Sport & Health | Scrollin' On Dubs

Feb 15

What the paintballing industry could learn from skydiving

Arizona, Entrepreneur, Sport & Health 1 Comment »

I went paintballing with a group of 11 guys this past weekend in the desert north of Phoenix. It was the third time I had ever been and we all had a blast. It was surprising how many people were up there – probably close to 100 when I was expecting about 10… Anyways, while the experience was killer, there’s a simple tweak they could make to take it to the next level.

This particular operation (or any other savvy paintballing outfit) should add a premium feature to their game play. They should learn from skydiving and offer helmet cams and then sell the footage back to the players. I don’t know what the exact economics would need to be but quick googling shows there are sub-$100 waterproof cameras that could easily be mounted on the players masks. Take it a step further and put a close-circuit TV in the deadman box (place where people accumulate after getting shot) , have the helmet cams transmit wirelessly in real-time and broadcast gameplay live from multiple angles. Affix helmet cams on all referees and make it truly cinematic with the ability to see the final firefight showdown after you’ve been shot.

Once you’re knocked out it’s still fun to come back and debrief with other folks in that area but you know you’re missing a crazy final battle that’s happening out of sight. It would incredibly badass for them to add this real-time window into that action without too much cost or extra effort required. The other benefit is that they’s then capture all that footage to a hard drive daily and have the ability to burn you a DVD at the end for $20 ($50?, $100?).

This paintball place doesn’t need more players – it needs a way of extracting more money from their existing player base and making the game more memorable to drive repeat business.

There is an absolute opportunity here to offer something extra that makes the experience more engaging while simultaneously giving the paintball company a high-margin new product to sell for essentially no cost. And the byproduct is footage they can not only sell on-site, impulse-purchase to the players but also to build up a knowledgebase or have fodder for educational DVD’s, to acquire highlight reel film for their promo collateral or best yet: post it to FB on players’ behalf and offload all their marketing costs to them. All of that drives more repeat business and higher-margin business. We used Groupons for this outing but if this place builds up their organic crowd they can cease the Groupons and keep the full price for themselves…

Anyways below is some point-of-view footage I took from my iPhone on one of the rounds we played if you want a flavor of what it’s like. In 3min I managed to run into a cactus, jam my gun, cap some guy in the head and then take a barrage of cross-fire myself. Good times.

POV of Paintballing in the AZ Desert from Sean Tierney on Vimeo.

Tagged with: paintball

Feb 08

Results and observations from one month on the Paleo diet

Sport & Health 27 Comments »

It’s been exactly one month to the day since I started the Paleo diet and I wanted to share some factual results as well as some completely subjective observations. If you’ve not heard of the Paleo diet, this is all the rage right now amongst the startup community. It’s very similar to the Atkins diet only as best I can tell it’s more of an overarching philosophy that we should attempt to live more like cavemen. It’s seemingly based on the idea that our bodies evolved over a million years to process the food we’ve had access to in the wild. Since we’ve only gained access to farming, grains, dairy, processed foods, refined sugars, etc in the last 330 generations or so, we’re not evolutionarily equipped to handle those foods. So the gist is we should eat how our bodies are currently evolved to eat.

The Results

So first objective results: I’ve hovered around 210-220lbs since I was in college. On January 9th my weight was on the low side of that continuum at 212lbs. I did a bodyfat measurement that same day at my gym using a handheld Bioelectrical Impedance Method scanner and got a reading of 15.1%. This morning (for the first time since high schoo) I weighed in sub-200 at 197lbs on the same scale I used before. I registered 17.4% bodyfat measured on the same BMI device (at roughly the same time in the morning to equate for variables like water weight, food intake, etc). Those measurements are perplexing because I seemingly gained 2lbs of fat and lost a bunch of lean muscle mass.

Here’s the before and after photos taken on Jan 15th and Feb 8th respectively:

I can hear it already: “you’re just sucking it in on the after pic.” Trust me I’m not – a 15lb weight differential remember… so let me say that again for emphasis:

I’ve lost 15lbs in 30 days with only one visit to the gym and by maintaining my regular running schedule of 3-4x per wk.

Subjective Observations

Now here’s a brain dump of purely anecdotal and factually-unsupported observations:

General affect – I feel fantastic, noticeably more energetic and with more mental alertness than I can remember having felt in… well, forever. I’ve seen comments in various forums that remark on “a positive correlation between the paleo diet and douchebaggery” – lemme say this is not me being douchey. This is me relaying the subjective assessment of feeling more healthy than I’ve felt since high school.

