My temple and my castle.

It is said that your body is your temple and that every man's home is his castle. I have been thinking a fair bit about my body recently. Every summer for the past 4 I have gotten out of shape during the summer. This is fine, my training cycle for ultimate was based on taking it easy and resting during the summer, starting in late August and peaking in May. It the past this has mostly meant losing muscle. My metabolism has always been fast enough that I didn't really get fat. For the first time this summer I started to notice the first signs of the innevatble 20's metabolism slow down. I was lazy and eating poorly and I managed to start to get a little bit of a belly, now mind you it wasn't that much, but it was there and I took notice. It seems I have reached the point in my life where I can no longer get little exercise, eat like crap and stay skinny. I feel that is a real milestone, though not one to jump for joy about I suppose.

Luckily my schedule has opened up and I have started working out again going for 3-4 mile trail runs and doing a bunch of push ups and core exercises that I like. This is what I think is interesting about the human body and athletics; in about a week I was 75% back to looking like I did at the beginning of the summer. The last 25% will take a little while longer but still that is amazing. This is interesting for two reasons; first, it is amazing how quickly our bodies react to change in neccesity, it took about two days of hard work for my body to realize that the time to store energy was over (add fat) and that it needed to prepare to do hard things again (add muscle). Somewhere in my brain years of transitioning from preparing for winter to needing to escape sabretooth tigers kicked in. Evolution is neat. Also considering how long it originally took me to get in the kind of shape I am in now the first time I can't believe how quickly I am able to get it back now, in 10 days I go from doing sets of 20-25 push ups to 45-50. That is pretty crazy considering it took me months to get from one point to the other the first time. There is just something the brain/body does when it breaks through a wall the first time, after that it just knows what it needs to do again. This has always seemed especially aparent with distance runners. You often here marathoners talk about how hard their first one was and that even though they didn't train for the next nine months after and felt like they were back at square one they were able to get back into shape in a fraction of the time. Obviously their is some sort of biological statute of limitations on this (after 20 years I think your body has kind of moved on) but still I think it is amazing.

So onto my castle. This summer has represented the longest stretch of time that I have kept a domecile consistantly clean and neat my entire life. I'm kind of proud. I was living with a roomate for most of the summer and I was actually the cleaner of the two, though we were close. I am now living by myself which is the past has been my messiest but I have actually been doing even better. The exception being a part of my cabin which is used by my staff to do work. One of the staff the other day even mentioned, unprovoked and off topic how neatly my clothes were put away. For those that have known me a long time, which consitutes many of my few readers you know what a big accomplishment this is for me. It's nice, I have to admit. Still it isn't easy. I have decided that anyone that says it is easier to consistantly clean then to let it get really messy and then clean is a liar. In pure time spent it is more efficient to wait until the mess is large and then clean up a bunch at one. However, I will agree that even though it takes more time to clean consistantly it is still a better idea because of the utility gained. Imagine cleaning consistantly is %150 of the work of waiting until it's trashed. When you clean consistantly you have at least a fairly neat domecile ~100% of the time, whereas if you wait until it is terrible then say 25% of the time it's neat, 50% of the time is pretty poor and 25% of the time it's awful. In the end it is worth the extra 50% of work because you overall situation improves so dramatically. I will try to keep it up after camp, that will be the real test, but I am confident. I was going strong last fall but then do to a number of reasons I let off. I would really like to be hold on this year, I really think it would make me a 'better person' whatever that is.

Now I just gotta start eating healthy.

Joey