Monologues of the Way #1 - Exercise, addiction and other things
For those of you who want to see the video version and the actual bike path
This is the first post in text format from “Monologues of the Way”, a format I decided to try for youtube, where I speak about things at the same time I try to show something, an itinerary, a stroll, a place or anything else that hasn’t occurred to me yet.
This first one I did it while cycling from Consolação’s fort up to Baleal. On the left side of the fort in Consolação there’s a point break that follows the shape of the reef and to the right of the fort there’s both a point break and several beach breaks with sand bottom.
The remaining route is done both through road parts and bicycles paths that end up covering most of the way up to Baleal and Cantinho da Baía beach, north of Peniche. It’s around 9km each way. You can see it all in the video. Nonetheless, to expand on the video content I decided to write a text version about the themes I talked there, namely the importance of physical exercise on fighting addiction and the problems of certain addictions.
Keeping an exercise schedule is sometimes problematic, especially during one-off travels, or even more for those who travel in a continuous way. Let’s start by rehashing the benefits of exercise.
Benefits
It’s still common sense the positive effect an exercise schedule, regardless of how light or moderate, has on our health.
Of course, it’s necessary to recognize there’s limits, both minimum and maximum, that have to be taken into account pertaining certain conditions (injuries, age, illness) where the consulting of an expert is essential but, in general, a simple cardio plus strength training, on a regular schedule, increase significantly a person’s quality of life and vitality.
I have never been obsessed with exercise, to be honest I don’t think I ever walked into a gym to exercise, but I have always done exercise. When younger that would be football (soccer for the heathens), handball, and running. In mid-teens I skated and during university and a bit after, pool and running.
After that it has always varied, I go on what I call “seasons” - this is - stretches of time where I don’t exercise as regularly and then others where I do, be it running and light calisthenic work, be it surfing almost everyday, or all things together.
Some people ask themselves why bother keeping a regular exercise practice?
I would say there’s several dimensions to it.
First and foremost we have vitality and physical development, the well-functioning of our organism and keeping us used to these work-loads. This has implications in our health: our immune system, our metabolism, fat accumulation, quality of sleep and even chemical balance, all things pertaining to an healthy life.
Nowadays this is even more important in case you have a sedentary job. Many jobs nowadays require much less physical exertion than a couple dozen years ago - even day-to-day life with all the comforts accessible at the tip of our fingers is further removed from the inherent physicality of human existence. So to keep the same fitness levels nowadays it’s necessary to purposefully exercise towards that, something that wasn’t needed for most people not that long ago.
Then we have the mental part. Exercising helps the chemical balance of our organism as well, in doing that it also helps us to stay out of a more depressive state. It’s also a way of exerting our will. I doubt many people like to train hard in itself. Obviously they like the results of the training, but going out to run even 5km or 10km requires you to exert your will and physical being. You don’t slide into a 5km run like you slide into 2h of scrolling social media.
It’s fairly easier to stay put watching a series or whatever (not that there’s any problem with watching a tv series as long as your life doesn’t revolve around that or similar activities) than it is to put some fitness clothing and get out of your comfort to run 40min when it’s either too hot, or too cold, or slightly raining, or whatever.
Reasons
I’m going to focus more on the point of view of a man - why being fit is essential, like having children and being able to protect them or doing regular activities with them, being more attractive, amongst thousands of others.
Some people may still think to themselves, “well, I don’t really care about those things”, and I say, ok, but stilll, even if you don’t but you go on a trip somewhere, and then there’s a vulcano there, and you met someone on the coffee that’s going to go on an hike there next day and you feel inclined to join, or there’s no one else involved but you would like to go, it’s going to be an awful long 5 hours uphill if you aren’t minimally fit.
Even more, if something happens to you, like when I was Koh Chang, and going uphill with my girlfriend on a motorbike and a guy going downhill cuts the curve in the middle forcing me to go off the road. I fell to the side of the hill, on the motorbike with my girlfriend on it as well. Luckily, because the hill was sort of a mix between dirt and gravel, the bike got the handle stuck when we fell sideways and we didn’t fall further down. But I still had to get the motorbike up and back to the road.