Permanence – I had gone through Bill Phillip’s “Body for Life” program two years ago about this time and achieved decent results. That program however required fairly intense discipline and once finished I gravitated probably 60% back to my former eating & exercise habits. Having done only one month of Paleo I can attest this feels more like a permanent lifestyle change. Fresh foods and free-range meats are just more appealing now, which brings me to a weird observation…

Surreality of the average grocery store – The typical grocery store feels extremely false now. I only travel about 4 of the 30-some aisles when I visit, the rest of them seem… for lack of a better word, fake. Brightly colored boxes & cartons with obnoxious labels masking pseudo-food made mostly of corn products. It’s hard to describe but it’s similar to the foreign feeling I had when I stopped watching TV for a year and eventually came back to it.

Diminished need for sleep – This may not be entirely caused by the dietary change (this period happens to have coincided with an uptick in activity on two startups I’m involved with) but I now sleep about an average of six hours per night where before I required eight in order to feel rested. I have considerably more energy and sleep less.

Substantial weight loss despite no gym activity – The Body For Life program had me in the gym three days per week weight lifting, alternating the other three days running and taking one day off. I’ve continued the running this past year (barefoot style using vibram 5finger shoes – the ones that look like silly gloves for your feet) but gym-wise I only went once during this whole past month. I run approximately 3-4 times each week on avg of about 30min and 3mi each run. This has been a constant though over the past year leading me to draw the conclusion that the weight loss I experienced this past month is almost entirely driven by change in diet.

Concerns

So as awesome as I feel right now, I also know I feel pretty awesome after drinking a bottle of champagne ;-) This isn’t all roses and my concerns are the following:

The average life expectancy of cavemen is estimated to have been around 35yrs. To my knowledge there’s been no longitudinal studies conducted that have tracked Paleo vs. control groups over time to compare the effect on life expectancy or prevalence of late-life diseases. Not having dairy was probably fine if you only ever lived to 35 and didn’t have to contend with later-in-life conditions like osteoporosis. I’m extremely interested if anyone has data on a study that speaks to the long-term health effects of this diet (even 5-10yr data for a related diet like Atkins). I’ve asked on Quora but no takers yet.
Riffing on that question: so how do Paleo folks get enough of key nutrients & minerals like calcium given the absence of dairy from the diet?
What is the typical impact on one’s cholesterol from being on Paleo? I would think consuming as much meat as this diet advocates would potentially become problematic cholesterol-wise for folks unless maybe the absolute amount is irrelevant given the right HDL/LDL ratio.
How and where are people finding the grass-fed meat advocated under this diet? I have yet to see it in any major grocery stores. I’m assuming there are butcher shops that specialize in this and that it will be pricy. My friend Bryan introduced me to a concept called “cow pooling” which sounds interesting.
Lastly, how are folks affording to eat under this program? Holy cow (pun intended) this is expensive livin’ – about twice of what I normally spend on food.

At any rate, all in all it’s been a positive experience thus far and I’m glad my friends talked me into trying it. I have not yet read the Paleo Solution which I understand is sort of the seminal work on this diet. I did go off the rails last Friday for my friend’s birthday and have no less than 5lbs of pizza, some assorted cheeses, 2 slices of chocolate cake and a couple beers – all of which are not on the agenda for Paleo. And consequently I felt like ass the next morning as a result. I think having cheat days actually helps with diet compliance not just because it allows you to satisfy a craving but because it also negative reinforces the behavior you’re exterminating. I’ll share future thoughts as I get further down the road with this program.

If anyone has some decent answers to the above concerns please do chime in and share.

Tagged with: paleo

May 18

Body For Life: Post Game Commentary

Sport & Health 23 Comments »

Today concluded my 12-week Body For Life program. I committed to posting the before & after pics so let’s get this out of the way- here’s me in my boxers 12 weeks ago and today:

seansbodyforlife
I learned a lot from this process and I’m happy with the results so far (nothing ends today – I’ll be continuing the training and the diet without a doubt). I did miss my goals of single-digit body fat and doubling the weight I can lift but I was able to move the needle from 18%BF to 14% and I can lift an average of 40% more now than when I started. Another twelve weeks and I’m confident I can attain both of those goals.

