Have you done your Murph yet this weekend? If you're unfamiliar, the Murph is a workout traditionally done on Memorial Day weekend. It's named after Navy SEAL Michael Murphy who was killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2005. The workout consists of a one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 pushups, and 300 squats, followed by another one-mile run, all while wearing a 20-lb. weighted vest. If you haven't gotten yours in yet, you still have time. But you better start running.
My gym holds a Murph event every year the Sunday before Memorial Day. I've never gone. It would require me to wake up early, which is not appealing, even though I'd very likely be up at that time, anyway. (As I've mentioned before, I often have trouble sleeping when I know I have to get up early for an event. So, what I need to do is not plan on doing the Murph at my gym, and then just decide to go the morning of. Although, now that I announced that, could I actually pull it off, or would I know the night before that I might go, thus defeating the entire purpose?) Plus, we often have plans that Sunday. Yesterday, for example, Lil' S2 and I went to the Mariners-Nationals game* with another dad and a few of Lil' S2's friends. I wanted to go as a family, but baseball is a hard sell on S and an even harder sell on Lil' S1. Overall, I'm glad that half my family isn't into sports -- it would be sports overload for me otherwise -- but I wouldn't mind if they were a little more sports tolerant. Like, would it be the worst thing in the world to go to a baseball game once every decade?
*The Mariners are in the midst of a bizarre season. They are in first place but incredibly unfun to follow as a fan, because they go through long spells in which they cannot score runs. Before yesterday's game, they had only scored two runs (and struck out 34 times) in their previous three games. I also went to the game on Friday, and they lost 6-1, with their only run coming on a home run on the first pitch of the game, which we didn't even see because we weren't in our seats yet. Yesterday's was a great game to attend, though. The M's won; they scored a bunch of runs (nine); the weather was gorgeous; and Julio hit a homer for the cherry on the top.
Anyway, I have done the Murph on my own the past two years. I need to modify it a little bit. For one thing, I don't own a 20-lb. weighted vest, so I just do it without one (most people do it without one, although I have been meaning to get one). For another thing, the arthritis in my right shoulder prevents me from merely hanging from a bar, let alone doing a single pull-up, let alone alone doing 100 pull-ups. So, I do 100 seated shoulder presses instead (and even on those I can't extend my right arm completely overhead). But the pushups and the squats I can handle with little trouble. I've gotten to the point where I can do unbroken sets of 30, 40, even sometimes 50 pushups, and I can knock out 50 to 75 squats at a time, no problem. This year I also ran two miles first instead of one mile at the beginning and one mile at the end, because we took the kids to the optometrist, and it was almost exactly two miles away, so I just ran home, and then did the rest of the workout.
Of course, I'm feeling the effects now. My latest most troubling malady is a sore knee. So many dudes my age have knee issues, and it was the one part of my body that was holding up well, so this is especially disappointing. But so it goes, and it's only going to get worse. I really need to reform my diet to counteract the fact that I just can't work out as much as I could 15 years ago. I'm back doing the 16/8 intermittent fasting thing, but I don't know that it's doing much. I'm pretty sure it's much more about what you eat than when you eat, and our society is designed to ensure we eat as much shit as possible.
Maybe I should just not worry about it and join the "healthy at every size" movement. I'm joking, but I do actually think they make a lot of valid points. For example, being fat is not a character flaw, and everybody should be able to look how they look without society harshly judging them for it. Also, obsessing over your weight and dieting constantly can absolutely be detrimental to your mental well-being. It's completely understandable for somebody to decide they would rather be fat than constantly be trying to not be fat -- to come to the conclusion that their life is better that way. As a friend of mine who has put on a lot of weight over the past few years put it, "Instead of dieting, I'm just going to work on my personality now." She was joking but also kinda serious, which is why it's funny.
With that said, I don't think you really can be healthy at every size. Obesity is strongly linked to deleterious health outcomes such as diabetes and heart disease. I mean, just from a common sense standpoint, speaking of sore knees, the stress on your joints alone from excess weight cannot be good for you. When I go to Disney World and see people not much older than me, who are really fat, drinking giant bottles of soda, driving Rascal Scooters, because walking more than 20 yards is an exhausting chore, it really strikes a blow to the HAES ideology for me. And to be clear, I am not saying that these Disney World people are bad or lazy or unworthy of compassion or that it's "their own fault." The struggle is real, and the more we learn about compulsive behavior, the more we learn about how little control people have over their own actions (as illustrated in the linked article by Johan Hari above). I am, however, saying that I don't think being like these people is healthy, and they probably do not feel like they are living their best lives.
Actually, the problems I have with HAES are a good example of the problems I have with so many progressively-coded movements these days. I'm usually totally with them on the positives of their movements, but I'm not with them on the negatives, and that's because they don't acknowledge that there any negatives, or they significantly underplay them. In fact, it's worse than that, because now the fashionable thing to do is to label anybody who even acknowledges that there are negatives of your movement as a morally suspect individual. With respect to HAES, you cannot criticize it without being called fat-phobic or ableist or accused of body-shaming. This article, for example, mentions a plus-size influencer who lost weight because "Two years ago, I couldn’t wipe my own ass!" The very next sentence after that quote: "Critics called her ableist and self-hating."
It's not just HAES either. It's pretty much every "progressive" movement these days (pro-Palestinian activism comes to mind right now). You rarely hear such movements argued in terms of tradeoffs, which is what they are, because that's what pretty much everything is. Instead, it's almost always: This is our self-evidently virtuous cause, and anybody who dissents -- or even so much as acknowledges that there is such a thing as legitimate dissent -- is a bigot. And unfortunately, this type of call-out is very effective on the surface. It really does silence a lot of potential opposition. But it's a terrible tactic.
For one thing, it often hurts the very people the movements are claiming to support. In the case of HAES, telling people they can be obese without any health risks is terrible for obese people, unless it is actually true, which it almost certainly isn't. (Your blood pressure doesn't care about your views on social justice.) I don't see a huge difference between this and telling heavy drinkers that their excessively drunkenness isn't that bad, that the real problem is society shaming them, and they should just work on accepting themselves as they are.
For another thing, it's a bad move politically. Scaring people into silence doesn't actually change their minds, but it can make them resentful and make the backlash against your movement worse. Also, doing this shrinks the tent. As I've said before, defining everybody who doesn't agree with you 100% as your adversary, means you will have a lot of adversaries, and having a lot of adversaries is contrary to the goal of affecting change. It's how you lose elections, and right now I typically prefer progressives win elections, because for as much as I'm dismayed by the illiberalism on the left, I know the other side is somehow almost always worse.
And with that, I shall bid you, reader, adieu. I just made myself think about Biden's chances in the November election, and I don't want to indulge that train of thought any further. It's not one that leads to a good place.
Until next time...
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