The best option is to be minimally fit. It might happen that even if you are, the situation would call for being even fitter, so you might think, “yeah, there can always be something for which I won’t be well prepared” but being a bit is better than nothing so it’s not a good excuse.
Then you have the fact that there’s a correlation between you knowing your limits and being used to exert your physicality and the way you go about your days, it can help you avoid trouble. If you go looking for it you’re going to find it right, but if you just want to go through without problems then it helps because like everything in life and nature, people usually choose the path of least resistance, and if you’re fit and confident it’s less probable that someone will jump you. It can certainly happen but usually people doing that don’t want to have more trouble than what it is worth. It all boils down to a very simple truth
being a bit more physically fit is better than being a bit less fit.
always.
Exercise while on the road
Keeping an exercise schedule while traveling is more complex, unless you’re “based” somewhere for longer periods of time. When you’re doing the nomad thing with short periods of time on the same place there’s a few options available and the best will depend on different factors.
First the context and external conditions:
Is it possible to exercise outdoors? Meaning, on the place you’re in is there any park or cycling/walking/running tracks close by, like 1 or 2km radius? Are there public equipment areas?
Is the weather while you’re there ok for outdoors exercising? If it’s monsoon season where you’re staying probably it’s better to not count on it. Or if it’s too hot and humid, unless you’re fine waking up 6am or going out after night fall.
Is it safe? Both personally and for exercise (vehicles, roads, etc)
If all of this is answered with yes then in my opinion - as long as you aren’t training specifically for hypertrophy or professional goals - a simple every other day 5km running, interspersed with every other day basic calisthenics, 250 sit ups, 250 push-ups plus stretching, is more than enough to keep in shape.
This you can do by yourself in any situation if needed, even in your room. Nonetheless many of the more touristically well known cities or places have either or both public equipment and running/cycling trails. The good thing about being outdoors is that it’s free and you’re outdoors.
If the answer to any is no then your second option is to stay in a place, hotel or rental, that has access to a gym.
Usually having a gym available means a higher daily rate for a stay but the comfort by itself might be enough of a reason to stay there, since it’s also an indication of being higher quality (normally). Having a space with professional equipment, reserved for clients, with AC, in the middle of a country where going outdoors from 7am to 8pm means sweating profusely, might be a good deal.
Lastly you have regular gyms. In almost any place you’ll be visiting there will be gyms that you can go to by paying a daily/hourly rate. Depending on the duration of your stay and frequency you want it might even be worthwhile becoming a member or buying a monthly pass.
It’s worth mentioning too that if you’re in some city, country or region where certain sports are very common, that enrolling in those can also be a great option. Imagine you’re in Thailand, it might be a very interesting experience to enroll in Muay Thai. Or if you’re in Bali or Portugal, to enroll in surf lessons. Those type of sports are more specific but being in the right place to practice them makes it a great way of learning something new while keeping a form of exercise.
Personally my order of preference is this - I rather run and exercise outdoors as long as I have some road, trail, beach, park, where I can get away from heavy traffic, fume exhaust and noise. Even if that means waking up earlier or going after dark to escape the heat.
Addiction
Addiction has many faces. There’s the obvious things like tobacco, drugs, alcohol. Then there’s more hidden things like food, attachment to mental states, situations that allow us to experience things like adrenaline rushes, pleasure, calmness, whatever it is.
I believe that the majority of addictions start by some sort of dissatisfaction. At some point they become real addictions where there’s a chemical change in the way our organism and mind reacts or desires the outcome of the addiction, and the absence of the addictive element has physical and mental effects that drive us to continuously search for it.
