginner classes, long enough to begin to take the regular classes and learn about the various instructors, and long enough to get my legs into a modicum of cycling shape after not having ridden in over 20 years. To put it bluntly, I have been sort of babying myself, coasting by on light resistance and high revs as I got my body into cycling shape. In other words relying on my cardio base while my legs start to strengthen. I even faked my way through a power zone test using the same strategy. My power results were pathetic, as my heart rate never entered zone 4 even though my legs were sobbing. But, hey, I met myself where I was, and I earned the score I got.

I am not interested in using my Peloton as a way to enable me to ride outdoors on the weekends, having given up outdoor cycling in the late 90s. I am not interested in using my Peloton as a way to replace live spinning classes or as a way to make spinning into the cornerstone of my exercise regime. I am interested in using it as a way to replace running as my go to for cardio training and as a way to complement my strength training which means I need to avoid the dreaded cardio zone 3 muscular destruction and spend lots of time in cardio zones 1,2 and 4.

That is why I subjected myself to a Tabata workout. I have done lots of interval training in my life, having run with a track club in my early thirties and having swum with a masters swim team for almost 20 years. But I have really not done many intervals since the early 2000s, except for a few treadmill classes at Equinox. While I had heard of HIIT, I had never heard of Tabata. Maybe I should have read more about it before I decided to do a 30 minute Tabata class. DOM me.

In my eight short weeks of Peloton, I have learned that there is enough variability in the bikes to detract from relying too much on the leaderboard for specific positioning. But it is accurate enough for me to get a pretty good perspective on where I fit relative to the population of riders taking a specific class. It is also really good for understanding a class’s popularity, as least after the fact. Lately, I have been taking classes where the leaderboard informs me that well north of 50,000 people have taken them. After my Tabata class, I was not surprised to see that only about 6,000 people had taken it. I knew why: It was tough. But, DOM, it was effective.

I learned just how effective as I watched my heart rate get well into zone 4 and nudge zone 5 for over 10 minutes during the 30 minute ride. The first time I had entered these cardio zones since I started with Peloton. I also racked up about 10 minutes in zone 3 while I was either on the way up into zone 4 or back down into zone 2. Due to the two to one work to rest nature of Tabata, I did not stay in zone 2 very long.

So as I sit here writing this with my heart hammering and my DOMS lurking on the horizon, I wonder when I will have the courage to knowingly subject myself to this level of self abuse again. Knowing me, it won’t be long enough.

Mingo Star

April 17, 2021 / hkraushaar

For the first time in 15 months Pam and I were about to leave our house for an overnight trip. It was a scary time, not because we were leaving the house in the middle of a pandemic, but because we were going on a vacation with the extended family.

For some reason, Shelby had decided that the best way to celebrate Portia’s second birthday was with a four day-stay at a resort-like house in the middle of Palm Springs. I worried about the house being too crowded with all of us. There was going to be a lot of us, including Shelby, Bryan, Portia and Nana (Portia-speak for Bryan’s mom, Karen), Glam (Portia-speak for Pam), Mi-Mi (Portia-speak for Kimberly) and Glump (Portia-speak for me). In addition, Shelby had invited one of Bryan’s stepmoms, Sue, and her husband, Chet, who had flown into LA from Louisville the day before.

So on Saturday morning Kim came over, and she and Pam proceeded to load the car while I procrastinated as long as possible. Eventually, I was out of excuses, and Pam decided it was time for me to take the dog out for a last visit to the tree before he was escorted into the back seat of Pam’s car. Yes, the family vacation included pets. Jake, our Golden Retriever, and Stassi, Shelby’s Golden Doodle, whose combined weight was about 150 pounds, were both attending the big event. Thankfully, Jake was the only pet driving with us, and Shelby assured me that the house she had rented was more than large enough to handle all of us including the pets. I was a tad skeptical.

Generally, I do not really like to procrastinate, but I had a good reason this time, and that reason had nothing to do with my normal curmudgeon-like tendencies. Shelby and her family were driving with Stassi in the van they rented for the occasion, and Chet and Sue were driving separately. We would not be able to get into the property until Shelby met with the property manager. So I was timing our departure to ensure that we arrived in Palm Springs no earlier than one minute after Shelby arrived there. As we entered the house about five minutes after they did, I think I did a perfect amount of procrastination. Of course, they would have arrived about ten minutes earlier, but Portia had a bout of car sickness on the way, the cleanup of which delayed them. I told Pam and Kim that I had factored the probability of that event into my procrastination model. They wisely opted to ignore me as I gloated about the perfection of my procrastination.

