From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VI

Introduction

This is the sixth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, and Volume V is here. But the different volumes have nothing to do with one another.

Yes, it’s another slow news day. So, taking a cue from writers like David Sedaris and Lydia Davis, I’m assembling and posting some excerpts from some old letters. If I too were a famous writer, these micro-dispatches could be gathered into a handsome printed volume sold in bookstores everywhere (i.e., I could basically print my own money). Instead, since I’m an unsung blogger, you can read them for free!

These ones were all written while I was a student at Berkeley.

October 26, 1990

My schedule is so weird, I have to do my cycling indoors sometimes, even when the weather is great. I don’t ride my rollers in the basement laundry room anymore, though. Here’s why. They have this timer knob hooked up to the overhead light, to keep it from being left on. I was riding my rollers in there in the pre-dawn hours before work, and gave no thought to the timer. So I was riding along and suddenly there was this loud “DING!” and the lights went out. I crashed instantaneously. My Walkman went sailing across the room and broke into like three pieces. So now I’m keeping the rollers in the apartment and riding them there. I have this headwind accessory that makes them harder than actual riding. Good complement to all the hills around here.

February 12, 1991

I suddenly find myself in the terrifying position of going head-to-head with the most depraved, cruel band of thugs the free world has ever known. These miscreants have no regard for peace of mind; they loot solace and tranquility like a roadside gas station or liquor store. Meet Mr. First‑and‑Last‑Month Rent: wanted in six states for Financial Burden with Intent to Ruin. Mr. Damage Deposit: known to be armed and dangerous, wanted by federal authorities for Monetary Assault on a College Student. A recent stakeout found that these two are operating with an accomplice: Kid Tuition and his gang, the Three Installments. What could all this mean? Only one thing: I’m laying it all on the line by finding a new apartment. Which means raising a lot of cash in a hurry. Got any quasi-legal, or (what the hell) totally illegal hustles you can bring me in on?

July 16, 1991

Our local sales tax has been raised to 8.25%, and extended to cover snack foods. This is interesting: candy bars and potato chips are taxed, while fresh produce and wheat flour are not. It gets complicated: all crackers are taxed, except Saltines. Popped popcorn is taxed, but not un-popped. (Do you get a rebate on the un-popped “old maids” in the popped popcorn?) At the bike shop [where I work] these items present some complications. Powerbars, for example, contain 100% of the U.S. R.D.A. of most vitamins and minerals, and have only a gram of fat: hardly typical snack food. Yet, they still don’t really qualify as grocery. So today, in my capacity as shop manager, I put the following notice on the Powerbar display:

DEAR CUSTOMERS:

Recently enacted tax legislation requires us to charge the new tax rate (8.25%) on all snack foods. Since Powerbars and XL 40 bars are “great anytime as a snack” they are now taxable items. But since Exceed High Carbohydrate Source “supplies as much carbohydrate as 6 cups enriched spaghetti, 8 medium sized baked potatoes, or 11 slices of white bread,” it qualifies as a grocery item and is therefore not taxed.

September 19, 1991

Here is the opening passage of the article I was supposed to have read for today for my Honors English seminar: 

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural or structuralist thought to reduce or to suspect.

Keeping in mind that the opening sentence is supposed to lure the reader into further study, I find this beginning atrocious. But amazingly, it gets worse:

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as the episteme—that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.

For me to be reading this might suggest that I’m some kind of elite student who can grasp really complex ideas. But the sad truth of the matter is that I am no better equipped to handle this than you are. Probably less equipped, actually, given my youth and naiveté. This essay rages on for twenty-six pages, getting increasingly obtuse, and I never made it past the first five pages, with zero percent comprehension. Thus in one day I have fallen hopelessly behind, since the rest of the reading for this course (one such essay per class day) is doubtless based on this foundational essay.

So I walked into class this morning very ill prepared, and thought to myself, “Self, don’t despair, the rest of the class is probably as overwhelmed as I am.” This day I happened to be early, for—having given up my attempt to read the essay—I had nothing better to do than to make a big breakfast and leave for school well ahead of time. I ask the first fellow student I saw what he thought of the essay. “I really enjoyed it, how about you?” he said, apparently with perfect sincerity. I told him that to be perfectly honest, I had found it somewhat difficult. He frowned, as if surprised to hear that, and said, “I found it similar to Beckett, didn’t you?” I vaguely remember a Sir Thomas Becket who wrote some religious thing, maybe about people flogging themselves or something, but couldn’t make a connection. [I realized weeks after writing this my classmate meant Samuel Beckett.]

