Updated on April 30, 2010
Where Men Win Glory
I’m a big fan of Jon Krakauer, mostly because he is what I once aspired to be. I’d still like to be able to research and write the kinds of stories that he tells: complex, non-fiction and incredibly well reported/sourced narratives of adventurous people who are drawn to and ultimately affected by forces larger than themselves.
With each of his books, Krakauer has expanded his range and has gone from stories of wayward youth and outdoorsy tragedy (“Into the Wild,” “Into Thin Air”) to history and religion (“Under the Banner of Heaven”) and now, mainstream news and current events.
I just finally finished his latest book, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.” Tillman’s life and death was fairly well documented in his/my local San Jose Mercury News, so I felt like I knew the story. Local boy does well in football, makes it to the NFL, 9/11 compels him to join the Army (wha?), he dies tragically (turns out due to friendly fire), his service and death are exploited by a desperate military and Bush Administration, his family fights for the truth surrounding Pat’s death and exposes a cover-up that leads straight to the White House. And in the end, I felt terrible for the Tillman family and it simply confirmed that the war on terror was good for just about nothing other than to get Bush re-elected.
Turns out Pat Tillman’s story is much more complicated than any of that. I don’t think that this is Krakauer’s best book by any means (I say it’s a toss-up between “Wild” and “Banner”), but perhaps it’s because I was already familiar with the story. The first quarter of the book describes Tillman’s youth and relies a lot on tales by mother Mary Tillman via her book “Boots on the Ground by Dusk” (which I haven’t read). Throughout, Krakauer slowly begins to juxtapose worldwide historical terror events against Pat Tillman’s life, which of course culminate on 9/11 and during his rising NFL career with the Arizona Cardinals.
This is where the book gets really interesting, as Krakauer dives deep into Tillman’s comprehensive personal diaries and interviews with his then-girlfriend (his eventual wife) Marie and other friends to get inside the character I previously knew as just a high-strung and confused jock. Tillman was much more than that, and the middle of the book reveals some deep and also seemingly contradictory views on religion (Tillman was an atheist), life in the Army (mostly hated it), his penchant to explore and challenge conventional thought (he was a conversationalist and admired Chomsky), and his love for his family and wife (he was constantly torn to leave them for the Army). Tillman passes up lucrative NFL contracts and chances to escape boring, regimented military life simply because he’d given his word and commitment that he would do his three years in the Army, no matter how much he despised it. And he does it with his equally tough brother Kevin, with whom he shares an incredible bond, by his side the entire time.
Krakauer also details other similar and terrible friendly fire incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the manipulative faux “rescue” of Jessica Lynch (in which Tillman played a small role) and of course climaxes with vivid descriptions of the events surrounding Tillman’s death. The second half of the book is riveting.
Yet some of Krakauer’s best writing ever in any of his books comes at the very very end, in the final 10 pages or so where he probably very knowingly slips into a beautiful essay that examines why Tillman died. As a reader, I stopped in my tracks and had to back up and start the section over as it occurred to me where the author was going. Quoting a portion of it would be worthless, because as a whole it’s so eloquent — just to get to the end and this part alone makes reading this book more than worth it.
Read it for yourself, Pat Tillman’s family, and the country.
Updated on April 18, 2010
Tales from the ash cloud
There are worse places to be stuck than in a nice London hotel. I’m right in the thick of things, two minutes from Covent Garden and five from Soho. It doesn’t suck to be me, even though I bitch about this damned volcano on twitter and to anyone who also wants to share complaints.
I was supposed to leave this morning. Now I’m booked on a Tuesday flight, but I’m skeptical that it’ll take off. The whole thing is almost comical. You can’t see any ash anywhere. Today was another beautiful bright blue day, clear as a bell and with no flights, no contrails mucking up the sky. I had a long stroll through Hyde Park and wished I was wearing shorts. Thousands of people were out enjoying the park.
Luckily, my company is footing the bill for me to be here (for now). There are about 20 Yahoo’s here from around the world, so it’s costing the company a pretty penny and that likely extends far beyond those of us who are stuck here. And I’m not trying to get home from a vacation, I’m not penniless and holed up on a bench at the airport or couch surfing on long-lost friends’ couches.
There are painful stories everywhere around town. Yesterday afternoon I dipped into the only quiet pub I’ve found in Covent Garden and started talking with a stranded Australian who was trying to get back to Sydney so he could meet up with his wife, and the two were scheduled to jump on a flight to Hawaii for an anniversary vacation. Now he’s trying to book his flight direct to Hawaii instead, but chances are he won’t make it at all since he can’t get out of Heathrow. We shrug our shoulders and share a laugh about it, tipping our pints back, because that’s all you can do. Might as well drink and make the best of it.