It turned out Shelby was right. The house was spectacular and there was room for all of as, as well as the dogs.

But enough about the house and the family. We were all there for Portia, and Portia was there for Mingo. For the past couple of months Portia had been talking about this thing called Mingo, Portia-speak for the blow up flamingo that would be in the pool. Pam had ordered Mingo as well as a bunch of mini-Mingos, so Portia was happy to see all of them in the pool

On Sunday afternoon, Shelby had organized a party for Portia. It was quite an event. We were all there, as was Portia’s friend and neighbor, Alexander, who coincidently was born on same day as Portia, and his family. The party had a Moana theme, as Portia has seen the film countless times. The party was a great success, and we all had a good time.

The rest of the trip was great, too. It was fun to catch up with Sue and Chet, as we do not see them very often. Shockingly, the dogs behaved really well, and, frankly, my grumpy self had nothing to grump about. Oh well, there is always next year.

Return of Cronyism

March 28, 2021 / hkraushaar

After 13 months of a Covid-filled void, I saw a portion of my cronies again, and I may have found a new one or two. For months I have been pining about the fact that the only cronies I have seen during Covid have been the people who work at the market and the bagel store. While I will keep them as cronies going forward, they will no longer be the only ones in my life.

Yesterday, I took my Porsche Rhodium Silver Cayman GTS to see its brethren. While there, I saw my PCA LA cronies, or at least a subset of them. My Cayman was ecstatic, as I drove it about 70 miles round trip to breakfast and back, all at freeway speeds. It has been cranky, because it has just been sitting in my driveway like a patient pet for so many months. It has been serviced twice since Covid began, but each time the dealer sent a flatbed to pick it up and return it. So this was the most exercise it has had in forever.

It was also the most I have driven in forever. It felt good to drive and listen to loud music and chill.

It felt better to see my cronies. They had been out of sight for so long, I lost sight of how much I missed the simple act of seeing them, their cars, and relaxing over a culinarily imperfect breakfast. Yesterday reminded me of what I had been missing.

We met at Stonehaus in Westlake Village. It is set up really well for a Covid, socially distanced cars and coffee. The parking lot is large and was cordoned off for our cars. The eating area was spacious with a good number of socially distanced tables that were large enough for us to sit in a socially distanced manner. Breakfast was really relaxing, as the eating area overlooked a small vineyard. The coffee was good. The breakfast burrito, well, it was inexpensive, prepared en masse and edible, but I didn’t go for the food anyway.

I went to see cronies, and I did. I am glad they are back in my life. I hope they can continue to be.

Dread Lifting

March 19, 2021 / hkraushaar

As I sit here writing this, almost every muscle in my body has been letting me know it exists. Except for my calves, each muscle was heavily used this morning. For a guy who just turned 66 it is a great feeling. Heck, for a guy at any age it would be a great feeling.

More interesting, at least to me, is how I got my muscles to speak this loudly. Louder than they used to scream in the early 00s when I was still doing Masters Swimming. I am excited that I feel this way now. The fact that I was able to generate this muscular cacophony while barefoot and in the privacy of my home during a pandemic is just icing on the cake.

I have always loved to exercise. Yeah, I’m a freak that way. Since I was 19, some 47 or so years ago, I have consistently worked out. During that timespan two themes emerged: I love cardio, and I hate weights, so much so that I avoided lifting them for most of those years. And if I did lift them, I just faked my way through a few meaningless sets.

But no amount of cardio would leave me feeling like this. It takes weights, the very things I profess to hate to lift. Huh? What about my life script? What changed?

My workout this morning consisted of exercises that require lower body pulling. Seven months ago, before I got my Tonal, I would not have understood what those words meant. Now, I do. They mean doing exercises that are centered around using the backs of my legs and my glutes to straighten my body. Exercises like deadlifts, or dreadlifts, as I used to think of them. My work out this morning was riddled with them.

For people who have worked out with private trainers this may not be a big deal. For me it was mind boggling. I mean, until I got Tonal, I had not done deadlifts since I was a High School Sophomore, and I probably did them wrong then. I would have never done them at Equinox. They represented everything I was afraid of while weight lifting. They required technique, lots of technique. They were the epitome of scary. Just the thought of doing them could cause an injury. Just trying them could leave me a twitch away from locking my back up for life. Or so I thought.

Yet I did a whole bunch of them today. My muscles are singing with fatigue, and I am brimming with excitement about it. WTF? How could I find myself in this position? The answer is simple: Tonal.