It’s perhaps beneficial to define “dissatisfaction”. Most commonly it just means not being satisfied with something. Some ways it manifests commonly in younger folks, due to social context and them still being on the development phase of their personality:
I don’t like to feel anxious while I’m at a bar so I’m gonna have a drink to relax
I don’t want to look like I don’t belong - for instance when you go out at night and everybody is doing a certain thing you also want to look like you belong and you end up doing it for that reason
You don’t want to be seen as being inexperienced - in the eyes of those you’re romantically or sexually interested in
There’s many other specific situations we could call out, but the underlying mechanism is always the same. But then there’s subtler things. Like wanting to look like someone you saw.
As an example, it doesn’t seem to be dissatisfaction that you want to look like the hero of a movie or book your read, that also happens to smoke, or your father, or someone you have as a model, or that guy in your school that gets the girls you want - but unconsciously it is a form of dissatisfaction - the dissatisfaction with who you are or where you are in life - those that are satisfied with that aren’t interested in emulating others.
And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to emulate others - by itself - if what we want to emulate is healthy. By healthy we mean something that leads to an healthy development. Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two forward.
The problematic part here is that when you’re young you don’t realize this is due to dissatisfaction, you don’t have yet a full blown identity - it’s still under construction along with your personality, so unconsciously you emulate a lot of different things, from clothes to looks, to brands, accessories, ways of speaking, hair cut, down to the sports you practice or what you take an interest in.
As you start solidifying your personality and taking the reins of your identity - in short, growing up - you’ll usually become conscious of this and start building it with purpose out of the things that influence you and how you want to be.
Sometimes you leave those things that aren’t helpful behind but others you don’t. It’s important to understand from where the things you carry with you came from.
It’s also important to understand how our minds fools us. I’m going to exemplify with smoking. I started smoking when I was 16 years old, very lightly out of curiosity, and by 17 I was smoking regularly. I smoked for about 20 years. In the last stretch of these 20 years I stopped smoking 4 or 5 times, always for longer than 4 months. The reason I always came back to it is that I was used to smoking and I enjoyed it - be it socially or even doing stops from my monotonous work at the computer. Nonetheless I could stop anytime I wanted, which made me less prone to actually stop - when you stop for more than 2 months you’re no longer chemically addicted to nicotine, if you come back it’s because you’ve decided you wanted to.
But what I noticed is that whenever I would come back and smoke a cigarette - it could even be after only 3 or 4 days without smoking - the taste would be awful. The same with the smell. But after smoking two cigarettes that would go away, it would feel relaxing and pleasant.
This is kinda interesting isn’t it? It’s like you need to take enough time away from something in order to acquire the truthful experience of that thing again. In this case the first cigarette, the awful taste, the awful smell, those are the things that are true - non-smokers will tell you that, things like it tastes like kissing an ashtray when kissing someone who smokes heavily, or their clothes stink all the time. But once your brain gets that kick from the nicotine it kinda goes, let me hide these awful things because I really like the nicotine kick. And you no longer notice them.
Could it be that there’s other things besides tobacco that work like that? Even things where negative effects are much more subtle or subjective than the taste of cigarettes. Where our brain enjoying the other effects “mask” the negative parts?
I’m always circling back to Pavlov’s dogs. I don’t even care anymore if the story is true or not because the concept is so useful for bridging different ideas.
The internet version of the history is that Pavlov did an experience in which he would ring a bell while feeding his dogs. After some time doing this continuously for a long period of time, he noticed that the dogs would start salivating when he rang the bell, even if no food was being given. Basically the sound became so intertwined with the idea of eating, in the dogs’ heads, that they would salivate just by listening to it.
Could it be that we can see the same thing in other areas, like our relationship with food. Could it be that breastfeeding, something that goes on during the initial 6 months in the life of any human baby, something so important for its survival and development, being fed on the warmth of your mother’s embrace, protected, in comfort, would leave some sort of very deep connection between the act of nourishing your body with food and that warmth and protection?
Could it be because of that that humans in general have a tendency to overeat when there’s enough availability of food?
