FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13d ago
Is it any good?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13d ago
I'm still on Journey to the End of Night. I liked it at first during the WWI bits, but it turned into a slog when he became a doctor, and honestly while I would have described it as razor sharp initially, by the time he gets to America I kinda lost the plot and don't really get what's going on at all anymore. I'll probably grind it out because it's so recommended, but I'm clearly missing something here. Also, is the African interlude just a Heart of Darkness parody?
In between I read American Sniper over Memorial Day weekend, for the holiday and whatnot, after seeing it referenced on here. I'm still really thinking about it, and trying to think about the entire Iraq disaster and how it reflects on the book and vice versa.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13d ago
Avoiding gluttony, wrath and excessive lust is good.
Notice your slip here, you've subconsiously moved the goalposts on yourself: excessive lust is bad. I agree! Excessive lust is bad, but some lust is necessary to human life, even if it exists only to be resisted! Someone who lacks any sexual desire is missing a gear.
but they are missing it in a good manner which will help them live a better life.
Maybe, sometimes, having a genetic defect to lack any libido causes them to lead a better life along certain metrics, if not others. And there are very few armed robbers or murderers in wheelchairs, but being unable to walk is pretty much your textbook definition of a cripple. It would seem ridiculous to say that wheelchair bound folks are more moral because they don't commit violent crimes. And it would be obvious to say they are cripples, despite the fact that they're less likely to end their lives in prison.
So either you're proposing a new definition of cripple by which any possible moral benefit obviates the many clear limitations imposed.
Or given that you already copped to only excessive lust being bad, your concept of Asexuality is something more like, extant but weak sexual desire?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
14d ago
People who choose to live in a certain way in accordance with their beliefs != People who lack fundamental human feelings
People who have urges to sin and resist them != People who lack urges
Gluttony is a sin. Someone who has no hunger, no urge to eat and no pleasure in food, is crippled and missing a fundamental human experience. A monk who chooses to live on a scanty diet of bread and water is making a choice for piety, a choice that is meaningless if he was born with a generic dysfunction that prevents him from feeling hunger or enjoying food.
Wrath is a sin. But someone who feels no anger, no urge to revenge when wronged, is missing a fundamental part of human experience. The nobility of choosing to turn the other cheek is meaningless if one simply lacks the neurons that fire that way for revenge.
So on and so forth to Lust.
Gold Gloves have always been the worst of the classic baseball awards. While they've generally not been awarded to true butchers, Jeets aside, they've historically been handed out more on offensive measurables than on defensive ones.
It's such a shame the pirates have been unable to put together a real team in so long. The gorgeous stadium alone should make it work. One of the best stadiums and one of the worst teams.
It's funny the grudges you have as a fan. The biggest hatreds I have are for players who play poorly for my team, then play well for a rival. Al Horford, oh boy. JA Happ. It's the random ones I really have a deep hatred for.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15d ago
I mean they look small so someone might not notice... But if they did see, or more likely hear, the cleats, yeah, you're gonna look retarded. I don't mean that in the jocular way, like the way Mrs. FiveHour would tell me "don't wear Pit Vipers to the restaurant you'll look retarded" but in the way that I'd feel seeing someone wear a helmet or something.
I guess in answer to original question it's essentially a complete faux pas.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15d ago
Funny, for a foreigner that probably does make a lot more sense.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15d ago
I wouldn't call it a faux pas, in the way that wearing a football jersey to a formal dinner is rude and shows a lack of taste.
If I saw someone wearing cleats outside of a sporting competition, I'd consider a mild sign of some kind of mental retardation.