The rest of my family and most of my closest friends are pretty much sick of me Tonal talking. I do it so often that it has become ridiculous, if not downright obnoxious. No doubt about it. But that is okay, at least for me.

I just completed day 19 of a 31 day group program orchestrated by Coach Liz, one of the cadre of amazingly good coaches at Tonal. My sister, Arlene, who resides in Northern California, is doing it with me. It makes it more fun. But it is the program and support that provides the framework and the majority of the fun. I am surprised as I think to myself, “I am so happy I will have the opportunity to redo this workout one more time before the program ends.”

Shockingly, in seven short months I have re-written my exercise life script and now focus on weights over cardio. Talk about an old dog and a new trick. It’s just not supposed to happen. Yet it did.

I did not expect this when Tonal showed up and was attached to the wall in our spare bedroom. My plan was to use it to enable me to cut the cord to Equinox and do a modicum of weight lifting at home. All the while I thought I would keep faking my way through weight lifting exercises in between the days I ran. Boy, was I wrong.

The device is spectacular in form and function. I can do a practically unlimited series of movements, working out just about every muscle in my body. What’s more interesting, though, is that Tonal brings technology to weight lifting. It uses digital weights, which make free weights look like buggy whips did during the dawn of the age of the auto. It has modes that enable it to alter the resistance at various points in the movement. It also measures everything I do. It captures the weight I lift, the range of motion I use and the power I apply to each rep. It create graphs of all this in real time. It also remembers everything, letting me know, somewhat sporadically, if I have achieved a personal best in one or more of those categories. I am slowly getting into all this data as I get more into lifting.

Tonal’s capabilities are somewhat mind boggling, but more important, at least to me, was the knowledge, coaching and community that came with it That is what provided me with the support, motivation and education I needed to embrace lifting weights and to learn how to do it properly. That was the key to taking the dread out of my dreadlift, to unlocking the deadlifter that still resided within me. The deadlifter I had no idea was there.

Not The Water

February 28, 2021 / hkraushaar

I spent about an hour and a half in my totally analog 89 Carrera this morning, only once reminding myself that I do not have anti-lock brakes. I freely admit that I am spoiled by the unbelievably effective braking systems in modern cars, like in my 2015 Cayman GTS, enabling me to brake way too late without recourse or remorse. Not so in my 89.

I like early weekend drives up PCH. I have been driving on it for 50 years, and I enjoy it as much now as I did when I was sixteen. Yes, the sights have changed. Yes, the number of cars has increased. Yes, the number of motorcycles has increased. Yes, the number of bicyclists has increased. But the feeling of peace and the relaxation I get when driving by the water is still there, as long as it is daylight and especially if the sun is shining, as it was this morning.

These drives are mind clearing, but sometimes tire screeching. This morning I was driving along in my mental fugue, ruminating on a host of things, ranging from bourbon to vaccinations to the state of Covid affairs, when I noticed that the light at Temescal changed.

I was too far from the intersection to keep going and too close to stop without locking up my wheels. Sadly, I have done this enough times to know when the lockups will occur. Happily, I have done this enough times to just enjoy the feeling of skidding to a stop. Thankfully, I did not have to endure the smell of burnt rubber, though I think that had more to do with the direction the wind was blowing than to the absence of the smell itself.

After the screeching stopped, with the nose of my car only partially into the crosswalk, I began to ruminate again. We have been living with the Covid restrictions for just about a year. In some respects it feels like a lifetime. As I have written about before, my inner hermit has been ruling my life, only releasing its grip on me sporadically. But that is changing.

Pam and I are fully vaccinated, each having received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. It is getting more and more likely that the people we come into contact with are vaccinated, too, meaning that the likelihood of getting infected or passing the infection along is getting lower all the time, which leaves me wondering when to press reset and begin to lead a more normal life. It also leaves me fighting with my inner hermit, which is quite content with the status quo.

As I passed Malibu, Paradise Cove and Zuma and pulled into the Trancas Market parking lot, my favorite Jimmy Dale Gilmore song began on my iPod. Yes, I still have an iPod. Actually, I have two, one in each of my cars, mainly because I love special purpose devices. But that is neither here nor there.

Jimmy Dale Gilmore is an alt-Country, Americana artist from Texas who is about as non-commercial as an artist can be, at least here in West Los Angeles, though Pam and I did see him and Dave Alvin perform at the Troubadour a couple of years ago.

Jimmy Dale spent most of the 70s in an ashram in Colorado, which must have provided him with the perspective to write the lyrics for Just a Wave, Not the Water, a ballad about a failed love affair in which the dumpee was reminded over and over again in the refrain that he was just a wave passing through the life of the dumper.