I figured I’d share some of the things I’ve learned that were non-obvious and that could be helpful to others considering the program. And let me preface everything by saying I have zero affiliation with Bill Phillips or his company. I just like his philosophy on eating and exercise and the motivational and instructional value of his book. In no particular order here’s a braindump to round out my last post of commentary from the halfway mark.

The Workbook

As I mentioned previously, the iPhone apps for tracking food and exercise are impractical as they add too much friction to the process of recording stats. While they are better in that they give you nifty progress graphs, you’re not optimizing for viewing, you’re optimizing for ease of capture. It’s ultimately about how much weight you put up next time and even the best app I found still required too much effort to enter stats. Print out the booklet in a combed binder at Kinko’s for $15 and use that instead. I had them do the first and last pages as cardstock because your book will weather its abuse better that way. And a combed binder works best of any binding because it makes a handy place to store a writing instrument.

You live with this book for 12-weeks. It becomes an irreplaceable, authoritative archive of how/when/what you lifted and ate. Do yourself a favor and in big permanent marker put your name, phone, email and a nice note asking people to return it if found.

I found the “actual vs. planned” distinction to be overkill. I think I only planned my meals and workout on the first day. Realistically if you belong to a big gym and go at highly trafficked times you won’t dictate which machines you can use so you end up playing it by ear. Same thing on meal preparation – it’s pretty unrealistic to plan out your meals for the week. You’ll end up getting a bunch of stuff at the store and deciding “at runtime” what to prepare. Lastly, I found his notation of tracking water consumption as a meal line item to be cumbersome. I just put hashmarks in the margins as a rough guess of how many glasses and at what point throughout the day I had them.

Customize the routines to your accommodate your goals

I found the program to be slanted towards fat loss as opposed to muscle gain. If I were to have followed the orthodox program I’d have only one upper body workout on alternating weeks – I found that unacceptable. Instead I altered the program to better fit my goal of muscle gain and would rotate pulling one muscle group out of the upper body day and focusing on it intensely on an adjacent cardio day. This seemed to work well especially since 20min for cardio leaves a lot of room for doing other exercises.

Google doc for streamlining grocery shopping

I’m not a big fan of grocery shopping (or any shopping for that matter). I find it tedious and almost always end up ping-ponging back and forth across the store because I forget an item in produce and then realize I needed some random cleaning product, oh and then the banannas, oh and then a toothbrush, etc. I did come up with a simple way to streamline things: make a google spreadsheet with all the items you could possibly need ordered by physical location right to left in the grocery store. Here’s my ordered list. Of course I didn’t need everything on each visit but it’s way easier to skip items you don’t need rather than to forget the ones you do.

Value of removing decision making

Much in the same way that Getting Things Done alleviates the burden of decision making and turns your todo list into a set of executable units, the BFL program does the same for eating and working out. You know exactly what to do each day when it gets to a meal or workout- simply refer to the relevant page in the book and build upon what you did before. I believe this accounts for 50% of the magic of the program. The other 50% are the motivating stories from the book and Bill’s somewhat-cheesy but clearly genuine interest in helping people get over the hump and achieve their fitness improvement goals.

Certain exercises can be done everyday

pulllupbar I found that abs and pull-ups are exercises that can be done everyday. I hung a wide-lat pull-up bar on my back patio and made a habit of doing a set when I woke up and before I went to bed. It cost a total of $50 for all the materials and took about an hour to set it up. Basically I drilled a hole through the beam and fitted it with a chain that held up the bar via a c-clamp. Doing a set of pull-ups and situps every morning and evening has become a habit.

Tupperware + cut fruits & veggies = awesome

I used to pay $7 for the pre-cut bowl of cantaloupe slices- what a waste. You can pay $.80 for a fresh whole cantaloupe and spend 10min cutting it up and have more and fresher slices that you save in a tupperware container for the rest of the week. This works with fresh veggies as well. I still buy packs of frozen but typically buy a fresh vegetable and then cut it up and store a few servings in the fridge for the rest of the week.

Burn your boats

I’m a fan of publicizing goals. I believe when you make a goal privately to yourself it’s very easy to blow it off and fall short. Posting them in a conspicuous place however puts the power of peer pressure in your favor: you know that people will be reading it and will hold you to it. A number of times I was on the fence about blowing off the gym or having a dessert and I thought about the idea of posting a before an after pic that looked identical. I posted a set of goals on my bathroom mirror when I started and I don’t mind posting them here because I know my friends that read my blog will help hold me to them. Ultimately it’s about doing whatever you need to to get motivated and stick to your commitment.

