Walking the 8-fold Path

The PCP is made up of three main components, but at the end of it, I've found myself with so many thoughts that need summing up that I'm going to subdivide. This post covers what I've learned during PCP from what I see as its main activities - and I'll then do a final post with pictures and statistics. Feel free to skip this one - it's long and there's no big reveal. You can just consider this my Dick Dietrick moment:

"Well, people. What have we learned?"

Writing
One thing I was a little ambivalent about at the start of PCP was writing about the experience as we went. On the face of it, the project is pretty boring; it's not something you want to go on about constantly down the pub or at a barbie for fear of being a bore. It's one of those activities that is so consuming that it is fascinating to those doing it, but could be stupendously tedious to everyone else. I decided I could keep a lid on it with non-participants unless they seemed genuinely interested (to all of my real-life friends, I apologise that I utterly failed to live by this decision).

But what about this insistence that I write about the whole thing too? Would I have anything worth writing about? Could it be entertaining enough that a non-participant would want to read it? Interesting enough? And then I decided it it got too boring I could just do fart jokes.

A few people have complimented the blog and I'm flattered and thankful that it went over okay. The writing was a small creative challenge and one I really enjoyed. In these days of one-line Facebook and Twitter updates, it's nice to get an opportunity to write something marginally longer without resorting to a full essay. Most of what I wrote was with the assumption that an audience would be reading and that I didn't want to bore them - and might even amuse them. This post, however, is primarily for me. This one is to look at where I am today and remind my future self of what I learned on the project. You can indulge me or you can just go look at some lolcats - I won't know either way. He he he; stupid cat is chasing the ball!!!

My writing probably saved the project for me about three weeks from the end. I was so over the whole thing and getting into a spiral of negativity that I could have just stopped and slipped away. Writing the blog post and having a good old whinge acted as a great circuit-breaker and put things back into perspective (not to mention the great support I got). Getting people to write about their experiences helps them engage with what they're going through on another level - to take a step back from the action and to observe and critique it - to not get so lost in the doing that they lose sight of what it's all about; it enables others to contribute to their thinking too. Even if it is just fart jokes. If any prospective PCPer happens across this - I recommend you participate in the blogging aspect actively. Write a few times a week - maybe just a few lines, a whine, an idea, something that will lift people's moods or your own. If nothing else it can be a memento for you later - and it might just save the project for you too.

I also had some behind-the-scenes correspondence, particularly with Pete and Inés and I'd like to thank them both for their communication and keeping me interested and entertained. I genuinely mean it when I say let's keep in touch.

Reading
It was a real pleasure every day to read everyone else's blog. Some were whiney, some nonsensical, some extremely terse, some pictorial (I'm lookin at you Makoto) and most brilliant - but I liked having them all there. I liked being reminded every day that there were 40-odd other people going through the same struggles or variations at the same time. It was inspiring to read about other people doing this shit while bringing up fucking kids and with proper lives to run. It was fascinating to see how people coped with interruptions, diversions, frustrations and the slog, the sheer fucking slog of getting through the valley.

It was also damn funny at times. Well done, especially, Coops; you played a blinder. I know I wouldn't have written much funny stuff without you; so thanks for lighting a fire under my arse as well. Richard, your posts were consistently strong and the descriptions you gave of where you were up to with each exercise were excellent. I kind of felt I didn't need to do something similar as I thought "well there it is - what am I gonna do - copy and paste it?" Inés and Mandy, great posts and great comments - always amusing and encouraging. Tracey and Conny - I am in awe of your efforts, of your pushing through the project through what sounded like some very disheartening periods and in Tracey's case while breastfeeding a freakin' baby (which has got to be awkward during floor-jumps). And then you both go and take the time to write encouraging comments to me and to everyone else; this is ridiculously far above and beyond the call of duty. What can I say, but a heartfelt thank you - enjoy your results (and they are amazing results); you deserve them.

