[ I’m so far behind on my “reading notebook,” but I’ll try to catch up over the next week or two!  Or three… ]

Going in to  this year’s Boston Marathon, I was a little low on running confidence due to slight lack of motivation and subsequent fairly light training load.  The night before I was reading the BAA’s Competitor’s Guide and found an excerpt from Ryan Hall’s new book, Running with Joy.  It was pretty good, so I downloaded the book to my kindle app.  I thought that if I read the introduction and his entry on race day that very night, that maybe I’d find a little spark…

The book starts with a couple of Bible verses, though this one is most relevant:

These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. — JOHN 15:11

Goes well with the 1st catechism in the Westminister Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man?  Man’s chief end is to glorify God an to enJOY Him forever…

Most of the book is Hall’s training journal along with his thoughts and reflections leading up to Boston last year.   Hall is a very devout Christian and walks (runs?) with God in all he does, as he reflects on his running, racing, and life as he journals his training.

The final entry covers the actual 2010 race for Hall, when, though he didn’t win, he found what he was looking for — Joy in running.  I do think the book helped me find my own Joy in the 2011 race.  I ran much faster than I expected I would (could!), and I had joy for most of the race!  The final six miles were a bit of a slog, but I only slowed a little and I’m still quite happy with how I ran.

A few quotes:

• My body responds best when I go to the well only on race day.
• Being okay with running slower than I have before and being patient enough to not force all my workouts to be at that same level is very challenging.
• The only way to prepare for the pavement is to practice on the pavement.
• In a world where it is all about the guy on the top step of the podium and we are defined and define ourselves by the time on our watch, at the end of the day I am trying to spread the word that it ultimately isn’t all about that.
• Enjoyment is a big part of unlocking our hidden potential.
• Pushing yourself to the brink is an acquired skill. It develops with time and practice and takes self-confidence and the boldness to test the body’s limit.

My good friend Chris G. suggested I read this — in fact he bought it for me and dropped it off in my mailbox one day.  🙂   As far as survival stories, it started a bit slow compared to Unbroken and Endurance.  But once it got going, it was really good.

The Whaleship Essex and its tale are the basis of Herman Melville’s Mobey Dick.  The funny thing is, the whole time I was reading this book, the story seemed so familiar.  I thought that was due to me having read Mobey Dick, but it turns out, according to my “reading notebook” from 2000, I read it all the way back then!  See this web page — before there were blogging tools.  In fact, at that time, this book inspired me to read Mobey Dick, which I wrote about here… Again, before there were blogging tools.  Here is what I wrote about Mobey Dick back then:

Wow, finally done!  The dates listed above are correct — it took me about 7 months to finish this book.  (Of course, I did read many others in that time!)  I decided I really wanted to read this after reading “In the Heart of the Sea,” which is a true story of a whale ramming a ship and causing it to sink (and likely Melville’s inspiration for Moby Dick).  I had to read a few chapters of this back in high school, but I don’t remember much of it anyway, and if I did do much back then, it was probably with Cliff Notes.  The book is definitely worth the read — I’m not sure there is anything else quite like it.  It is certainly not an “easy read,” though, and that is why it took me so long.  I often put it down for a month or more at a time.   There is so much detail on so many things — often chapters of several pages devoted to something as simple as a rope, or more complicated as the whole study of whales as known to Melville in his time.  But often these chapters are filled with symbolism of humanity, life, religion, etc.  Again, worth the read, though it’s not easy.

If you like adventure stories and stories of survival in extreme circumstances, In the Heart of the Sea is an excellent read.

Wow, I  started this post almost 2 months ago and forgot it… I’m so far behind on posting in my reading notebook category!

David Platt became “the youngest megachurch pastor in history,” a claim he may dispute but likely is true.  At 28, he became the pastor of a  4000+ church.  Amazing story of someone who is living an amazing life.  This book is well worth the read for any Christian in America.  It really makes you question a lot of things about your faith and how that relates (does it?) to the American Dream.

• We live in a church culture that has a dangerous tendency to disconnect the grace of God from the glory of God. Our hearts resonate with the idea of enjoying God’s grace. We bask in sermons, conferences, and books that exalt a grace centering on us. And while the wonder of grace is worthy of our attention, if that grace is disconnected from its purpose, the sad result is a self-centered Christianity that bypasses the heart of God
• Here we stand amid an American dream dominated by self-advancement, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency, by individualism, materialism, and universalism.
• I could not help but think that somewhere along the way we had missed what is radical about our faith and replaced it with what is comfortable. (Emphasis mine)
• We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.
• We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus.
• As long as you and I understand salvation as checking off a box to get to God, we will find ourselves in the meaningless sea of world religions that actually condemn the human race by exalting our supposed ability to get to God.
• The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability. The American dream prizes what people can accomplish when they believe in themselves and trust in themselves, and we are drawn toward such thinking. But the gospel has different priorities. The gospel beckons us to die to ourselves and to believe in God and to trust in his power.

This book was mentioned to me, somewhat in passing, by my old physical therapist.  My wife has a knee injury and is now seeing him, and I wanted to go to listen in on the diagnosis and prescribed exercises.  While I am a layman compared to a PT or a Doctor, I became a bit of a knee expert in my own when I went through so many problems in the past.  His description sounded intriguing, so I immediately picked it up, which in today’s terms means I downloaded it to my kindle app on my iPad.  🙂   I was instantly hooked.