Well tihat’s about all the observations I have. To be clear I did this using no supplements other than protein shakes and power bars. The majority of the change manifests towards the last part of the 12wks but if you stick to the plan a transformative change is possible in a short time. I encourage anyone considering a diet / exercise program to check this one out. I’m very happy with the results and plan to continue the regimen of eating and exercise indefinitely. If you’re local in Phx and want to borrow the book, I have a very dog-eared and chewed up copy that I’m willing to lend anyone who asks.

Tagged with: bodyforlife

Apr 06

Body for Life Program: Halftime show

Sport & Health 5 Comments »

I’m exactly halfway through a fitness and exercise program I started six weeks ago and figured I’d share some halftime commentary that might be helpful to others considering undertaking such a program.

It’s a virtuous cycle if you can start it

First, this does work. I’ve seen a noticeable strength improvement but more importantly I’ve experienced a significant increase in energy. Before starting I would find myself hitting a wall of lethargy about 3pm and feeling sluggish in the evenings after work. The change in diet and exercise has resulted in better energy during the day and consequently better sleep at night (which improves the daytime effectiveness). The improvements didn’t fully kick in until about the third week so it’s a delayed effect but if you can get through that first bit it becomes much easier to stick with it. I can see how the initial hit in extra work without the energy benefits cause people to bail on the program. But I have a trick to propose for overcoming that New York New York threshold…

Commit publicly

The same factors that make the idea of the Open Source Goals meme effective can be put to work for you in this situation. When you decide to commence a program like this, I would recommend going “all-in” and making a public declaration some place where you know people will see it and hold you to it. It could be as simple as a status update on your facebook or a post on your blog but whatever it is, go public with it. I took one of those dorky before pictures when I started (you know the ones where you hold up a magazine in the mirror so it proves what you looked like when you started). I’ll post the before/after pics here when I finish. I don’t even know how many people will see those pics but just the thought of having to do that has motivated me more than once to power through at 6am and make my way into the gym.

iPhone fitness programs can’t match paper

I had done a moderate bit of research to find the most popular iPhone app for tracking workouts. I ended up purchasing one called “iFitness.” Unfortunately after trying to use it I quickly concluded that no matter how much they improve the UI on these apps it’s still too much friction to enter the data during a workout. Nothing compares to a paper booklet divided according to how you plan your workouts (and a “combed” binder works best because it’s perfect for holding your pen). You need to be able to quickly jot down numbers and flip back to see what you did the week before. The iPhone interface while beautiful for graphing progress over time is not appropriate for quick data entry while in the gym. You’d be better off doing your booklet and then sending it to India for someone to transcribe it into a google doc or database so you can run reports on it.

BFL is geared towards fat loss

I’ve noticed that this particular program seems to be biased towards people losing weight. While that’s probably the typical use case I’m 70% interested in muscle growth and only 30% interested in fat loss. Accordingly I’ve tweaked the program to fit that goal. The typical workout consists of alternating between cardio and weight training so you’d do upper body, run, lower body, run, upper body, etc… and then reverse it the next week. I’ve found that it’s impossible on the upper body workout day to do adequate justice in an hour so I’ve taken to pulling out a muscle group from that day and throwing it in on an adjoining run day and focusing heavily on it. So for instance I’ll yank triceps from the upper body day and the next day I’ll run and devote 4 exercises to tris. I’ve found this works great (especially given that the cardio only takes 20min so there’s plenty of time left over).

Make a 20min power mix

I’ve not yet done it but I came up with an idea I believe will be very useful. The cardio workouts are supposed to be kept short (20min) and adhere to a pattern of hitting four “high points” during that time. So typically you’d start out with a jog that builds to a full sprint by minute five and then back off to a jog. Repeat that cycle four times and you’re done. The problem is unless you only ever run on the treadmill where you have a LED readout in your face telling you where you stand time-wise, you’ll find yourself constantly glancing at a stop watch trying to keep to the schedule. An obvious solution here would be to create a song mix with audible cues on when to change intensity. I came up with the idea to make a custom 20min song in Garageband that had adrenaline-type music with signals embedded at each switching point. There’s also a guy locally here in Phoenix who developed something called Prime Condition which is an advanced, online version of this concept and worth looking at.