Finally, I loved the "Unhappy Meals" article; I anticipated Patrick's daily emails and I eventually read every single blog post on the PCP Update. EVERY ONE. They're good, people in case you haven't scanned them all. So, thanks Patrick for creating an eminently readable and enjoyable resource on what could be some very dry topics - your mix of wisdom, random observation, science and a little whimsy to make the medicine go down is just right. Awesome job, man.

Sweating
Why would anyone want to sweat every day? Well, it turns out it's easier than sweating a few times a week or, I dunno, dying a few years early. So they're your basic choices - do a little every day, do a bit more a few times a week or die. Oh, and until you die, feel by turns more grumpy, agitated, ungainly, sick, lethargic, pained and sleepless.

Everyone knows that option three is a bad one, but why is option one better than option two? For me the answer is simple; for others maybe less so. If I am going to train 3-4 times a week, then I'm left with choices. Which days should I do it and which should be rest days? It takes at least an hour once you factor in changing and showering and your times is often tight. Some days you're sick or under the weather or not in the mood so you postpone to the next day - after all, you'll still get your 3 sessions in over the weekend. The problem is it's too easy to find excuses for not doing the work on any given day. Making excuses is habit-forming and before you know it a couple of days off has become a week and then it's really hard because now you're a bit more out of shape and the prospect of a half-hour run is a bit daunting - so you do something else and now it's a month and next thing you know - BANG - you're back to being sedentary.

With option 1, your default position is that you do it every day and for a short duration. So now each individual day is less daunting. It's harder to justify missing 10 minutes of training first thing in the morning than to just do it. And if you do miss a day, you're not shunting them along the track and filling your weekend with 3 dreaded sessions. You just miss one and you pick it up again the next day (and maybe a little extra if you feel okay). And if you miss a week on holiday - well, when you get your routine back it's only 10 minutes - so it's less difficult to get going again.

Of course this is never going to get you fit for a marathon, but if it keeps a base of fitness up and burns some excess calories who gives a shit? Only freakish cunts run marathons anyway!

Grunting
Also known as lifting and pushing shit. This was easily the hardest part of the PCP for me and what I dreaded and procrastinated about almost daily. I had plenty of excuses - a bodgy shoulder which has bothered me for years - problems with blood sugar making it difficult to workout before meals - having more fun things to do - not having the right equipment in the right places - being a lazy shit (it's a serious medical condition, people!).

In a sense, this probably means this is what I should have concentrated on most. I was stressed about not doing it right, whether it was not getting low enough in the chest dips, not doing full pull-ups, not jumping far enough in the floor jumps. Eventually, though I realised you've just got to do your honest best. If it hurts like hell, you're probably doing it close to right. If it doesn't, then you should make it harder by doing a few more reps. If you can't get every rep out but you genuinely got to failure, that's okay. If you can't do a pull-up that's okay too. The whole point is to push yourself as far as you can go and get yourself to the best place you can be. Not everybody has the same innate or trained capability - some people have injuries - some people don't pile on the muscle as quickly. And that's okay too.

In the final few weeks, I began to accept this and give myself less of a hard time - and that helped me get the eye of the tiger ... or maybe just the eye of the surly domestic cat - but determined anyway.

The flip-side of this is that you can take the recognition-of-limitations too far and start letting yourself off the hook on little things. If I'm honest, I did this more than once on planks and so had nowhere near the right level of stamina near the end. It's a lesson learned and a small regret - but I'm not going to hate myself for it; just commit to push it harder next time.

Eating
The food component of PCP is described as being 80% of the project. I have lost weight in the past before, have read many issues of Men's Health, had friend's who knew heaps about nutrition - so I would be lying if I said I learned lots about the facts of nutrition from the project. The discussion on salt was interesting and the philosophy around the nutritional component is as excellent as it is simple and common-sensical: eat a sufficient amount of (mostly) vegetables and unprocessed foods throughout the day. Or as the article we read early on put it, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

It's almost painfully obvious. It's almost embarrassing being told something so simple and fundamental. It's stuff we should all know from being grown-ups - from simply having grown up and being told this by parents and grandparents. And moreover, I think we we *did* know it, or at least most of it.