The same with many other things, experiences that we have along our way, while we live with certain habits, that stay with us, due to our own actions, in an attempt to revive something that we no longer even know what it is, just a blob of familiar sensations.
Exercise and Free Will
It’s relative to this facet of addiction that I think exercise can help. There’s certainly addictions related to fitness culture itself - when done for extreme goals and not for health reasons alone - but lets assume we’re talking about regular training in order to keep or reach our best physical state in an healthy way.
Physical exercise with the purpose of training is something that builds resilience and will power. It’s always easier to not do it, than to do it which means there’s “resistance”. Our muscles grow also through pushing through “resistance”, and so does our will. Of course, it’s easier to go run 5km in a beautiful day than 5km after waking up to a cold rainy day, but either one is more difficult than staying in the sofa or daydreaming.
Due to that it’s great when we’re able to achieve a regular exercise schedule that pushes us towards our current limit, because exercising regularly in an healthy schedule improves everything, and pushing towards our limits makes our limits grow.
Addictions usually are the result of our will spiralling out of control. The desires related to them become stronger than our will and as such we become incapable of controlling them up to an acceptable level.
Many times this lack of control is, as well, a reflection of a damaged emotional state. You can call it whatever you like, depression, angst, emptiness. When this emotional state expands to occupy all your emotional space it’s very difficult to keep our will.
And so this spiralling tends to accelerate. The behaviours lead to more damage, more damage leads to less will, and so it goes. There’s many additional factors that might worsen it, even significantly, but I believe the root of the problem to be always this - the loss, in one way or another, of the capability to exert our will power.
If through purposeful exercise we can build up our will power then that means that physical exercise can be used as one of the many weapons we have to rebuild it to a level where we can ditch certain behaviours or habits.
But there’s more to it too. The fact that by exercising we’re making our organism work better is an important aspect as well. By improving the functioning of our whole organism we are stronger to exert our will.
As an example, if we live in an house in complete disarray and dirty that’s similar to saying we lost control of our space - we are no longer sovereign in that space. Everything becomes more difficult. Cooking dinner is more difficult because there’s nothing clean, the tabletop is filled with stuff left to be cleaned and stored. Taking a person to our home is not pleasant, both for us and them. We don’t even feel like we want to be in that space.
If somehow we can convince ourselves to clean up and organise a little bit all of it, following a model where we leave our home a little bit better than it was the previous day, until we regain sovereignty over it again, day by day, it will start getting better.
This doesn’t mean we will never be able to leave a dish to be done next day, or something out of place for the week, it simply means that we won’t loose the sovereignty over it ever again, we won’t let it reach a state where it will take us a lot of concerted effort to clean it up.
And each passing day this process becomes easier. The worse will be the beginning and truth be told, even after starting, and even if it’s better than the previous day, the first times it will still be “dirty”, or in “disarray”. But there’s no going around that. It’s similar to starting an exercise routine, or regaining the sovereignty over our mind and will power.
If we are obese and out of shape, the first times we go out to run we will even have to limit ourselves in order to not injury ourselves doing a single km or 2. We will be going out more than 5 or 6 times until you even see any difference. But the truth is that even though the outside will still look exactly the same, inside something has changed - we’re becoming better, preparing ourselves to be able to shed weight and gain strength.
So first our muscles need to develop enough that we can comfortably (or more comfortably than before) carry our weight, for extended periods of strain. As that happens we start being able to reach states where we effectively start burning accumulated fat reserves, which in turn drops our weight, which in turn means our muscles now needing to move less weight and our veins being less clogged, we are able to run a bit more, and by running a bit more we are increasing the amount of energy we can consume. It’s a feedback loop. It all starts with a simple step.
Forcing ourselves to do it, specially when it’s easier to just come up with some excuse - “yeah I’m really going to start next year”, “let’s just do this first”, “not today, I got this amazing show I want to see”, whatever - is what builds our will power and will power is essential to keep track once we no longer feel like so, or when we’re not seeing the results we expected or at the rate we expected.
