Churbuck.com

A year ago I could barely raise my right arm over my head due to a partial tear in my rotator cuff suffered one icy day when I slipped and fell on my ass while filling the bird feeders. A trip to the surgeon, a claustrophobic half hour in the MRI machine desperately fighting the urge to squeeze the claustrophobia panic bulb, and next thing I knew I was scheduled for surgery and what veterans of the procedure said was a nasty multiple-month recovery involving sleeping upright in a chair and being incapable of performing a certain unmentionable act of ablution.

I decided to cancel the operation and fix the issue myself. I think I’ve done it. How exactly, I can’t say, but for the most part it’s been a lot of work focused on shoulder strength, stretching, and some quasi yoga poses. A piece in today’s New York Times by Jane Brody confirms what I learned myself over the past eight months: you can fix yourself with some simple moves. A basic yoga stretch promoted by a New York physiatrist, Dr. Loren Feldman, has helped other rotator cuff sufferers avoid the knife (or scope).

I’ve gone through physical therapy for various muscular-skeletal ailments over the years, stretching rubber bands and lifting light weights, but nothing has done more to help me fix my messed up body more than Kelly Starrett’s Mobility Work Out of the Day, or M-WOD blog. Starrett is the owner of San Francisco CrossFit and a guru to CrossFitters for his simple message that “every human being should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves. If you have a lacrosse ball, a foam roller, some pylometric bands and the will, his daily video posting will unmess your joints and muscles in no time. His first work out of the day, posted a year ago, is humbling and very, very primal — sit in a squatting position like an Afghani villager in the dust for ten minutes. Try it. I made two minutes the first time.

I just read Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body,  an interesting exercise in one man’s obsession with understanding his physiology and improving it without wasting hours of fruitless labor and bad diets. The punchline is this: time expended does not equate to results. A paleo diet (no grains, sugar, dairy, legumes) administered like a drug (time the intake of protein, boost the metabolism with lemon juice, cinnamon and certain supplements), a CrossFit like regimen of short, intense, but functional movements, and an obsession with measurement can yield significant results in very little time.

Anyway, self maintenance is a good thing, it’s cheap, and it can deliver great results if you stick with it. So get a lacrosse ball, bookmark the MWOD blog, and read what you can about the science that is turning the FDA food pyramid on its head.

Nearly six months of formal Crossfit training and the results are pretty remarkable. I won’t post pictures of my oily muscles, but let’s just say the day I was able to execute an unassisted classic pull-up was a big personal victory. Now, it’s all about the Work Out of the Day and getting stronger and ready for the next big Churbuckian athletic goal — the 2012 World Indoor Rowing Championships.

Yesterday I embarked on what may prove to be my undoing: the 100 Day Burpee Challenge. If pull ups were my first goal, mastering burpees is next on the list (that and doing a lot of consecutive double-under rope skips, but that’s a digression for another day).  What is a burpee? The New York Times recently asked the question : “What is the best single exercise?”:

“Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

“But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

Burpees suck. Especially for big, tall people like me as it involves throwing oneself to the ground into a planked push up position, performing that pushup, and then leaping to one’s feet and jumping in the air with an overhead hand clap. Here’s the video demonstration:

I hate burpees. Dread them. Nothing destroys me faster or more completely than a round of burpees. They make me feel sick, panicked, and woefully old. Hence I love them. This morning’s Cape Cod CrossFit WOD (called the “Airforce WOD”) was a simple round of five relatively light weight exercises, 20 thrusters, sumo high pull deadlifts, push presses, front squats and overhead squats at 95 pounds. Doing 100 lifts against the clock is hard, very hard. But leave it to CrossFit to make it horrible by specifying that every minute, on the minute, you stopped what you were doing to perform four of the evil Burpees.

The origins of the Burpee are in dispute, but I like this explanation:

“The exercise may have been originated by a man named Lieutenant Thomas Burpee (1757-1839). He was an officer in the New Hampshire Militia during the Revolutionary War and was described as “having the innate Burpee fondness for martial exercises” in A History of the Town of New London, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Lt. Burpee may have used the combination of pushups and squat thrusts as a means of drilling, conditioning, and disciplining the troops under his command. In addition, the exercise may have also been used by the troops as a way to stay warm during the winters in wartime New England.”

Being who I am and believing in attacking weaknesses head on, I am embarking on the dreaded 100 Day Burpee Challenge. Simple enough. One burpee on day one. Two on day two ….98 on day 98, 99 on day 99 ……

I am on day two and all is well with the world. Then again, I managed to have 52 inflicted on me this morning at  while doing the aforementioned “Airforce WOD.” I promise not to blog every dreary day ahead. And yes, there is a cult around this particular silly challenge or, at the very least, a blog.