The one good iPhone fitness app

So having said that all iPhone fitness apps for weight training are bunk, I will say there’s a really useful one for running outdoors. I’ve been using Runkeeper now for a few months and it rocks. I’ve found their free version to be exactly what I need. I can launch my iPod music in the background before a run and then fire up this app and have it track everything automatically. It records the route over time and produces a historical record of the run with a map and speed indicators at one-minute intervals. They’ve done an amazing job with this app. It can track other activities as well like hiking and cycling and it sends them automatically to your web account so you can get in-depth analysis of the activity. If you’re doing any amount of running and have an iPhone definitely check this one out.

Foods I never thought I’d eat

I’ve experienced first-hand that when you start eating high-protein foods and exert a lot of energy regularly, you come to have some weird cravings. I’ll share my average shopping list once I get it into a google doc but I’ve found myself making a hard-boiled egg / tuna / cottage cheese / dijon mustard concoction and while it sounds gross it tastes delicious when your body craves protein. The verdict is still out on whether beef jerky is a healthy snack but I’ve discovered all kinds of high-protein snacks like edamame, sardines, cottage cheese and protein bars that are totally edible and even tasty. The flash-frozen fish cutlets at Costco are _awesome_ – I’ll grill them up with teriyaki and lemon pepper and it’s better than stuff I get at most restaurants. I’ve found a little squeezed lemon to be a perfect substitute for butter in almost every scenario. And I now look forward to my frozen strawberry & banana protein shakes in the morning. Bottomline: do not fear the protein crazy foods – they’re actually really good once you get used to them.

Anyways, those are just some thoughts here at the halfway mark. I’ll post those embarrassing before/after pics when I finish. If you are engaged in any kind of fitness program, what useful or surprising lessons have you learned that you can share?

Tagged with: bodyforlife • fitness • wellness

Feb 22

March Metric Madness

Sport & Health 1 Comment »

They say “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” March is the month I dive into a two-pronged Blitzkrieg assault to put metrics in place for tracking and improving health and wealth. I’ve spent the past couple days working on two projects, namely:

Body For Life Program

This is a 12-week program I did about a decade ago and I can attest that it definitely works if you stick to it. I re-read the book last weekend and printed out copies of the planner today – my roommate and I start the routine tomorrow. My publicly-stated goal here is to return to single-digit body fat by my birthday (May 7th) and to double my strength between now and then.

The program consists of a nutrition and exercise component. You work out six days per week alternating between cardio and weight training. You change your eating habits by increasing the frequency of meals (6x per day) while decreasing the portion sizes and ensuring the meal composition fits a certain profile of nutrients, carbs, fats, protein, etc. You get one day off each week to go nuts, pig out / veg out and you track everything you do down to the individual meal and weight rep (sounds super OCD I know but once you get into it, it becomes habit).

Mint for finances

I had signed up for Mint.com over a year ago and had integrated my bank account and credit card at the time so it’s been quietly tracking my account activity this whole time. I spent the day yesterday learning their system and categorizing a year’s-worth of transactions. For better or worse I now have a crystal-clear view of my negative net worth (woohoo!) and the absurd amount I’ve been spending on eating out at restaurants and going out with friends on weekends. I’m not yet using their “ways to save” recommendations so there’s nothing immediately that saves me money but it’s providing accountability and a big, fat, undeniable motivator for me to make some necessary expense reductions.

This may be a “commander of the obvious” insight but the phrase “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” is simply not true. It is possible to improve in the absence of metrics. To illustrate this take the following example: I could stand in my backyard and curl progressively-larger cinder blocks of unknown weight. My strength would improve over time but I would have no idea by how much. Conversely, I could wire myself up to all kinds of fancy machines that measured muscle density, bicep size, force exerted, body fat, etc. and know everything about my physiology but if I never lifted a weight my strength would go unchanged. The same principle applies to any situation you’re trying to improve: making effective modifications to a web site, reducing wasteful spending, optimizing how you use your time. The metrics are useful insofar as they help you to alter your behavior but ultimately results are the product of one thing alone: action.

On another note, I’ve had writer’s block lately being completely uninspired to write here. For whatever reason I’ve felt I don’t have unique perspective to add to the noisy chatter that is social media. Hopefully the exercise of going through both of these focused efforts will yield some interesting results and tactics that will become fodder for writing. There’s nothing of significance to share today on these fronts but this post serves as a formal declaration of war on sloppy financial and health habits. I promise to post a screencast here of how to get going with Mint.com and the few unintuitive aspects (they’ve got an insanely good UI with only a couple quirks). I’ll also commit to distilling and sharing whatever results and lessons I gain from going through the BFL program again.