So like, what kind of cleats are we talking about here?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
My Life Measured in Captains of the New York Yankees
— The Pre-Socratics: The line of Yankee Captains starts in the dim prehistory of the pre-Ruth era, many of them nondescript players on nondescript teams before Babe Ruth came and changed baseball forever. There’s even some archivists who dispute over whether some players who were Captains of the Yankees who aren’t officially recognized by the team. Hal Chase and Roger Peckinpaugh are the first according to the Yankees’ official list, two players I’ve vaguely heard of, though historians claim to have found newspaper clippings referring to Clark Griffith and Kid Elberfield as Captains, but I have no idea who those players were. After Babe Ruth was purchased, and built the team and the House that Ruth Built, he was very briefly made Captain, but he didn’t even last a season. The Bambino, true to his character, dove into the stands to fistfight a heckler, and was deposed as a result. Everett Scott would succeed him for three years. Then would come the man who defined the role so well he was almost the Last Captain…
— The Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig is nearly unique among all sports legends across all fields, in that he’s a man whose incredible Greatness at baseball is often overshadowed in public memory by his tremendous Goodness as a person. Gehrig was top 20 in WAR all time by Baseball Reference, he hit .340 across his career, he ended just a few weeks of an incurable disease from 500 home runs and 2000 RBIs. His 162 games average across his career were 8.5WAR, 113 walks, 37 home runs, and 149 RBIs; his career OPS+ was 179, he was 79% better than an average hitter. He was the cleanup hitter for Ruth on the Murderer’s Row lineups, providing the protection that let Ruth hit more home runs than many whole teams. If he had been a jerk, he’d still an inner circle Hall of Famer. But he was a hero even more as a man than as a baseball player. The Iron Horse, because he played in 2,130 consecutive games, a record which would stand for 56 years*, and would only be broken by Cal Ripken Jr. and then only with the help of a timely blackout. The movie made out of his life, Pride of the Yankees released in 1942, would open with a title card reading:
This is the story of a hero of the peaceful paths of everyday life. It is the story of a gentle young man who, in the full flower of his great fame, was a lesson in simplicity and modesty to the youth of America. He faced death with that same valor and fortitude that has been displayed by thousands of young Americans on far-flung fields of battle. He left behind him a memory of courage and devotion that will ever be an inspiration to all men. This is the story of Lou Gehrig.
My wife would bawl when we watched the movie together, because she didn’t realize he was going to die. I said “Darling, he’s Lou Gehrig, he dies of Lou Gehrig’s disease, he gives the “Luckiest Man in the World speech” and she wailed “YES BUT I DIDN’T KNOW IT HAPPENED RIGHT AWAY!” I’ll reprint the text of his speech here:
For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. When you look around, wouldn’t you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such a fine looking men as they’re standing in uniform in this ballpark today? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.”
A leader on the field and off. Jonathan Eig wrote in the WSJ, when talking about his work as a biographer and how you deal with finding out horrible things about great men. Eig talked about dealing with how to report MLK’s philandering, Ali’s controversies, two men who were in many ways secular saints of the 20th century. And then he talked about researching Gehrig, and he never found any controversy, except that maybe he loved his mother too much. But just before the book went to press, some never before published letters came to his attention, and he had a knot in his stomach as he opened them…but there was nothing, just more of Columbia alum Lou Gehrig, momma’s boy.
I of course never saw Gehrig play, neither had anyone I knew. I’m just barely old enough to have said hello and shaken Yogi Berra’s hand at a gas station in New Jersey. Gehrig was a dim legend of ancient days, but he was a symbol of how a man should be. Show up every day, do your job, love your family, do what you need to do for your teammates, and when it’s time to move on, take it with a smile on your face.
Gehrig was so Great, and so Good, that Joe McCarthy would declare that there would never be another Captain of the Yankees. Dimaggio, Mantle, Berra, none were named Captain. And McCarthy's word would hold for 30 years.
— The Middle Period: George Steinbrenner, in his grasping overwrought Boss era, would reinstate the role with Thurman Munson. After Munson’s untimely death in an airplane accident, it would pass to Graig Nettles, then to co-captains Willie Randolph and Ron Guidry. These were names I knew, players that older guys at the Yankees Fan Club had seen play, but who I never saw myself. Parts of Yankees lore, sure, but not part of the peak periods. I would be born during the reign of the next Captain...
— The One Who Never Reached the Promised Land: Don Mattingly was the bright spot of a mediocre series of Yankees teams. He would hit .307 over his career, winning MVP in 1985, but his bittersweet ultimate honor is that (as of now) he is the only player in New York Yankees history to have his number (23) retired without having won a World Series. I probably watched him play, but I don’t remember it if I did: he retired in 1995, when I was still too young to really watch or remember a baseball game. Donnie Baseball is the first Captain that is part of my life, but distantly, like an uncle who died young. Friends and relatives older than me would talk about how great he was, reporters would write about his potential, but I never saw him myself, and he never really made it, never won the Last Game of the Season. He would retire the year before the next golden age of the Yankees would begin with the debut of his successor as Captain. The essential tragedy of Donnie Baseball is that if he had shifted his career by just a few years, he would have been a Champion, but some things can’t be helped. I would always hear of him in those terms, as a sad figure, who never got what he deserved. Contrasted to...
