Back in the saddle after a wild rideday I
20 October 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A week ago today I started my Thursday off by supervising a 9am lifting session with The Cat Herd, my group of TV reality show participants. While conducting the lifting we simultaneously grilled a whole turkey on the Weber kettle grill that sits on my deck. I am big on this whole fitness concept of teaching folks how to catch proverbial fish - instead of selling them fish. This applies to both training (cardio/free weights) and eating. If you want to alter peoples eating habits show them how to make healthy foods that taste great. One of the reasons we are having great success working with obese folks is that we inject fun into hard training and we inject taste back into diet food eating. Slow cooking a turkey over hickory smoke is one damn fine way to put taste back into diet food eating. After the allotted two hours we popped the top to reveal a perfectly rendered bird: honey colored yet moist. After a perfect training session we sat and ate perfectly prepared fowl on the deck the bird was so perfect that this week another herd member asked to bring a turkey to slow roast over smoke as we train. In keeping with the teaching people how thing, with each bird roasting I purposefully do less and less (there are five separate steps) and they do more and more once you are able to cook something so good you look forward to munching on it all week long you sir have taken a gigantic step towards dietary success. On Thursday evening I put two more herd members through their power paces. Friday morning I began the slow crawl towards Richmond for the AAU push-pull (bench press-deadlift) world championships. I traveled from the mountains to Richmond by back roads mostly through horse country and made it to the hotel-meet site in three hours.
I immediately phoned Pavel Tstasouline who met me in the lobby. He looked thin and fit and ready for anything. He needed to make weight that afternoon and in order to take his mind off food and drink, asked if we might play some chess. He directed me to a scenic park adjacent to the hotel and we were suddenly locked in a chess death match. He shellacked me easily in the first match I realized I was in way over my head. I resorted to asymmetrical psychological warfare on the second match and as he would begin his descent into a deep and powerful chess computer concentration mode, I would offer up some tantalizing strength or power bon motYou know Pavel, Big Jim Williams supposedly did time as a counter-fitter. This type of talk would prove seductive for him and hed rise like a trout to the bait, No way Marty I have never heard this. He would say, losing his chess mindset. Yep. It was said Big Jim wanted to get caught and put his own face on the last set of $20 bills. Can you imagine Pavel? A 350-pound black man in a powdered wig? That man enjoyed the order and confinement of prison life and engineered his own re-incarceration. Pavel would shake his head, ruminating on grandeur of Big Jims efforts, totally off on the power tangent, Imagine how great he could have been Marty. We commiserate on Big Jim and the 2-second pause used back in the 70s in the bench press. Id be examining the chessboard the entire time and when I had a move I’d break his power reverie. Whose move? Id ask with innocent nonchalance.
Oh, I am sorry, it was my move Marty. He began another descent into computer chess mind-set when Id pop the cork on another irresistible bauble, You know Pavel, Doug Furnas once told me he never did more than 5-reps in the squat in his entire life! Ah! This is similar to what Jan Talts discovered when he worked with Vorbev at the Moscow Sports Palace in 1970. Pavels face would screw up as he worked his way mentally through his mental storage cabinets. Whose move Pavel? I eventually won the second game using this effective psychological ruse the entire match - all of a sudden it was 4 PM and time for Pavel to weigh in. The class limit was 181 and he tipped the beam at 180. He was officially a light heavyweight and wanted to eat, A big steak - or perhaps two. This kind of talk is always music to my carnivorous Irish ears. Mortons it is then! Pavel had been there the previous night. We met at 6 PM. Pavel was with Jack the pilot, Brooklyn Ellen, Michelle and several others. I had gotten a call from my consigliore, Bobcat, as I was getting ready. He and wife Vondah had just arrived by car from Lexington Kentucky and boy would they love a martini and a giant steak. The cab company bought a van and soon there were ten of us off to Mortons for power fuel. Mortons did not disappoint; this despite having the near insurmountable handicap (in my mind) of ransom note pricesI could buy 10-pounds of Black Angus rib eye from my local Mennonite butcher for what my meal cost but what the hell, you need a frame of reference and the quality and preparation did not disappoint.
I had the giant rib eye on the bone after a lobster cocktail salad. The meat was superb in quality, the quantity sufficient and the peppercorn crust was seared with an expertise that only comes from working a grill for a decade. I enjoyed watching Bobcat send his first steak back after it arrived overcooked; steak sushi was the degree of doneness he wanted. Vondah sat next to me and has a degree in literature. Bobcat has a doctorate in Platonic philosophy so over many cocktails we talked of Huxley and the doors of perception, the West Coast beatnik/Zen movement that sprung up after World War IIAlan Watts, Neal Cassidy, Ginsberg, Keroauc, Burroughs and all the other Dharma Bums that congregated in and around Southern California. Carmel, Big Sur. Then they bought desert and everyone who had made weight had one. I liked that I was discussing Plato and Alan Bloom and Huxley in spirited dinner conversation with a pair of powerlifters. Both Vondah and El Gato would be competing tomorrow along with Pavel, Jack the Pilot, Ellen and Michelle. We called a cab and headed back to turn in early. The next two days of lifting would be physically and psychologically draining.
TOMORROW: DAY I I havent forgotten about the Doug Furnas follow-up either.
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