I spent the class period realizing that for perhaps the first time, I’m hopelessly outclassed by my peers. I start to fret and sweat, it gets hot, I can’t get away, the prof rolls, I’m popped. How’d I get into this spot? I played myself. But why am I facing off against this fierce foe? The faculty’s fault? No. Nobody signed me up for the course; nobody enrolled me by force. I thought I that I could excel at this big school? Fool. I played myself. [Apologies to Ice-T.]

February 27, 1992

I was studying yesterday in Sproul plaza, sitting on a bench, and an old man came and sat down by me, with nothing to occupy him but people watching. Eventually we had some conversation: he’s 85 years old (didn’t look it!) and from Russia. He didn’t seem to recognize Lolita, which I was reading, and was surprised at my choice of the English major, having studied engineering himself. He says in Russia, those with a college degree are admitted to a special grocery store that those without a degree are not. Same prices in the alumni-only store, but much vaster variety and availability of goods. He didn’t say how the store vets these people, and I didn’t ask.

During the big rains we had a week or so ago, I parked my bike under the bridge between LeConte Hall and Birge Hall, just east of Sather Tower, before going into Doe Library (through the back entrance, as a construction project has blocked the front and snarled most paths through campus). It wasn’t raining that afternoon but my precaution was well taken: when I finally left the library in the late evening, the rain had started up again. Groggy from my scholastic haze, I was shocked to find that nature and weather and the out-of-doors had all continued without me. Riding down Bancroft, I was impressed by the electrifying effect the rain had: extra-shiny reflections on the cars, and extra-black asphalt with a neon-like red reflections of taillights.

In five minutes I’ll leave go to tutor at Malcolm X school. My student, “Eddie,” is trying to imitate my out-loud reading by going as fast as he can. This means the words come out at the same pace as before, but with a tone of frantic urgency and almost no pause between words. I sometimes worry that he isn’t retaining what he has read, but last week we worked together on a book report and I found he’s getting most of it. His dopey teacher had acted like he’s a hopeless case, totally checked out, etc. but I find he works pretty hard if someone’s around to help him focus.

May 25, 1992

Doesn’t it piss you off when you get a defective band-aid? At the bike shop we have Curad. As you know, these are not the band-aids we grew up with, and I find myself somewhat hostile to them. Their lack of quality control is one of the small but nagging travesties that plague my employment at the shop. I would say about one in three Curad band-aids is defective. The little sanitary cotton pad is skewed, and sometimes has missed the center of the adhesive portion, so you get just a little triangle of pad, and the rest is free to stick to the wound. I really can’t believe the bandaging public tolerates Curads at all. At home I use Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid brand. This becomes expensive since I’m constantly washing dishes or taking my contact lenses out or something. I’m tempted to just leave the wet band-aids on and let them dry out, but I called Johnson & Johnson on their toll free number and asked about this. “You know how the box says they’re waterproof?” I asked. “Oh, yes, they certainly are,” said the lady earnestly, in her charming southern accent. “Well, does that mean I don’t need to change them once they’re wet?” I asked. “Oh, no, you should always replace them—that’s the only way to prevent bacteria from infecting the wound,” she replied. Puzzled, I asked, “Then what’s the benefit of their being waterproof?” A long pause. Finally she said, “Well, if you’re swimming you won’t lose them in the pool. And, they won’t go down the drain.”

September 12, 1992

I have purchased Lila - An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig, author of the classic Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hope this second book is good, but I have little faith that it’ll live up to its predecessor. I really loved the Motorcycle book, but the really lame Epilogue, which Pirsig attached to it like a decade later, irritated me so much that I tore it out of the book. This act was, I’ll confess, tantamount to destroying knowledge and human thought itself. Even worse, it loosened the cheap glue binding on the whole book, so that eventually all the pages started falling out—a disaster, especially since this is the one book I really wanted to pass around among my friends. It’s a really shoddy paperback to begin with, from the imprint “BANTAM NEW AGE BOOKS: A Search for Meaning, Growth, and Change.” Other Bantam New Age editions include Ecotopia, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and The Complete Crystal Guidebook. What bothers me isn’t so much the nature of these books by themselves—although that alone is annoying—but rather the very idea that Bantam could integrate so many conflicting and discrete books into a single group, as if they could all be united as life philosophies. Like somebody is going to just go right on down the list, finding Meaning, Growth, and Change in every one of these. It’s tempting to think that when Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he would have winced at having his work co-opted into the Bantam New Age menagerie. But actually, the epilogue that he added later totally smacked of the easy, wildly speculative, faux-spiritual sentimentalism that the “NEW AGE BOOKS” line can be presumed to have. Who knows, maybe Pirsig got cocky; after all, his book sold like crazy and impressed a lot of people, many for perhaps the wrong reasons. Anyway, I still have the decrepit Motorcycle paperback, and without the Epilogue it is a work of pure genius. I’ll let you know how Lila ends up going.