Even the bartender at the pub is stuck; she’s trying to get home to France for a big family reunion. The trains are jammed and if you really want a ticket, you have to pay a premium upwards of $300 or more. Speaking of premiums, my hotel rate has conveniently gone up $50 a night, and they removed breakfast and tax from the charge. “That’s business, I guess,” said the guy behind the desk. The airlines may be losing $200 million a day, but some people are getting rich off this mess. It’s amazing, really, to think of all the various people and downstream businesses that are affected by this. It is such a big deal.
The only reason I want to get home so badly is to provide some relief to my poor wife who’s home juggling two babies, our son and her job. This weekend has felt like a vacation for me, and it isn’t fair. I’ve had some fun (a little too much fun last night, oww) but it sure would be more enjoyable if there was an end to the ash cloud in sight. Instead, we’re powerless to do anything about anything, and that’s what is so frustrating.
Posted on April 1, 2010
Swim log
Today was the last of my weekday swims. Or at least the last of my midday weekday swims. I’ve enjoyed a couple months off of work (enjoyed isn’t quite the word for it, but let’s look at the bright side: I get to swim at 11am, 1pm, or pretty much whenever I like).
Anyway, the latest workout has been good and challenging without being too much. Need to remember this.
Warm-up:
- 1×100 freestyle
- 1×100 free kick
- 1×100 breaststroke
Main (rest 15 secs between each set):
- 6×50 free
- 6×50 mix (free kick, frog kick, free pull x 2, breaststroke, free)
- 6×50 breaststroke
- 6×50 kick and pull mix (legs about to fall off by this point)
Cool down:
- 200 or 300 (50s of free and breast mix)
total yards = 1700
Posted on January 24, 2010
Back in the Pool
Long time no post. With our 73 children, we’ve been busy!
I’ve wanted to log my swim routines for a while, so here goes. First, an intro.
I’ve been living with pretty bad and consistent back pain/sciatica since last March when I tweaked a couple of discs while demo-ing our backyard. Old man! I don’t need surgery, but the orthopedic surgeon told me to exercise like crazy with something low-impact like swimming, and then go to physical therapy. So over the summer I hopped back in the pool to swim laps, something I haven’t done since my freshman year of college. I used to be a good swimmer (I was a lifeguard and swim instructor in high school and some college) and with surfing my love for water and stroke never died, but right as I was getting into the swing of things … boom … we had twins.
My back is still screwed up, and suffice to say that besides my consistent stretching and core strength routines, the pool has offered the best way to keep loose and in shape, and has reduced my overall pain. I aim to get into PT this week, and I’ve been seeing a chiropractor once a month, primarily for deep-tissue muscle work.
Working at a startup, plus tending to our three kids, hasn’t allowed me the time to get into the pool nearly as much as I’d like, but I’ve tried to keep a steady schedule of going twice a week. It’s just enough to improve my distance, lung capacity and stroke. Incidentally this has been one of the most unhealthy years of my life (thanks son and daycare!). So it seems every time I get my routine going and I start feeling good in the water, I get hit with a cold or something. Then back to square one.
My goals have been pretty doable, and I’ve been hitting them so far. I started out wanting to build up to a straight 500 yard freestyle, after a good warm-up and with a cool-down. Check. I do that and more now each time I get in the water. Now I’m on the cusp of doing 1,000 yards straight. I did my first one the other night, and when I got out of the water I felt an endorphin high that I’ve never had before – it was amazing! So now I want to hit the 1000 yard mark regularly and build to a mile straight. That’s about 70 x 25 yard lengths. After my swim Friday evening, I realized I had come 100 yards short of a mile (broken up), and I was pretty bummed I hadn’t thought of it before I got out of the pool.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Masters swim group workouts, trying to emulate some of it each time I go. Masters would also be a goal but I’ll have to improve my speed and times. Anyway, typical routine now is looking like this:
- 3×50 freestyle warmup at intensifying rates of speed – 15 sec. rest between sets
- 1×100 breaststroke fast – 30 sec. rest
- 1×200 breast and free
- 1×500-1000 yard free (I did a 600 this morning and could have kept going if time wasn’t short)
- 1×100 breast
- 1×100 free
- 3×50 free at fast then reduced speed to cool down
= approx 1300 yards total, or more or less
Updated on November 16, 2009
Sleep-training the Twins
My son turns four tomorrow. Four! It’s incredible, how the time has flied.