— The Captain: Derek Jeter would become a full time player in 1996, the same year that I would become conscious enough of the world to really follow baseball, he would win Rookie of the Year and the Yankees would win the first of five World Series rings over the course of his career. I naturally idolized Jeter. My golf swing still has a vicious slice off the tee, because I modeled by baseball swing off of Jeter’s famous “inside out” swing. Jeter aimed at the short porch in the right field of Yankees Stadium; in little league I simply knew that every team hid their worst fielders in right field and that if I hit it dead to the right fielder I had a high chance of reaching base on an error. Jeter is the modern exemplar of a player who is so overrated that he became underrated: he hit a lifetime .310/.377/.440 as a shortstop, for an OPS+ of 116. He had 3,000 hits (6th all time), and lead the league in hits as late as 2012. His poor range at shortstop was the object of sneering by stats nerds by the end of his career, but the bat he brought to the position was valuable, and in the end by bWAR he’s a top-100 player and an easy Hall of Fame choice. But more than that, growing up as a kid, Derek Jeter was so incredibly cool. He was the impossibly amazing older brother that you wanted to be, in every way. He was great on the field and off. He was nice. He did everything for the team to win: he would say over and over that the only record he cared about chasing was Yogi Berra’s ten World Series rings. He dated beautiful women, but was never known as a whoremonger. Captain Clutch, Mr. November, he competed with a vicious, self-sacrificing will to win; but he was never bitter or talked trash, he was friends with his rivals. As his career progressed and I grew up, I was aware of the less savory aspects of his persona, the way the mask had eaten the face, but as a kid I read and re-read his authorized autobiography, I still remember anecdotes from it. He would refuse to move off his iconic shortstop position when the team acquired Alex Rodriguez, who was a better shortstop, a widely criticized move. A-Rod and Jeter would have a certain Ruth-Gehrig style relationship: A-Rod the hyper talented all-timer with a bad attitude, Jeter the classy and sportsmanlike complement.The Captain Giftbasket stories were mildly hilarious. And he declined with the last of those 2000s Furious George teams. He would of course be one of the Core Four alongside Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettite; the four players who bridged the 1996-2003 dynasty Yankees and their later 2009 World Series win. To be a team leader for an era of greatness like that is a singular accomplishment. People criticized the Yankees for overpaying him and him for being overpaid in his later years, but I watched those teams: they weren’t Derek Jeter’s salary or lineup spot from competing, and I watched in part to see him play. I was watching with my now-wife when he blew out his calf in 2013, a sad decline. But he would finish his retirement-tour 2014 season as only he could: he ripped an RBI single with that beautiful swing, and got a standing ovation from the Fenway Park crowd.** His retirement would coincide with my graduation from undergrad, my passage from a child into a man. I looked up to Jeter, now he was gone. It was my time.
— All Rise: Aaron Judge was the first star player for the New York Yankees that I followed from before he was even drafted. The Yankees, coming off a scuffling year in 2011 where they won division with an aging team held together with duct tape and pixie dust, had maneuvered to get three first round picks that year at 26, 32, and 33. Eric Jagielo, picked at 26, would never make the majors and now works in finance in Denver. Ian Clarkin, taken at 33, never pitched in The Show and today plays indie ball for the Cleburne Railroaders. But Aaron Judge, taken at 32, is a multiple time MVP, a surefire Hall of Famer, one of the faces of the sport, the leader of the Yankees from the time he debuted. You just can’t predict baseball Suzyn.