The story is of Louie Zamperini, who was a kid struggling to stay out of trouble, when he discovered running. Within a short time, he had broken the national high school record in the mile at 4:21 in a 1934 preliminary meet.  He did not qualify for the Olympics in the mile so decided to try the 5k, and on his 3rd race at that distance, finished in a dead heat with world-record holder Don Lash.  While he only placed 8th in the 5k at the Olympics, his last lap was so fast (56 seconds!!) that Hitler asked to meet him personally.    In 1938, he won the NCAA Championship in a time of 4:08.3 — while his opponents tried to slow him.  He finished with a cracked rib, punctured shins, and an impaled toe!  Many thought he would be the 1st to break the 4:00 barrier in the mile, but along came World War II.

In World War II, Louie became a bomber in a B-24.  On one of his flight missions, the plane goes down and Louie and two others drifted on the pacific for 47 days, catching birds and fish as best they could, and rain water in small tins.  (One of the three died before they were rescued.)  Unfortunately, the rescuers were Japanese, so Louie then spends a lot of time in various Japanese POW camps, under abhorrent conditions.

I guess if I tell much more of the story, you may not read the book.  It is so worth reading… Fantastic book if you like running, US history, World War II, or biographies that read like novels.

As always, a few quotes:

Given the dismal record of raft-bound men, Mac’s despair was reasonable. What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac’s plight didn’t share his hopelessness. Though Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet occurred to him that he might die. The same was true for Louie. Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out

• Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.
• Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.
• The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer.
• All he had left was his alcohol and his resentment, the emotion that, Jean Améry would write, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”
• His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him a laughing equanimity even in hard times

Rather than do the kind of review I normally do (which aren’t typical reviews anyway), I’m going to highlight the points in this book that I find different from current paleo/primal views of folks like Robb Wolf and his Paleo Solution (PS) and Mark Sisson and his Primal Blueprint (PB).  Both of those books have been published in the past year or less, while The Paleo Diet for Athletes (PDA) was published back in 2005.  I do understand that Cordain is working on a new book, so I think it will be quite interesting to see what his take is on a few items that are much different in Wolf and Sisson.

The 1st differences I want to talk about are those between endurance athletes and the typical people PS and PB are addressed to.  While Sisson comes from a background as an endurance athlete (competitive Ironman triathlete and marathoner) he now thinks that kind of cardio is bad for you.  In fact, he dubs it Chronic Cardio and outlines the problems associated with it, at least as he sees them(*).  Wolf has more of a background with strength and crossfit type of exercise.  So in both cases, they are pretty high on low carb., which is much different than PDA.  I should note that on Wolf’s podcast he often talks about using carbs such as sweet potatoes and yams immediately following a workout, so that part is not different.  But PDA is much higher on fruits in general.  PDA specifically outlines periods of carb consumption as high as 50 percent, and at some limited periods 60%, of total caloric intake.   I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Wolf give a specific percentage — he’s pretty much against calorie counting for the most part (though there are times he sees the benefits), and Sisson talks of 100 – 150 carbs max as ideal (and sometimes suggests much less).  Even at 2500 calories, 150g of carbs would be 25 percent of intake, so you can see the large difference.

The other recommendations that I am really surprised by are listed below, because these seem quite different from current recommendations:

• the recommendation of canola oil by PDA.  while PS doesn’t mention it specifically from what I recall, PB is adamantly against it
• PDA recommends to steer clear of saturated fat, while it seems like the current paleo folks are ok with it, particularly if it is grass fed organic meat.  PDA recommends trimming all visible fats before cooking.
• PDA recommends lean meats over fatty meats… This is one I’d like to dig more into to see what PB/PS/paleo folks are saying… All I recall are that any meat is ok, and in fact at least one blog (hunter gather love ??) talked about why lean meat won’t cut it on a truly paleo diet.  Seems like most current paleo thought is that fatty meat is actually good and necessary (to get enough caloric load)
• PDA recommended agains canned fish like sardines and herring, while PS and PB both seem to be for it.
• PDA says 15 minutes of sunlight per day is enough for adequate vitamin D, even in the winter, while both PB and PS are big into supplementation — as much as several thousand mg per day of D3.  (but both recommend regular blood testing as vit D can be toxic)
• As mentioned above, PDA is high on any fruit any time, while PS and PB want to limit fruits due to their insulin load.  I do take it from Wolf that this is more individualized, and that if you are lean and healthy, more fruit is ok.  I sure hope so!  🙂
• PDA has ZERO mention of coconut oil from what I can find, while PB and PS are high on it.  I’ve really enjoyed learning to use it the past couple of months.
• PDA says to limit eggs to no more than 6 per week.  I explicitly recall on the PS podcast recently that they don’t agree with this unless you have some kind of allergy; otherwise, they are all for lots of eggs.  I make 5 egg omelets for breakfast sometimes!  I definitely eat more than 6 per week most weeks.

Finally, I would just say I was really surprised by PDA’s talk of following the American Heart Associations recommendations of limiting saturated fat to less than 10% of overall calories and limiting dietary cholesterol.  Maybe I’m too deep into Gary Taube’s “Good Calories Bad Calories” right now, which seems to blow apart this hypothesis, but it also seems to go agains PB and PS and all the other paleo blogs out there!

(*) Suffice it to say that I don’t fully agree with Sisson on his views of Chronic Cardio.  I do think that for people that work out 5-6 days per week at 90%+ maximum heart rate, there is a problem.  You definitely need to mix it up with lower effort level aerobics as well as short sprints and “lifting heavy things.”  I wonder if he would be cool if I explained to him my view that my ultra running is part of my “play time.”  🙂