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Exercise & the Gumption Trap

Introduction

When it comes to exercise, I’m a disciplined person. Last quarter, I managed some kind of physical activity for 89 out of 90 days, and I rode my bike 51 times (that is, four times a week). Would it surprise you, then, to learn that I struggle to find the motivation to exercise pretty much every single day? This post documents that struggle: why it persists, and how to overcome it.

The struggle

Among those of us fortunate enough to have the spare time and energy to exercise, I don’t think there’s anyone who’d dispute its benefits. Articles on this topic pepper my inbox and browser constantly, like one of those machines that shoot tennis balls. For example, today I stumbled on this one providing eighteen reasons to work out (among them higher energy, better mood, better sleep, better sex, lower anxiety, and lowered dementia risk). I really have no philosophical issue with the practice of exercise; I’m totally on board with the program.

Why, then, is it so hard to motivate myself, in the moment—to actually get out there and ride? You might answer, “You’re just lame, Dana!” but you know I’m not alone in this. We all struggle, as is documented every year in articles about failed New Year’s Resolutions. I think the problem comes down to gumption. You can resolve, at a macro level, to follow an exercise regimen, but that’s the easy part. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, the intellect is adept at contriving lofty resolutions, but when it comes to remembering pain and suffering, the less sophisticated lizard brain is more realistic, and exerts an awful lot of influence over the organism as a whole.

Don’t get too hung up on “lizard brain,” by the way. I realize I’m no expert on brain science, but this is a useful concept metaphorically. The point is, the rational part of our brains fully grasps the many benefits of exercise, but it has to argue with the older part of our brain, that evolved over a couple hundred thousand years and understands the need to conserve energy, in case of famine. Sloth actually produces dopamine. To overcome our laziness impulse, then, requires gumption.

Gumption and gumption traps

A basic dictionary definition of gumption is “boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.” For more nuance, I like how Robert Pirsig describes gumption in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good. Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed.

Even more helpful to this exploration is Pirsig’s concept of gumption traps. Pirsig points out that gumption isn’t “a fixed commodity” doled out at birth; it is, rather, “variable, a reservoir of good spirits that can be added to or subtracted from,” so we can define gumption trap as “anything that drains our enthusiasm.” He defines two main types: 1) setbacks, which are those caused by external circumstances, and 2) hang-ups, which derive from “conditions that are primarily within yourself.”

Where ego is concerned, it’s surely easier when we can blame setbacks for not exercising. For example, you figure you’ll exercise when you get home from work, but then you end up working late. Or, you get home from work and realize you’re too tired to work out, so you decide, “I’ll do it tomorrow instead, without fail!” (This little subroutine, of course, gets you nowhere.) Or, your buddies talk you into getting a drink after work, or your spouse/other has made a nice dinner or wants to go out. Or, or, or…. It can seem like almost anything can short-circuit the mythical evening workout.

Of course, many of these setbacks could be overcome; for example, did you really need to work late, or did your deep-seated fear of pain and suffering trick you into pretending there was work to be done? (Working from home may well increase the likelihood of this kind of rationalization.) For me, most of the struggle is around the non-circumstantial cause of not riding: that is, it’s the internal hang-up.

Internal gumption traps

Pirsig, who jokes about starting “a whole new academic field, gumptionology, in which these traps are sorted, classified, structured into hierarchies and interrelated for the edification of future generations and the benefit of all mankind,” identifies a variety of internal/hang-up gumption traps. The most germane one to my study of exercise resistance is anxiety, which he describes thus:

You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness,” is the real reason you find it hard to get started. The gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness.

“Do everything wrong,” in Pirsig’s context, refers to screwing up a motorcycle repair, since that’s his central metaphor. But the concept applies also to sport, in the sense of performing poorly. In theory, only competitive athletes would care how well they go, one day to the next, but the widespread success of Strava proves otherwise. For anyone who used to race or still dabbles, the habit of monitoring, evaluating, and documenting our performance is deeply embedded. We don’t just want to get out on the bike; we want to ride well, we want to shred some gnar’, we want to put the pussy on the chainwax! This, to continue Pirsig’s concept, is the overmotivation. Which is why, as ride time approaches, we get anxious. At least, I do.