I read about Judge on Mike Axisa’s old blog RiverAveBlues, months before the draft. Mike would profile players coming into the draft who might draw the Yankees attention, and wrote an article pointing to this huge kid from California, who would be the tallest position player of all time if he made the bigs, a power hitting centerfielder with great intangibles. Reading it, I wanted the Yankees to pick him up. Not for any good reason, man I didn’t know shit, but a giant herculean centerfielder just seemed cool. He was a lottery ticket: he’d probably never figure out the high strikeouts with a strike zone larger than anyone’s and a long swing path. But it’s way more fun to dream on that size and power turning into a star than to draft a left-hander who profiles as a high likelihood innings eater back of the rotation starter. I was working out in my parents’ basement, home for the summer from undergrad, when Judge was drafted, watching the draft on MLB Network on cable. I had just taken up lifting, trying to get into shape for the next year’s crew season. Thrilled to see them take the big fella I had read about, I stopped my set of deadlifts and texted all my friends who were fellow fans.
My relationship with Aaron Judge after that was rather like the way you follow the rise of a band that you saw play to twelve people at a bar before they hit it big, or a writer or podcaster you knew when he was just another commenter. Largely, I read RiverAveBlues Down on the Farm articles summarizing minor league outcomes. Judge was not a guy who ripped through the minors, despite being drafted out of college. He debuted in the minors in 2013 after the draft, and wouldn’t reach the majors until a cup of coffee in 2016, and wouldn’t full graduate until 2017. Following his rise, mostly in the form of box scores, was a process of slowly building excitement. The lottery ticket might pay off. But no one imagined who he would be when he reached the majors, even the most optimistic Yankees fans wouldn’t have guessed.
He burst onto the scene in 2017, winning Rookie of the Year, the Home Run Derby at the All Star Game, setting a record for hardest hit ball of the Statcast era, set a since broken rookie HR record, and had the most walks by a rookie since Ted Williams. He would have won MVP if the Astros hadn’t cheated. Judge was a big revelation for the team, and has been the team’s heart ever since. His Baseball Reference page is filled with black ink: he’s lead the league in bWAR twice, in runs twice, in HRs and BBs three times. He’s won MVP twice, and this season he looks on pace to win it again barring injury. For 162 he averages 8.8bWAR and 51 HRs. A total superstar.
And in all this Judge has been my peer, we’re the exact same age. He was drafted out of college when I was in college. He reached the big leagues when I entered the work force. And as he declines physically, so will I. But not for now, for now I can look at Aaron Judge and be inspired to push myself harder than ever, we still have some good years left in us.
It’s early yet, but so far this is his best season of his career, maybe one of the best seasons ever on the off chance he should keep it up. We’re a little past the 1/3 mark of the season, and he is flirting with hitting .400, with a .500 OBP, and his SLG would make a decent OPS. He’s got a 244 OPS+, he’s better than two other players by value. Fangraphs gives him a 42% chance of walking away with a Triple Crown at the end of the year, which translates to a near certainty of a third MVP. award. He probably won’t hit .400, he’ll hit a slump in the dog days of summer, but he has a very good chance of an all-time-great season. On top of all that, another ten-win season translates to pushing his career total from “probably makes the Hall of Fame eventually on the quality of his peak seasons” to “definitely makes the hall of fame on the strength of his overall resume.” If you figure an aging curve on the aggressive side, of 1war a year rather than the typical .5war, he still might have eight more years of average MLB player left in him, which would put him potentially in the 80 win range, a top-100 player of all time. For right now, we’re having the best years of our lives, and we’ve still got years left to go, we can still hang with the young bucks.
And in addition to all that black ink, Judge is a good guy. He’s friendly, he’s aww shucks, he’s a gentle giant, he’s everything you want your star to be. He was adopted as an infant by two school teachers, he didn’t even know he was adopted (or black) until he was in middle school. He publicly talks about how much he loves his adoptive family and advocates for adoption, and the greatest argument in favor of cross-racial adoption. He’s a great teammate, unlike Jeter when the team traded for another RF in Juan Soto last year he was willing to move to center, a position he hadn’t played since college, to get Soto’s bat in the lineup. And he would play CF every day and win MVP!
Sadly, last year with Juan Soto might have been Judge’s best chance to avoid Mattingly’s fate as a team legend who never wins it all. The Yankees finally won a pennant for the first time with Judge, but would lose in the fall classic to the Dodgers and Judge’s friendly rival for Face of MLB Shoei Ohtani***. If they had just found a league average first baseman, like Ben Rice who has broken out this year but wasn’t trusted last year at first base, and a decent third baseman, they might have won it all. This year the team is still good, still odds on favorites in the division, but Gerrit Cole is out for the year, and without an ace I just don’t think they have it. Aaron Judge might never win a ring, and if he does it may be with a whole new team around him lead by new kids who haven’t even debuted yet, one on which he is more role player and eminence grise than superstar. But regardless, he’s the kind of player that every team will honor when he comes to their stadium for the last time. One day he’ll take his retirement tour season, and I’ll make sure to get a ticket, because it’ll be the day I really start being old.
