TLDR: Beach Week

Too Long Dad Recap

This week was a welcome break from the work-from-home doldrums. We escaped to a sparsely populated beach area in Virginia, but it was an active vacation. I returned feeling refreshed and ready to get back to the grind. But first, here is the update on all things DadLifting.

Enjoy, share, send me ideas for videos or articles.

Stuff I Watched this Week: Technique in Focus

This week I watched some baseball, including the horrific Dr. Fauci first pitch of the Nationals home opener as it happened on TV (the COVID equivalent of “I was there, man!”).

I also caught a few technique videos that I found quite useful from two of the great fitness YouTubers, Alan Thrall and Brian Alsruhe.

• Alan Thrall – “How to Squat – Any Style”
  • Alan makes a video on how he teaches the squat every few years, always updating and adding in what he’s learned.
  • Last October, I participated in a clinic with Alan where he taught the squat to a group of 20 of us. He is a fantastic coach.
• Brian Alsruhe (Neversate) – Critique Geek on Bench Press
  • Brian temporarily shut down his gym in Maryland and set up a gym at his house in the woods recently.
  • He also took a few months off of lifting and has been filming his return to lifting by critiquing his sessions.
  • Seeing him struggle to regain his form and strength is very instructive, and these videos are loaded with great tips.

Stuff I Listened to this Week: Mindset in Focus

I caught a podcast from Ryen Russillo where he interviewed Drew Hanlen, a very high end basketball trainer (click here to listen). I wasn’t expecting to find the episode interesting, but I was running some errands and had it on in the background.

Drew’s story was fascinating, the most interesting part being his single minded focus on his goal from a very early age: a basketball scholarship. To achieve that goal, he:

• Decided to abstain from sweets and artificial sweeteners at age 10
• Developed a legendary shooting routine in high school. He showed up at 5:30am and shot 1,000 jump shots. If he didn’t make 850 of them, he’d shoot another 1,000 at night.
• Drew made it to Belmont on a scholarship, then started training NBA players while in college and grew his basketball training business from there.

With the full life I lead as a husband/father, employee, and investor, this single-minded focus and purpose seems out of reach. My best hope is to be able to instill some semblance of the focus and work ethic in my children.

Being comfortable financially makes that fatherhood goal extra challenging. Through the meritocracy of sports, including training, I have enjoyed some success showing my kids how putting in work leads to improved outcomes.

Stuff I Read this Week: Never Enough

Vacation weeks at the beach are renowned for being great for downtime and reading for pleasure. As a father of 3 very active children, I have never found that to be the case. By the time I got to sit down, rather than read, it was a time to catch up on some quality time with the wife.

That time was spent discussing personal finance plans, searching real estate listings on our phones in search of the next rental property, and just checking on the local Virginia Beach market for vacation homes, however unrealistic.

I can report that my children read extensively on both 6 hour car rides and throughout the week. My older son was focused on human anatomy on the trip down, but by the end of the week he was trying to learn about quantitative investing. He’s 11.

My kids haven’t been slowed by the quarantine. On the contrary, they’ve used it to indulge in their curiosities. I am jealous of their naive optimism and love engaging them in discussions of their possible futures.

Stuff I Lifted this Week: Mixing It Up

This was the last week of just kind of fooling around prior to starting a focused strength program. I got two garage gym sessions in before we left for the beach (Sunday and Monday). Worked up to heavy sets of squats and deadlifts on those days.

The rest of the week was catch as catch can, but I stayed active:

• 400m of lunges every day, including one on the actual beach
• One virtual zoom push-up session where I got 420 in 25 minutes
• Some pull-ups and rope climbs at the outdoor gym on the beach, which was so much fun

Stuff I Ate this Week:

Because we drove and had a full kitchen in the rental, I was able to pack everything to stay on point with nutrition during vacation this week.

I brought eggs, chicken breasts, turkey burgers, protein powder, SmartPop microwave popcorn, and a bunch of coffee. I also brought my food scale and bodyweight scale.

Most mornings, I’d stick with coffee until we got back from the beach around lunchtime, then I’d make french toast with the eggs and protein powder. Then some meat, fruit, and finish off with a full bag of SmartPop.

We made a trip to Whole Foods, where I got frozen blueberries to mix into fat free Greek yogurt. That mix was an effort to avoid crushing pints of ice cream. Of course on the last day, faced with a choice of throwing away ice cream or finishing it off, I crushed well over a pint.

I targeted 1,800 calories a day, and I stayed close to that number all week, which led to further progress on the scale. I am 14 weeks into my cutting phase. The target will remain 1,800 calories for another week and re-assess from there.

It’s starting to get real at this point, in terms of feeling hungry and avoiding temptations to binge. But the discipline is intact, and I am very much enjoying the results.

Dad Report: See Above

Plenty of discussion of dad stuff from this week in the above section. The younger son’s little league team played this week. My head coaching record is now 0-2 in baseball, but everybody is getting plenty of playing time.