Here's my yearly log entry for 2023.
So you wanna de-bog yourself
A list of ways to get stuck. It's nice to have labels for them, so they're easier to recognize and talk about.
Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years - boring to both live through and talk about, like you're sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living.
Every kid learns to play the "floor is lava" game, where you pretend that you'll get incinerated if you touch the carpet. Even toddlers can pick it up, which reveals something profound: very early on, we acquire the ability to pretend that fake problems are real. We then spend the rest of our lives doing exactly that.
Often, when I'm stuck, it's because I've made up a game for myself and decided that I'm losing at it. I haven't achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun. These games have elaborate rules, like "I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I've done so far doesn't count," and I'm supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It's like playing the absolute dumbest version of the floor is lava.
What if you never sort your life out?
I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn't quite the real thing, not just yet - that soon enough, we'll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we're living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the "provisional life." ("There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that... [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.")
One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you'd ... never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life's troubles.
A Critique of Modern SQL And A Proposal Towards A Simple and Expressive Query Language
I'm not super excited about their proposed language, but they have some insightful criticisms that I haven't seen elsewhere:
- All join operations in sql are verbose except for cross products - the one operator you almost never want on purpose and that will blow up your database server if you slip it in by accident.
- The ordering of multiple outer joins is weird and subtle and not obvious from the syntax.
- The order in which operations happen semantically has almost zero relation to the syntactic order, so that understanding a query requires bouncing around back and forth.
The status game
In some ways a typical popsci book eg tries to explain everything with one big idea. But I really enjoyed the idea of being concious that status is an innate need and being deliberate about where you get it from. Eg if your entire status is bound up in a single game then any threat to that is existential and you'll react poorly, but if you're spread across multiple games then you can handle losses in one of them gracefully. The author also divides status games into different flavours which can also inform choices. Eg dominance games are inherently zero sum, but status from competence less so eg being on a team where everyone is good at different things and feels respected for their particular expertise.
More fuel you
Sometimes repetitive and often infuriatingly vague when covering important numbers. But still well worth reading.
They warn that most government/medical diet advice is aimed at sedentary people who are at risk of obesity, and so this advice is often actively misleading for athletes. For example, the canadian government recommends I limit myself to 130g of carbs per day. But the author recommends 270g for a rest day, and for a full day of climbing would have me eating 900g (for scale, that's 36 bananas or 830ml of corn syrup). Before and after can be complex carbs, but during should be "jelly babies, dried fruits, energy drinks, jam sandwiches made with white bread, energy gels...". Contrast to the government advice to "Limit highly processed foods. If you choose these foods, eat them less often and in small amounts. Prepare meals and snacks using ingredients that have little to no added sodium, sugars or saturated fat. ...Replace sugary drinks with water." Neither is wrong in context, but you can see how someone only reading the government advice could end up under-eating.
A study in Frontiers in 2019 (ref) looked at the dietary intake and eating attitude of recreational adolescent rock climbers. ...86% of climbers failed to meet their carbohydrate requirements, set at 5 grams per kilogram... adult elite-level climbers, where 40% failed to meet their nutrional requirements.
This is important because athletes that try to follow sedentary diet guidelines get fucked up. The prevalence of RED-S is much higher than I expected, and I didn't know that it could occur without losing weight or reduced performance. The way they explain the mechanism is that the body generally prioritizes using calories for movement and then does maintenance/repair/heating with whatever is left over. So if you consistently undereat for training you might still perform well for a long time but over the course of months or years your body will slowly fall apart. Symptoms in the short term include irritability, poor thermoregulation, IBS-like symptoms, poor recovery, recurrent injuries, poor adaption to training, frequent illness, poor sleep etc. And in the long term pretty much any bodily malfunction up to and including death.
The author doesn't like low-carb diets for almost any sport, because even endurance sports tend to have spikes in energy output that burning fat can't handle (eg running uphill). They don't like intermittent fasting or similar, and recommend almost the opposite in places eg for recovery periods they recommend eating every 2-3 hours, and for protein intake they recommend 3-5 portions per day including just before bed. They argue that calorie restricted diets are ineffective in the long run and also massively increase the risk of RED-S. They also have some fairly standard advice for vegetarian/vegan diets eg supplements, increased protein, being wary of low energy density.
They stress that, anecdotally, moving away from the kinds of foods you grew up with may cause nutritional problems, perhaps due to the gut biome being slow to adapt.
Ageing athletes need more rest, but they recommend reducing volume rather than intensity, because high intensity sessions combat hormonal declines. They also advise maintaining regular resistance training to prevent loss of bone density, increased protein intake to offset declining muscle mass, and vitamin d supplements to compensate for older skin being worse at synthesizing vitamin d.
My sticky note:
- Every day = 145-200g protein, 90g fat
- Rest day = 270g carbs
- Gym day = 720g carbs
- Crag day = 900g carbs
- During exercise = after 1st hour, 90g carbs per hour
- Recovery = 110g carbs, 36g protein, every 2-3 hours
- More fermented foods eg yoghurt, kimchi, tempeh
- Vegetarians should supplement D, B12, and be wary of iron deficiency