So why the fuck weren't we doing it? As Morpheus told Neo, "there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path". What, some Buddhist fellas said it first? Them feckin' eejits in the robes?

90 days of walking the path teaches you the truth of this simple message more than any amount of reading ever will. You know and feel fundamentally that this is the right and healthy way of consuming food only after it has become second-nature. The proof of this is in the freedom from cravings I've felt as time went on. It's one thing to be able to resist temptation but quite another to no longer be tempted. Only walking the path can get you there.

Drinking
This is a big topic for me. Before the PCP I actually ate a reasonable food intake a lot of the time - not going for huge portions, almost never snacking between meals, eating a proper breakfast every day (not all that different from the one at the start of PCP) and a salad heavy in vegetables and lean protein for lunch. But when work would finish or I would go out to dinner (most days), it would frequently be accompanied by alcohol and often by a lot of alcohol.

A big part of Irish, English and Australian social culture revolves around drinking. Whether you're going to the pub, eating a meal, going to the theatre or a concert, having a picnic, taking part in a quiz, watching a movie at home, you'll have a drink; you'll have a few drinks, and oftentimes you'll have too many drinks. And it's nice, it lubricates things, it makes pleasurable experiences more pleasurable. I love a bit of booze; I truly do. I enjoy the buzz, I enjoy the taste and I enjoy being properly drunk.

Unfortunately it also makes you more groggy the next day, it makes you forget chunks of your evening and incidentally, it carries calories. Lots of calories. As in, a big night out on the beer is pretty much an entire day's worth lots of calories. Note, I'm not one of those people who gets a kebab or some other crap when drunk, so I'm not even counting those potential calories. If I had stopped drinking for 90 days and done nothing else in PCP I would have lost weight - not as much, but a few kilos for sure. I know this from past experience.

I've given up booze for a month here and there - to prove to myself I could and to feel healthier. But you can be sure as shit that by day 31 I was back on it and celebrating my self-control with none whatever. The PCP gave me a structure, a reason and an excuse to stop for much much longer; to get past the point of showing I could to it to getting to the point where I no longer wanted to do it - at least not as an automatic response to any social situation.

I find myself in an interesting place in this regard. I will drink again (most nights this week, as it happens) and I'll enjoy it. But the last 90 days has starkly shown me how much my social life revolves around or is at least peripherally involved with drinking. I was surprised by how my friends were subtly or not-so-subtly pressuring me to have a few drinks here and there. I'm not judging anyone as I'm sure I've done the same countless times, but it was nice to have the PCP as a ready-made excuse to deflect them when I simply didn't fancy a drink. Without that there I'm going to have to become strong enough to just say "I really don't fancy a drink tonight".

The problem is that I have almost no repertoire of alcohol-free social activities. Boozing is fantastic, but sooner or later, unless you're a complete dullard, it also gets boring. I need to find a balance between social withdrawal (which did happen quite a bit in the last 90 days and is nothing to be scared of), enjoyable social drinking and sober socialising. Building that repertoire is something I have to work on.

Excreting
I know I already talked about sweating, but let's face it - the excretions you're interested in are the ones that come from my nether regions. What a journey that's been. From the painful rabbit pellets of dietary adjustment to the Tolkienesque bowel-rog monsters of yore - from the Bourneville tadpoles to the great brown trouts with their vigorous leaping into the briney orange waters Urinus Majoris.

There was the occasional stealth-poo that would lie in waiting until you were 5 minutes into a skipping session and then announce very firmly and uncompromisingly that it was coming out now and that your cardiovascular exercise would have to damn well wait. A terrorist-turd if you will; except unlike the USA, my foreign policy can't refuse to negotiate with these terrorists - because the last thing you want is their explosions in the regional areas.