Here’s to improving whatever is important to you over the coming months.

Jan 20

Thoughts from a first-time marathon runner

Arizona, Sport & Health 2 Comments »

Okay, half marathon, but it makes a better title ;-) I completed the PF Chang’s Rock n’ Roll Half Marathon two days ago and wanted to post some random thoughts. Having participated in this event from two angles now (twice as a band playing on the sidelines and once as a runner) I have a few observations:

Holy clockwork! The level of coordination to pull this event off is nothing short of miraculous. Holding any event involving more than fifty people is difficult enough – they had something like 30k participants. And that’s not to mention the volunteers who staffed it, the bands that played along the route, the fire and police coordination, the road closure crews, the medics in the celebration area, the snacks and drink servers, the t-shirts and medals and schwag hander-out’ers… the list goes on. For all that took place there were only a few traffic jams and no significant mistakes that I saw. I’m blown away by the Elite Racing folks and everyone that collaborated to make this happen. Thank you thank you to the volunteers that donated their time.

Pace is key I now wholeheartedly grok that “slow and steady wins the race” adage. Only a few weeks ago I was sucking wind after a 6mi run with a partner and ended up walking a good portion wondering how I was going to somehow double that distance. On Sunday I was able to complete the 13.1 mi race in 2h19m without being winded (sore but not winded). I’m convinced the key to that breakthrough was in consciously slowing my pace. My goal was to finish without walking any part of it and I was fortunate to make it the whole way with the only slowdown being the trot for the occasional handoff with a water cup volunteer. It’s amazing to me what a difference in endurance it made to back off the pace slightly. If you’re struggling with endurance on a run, try reducing speed by 10% and I bet you’ll see a 2x return in both time and distance.

A good use of RFID When I think RFID I typically think of chipping passports and animals and big brotherish-type stuff. This was an awesome use of that technology though- the packets they distributed to runners beforehand included this orange plastic band that you attached to your laces. When you passed over the start and finish lines it clocked your times and sent the results to a central system. By the time we got back home (and probably earlier) our results were already online – that my friends is at least Web 5.0.

Ahem, sunscreen You can and will get burned by direct sun in the wintertime in AZ. For some reason I was thinking the sun would be low enough that I wouldn’t need sunscreen. Bad assumption.

Gu is good I had purchased some of those gel instant energy packs in advance and then promptly forgot them in the car in the early morning scramble to the starting line. Luckily the volunteers at mile eight were handing them out (and even the good flavor, vanilla). While this is probably frowned upon by race purists and akin to using supplemental oxygen when climbing a big mountain, I have to say it gives you a noticeable boost of energy replenishment when you need it. And to me the vanilla flavored one tastes completely fine and a lot like cake frosting.

Rolling storage lockers UPS provided a clever and useful service for runners. They had tons of trucks backed up at the starting line and made it so any runner could check a barcoded bag with them to store belongings. The trucks then drove to the finish line and reassembled in the parking lot like a strand of storage lockers on wheels. What a great idea and a simple yet memorable sponsorship service.

GPS fail I’ve been using the RunKeeper Free iPhone app to track my runs. It’s 90% awesome and 100% free so I can’t complain. But on raceday perhaps the cell network in that area was overloaded or something because it never got the GPS lock. I would recommend to anyone who plans to track a run on a raceday to acquire the GPS lock well in advance and then simply reset the clock when crossing the starting line. Trying in vain to fire it up once the race begins is a bummer and a distraction.

The rah-rah’s do make a difference The cheers of a complete stranger yelling “you can do it” have a surprisingly real effect. This is something that’s puzzled me about sports- I’ve gotten the camaraderie aspect amongst fans but I’ve never truly understood the adrenaline/supportive aspect from the perspective of the athlete until this race. It’s very real and I will appreciate that relationship in sporting events from now on.

Run like an amoeba Not quite sure how to verbalize this one but being in this river of bodies with the same goal all running with similar pace but in constant flux as people slowed or sped up- it just felt being an appendage of a larger organism. I was just one set of legs on this distributed human caterpillar that snaked through the streets of Phoenix. I can’t help but think if there were a way to organize one of these races with warring cultures somehow it would resolve a lot. Or maybe it’s the endorphins from the exertion and the high-fives with random strangers that’s the magic secret sauce. Either way, we need to bottle and share this stuff. I recommend participating in a marathon if you ever get the chance – it was an awesome experience I will remember for a long time.

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