Ageing can compound this anxiety, because as we get older our bodies become less predictable, so heading out is like tossing the dice. Overmotivation aside, anxiety accrues because when we aren’t going well, a bike ride can be a pretty miserable affair, at least in the Berkeley hills where I ride. Based on my bike’s gearing I’m forced to suffer—there’s no taking it easy. If I’m not on a good day, this isn’t a matter of mere disappointment; it’s a case of Mother Nature kicking my sorry ass. Sure, when I have good legs (or “positive sensations,” in pro racer parlance), I get all kinds of adrenaline and endorphins and I “don’t feel the pedals,” as they say. Other days, it’s a brutal slog—and alas, I never know beforehand how it’ll go. No wonder I get anxious.

Does this lead to excessive fussiness? Well, that’s part of the problem: I have to mix my energy drink, suit up, check over my bike, clean the last ride’s sweat off my sunglasses, etc. but that’s not the real issue. (Pirsig, remember, happened to use motorcycle repair as his example, which surely is a much more complicated affair.) With working out, the excess is in rationalization, in pretending you’re too busy at work, or that you’re too tired, or that you should be worried about that sore throat, etc. Etc. Etc. A friend of mine used to like to say, “Listen to your body.” To which I reply, “Ignore your body. It’s a fricking liar.”

So what is to be done?

“Ignore your body.” Sounds kind of harsh, doesn’t it, like a dickhead coach or drill sergeant? Yeah, I was playing around, but only sort of. The fact is, self-loathing can play a part in this internal gumption trap dynamic. If excess motivation leads to anxiety, which in turn leads to procrastination or rationalization, and then the ride doesn’t happen, it’s natural to feel disappointed in oneself. To some degree, this disappointment serves a valid function: it inspires us to try harder next time. It’s a hedge against shameless laziness.

On the other hand, being more compassionate with oneself can help temper that excess motivation, to reel it in a bit, and perhaps reduce the anxiety. As I prepare for an evening ride (since, notwithstanding  the photo above of me procrastinating with the cat, my workday now starts too early to ride beforehand), that inner voice starts saying, “What if you’re not recovered from the last ride? What if your legs are shit?” My more compassionate side needs to answer, “Who cares. I’m not out to set any records or beat anybody. It’s enough just to ride.” Of course, this is easier said than done, which brings me to my next strategy: scale down the difficulty.

I stumbled on this by accident. One day, not feeling great, I skipped my first big climb, South Park Drive. Instead, I descended Wildcat Canyon Road. Such a cop-out! I was actually coasting downhill at the very moment I was supposed to be flogging myself going up! What a delicious sense of relief!

Of course, I still had to get back up over those hills to go home, which could have meant going up El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas, which isn’t only a harder climb, but is harder to write a poem about, as explained here. Rider’s block and writer’s block at the same time! But instead, from El Toyonal I took a little bail-out road (part dirt) to get back to Wildcat, and thus a new route was born. It follows the dotted line labeled “cutover” below. Click the image. (Click ‘em all.)

Even though on most days I could do a much harder ride than this, I almost never do. If I finish my ride wishing it’d been longer, I’ll be that much more motivated the next time. This is how I “act my age” while still being an active guy. (And no, self-compassion will not make you a wuss.)

If you don’t feel like taking my word for it, here are some schematics showing how much easier my current standard route is from the route I did for like fifteen years, which I called the “Hill Climb Extravaganza,” aka HCE:

The HCE entails more than 4,000 feet of vertical gain in just under 25 miles. The modern ride climbs only 2,100 feet, in just under 21 miles—it’s basically only half as hilly.

But wait, there’s more. It’s not enough just to cut myself some slack due to age; since my tired days are really slow and awful, I have to make sure they don’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. So I also cut myself a deal: going into every ride, I promise myself that if I’m really riding badly, I’ll cut it short, shamelessly and unapologetically, even if that means turning around abruptly and retracing my route. After all, any ride is better than none.

Does this work? I wish I could say my scale-it-back protocol completely wipes out the gumption trap and the daily dread of the workout—but it doesn’t. For some reason, even though my rides are almost always fun, and I’m always glad I did them, I still routinely struggle with motivation beforehand. However, I’m almost never snared in the gumption trap—my system gets me over the hump, almost every time. And once I’m out there on the road or trail, if I’m feeling good, I give myself a jolly good thrashing. You don’t need a long ride to get a killer workout, after all … and prevailing in this daily struggle is what keeps me from becoming a mere former athlete.

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