— The Little Brother: When he retires, though, I think he’ll pass the role of captain directly to his successor, already on the team: Anthony Volpe. Why Tony Fox? Well, it’s a hopeful projection, but he seems to have figured out his bat this year for a cool 116 OPS+, and his fielding is so slick that he put up back to back 3war seasons even when his bat was weak. He’s a good kid, a drafted Yankee. Like Jeter and Judge, he’s biracial, half Filipino and half Italian. He loves his mother, like Jeter and Judge and Gehrig. He’s a high character guy. But watching him, he’s not a peer like Judge or an Idol like Jeter or a legend like Lou; he’s like a little brother made good. He’s not The Man, he’s The Kid. I watch him with the pride of an elder, the young fella made good.
— The Future: And somewhere in the Dominican Republic, there’s some 13 year old who is already freakishly fast and freakishly strong. He’s got a sweet left handed swing despite being a natural righty, and he plays shortstop though the scouts already think he’ll thicken up and play third base by the time he’s 20. He can’t be signed to a contract for years yet, but his trainer already has a wink-and-a-handshake agreement with the Yankees scouts in the DR that he’ll sign with the Yankees the moment he can. Everyone at the complex is amazed not just at his talent, but at his brains, at his determination, at his baseball IQ. He watches film, what a world where kids can do that in the DR, to get better. He focuses on technique. And like the young hidden Cyrus the Great, his friends look to him as a natural leader. He’s in charge, he makes sure his teammates are focused, that they do their work, that they are all in to win. And fifteen years from now, he’ll be in the Bronx aiming for the short porch. He’ll be young enough that, chronologically, he could be my son. And with any luck, I’ll be able to take my son to the game and point to him and hand my son the binoculars and say, look at him, that’s what you want to be like when you play, that’s focus and sportsmanship and the will to win, that’s The Captain.
*Gehrig’s record would only be broken by Cal Ripken Jr. and then only with the help of a timely blackout. TLDR: One game in the middle of Ripken’s streak was canceled due to electrical issues. Rumor has it that Ripken told the team he couldn’t play that day, because he had caught Kevin Costner canoodling with his (Ripken’s) wife, and the ensuing fight had injured Cal both physically and emotionally. So maybe Gehrig’s record still stands, if Mike Pence has the courage to do the right thing!
**Clay Buccholz, that greasy prick, would later claim that he fed Jeter that pitch so Jeets could get a great moment to finish his career. Idiot, if you’re going to do it, you have to never speak about it again. Admitting makes you look petty and stupid.
***Ohtani’s career arc is fascinating to me as a counterpart to his one-time teammate Mike Trout. Trout was the good guy who resigned with the Angels early, he’s only made the playoffs once despite being the best player in baseball for so long he got fewer MVPs than he deserved out of boredom. Ohtani chased money to the crosstown rival Dodgers, and looks to be winning multiple rings. But what about the fucking Angles? They had two all-time talents on league-minimum contracts in Trout and Ohtani, and never put together a consistent winner around them. What a tremendous failure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17d ago
What is he fucking blind?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
You're allowed to segment them, most people go 5 pull ups - 10 Push Ups - 15 squats. So if you can do 5 pull ups, it's not that you're "doing" 100 pull ups it's that you're doing 5 pull ups twenty times. So the gun-to-the-head scenario is more of a SAW style kidnapping, at worst, than a murder.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Once again, yes many things were smears, but other things that likely run against the sexual morality of most moderns wasn't a smear, it was just a mundane fact. Fucking a 12yo slave prostitute would (I hope!) widely be agreed today to be worse and more degenerate than fucking a married woman, I don't think the Romans would have agreed.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
The idea that those were just the hangups of losers that don't merit consideration is silly.
I want to register my agreement with your general point. But:
It's true, people rarely live up to their principles, and powerful men are no exception. But people still understood that as a failure.