I’m dieting, done in by the Florentine mime, so my ballpark fare has been restricted to a paltry bag of unbuttered popcorn this summer. Go to Yarmouth-Dennis and get your Lipitor on with a “Hurler” — a cheeseburger on a jelly donut topped “with the finest canned cheese on the market.” Eric Williams and CapeCast explains:

Date: 04-26-2009
Distance: 5000 meters
Time: 20:40.0
Split: 2:04.0
Comments: Testing erg score integration with blog.
Tags: workout

Workout Name:Half-marathon
Date: 12-15-2007
Interval #1: 21097 meters/ 1:25:17.0/ 2:01.3
Comments: First half-mara ever.
Tags: half-marathon

Crossed 100,000 today with a mighty 10K in the boatshop in 25 degree chill. Definitely getting in better shape and that’s, as Martha Stewart would say, a good thing.

Working out in Dallas was a labor of love. Up at 5 am, get a day pass from the desk, troop a couple blocks to the Texas Club, erg for an hour amidst the elliptical and stair climbers (preferred music these days is the stoner-metal band Fu Manchu  but definitely need some new noise on the iPod), build up a bodacious pool of sweat, then endure the usual flesh eating virus creepiness I feel in any public gym.

But what a difference for the rest of the day …

So, 93,000 meters to go before Dec. 24th. Piece of cake. 18 days … that’s 5167 meters per day — heck, old men can do that. The mad men are the loonies who do all 200,000 meters on November 24th — seriously — that’s like an 18 hour marathon on the wheel of pain.

Date: 06-11-2007
Distance: 5000 meters
Time: 19:15.00
Split: 1:55.50
Comments: Power 5′s on the “5′s” and 10′s on the
“Ks”

20 minutes, that’s all. A little pollen got swallowed and gave me wicked heartburn.
Tags: ergblogging

Date: 06-01-2007
Distance: 7620 meters
Time: 30:00.00
Split: 1:58.11
Comments: Strongest piece in a while. Done in the shade, with new erg music. Pulled a hard 1:44 power-ten on every five minute mark with a full-on 60-second sprint to finish.
Back is still shaky, so I need to watch the power-tens, could mess it all up with one bad catch.
Tags: ergblogging

Date: 05-31-2007
Distance: 5000 meters
Time: 21:22.00
Split: 2:08.20
Comments: blech
Tags:

Date: 05-29-2007
Distance: 7010 meters
Time: 30:00.00
Split: 2:08.39
Comments: Long, low and slow. Trying to keep my heartrate down below 130 bpm to focus my efforts on fat burning. The rule of thumb in heart rate monitoring is that fat burns under 50% of one’s maximum theoretical heart rate (220-age=max hr) which in my case is a ridiculous 85 bpm. I try to go at a pace that would allow me to carry a conversation without wheezing and sub 130 bpm does that.

Date: 05-22-2007
Distance: 6000 meters
Time: 24:20.00
Split: 2:01.67
Comments: More human than a human

Date: 05-13-2007
Distance: 10000 meters
Time: 42:13.00
Split: 2:06.65
Comments: another slow and smooth piece in the garage, still babying the lower back

Date: 05-11-2007
Distance: 10000 meters
Time: 45:00.00
Split: 2:15.00
Comments: Low and slow, damper on 1. First post-back spasm row done at low to know pressure, with BPM below 130.

No erg for a while. My back collapsed on Saturday while I was rummaging in the garage for fishing gear. One mis-step and … twang. I was walking like an S-curve, lying on the floor trying to pop my sacrum back into place, doing weird stretches, and making everyone around me wince. Better today, but no erg for a few days I think.

Sacroiliitis sucks. 

Workout Name:Half-Hour-of-Power
Date: 05-04-2007
Interval #1: 7326 meters/ 30:00.00/ 2:02.85
Comments: nasty ugly Claritin/pollen/allergy hell row. Feel like an old man who smokes crack.

ErgScores.com | Welcome

I’ve started to get into this interesting site for tracking and mapping ergometer scores. What’s most impressive is the guy behind the site, Jeff Wagner, redefines great blog marketing. He detected I was erg blogging, invited me to check out Ergscores.com, then … and this is cool, wrote a widget that permits me to auto-publish my scores from the site to this blog every day, and a gadget for iGoogle.
What is ErgScores.com?

ErgScores.com is a free online indoor rowing management application. With ErgScores.com you can:

* New! Daily Erg Blogging
* New! Team Accounts
* Classifieds. Search for rowing equipment from classifieds across the web.
* My Community mashup of rowers by distance.
* Calendar support for scores and workouts
* Support for Google Gadgets
* Create and manage goals
* Manage your erg scores, daily workouts and graph your progress over time
* Export your scores into a variety of formats for sharing with others
* Team data management with graphs, reports and lineup comparison for coaches
* Access your scores from anywhere
* High School rowers can release scores to college coaches
* ….more features are being added daily. Comments welcome

Here’s what Jeff wrote me recently as an example of total mash-up passion:

“The biggest obstacle is getting the data into ErgScores.com.  I have not used RowPerfect, but I believe they have an auto-sync method that uploads the data directly to C2.  Unfortunately, C2 has no public APIs for their log book (that I know of anyway). So you would have to input your data into ErgScores.com directly.  Perhaps, I could make data entry easier for you by writing a Google Desktop widget for data entry or something of that nature.