Entering my hermit state was easy. It was legislated and it felt right, despite the economic carnage that occurred. Now the US is opening up. The tide is leaning towards restoring our ability to act normally, even if we have to do so masked. Schools are opening. Sports are returning. We can eat outside. But the future is not clear. It is highly likely that the case count, which has been dropping over the past few weeks, will go the other way again.

So there I sat, listening to Jimmy Dale wax poetically about coming to terms with the end of a relationship. So there I sat, waiting to go into the Trancas Market to buy some tea for Kimberly, something that I could have bought at Pavilions about a mile from my house when I was there early this morning. So there I sat, wondering if it was time to treat Covid as the wave, not the water.

I think it will be very soon.

Oily Bubbles

January 29, 2021 / hkraushaar

With all due respect to Don Ho and Leon Pober:

Oily Bubbles in the saline
Make me feel happy
Will make me feel fine

For possibly the first time in my life I was full of oily bubbles. To be precise the oily bubbles in my body were really lipid nanoparticles. As these particles were wrapped around a whole bunch of messenger RNA molecules, I was happy and going to feel fine because the messenger RNA molecules are the cornerstone of the Pfizer vaccine, and I received my first injection the other day.

As I sit here writing this, my trusty oily bubbles, aka lipid nanoparticles, have randomly bumped into other cells and released a whole bunch of messenger RNA, eventually leading the other cells to build spike proteins and destroying the messenger RNA.

The spike proteins were the goal. As the cells died or if some of the spike proteins poked out of the cell walls before they died, my body realized that it was under attack and began to mount a defense. I know this because my arm hurt for about 24 hours after I received my shot.

I am no scientist and, frankly, I never took a biology class in school, so I find it more than slightly humorous that I am even typing these words. But, hey, my arm muscle, not the bone, was killing me.

The mere fact that I received a vaccine so early in the vaccination process is a testament to two things: My advanced age and my saint of a wife. As I have written about before, Pam, the saintly one, is rather adept at getting things on the internet.

The reality is that anyone can shop and buy things on the internet, but Pam has a knack for getting things that are hard to come by, like concert tickets, pretty consistently. I have no idea how she does it. Generally, it has been a good thing, but, ironically, her greatest coup with respect to getting concert tickets, snagging unbelievably good Adele seats at Staples just before the ticket website crashed, was for a show we cared about the least. I am not complaining, though, as that show gave me something to complain about for months.

Pam started scouring the internet for vaccination appointments earlier in the month when Ralphs offered appointments to get vaccinated in their stores. Pam’s friends, Daryn and Candace, were successful in getting appointments, so Pam dove in to the Ralphs site and eventually snagged some appointments for us at a market in a scary part of town. Appointments that, thankfully, we were never going to need.

When the county began offering vaccinations at the Forum, Pam and I thought it would be a good place to get the vaccines. It was close, and it was not as large as Dodger Stadium. In addition, we have seen numerous shows at the Forum since they refitted it for concerts, and Pam has always gotten us good seats there, so we felt good about trying. As we never buy Dodger tickets or see shows there, Dodger Stadium was off limits.

At first we were hopeful. Pam logged on to the site and thought she had an appointment, but the site crashed before she could complete the process. I tried to log on, too, but got nowhere. We waited for the new appointments that were to become available the following week, and despite the fact that our other friends were getting appointments, we got nowhere yet again.

Though I was less hopeful, Pam was not to be deterred. After dinner last Sunday, Pam tried again to get a reservation at the Forum. Shockingly, she did. It was for the following Friday. She said, “Harry, get on your computer and log into the county site. There are reservations open at the Forum!” Needless to say, I logged in and noted that nothing was available. Big surprise.

As I mentioned earlier, Pam is a saint. She is also never content with getting beaten by a web site. So she ignored my frustrated cries of dismay and logged back into the county site, this time for me. Next thing I knew I heard her say, “Harry, I can get you an appointment on Thursday! Do you want it? Or should I try to get one on Friday so we can go together?”

Being the Debbie Downer and realist that I am, I told her to snag the Thursday reservation while it was available. She did. Then she tried to go back in and get one for her on Thursday or one for me on Friday, but there were none to be had.

So I got my vaccination Thursday. It was pretty easy, as the county has the vaccination process working much better than the web site. Interestingly, I received an email from Ralphs just after I got back from getting my vaccine letting me know that they were cancelling my vaccination appointment in their store in the scary part of town. I just smiled.

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