Our daughters — we have two of them, twins — are just about four months old. Four months! Time flies…
Collectively, we’ve lost years of sleep between all these kids. That’s to be expected — it comes with the territory. When the boy was born, a co-worker congratulated me and said: You know, having kids is God’s way of saying you’ve had enough sleep. Little did I know that it’d be about two years before he slept through the night on a regular basis. We screwed up. We tried the cry-it-out thing, albeit half-assedly. I’ve slept on his floor, more times than I can count. We’ve kept doors open, lights on, responded to binkies flying across the room, wails of “Maaawwwmy…” coming down the hall.
And now, two girls. It’s starting all over again.
So a confluence of events has told us that it’s time to get control of this whole lack-of-sleep situation, not the least of which is being tired. Keeping the girls on the same schedule is crucial. They need to sleep together, eat together, and play together. Otherwise, we’d be on a round-the-clock mission to keep them fed, changed, playing and sleeping.
Enter, sleep training.
After consultations and reviews of a couple of different kinds of sleep therapists (yes, there are a few), we settled on one who didn’t cost an arm and a leg, yet seemed to have a pretty good system and a legion of devoted, well-rested parents. Vivian Sonnenberg came highly recommended through various twins club parent groups, and so we met with her a week ago.
She came and met with us for a couple of hours, evaluating every aspect of how we were raising our babies. She looked at how we put them to bed, how the crib was arranged, how much we were feeding them, how cold the room was, our bedtime ritual. The net result has been a complete revamp of our day-to-day routine, and setting up a pretty rigorous schedule that we’re to adhere to based on some time-tested rules.
So now, the babies eat at fairly regular intervals. They nap predictably three or four times a day. They get a couple of sessions of decent play time. They go to bed by 6:30pm. Best of all, they’re starting to sleep through the night.
Prior to all this sleep therapy, we had a pretty (we thought) decent routine. Wake up around 7am, feed the babies in the morning. They’d nap (restlessly) around 10am, wake up for lunch and play, nap again in the early afternoon for a while, then be awake til around 7pm when we’d put them to bed. Looking back on this, they were often fussy when eating, hard to put down for naps, and generally over-tired. Vivian noticed this right away. In fact, one of the babies had been diagnosed with acid-reflux and we had been giving her some Zantac because of her feeding fussiness. That seemed to work but since we’ve been on the changed routine and more sleep, the “reflux” seems to have mostly stopped. At night, they’d wake up and we’d feed them at around 11pm, 2am, and 5am, changing diapers each time. Binkies would fall out and we’d rush to pop them back in, stretching the feedings out an hour or so if lucky.
The new routine so far looks like this: No binkies. We don’t swaddle them in tight blankets, but rather bundle them up in sleep sacks and with a space heater in the room. Vivian told us the babies like to have their hands free and move their knees up while positioned on their sides, so that’s how they go to bed now, and they seem to like it. They wake up around 6am. We feed the babies, and put them down for a nap just an hour after they’ve gotten up. Then they basically get about three more naps throughout the day, plus a detailed regimen of feeding and play time. They’re in bed for the night by 6:30pm, after a nice quiet feeding in their room with pajamas on.
This also gives us a nice amount of evening time with our son, and time to ourselves. We even watched a movie the other night.
Here’s the downside. The babies alternately wake up during the night and scream and cry. The deal is that we let them “cry hard” for 20-25 minutes before going in and picking them up (and feeding them). We give them up to 45 minutes of off-and-on crying before picking them up to feed. On Friday night, they woke up and cried once but put themselves back to sleep pretty quickly, and we had a really nice sleep. Last night, they were awake and crying off and on between 1:30-3:30am, and then they woke up at 6am. I don’t even really remember what happened between all those hours. Jo got up and fed one of the babies, and I got up early to feed the other.
So, we’re not out of the woods yet, but we’ve been told to give this adjustment period about 12 days to kick in. Already we’re seeing signs of progress, but we’re a week in and are already seeing some benefits. The routine also makes “cry-it-out” a little more palpable, because the crying doesn’t just tear at your soul. The babies are only a few months old, so they’re not smart enough yet to be such manipulators, the way our son was when we pathetically attempted (and failed with) cry-it-out when he was about 18-months old.
I’m pretty sure we’re on the right track. Ask me again in another week to see how we’re doing…