Let me know what you think.

FYI: I book marked that erg finder you were looking for this morning for you ( http://del.icio.us/jwagner/for:dchurbuck). I’d love to mash that up as well..”

OTW = on the water, shorthand in my rowing log for an outdoor scull around Grand Island. This morning was perfect — temperatures in the 60s, no wind, water like glass. So down the road I go with my boat, launch in the mud on an extremely low tide, climb aboard, get my muddy feet into the stretchers, turn on the SpeedCoach and off I go at 24 strokes per minute for 45 minutes and 9200 meters around the three bays of Cotuit, Marstons Mills and Osterville.

After three months of garage workouts, staring the grill of my car, rolling back and forth on the ergometer listening to heavy metal and electronica, a scull on smooth water in a wakening spring landscape is just the ticket. This is a rowing day — I’m off to Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester to see my daughter’s first race of the season.

My last workout was a week ago — Saturday, a water workout — but I hit the gym at the Loong Palace (aka “The Lonely Palace” due to its utterly remote location and long distance from downtown Beijing) as soon as I arrived on Monday afternoon — China time — and discovered I had forgotten my running shoes, forcing me to shuffle through the library in white socks and stupid plastic shower slippers.  There I found the usual anemic exercise equipment. Rack of dumb-bells, stair-master, elliptical, stationary bike, recumbent bike, and of course

No Concept2 ergometer. The closest one was 50 km away at my step-sister’s house SE of the city, and I expect it probably is one of the few in the country save for those used by the handful of Chinese crews (which I have seen rowing on a river in the city last year).

So, since my boss was on the elliptical, I climbed onto the stairmaster and trudged away for ten minutes, switching to the bike for another ten. It is frustrating to only workout half of your body after getting the full treatment on the erg. But, breaking a sweat after the flight is a good thing, the only cure, and a necessity to, in the words of Joe Nickerson, to teach “the body is evil and must be punished.”

This morning, back on Cape Cod, I managed an brisk half-hour on the machine, my lungs burning from six days of Gobi desert dust, Beijing smog, and reprocessed United airplane air. But, it felt great and the time was decent.

Today I completed 30 minutes and broke the magic 7,500 meter mark, an indication that I can keep my splits under 2:00 for a sustained piece, which in turn is an indication that I’m getting back in shape.

Rowing is all about the numbers. I divide the stroke into a four-beat count of: catch, drive, finish, recovery and the Concept2 PM3 monitor tells me the rest: strokes per minute (I am most comfortable at a 24 rate, racers sprint at 34-36 spm), heart rate (my resting rate is 70, I need to calculate my basal, or waking rate, but while rowing I usually hang in the 150-165 bpm range with a finishing sprint in the 175 bpm range), watts, calories per hours,  meters elapsed, meters to go, projected finish time, etc. etc. etc.

In short, rowing is for number geeks. This is not a pleasant experience of watching the river bank slide by. Eyes in the boat, upright carriage, chin lifted to keep an open airway, and total focus on the balance of the boat. Well, on the erg it’s worse. Sit up right, try not to flail, don’t let your head roll around in agony, and ignore the sappy James Taylor song that comes on the iPod during the ultimate sprint.

My targets now are around weight loss, that means long pieces — like 10,000 to 15,000 meter sessions over 40 to 60 minutes — at a low rate, low effort, keeping my heart rate down in the 120 range. This is the definition of tedium. No challenge. No competition. Just grinding along letting my metabolism cook off fat cells. Hence I have graduated from the acclimation rows of 5000-6000 meters (20-24 minutes) to a half-hour, and after a couple weeks of consistently finishing the 30 minute piece (my favorite training distance and conditioning maintainer) I’ll graduate to the 10K.

So, getting there. Still too embarrassed to disclose my gross tonnage.

Sidenote: I received word from my agent that an actual royalty check for the Book of Rowing is on its way. Amazing that is still in print.

Sunday morning erg piece was marred by a USB failure between the erg and RowPro — the software I use to log my meters and plan the workouts — so it was a straight up old-school, use-the-erg-monitor piece, but …

My iPod Nano was frozen and wouldn’t play, which meant for 19 minutes and 18.6 seconds I had to listen to the flywheel fan inhale and exhale along with my desperate wheezing. Afraid to get on a scale, but now able to handle over 20 minutes of sub 1:58 pace which is a good thing indeed. My lungs are opening up and my VO2 max is improving judging from my heart rate which is trending down into the high-150s.