Controlling For Reality

Careful readers will have noticed that I write quite a bit about "reality" these days. I believe that the events of the last eighteen months will cause fundamental changes in the way we live our lives. I have also made substantial changes within my own approach to living.

When Monica starts repeating gordo-isms back to me, I know that I have been hitting a topic particularly hard. Part of the purpose of this blog is to reinforce the life that I want to lead for myself. Also, if my views get too crazy then, I hope, a few of you will let me know!

The gordo-ism of the last six months is "it was nice while it lasted". There are two components of that statement.

The first is the classic view of the self-absorbed guy (me). In the Story of G, I was fortunate that circumstance offered me the ability to be completely self-centered in my pursuit of academics, finance and athletics -- each for about a decade. Seeing Lex snuggled into her mother, the two of them star-fished on what was formerly know as "my bed"... drove home the reality that I'm not running things any more. Further, to impose my will (and retake my self-centered existence) implies breaking my personal ethics. That said, I am holding out pockets of resistance...

Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to live in the Roaring Twenties -- the champagne flowing, the Charleston... all the various things that typify our collective memory of that age?

The chart below is linked from John Mauldin's site.

Wasn't it nice while it lasted?

The increase in mortgage lending, effectively, pulled 20% of GDP growth forward. I haven't seen information for the impact of other sources of leverage but image they had a similar effect. We have pulled 10-15 years of economic growth forward, and consumed it.

I hope you got a slice.

Those days are over and hundreds of millions of people will need to adapt the approach they have applied to life. The advice of our grandparents is going to make increasing sense to us.

Now, to counteract the impact of the Great Unwinding, our government is going to pull forward 10-15 years of fiscal deficits. I am philosophically opposed to increases in government spending -- it is a horrible way to allocate capital. However, I am in favor of Obama's stimulus package.

Why?
Revolutions happen when citizens lose hope in their society.

This recession is not about missing a ski vacation. It's about my nephew fighting a war in 5-10 years time. The level of financial hardship that will be visited on our global society is going to leave tens of millions of young men unemployed and devoid of hope. Good government gives its citizens hope, weak government channels their anger. There is a lot of anger around and plenty of weak governments.

I sense this is a very dangerous time. America's enlightened self-interest is to be generous in these times. We should focus on our relative wealth, rather than collective decline.

Not a particularly upbeat opener!
Well, despite the gravity of those thoughts, I am optimistic that we are going to come out of this. There are a lot of smart folks in the world who like to work. The ways of excessive leverage were not good for our collective ethics and the changes that this economic contraction will force on us, and our children, could make us better citizens.

We are in this together and an increased sense of community is a good thing.

Nutritional Reality
What does the above have to do with nutrition?
Sometimes it can make sense to focus on being effective, more than on being correct.

When you control for calorie consumption, the percentage of carbohydrate in a diet has no impact on fat storage.

The above statement comes up a lot in discussions about diet and nutrition. Cyber pot stirrers like to wheel it out in conjunction with the First Law of Thermodynamics.

I suspect they could be correct, but they sacrifice a lot in terms of being effective. Because of the quirks of human nature, in order to achieve a desired result, we sometimes need to focus on what's effective rather than what's correct.

Training Reality
Here's another example:

The most powerful training stimuli we can give ourselves is increased training intensity.

I'd agree with that statement but the implication tugs at the back of my mind... because when we control for reality there is a HUGE cost in terms of consistent work done over time. The statement doesn't apply when reality imposes a large cost in workload.

Advocates of intensity-based programs always fix training time in their discussions. This is intellectually appealing because working athletes have fixed schedules. However, it ignores the training load lost to injury, illness and burn out.

How does reality assert itself on a program that may be physiologically optimal?

• We are lousy at portion control -- athletes consistently overshoot the magnitude, and the optimal intensity, of their training load.
• Intensity driven programs involve high heart rates -- our capacity to think is inversely corelated to heart rate. Speaking plainly, stress makes us stupid. If you can't see it in yourself then look for it in your friends!
• Proximity to other people magnifies these two effects.

I have considered my own decision making in races (and life) -- when I have outperformed my peer group in crisis, more often it is from arousal control, than arousal tolerance. In other words, I have had a lot more success with controlling my reaction to stress than learning how to cope with high stress.

I have been considering why "180-AGE" training is so effective -- I sense that it might work because we simply make less mistakes when we have our heart rate under 150 bpm. By making less mistakes, we do more training over time. The mechanism that makes it an effective way to train could be driven by human psychology, rather than physiology.

Back Next Week,
gordo