My point isn't that Augustus and co didn't live up to his principles, it is that their sexual principles were largely alien to ours and probably in relevant ways that make the law's impact different than simplistically comparing it to the modern day. The laws probably didn't really apply to poor people, and mostly didn't apply to non-citizens, and definitely didn't apply to slaves. Citizens were somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population at the time, depending on what estimate you prefer. Then you get into the commonplace homosexual behavior.
So the ban on adultery was, in function, more like a Bro-Code deal than a moral statement. In impact, it's roughly like a law in modern America which prescribes punishments to College Graduates if they steal the wife of another College Graduate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Sure, but a lot of this stuff wasn't really even a smear. Like the stories that Tiberius would have murder orgies, sure, even at the time those were probably false. But homosexuality, provided one was a top rather than a bottom, was barely a slur. And having sex with slaves and other non-citizen women was completely outside of this legal framework, and mostly outside of. the underlying moral framework.. It likely barely applied to the poor and plebs.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Gibbon tells us that of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only Claudius had sexual tastes that were "correct."
Augustus introduced these reforms to marriage, was succeeded by a series of perverts and deviants for decades until the dynastic changeover at least.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
So Doc, what's the latest on getting on/off semaglutide? My biggest concern would be long term impacts of use. Is it the kind of thing where one could run a 3-6 month cycle and lose some weight then return to more-or-less normal, or the kind of thing where if you start you might never be the same again for good or ill?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
The two most devastating kinds of breakups are losing someone you thought you'd spend the rest of your life with, and being dumped by someone you were only barely tolerating. Both attack your self conception because you're in such a different place than you thought you were.
Sorry bro. You'll get over it quick enough. But in the future: Most Favored Nation rules. No commitment until you're at the point she was at with prior partners. Don't chastely date a poly girl.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
Memorial Day Murph Madness Notes
Or
Why am I trying to do The Hock if I'm already married?
I may someday recover my grip strength and stop being sore, but I haven’t yet. Around pull up 75 I texted a friend: Mother Mary save me from my bad decisions.
I had been planning to run Murph on Memorial Day for months. Not out of any particular sense of patriotism, so much as thinking it was a good workout to get myself to do some conditioning. A buddy of mine from BJJ was having a big group over to his farm to run it, and I figured it would be a good way to motivate myself to work on my cardio and hold myself accountable.
It’s a simple calisthenic workout: Run one mile, do 100 pull ups 200 push ups and 300 squats, then run one mile. If you’re serious about it, you wear a 20lb vest.
I’d been training it without the vest for a while, and managed a full unweighted run in just under an hour. Then I picked up a series of BJJ injuries, nursing a back injury one week and I put off using the vest for a bit, and then a little brother gashed my face open with an elbow the next, and I didn’t get in as much training as I would have liked.
So I was unsure of how I would do with a full, weighted run on Memorial Day. I was a little worried about the vest, would I be able to get the reps in? Even short sets with the vest my breathing was so restricted it felt pretty rough.
Then the weekend hit and one of the bjj coaches announced a 6am class for Memorial Day. I, having shot off my big mouth and loudly lobbied for 6am classes and vowed to come to every 6am class, was obligated to go. And my best friend was going, so I was obligated to roll and roll hard.
So the day of, I’m up at 5am, I drink a double espresso to wash down a Modafinil, hit everything with the Theragun, and away I go. Perfect BJJ class: my favorite coach, and eight guys who are all adult men around my size. We learn some Americanas (love the theme), and then everyone wants to do a gauntlet style where we all line up and roll a four minute round, then shuffle one guy to the left and roll four minutes, and so on until everyone rolls with everyone. I’m feeling good, I’m not about to say no to that, and I got some great rolls in, but man I was wearing down by the end of the gauntlet. My last roll was against the coach, and the roll before that really wore me out, I had gotten lucky on him last time and he was coming at me hard, we fought through a lot of positions. Then the bell rings and I’m laying there on my back, panting, and I look up and the coach is looking at me, with his hand out to slap hands before we start the round, standing over me like a sleep paralysis demon. By the time I was done at 8am, my forearms, biceps, and triceps were pumped and my legs were exhausted. Great start, with the run starting in two hours.