Having said this, to shed some addictions it’s a bit more complex because many of them are based on actual chemical, hormonal, changes in our organism, and require quitting cold turkey. There’s no gradual letting go for some of them.
Nonetheless, in both cases it’s still will power that dictates if we’re even able to take the first step, and then if we can keep on the path until we get rid of them.
Consistency & Injuries
In order to keep consistency we need to not get injured.
Even though we need will power to keep a regular exercise schedule - on top of other every day life obstacles, like a time consuming day job, other responsibilities - we need to pay attention to injuries and cumulative fatigue.
Resting, specially regular quality sleep, is something extremely important for our organism in any context. We don’t even need to be talking about exercise in particular.
We need it for the correct functioning and health of our organism - it touches our mental and biological health, our immune system, cell clean-up, tissue and bone regeneration, everything that’s related to our physical existence.
When we live life along with a regular training schedule we end up exerting bigger workloads on our body. The muscles and bones suffer micro-tears due to repetitive strain under prolonged tension. Our metabolism accelerates promoting energy usage more aggressively. The simple tiredness that comes from our body having to guarantee capacity to handle the continuous exertion.
It’s easy in sports like running to injury ourselves due to over-training, specially if paired with bad form or low quality equipment. It’s easy to go all in training for 1 or 2 months and then fall into a limbo where we stop training. There’s both physical and mental fatigue.
Hence the necessity of proper recovery. It’s better to run 6 miles every week for 2 years, than to run 6 miles 3 times a week for 2 months. Paying attention to what our body tells us is of the utmost importance.
For instance, it has been more or less 2 or 3 weeks since I’ve injured the lower leg muscle, I don’t know the name, but below the knee and “inside” the leg. I was already in a pretty decent rhythm of running every other day with 2 rest days on weekends, for 6 miles each time, summing up to 18 miles weekly. Almost an half-marathon per week (obviously, less strenuous since it’s divided in 3 sessions).
One of these days I went running, did the regular distance and upon finishing I was feeling a bit of discomfort on my right leg. So next day I paid attention to it - it was calisthenic and stretching day - and I noticed it was slightly sore. Next day, instead of going to run I said, well, lets rest this one too. I did another day of calisthenic and stretching workout and this time didn’t feel anything wrong. In my mind I was - ok, tomorrow we’re back to running.
And so I went. 3 miles in I started feeling again that discomfort on the leg but I decided to push through because I thought it would be just fine, I would rest an additional day or 2. But it wasn’t. I ran more half a mile and then the discomfort turned to a slight pain and I had to stop. I walked my way back home. This time next day I felt the muscle all flared up. It took about 5 days for me to no longer feel anything.
Due to this I decided to now give an additional 3 days. 3 days without discomfort of any kind I decided to try another run, and again, same thing, 3 miles in I started feeling the discomfort again but this time I stopped immediately. I went back home and probably because I stopped immediately once I arrived home it was no longer even discomfortable nor anything. But I decided I still needed to do cardio and workout my legs, without worsening or flaring up that injury.
So next day I got my bicycle out, went for a 15 mile (you can see the whole thing in the youtube video) and kept doing it instead of running, for another week. All while keeping the other part of my routine (light calisthenic workout and stretching).
Just two days ago I went running and did 4 miles. This time I didn’t feel any discomfort - but also didn’t push further, it’s less 2 miles than my normal runs. But i will keep it like this for another week, bicycle most of the time and then run once, and then maybe another week of the same, who knows.
You can apply this idea to many things. Be it weight lifting or cardio, or even some life problems. In this case I found another type of exercise, bicycle, that substituted the one that was flaring an injury, running, and this allowed me to keep training more or less the same things, legs and cardio, without worsening my leg issue. By the looks of it I will be able to be fully recovered in another week or so and then back to my regular routine (which has given me great results in all other areas).
As I’ve said previously, it’s better to run 6 miles a week for 2 years than 18 miles every week for 2 months.