Doubt

This morning I extracted a tick from between my 2nd and 3rd toe.

It was about as much fun as it sounds.

During the process I kept thinking, "Why oh why didn't I just spend more time with Kenan-Flagler's career services, get a nice desk job with Proctor and Gamble, and settle into a comfortable life? I could spend my days in a climate controlled building*, working on Excel,** and I'd make 5x more money."

*I think a lot about air conditioning these days. Folks, it's HOT out there. Your humble coach is starting to feel like a dried-up piece of beef jerky.

**No jokes, Excel is awesome and I love it. My biggest regret from not following the "traditional MBA" life route is that my once fearsome Excel skills have dwindled away to nothing... alas...

Doubt is my constant companion: "What if I miss this jump?" "What if I slip and fall?" "What if I'm too old to get better?"

Or, more fundamental: "What if I'm a bad teacher?" "What if my business fails?" "What if people think what I'm doing is stupid?"

..."What if I'm doing it wrong?"

I have what I consider to be a pretty healthy amount of self-esteem, yet at least a few times a week I convince myself that I'm weak, stupid, and lazy. I'm pretty sure most of you can relate.

(At least, I hope so... otherwise this would be awkward...)

Doubt is a normal part of the human experience. We are just smart enough to recognize how little is actually within our control. The world is complex. There are no easy, clean answers to anything. We all amount to motes of dust being blow around in the infinite cosmic storm. Is it any wonder we sometimes wonder what the hell we are doing?

We often try to insulate ourselves from doubt. We wrap ourselves in stories of our own infallibility. We convince ourselves of our superiority. We become arrogant.

But arrogance is a prison. We become so afraid of being wrong that we refuse to engage with anything that could challenge us. Look at Crossfit. Look at Paleo or Veganism. Look at the current debt limit debate.

Instead, we should open ourselves to doubt, learn to embrace it as a part of ourselves, and practice overcoming it. Doubt can clarify our opinions and confirm our convictions.

Ultimately, we all seek growth.  Growth is not something that happens to you - you have to make it happen. You have to push beyond yourself. You have to test yourself. That means engaging with and pushing through your doubts, not running away and hiding from them.

Safety

Sad news out of Arizona. A 19-year-old suffered critical injuries after missing a rail precision jump and falling 40 ft. on to concrete. His prognosis is uncertain.

The news story and the video are quick to label Parkour as dangerous. I give the reporter credit for seeking out other opinions and trying it out himself, but the overall message is pretty clear: "Danger. Don't try this at home."

At the same time, we have this. Too much safety is dangerous. Both in the short term (did you catch the bit about "soft surfaces" leading to increased injury?) and the long term - from the article:

"While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

'Paradoxically,' the psychologists write, 'we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.'"

(Here's a link to the study)

Does anyone else see the link between these stories? Once we started designing playgrounds more for lawyers than for children we implicitly marginalized essential developmental behavior. Boundary-pushing play is just as essential now as it ever was but without proper outlets it gets expressed poorly - or dangerously.

An untrained muscle is weak, uncoordinated and spastic. Untrained play-behavior is the same. Kids overcompensate without knowing their limits. Again, from the NYT article: '“Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind,” Dr. Ball said. “Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all.”'

I don't know anything about the young man who fell in Arizona. It could be he was highly skilled, highly experienced, knew exactly what he was doing and understood the risks involved. This could have been a one-in-a-million slip. But I doubt it. My guess is he's another young person who found Parkour via the internet and was swept up in the excitement of discovering an activity that spoke to some deep desire within him to push his limits - and then in his excitement proceeded to push too far too fast.

Let's be clear: all traceurs who are interested in long-term progression, continuous self-improvement, and the positive growth of Parkour agree that there is no reason to practice 40ft. off the ground. Or 10ft. The media portrayal of Parkour as "jumping from rooftop to rooftop" is wrong and dangerous. But how can we expect our children to understand this when they've never had the opportunity to fall off a jungle gym and scrape their knees?

So what do we do about it? I remember talking with Erwan about this a year or so ago and he said, "Oh, yeah, it's the risk-danger ratio." I loved the concept and have been thinking about it ever since (Thanks, Erwan!)

The risk-danger ratio is present in every movement.  In it, "risk" is your chance of failing a particular movement. "Danger" is the consequences of failure. When you start training a particular move the risk should be high but the danger should be low. As you get better, the risk decreases. Only when the risk is as close to zero as possible should you even think about marginally increasing the danger. And, if you do, you'll probably discover the difficulty has increased - from a purely mental perspective. There's a huge difference performing a precision jump at ground level vs. even just 4 ft. off the ground.  While occasionally increasing danger might be beneficial for mental training, you should never ever perform a high-risk, high-danger movement unless your life depended on it.

Understanding the risk-danger ratio will keep you safe. Teaching the risk-danger ratio to your children will keep them safe. Better, let them figure it out for themselves. Too much padding only increases margin-of-error (this is why I'm skeptical of indoor training on fluffy equipment) Life is about understanding risk and acting appropriately. The world is a beautiful, exciting, risky, and often dangerous place. We should prepare ourselves and our children appropriately.

Please join me in keeping the young man in Arizona in your thoughts and wishing him a full recovery.

Use of the hands

I am pleased to report to all of you that I still have all of my fingers.

"Huh?" you are probably saying. I wanted to lead with that up front so the next part is less nerve wracking - especially for my poor mother.

Last night I attended the first of two "Wood Shop SBU" classes at the super awesome Tech Shop. We learned how to safely operate band saws, belt sanders, drill presses and router tables. I did rip cuts, cross cuts, freehand curves, routed a few different grooves - and had a great time doing it.

Next up is table saws, miter saws, planers, and jointers.

Why am I doing this? I'm hoping to get enough woodworking skill to successfully build some custom Fifth Ape gym equipment I've been thinking about. Some modified plyo boxes for a start. Maybe some more advanced precision trainers. And, basically everything on this site.

"Colin," I hear you say, "You can pay people who know what they're doing to make this stuff for you."  True, but what would probably cost a couple thousand dollars to buy can be made just as well, if not better, for a couple hundred.  But there's another deeper reason.

This will make immediate sense to anyone who played with legos as a kid... especially to those of us who never stopped: Building things is incredible.

First, there's the empowering process of taking an idea and manifesting it in reality. There's the inevitable problem solving as your first attempts fail in some way. A big project forces you to plan ahead and pay attention. Small mistakes can quickly add up and lead to hours of head scratching. You learn to measure twice and cut once.

Deeper than that, using your hands makes you feel... hm, I don't have the words to describe it. Fulfilled? In control? Whole? This feeling isn't limited to building things (that's where I've felt it the most powerfully though)  It kicks in whenever you're using your hands. Cooking is a good example. And let's not forget training - climbing especially.

Our hands are incredible. 27 bones, a dizzying array of muscles and connective tissue, prehensile, capable of incredible articulation, packed with nerves. Through the use of our hands we have risen from a small pack of arboreal apes to the dominant species on the planet. Our technology, our culture, EVERYTHING that we are has come from our hands.

Many of us don't use our hands much these days. We use them, sure, but not nearly to the extent that we used to. And it's having a pretty negative effect on our mental health, according to some research.

The "effort-based reward circuit" is, in my experience, very very real. It has helped me manage and eventually overcome some pretty nasty bouts of Depression. I always feel better after a hand-intensive activity.

You don't need to learn how to use power tools to benefit. Knitting, pottery, scrapbooking, anything that gives you the opportunity to use your hands to make something. Ultimately, making things is an act of creation - a physical manifestation of your growth and potential as a human being.

So, what are you going to build today?