to climb the ziggurat

“If one would like to climb the Ziggurat, one must begin with the first step”

It’s been a week of training hard and using some dietary constraint, but it’s been good. I feel strong, and healthy… and… well, tired – but that’s a whole other thing.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that when I am training hard – typically for an event – that all my habits fall in line… particularly around food, but also with other things, such as taking in inspiring information, and staying more organized in other aspects of life. And I’ve been fortunate enough to have some conversations this week that reminded me of the early days of training and losing weight.

I’ve met a lot of people in the past 7 years, and these are people who did not know me when I was big. They only know me as this person who I am, and I am sure they wonder what, where, when, why, who, and how I became who I am. I reminisce about the early days of weight loss because I had SO FAR TO GO (for those of you who don’t know, I dropped roughly 160 lbs. between 2020 & 2022) and when that’s the case, all strokes are broad strokes.

When you want to lose; say, 100 lbs, it’s the drastic measures that will net drastic results. These are things like Juice fasting for 10 days at a time, weighing all your food down to the gram, comprehensive training schedules, early bedtimes and even earlier wake-up calls. All of these things are effective because you were probably doing none of them previously.

But if you want to drop; say, 25 lbs, and do it AFTER you learned everything you needed, you WILL assume it’s something you can just do.

It ain’t.

I can’t necessarily just start getting up early because – I do.
I can’t switch to a whole food diet because – I do that too.
I can’t start working out 5 days a week because – you guessed it…

What I can do, it tighten the screws.
Maybe I’ve been a little lax on my diet – but I’m still vegan, so I CAN remove the vegan junk food.
Maybe I’ve been getting up later – 5am instead of 4:30am…
Maybe I’ve been letting my workouts be a little slack – but it’s still 5 days a week and still a solid 90-minute session.

So… this battle is fought in the minutiae. The small measurements that require fine tuning must be made in a way that I couldn’t have made last time around. So I’m back to weighing my food, structured workouts with goals in mind, prioritizing sleep – the things I was mostly doing already, that now I have to commit to in a deeper way.

I’ll often hear about things in podcasts, like diaphragmatic breathing, intermittent fasting, certain types of equipment – and they are described as the 1-2% factors. (i.e. if you are climbing boulders, and some friend of yours saw a reel that said a breathing exercise might help you, and brings it to your attention).

That breathing exercise might help, but not if your muscles are weak and undertrained. Muscles; after all, do the work. However if you are a trained boulderer with a strong track record, but looking for some personal bests… a breathing practice could make all the difference… since it might improve your performance by 1 or 2%, that small amount is going to have a lot more impart on someone who is 95% of the way to their goal than it will for someone who is 25% of the way.

At any rate, there’s a lot more “1-2%” improvement advice out there, and if you’re not immersed in the game, and getting your thing done,then that 1-2% is going to be insignificant.

So you have to figure out where you are…

And despite my negative self-talk… I’m a lot closer to my potential than I feel when I look in the mirror.

---

Confusionaires new record is in the pre-order phase.
Get excited.
Buy several.
They make excellent gifts.
How many can I put you down for?