Went home, showered, walked the dog, hung out with my parents, theragunned again, then drank a preworkout while I drove over to do the Murph. It was a way bigger event than I though, my friend had a big social circle in the crossfit community and a lot of veterans turned out to do it as a way to remember their buddies who didn’t make it back through suffering. I felt like I had discovered a lost land where everyone was either a bottle blonde hot fitness MILF, or a guy with at least one patriotism related tattoo.
I got started ok, but my legs were killing me from the beginning, and the rest caught up pretty quick. Adding the 20lb vest didn’t actually make me that much slower, surprisingly, though it may be that I'm just already about as slow as it gets. Neither did getting my ass kicked all morning. Both did make it suck way more. My calf was bruised from a series of leg locks, my triceps were already aching before I started, and running uphill was agony on my legs. But I kept moving ok, I just couldn’t breathe as well with the vest.
I’m very grateful I wasn’t overly occupied with my time or competition, because I’m going to take a second to bitch anonymously on the internet and say: GOOD LORD THE SHITTY HALF REPS I SAW. The vest is totally optional, you can run the whole thing without it. But I saw so many guys with the vest on cheating on reps, and I’m kinda like huh, what’s the point? Why put on the 20lb vest to make it harder and then not even do your push ups to parallel? Shit, I saw a guy doing push ups from his knees girl style; I'd sooner just take a DNF. Why do 100 pull ups and not get your chin anywhere near the bar? Like, look, I’m pro-kipping if you’re going to do competitive pull up reps for time, because otherwise it turns into a game of cheating, but some of these sets of pull ups were just like a weird wave spasm in the bottom half of the RoM for a few seconds.
I slugged through the calisthenics and got back on the trail to finish the second mile. It was brutal, I was slow. The second mile was pretty weak, which I thought to myself “I’m doing it half-assed to honor the US effort in Afghanistan” and started giggling and immediately thought I shouldn’t say that to anyone here.
Overall, fantastic Memorial Day workout for me, proving a point no one cares about to no one other than myself.
Leftovers:
— I need a new dumb goal to pursue. I think I want to get back to the KB Pentathlon, I’m thinking I want to try to hit max reps with my 20kg bell. It’s a weight I can normally pick up without a warmup, but somehow the extra 4kg makes it much better technically than the 16kg. It’s also the heaviest weight I can throw in my car for a long drive without serious packing efforts, so it can come with me on beach trips all summer. Technically doing all the reps with a 20kg would be less points than my previous PR by Pentathlon scoring, but I want to FINALLY hit max snatch reps in a set.
-- The facial stitches have healed pretty well. My wife thinks it's kind of hot, which I can tell is true from her behavior, and her refusal to admit it. Go figure. Might just be the novelty.
-- It's amazing how quickly BJJ went from something I was doing in lieu of working out, to something I was working out to get better at.
-- My hair loss, previously noted as looming, seems to have become less of an issue with long-term consistent use of Nutrafol. I'm unwilling to try anything stronger, so if I can buy a year or two out of it that's worth the effort for little harm. A year or three left of getting my summer coat in.
-- The post workout soreness from the Murph is a new animal for me, in that when I warm up to work out Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the pain goes away, but leaves behind weakness, and I pump out too fast. Cost of greatness premium mediocrity.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18d ago
The conventional wisdom and proper scientific studies will tell you that you can't do it. I'll tell you that you can in certain limited circumstances but that getting on Semiglutide and trying to force yourself to eat more protein to gain muscle feels like a bit of a self-licking ice cream cone. You'd be much better off cycling from trying to build muscle to trying to cut weight. When you try to build muscle while also trying to restrict your appetite to lose weight, there's a risk you aren't going to do either, and you're going to find yourself months from now having achieved neither. I've never tried it with semaglutide, but I speak from experience on the topic. That said, here's my largely woo-woo experience with recomping.
I assume when you're saying you're doing hypertrophy-focused workouts you mean moderate-to-high reps in lots of exercises? Don't do that. Everyone I know who hops on semaglutide, and most people on cuts anyway, lack energy so you don't want to be trying to do long workouts with tons of sets of tons of exercises. You'll wear yourself out and increase the likelihood of injury.