The air-biscuits were of such novelty and variety as to be worthy of study in themselves. I have never experienced such diversity in my anal trumping in my life. The mid-afternoon cramped up sort got to me most - a nagging cripple of a fart which could bloom with such unexpected intensity as to floor a business meeting of 20 people. Sometimes I would just sit at my desk and percolate in my own eruptions throughout the morning. Sometimes a silent-warrior would turn out unexpectedly to have a voice and announce itself to the room. Or I would find myself waddling tight-cheeked to the gents' only to have each step announced like a squeaky shoe.

The most destructive exit-hole eructation though was surely the one that would happen in the middle of a workout and destroy the intensity of the moment. When you're chest-dipping down into a cloud of your own filth and already giggling from the parping sound I defy you not to just fall off the support and lose all self-control.

Supporting
One person put me onto this project - Barty Dunne. Barty is one of those annoying people who is enormously successful in his professional life but is not content to leave it at that - he also has to set himself physical challenges and goals that he then has the fucking gall to achieve and embarrasses all the normal useless schlubs who potter about their miserable unfulfilling lives. So when he brought up the PCP, it seemed like the kind of extreme, ridiculous project that only people of his outstandingly smug, superior asshole-ishness could achieve. Barty looked infinitely better before his PCP effort than I look after mine; and in the meantime, he's done a triathlon just to highlight his superiority further. And he does marathons, the freakish cunt!

Despite this, I became interested in the PCP and realised that maybe ordinary mortals could give it a shot too. Not everyone with a PCP Complete stamp looked like a model physical specimen of healthfulness (at least not in their before pictures) which encouraged me to look a bit further. I wanted to see if the PCP could work for a 'normal' - not having grokked that that's exactly who it's designed for. It was a big relief when on Day 1 when it appeared most people looked middle-of-the-road in their pictures with plenty of flab wobbling through the blogs. The relief continued when people started asking dumb questions about nutrition and exercise and expressing uncertainty, discomfort and confusion. These people were like me: useless fat lumps of faltering optimism with a soupçon of self-doubt.

We shuffled to and past the start line like participants in an overcrowded fun run - nervous, reluctant, unsure but undaunted, and trying desperately to find our strides. We turned to Patrick for help and guidance but when Patrick was lacking, we soon we began to turn towards each other; alliances were forged, encouragement was offered, banter emerged, because we knew despite the challenges that we were all in this together. People on the outside wouldn't understand it - so whatever painful shit was thrown at us, we would have to rely on each other.

Support is such an important part of the project - giving encouragement not only helps its target, but helps you. Every time you front up to tell someone to push through or try harder, you're implicitly telling yourself to do the same. You're giving yourself a responsibility to do at least as much as you're asking them to do. It's not just a fluffy touchy-feely thing you're encouraged to do; it's a survival mechanism to push through the 90 days of PCP.

I also inspired (maybe a bit over the top) one person, Mike Duffy, to sign up. I didn't mean to as this just doubled-down my responsibility to finish as a good example. But I'm glad he started; he's been a further inspiration to me and I recognise the mutuality of the benefits. You're doing a great job, Mike and I look forward to your Day 90 photos.

So I thank everyone for your support. Some it it was direct (emails and blog comments) and some was implicit (your just being there, plugging away on your own path encouragement enough). There's no need to pull out any more names - ultimately, all of you supported me even if you didn't mean to.

And finally, I would like to thank Barty and Jo. For all his cockheadedness, Barty introduced me to PCP, he encouraged me to do it as soon as I expressed an interest, he provided invaluable advice and lessons learned from his experience. Jo provided me innumerable cooking and preparation tips and both of you provided your friendship and support through the 90 days. I may not have expressed strongly enough how much I appreciated it, but I did and I do. Having had you guys in Sydney has been superb and never more so than now.

Now, let's go and get wrecked.