What you want to do if you want to retain muscle and maybe build a little, while losing fat is two things: convince your body that it needs as much muscle as possible, while also convincing your body that it needs to be lighter. Do the former by doing low-rep high-intensity work in the weightroom, do the latter by doing bodyweight exercises.
I'm convinced that the body is "smarter" than we think it is in terms of building muscle or burning fat, in repsonse to the stimuli it gets from the outside world. Your body interprets calorie restriction as famine, food is less available. In that scenario, if you don't need maximum strength, your body is going to discard muscle as unnecessary. But just a few sets of high intensity lifts, and your body is going to assume that it needs that muscle to keep getting food in a famine environment, and will preserve it.
Similarly, if you're doing a lot of pull ups and push ups, climbing, muscle ups, etc your body knows that the resistance it faces is relative to its own weight and wants to reduce the load, or at least not increase it, and responds by leaning out. Exercise science tells us that resistance is resistance, but popular myth will point out that push ups and pull ups lean you out in ways that lifting never does.
This is my wild speculation on the topic at hand.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
No, my goal is to assemble a list of "advice compatible" traits that a man can cultivate to put himself in similarly rarified air as a Good Man to match up with one of these Good Women. It's actually pretty easy: there aren't a million single men under 40 out there who make decent money, aren't convicted felons, attend church, work out, and aren't addicts.
We don't need to get into gambling or porn. Just follow those criteria and the Good Woman to Good Man ratio shifts from the GW:M ratios to slightly in favor of Good Men pretty quickly.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
Average guy on here, if you had fifty women throwing themselves at you, would you pick the top ten most attractive ones or would you sleep with all fifty?
This was basically my experience of the summer of 2010, I went from being invisible and unable to get a date, to having the attention of several girls in the space of about a month. Not fifty, but five or so was more than I could handle at 18. So I can tell you from direct knowledge: I would try to have it every way, be seized with indecision as a result of the abundance, fail to commit to any one choice, piss them all off a little bit when they figured it out, and like Baridan's ass starving in the midst of plenty eventually fumble the whole lot of them. I would behave with mild immorality, while using vague language and a personal sense that I'm a "nice guy" to assuage my guilt about clearly not giving any of the women what they actually want. I would date or make love to as many of them as practical, rising to my Level of Incompetence and eventually screwing up the whole thing.
Luckily I'd learn something useful for the next set of fifty.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
You seem to be making some kind of a point that there was one constant policy over seven decades of USSR existence, but it was a multitude of different policies.
Global Communism had one consistent policy towards Western Capitalism from before the birth of its avatar to today: the historical inevitability and moral advisability of a proletarian revolution. That proposition gaining or losing credibility and relevance globally among the masses and among intellectual elites. That policy and that conflict didn't pause because of any alliance or detente signaled or signed by either the USA or the USSR.
My point is very simple - if US chose to never fight, it would not lose any specific wars to USSR, but it would lose everything,
I really don't understand this argument. Is it that the choice is more or less random and you win some you lose some? Is it that Vietnam was a good choice, and the loss was bad luck despite good odds?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
I have no interest in lecturing "men" here, advice when given is given to an individual man. And that man can quite surely make good decisions to achieve the goals set out in the post, and be among the top million marriageable men in America.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
19d ago
I disagree with that historiography, the first red scare happened decades earlier. Enmity between the Capitalist USA and the USSR started with the latter's birth, or preceded it.
I don't know how you're making your assumptions about what does or doesn't impact credibility other than assuming the consequent.
People can still live a good life while living in a wheelchair, while being blind, while being deaf. Those are nonetheless core examples of cripples. Hell, one of the most successful businessmen in my small town has one arm. He's not substantively prevented from living a successful life on most metrics, but he is crippled. "Can live a good life" isn't a counterargument to being categorized as crippled. "Doesn't make them a bad person" isn't a counterargument to being categorized as crippled. "Might be less likely to commit some sins" isn't a counterargument to being categorized as crippled.
Perhaps they are mechanically capable of intercourse, but are they capable of fully committing and connecting erotically with another? Maybe they can force themselves to have sex, but can they ever want to make love?
I believe that there is more to erotic love as a human being than the mere mechanical process of penetration. And I believe that the inability to understand that is crippling emotionally. People who don't experience that are not experiencing the full range of human life.
I also disagree about anger. Williams Syndrome isn't any way to go through life.
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