Barbarous Coasts: A Seasoned Cop, A Paroled Hacker, And Epic Chicanery in The Financial World

A well-dressed man falls forty-two floors off the roof of Le Parker Meridien. A Big League pitcher witnesses the event. Somehow, Detective Karl Standt, a Vermont boy who's made his mark in the big city, believes this is more than a Wall Streeter's fall from grace.  What unfolds is a fast-moving, multilayered tableau depicting the sharp end of contemporary Banana Republic America.

The book is downloadable in Kindle format from Amazon. Remember that you can put the Kindle reader software at no charge onto your computer or smartphone. Enjoy it!

Buying Fitness For Geeks

You probably have a local, independently owned, brick and mortar bookstore to support. To find an independent bookseller near you, use the INDIEBOUND STORE LOCATER.

Also available at:

O'REILLY || AMAZON || BARNES & NOBLE || POWELL'S || BAM!

Which is more important, baseball or food?

This is kind of a loaded question, but emblematic of America circa 2012. When I was a kid, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket to Fenway Park, I came to watch the game. I observed intently, fantasized, had a real emotional investment in the result (unfortunately, for a Red Sox fan – although 1967 was magical), and scored the game with pencil and paper.

We went to the Sox-Orioles game recently, as the photo attests. That's us with the Green Monster gracing the horizon.

We had a nice time. But it seemed like baseball was 2nd or 3rd on the priority list among most fans. Eating and drinking were first. People get out of their seats every two seconds (or innings) for more dogs, fries, beer, ice cream, or flag down the affable, busy vendors. I felt like I was surrounded by waitors the whole time, and it kind of detracted from watching the game. I looked around at the other adults, assessed the empirical evidence on this eating : baseball priority shift, and the results aren't so good. The small children were the only people who were actually in shape.

Gyrating around to the entertain'o'tron is also popular – maybe more so than baseball as the innings grind on for most. It seems obvious that baseball, all pro sports, have been subsumed into vacuous popular culture, thus losing some of their innocence and purity. You're not a fan, you're a consumer, a passive receptacle of prefabricated entertainment.

Of course, there are exceptions in my memories, like the minor leagues, and on two fascinating occasions when I attended the Olympics (1976) and the Alpe D'Huez stage of the Tour de France, when purity and sport still reigned.

Moving Most Content To FitnessFG

I'm moving my posting activities, for at least the time being, to fitnessfg.com. This is a site that more explicitly supports a book I'm publishing in April 2012. I'll be putting the same types of content there as I do here, and I'll probably start redirecting requests for this site to the new "conduit for readers" of my book. As always however keep the mantra going: go outside...move.

Paleo Skiing – And Using Endomondo For Alpine Ski Runs

I had to use those two words together (Paleo + Skiing), as they probably have never been used in conjunction before, in printed text (well at least not in a headline). Since I have a paleoish lifestyle (real food + dairy, occasional fasting, resistance training for workouts), I can say that Paleo, particularly the lower-body weight work, is an excellent prep for alpine skiing.

I've been skiing the last three days at Sugarbush in Vermont. Although the weather's been spotty in terms of keeping snow on a big mountain, the run from the top of the mountain is very good, with great views of the Vermont woods and Champlain Valley. Everyone should come skiing to Sugarbush for the holidays; that means you Bostonians and New Yorkers.

I used Endomondo, which is a sports tracking "app" from Denmark, for alpine skiing. Endomondo (roughly translated: endorphin world) is a Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled app that records everything you do sports-wise, then outputs the "runs" to a map. That could be seen as silly at first, since the visual on the map while skiing one top-to-bottom run looks like a circle redrawn over and over again, but the statistics are kind of interesting. The screen from Endomondo is reproduced here.

Apparently, I skied fairly conservatively, because I never hit faster than 22.7 mph. It also tallies up your vertical for the day (total amount of feet skied downhill for the day); I did 5,644 ft. for five recorded runs and one hour seventeen, which isn't bad. It shows how much vertical you can do in a full day of skiing.

Then you can export the workout from Endomondo as a GPX file (with a .gpx ending), and presto! you can open it up in Google Earth, which can be a more revealing view of the skiing path, particularly when you're on a big mountain that's fully open, including the woods. Google Earth also amasses the stats, and its calculations deviate somewhat from Endomondo (that's to be expected). GE gives me a little more vertical (5,800+) and speed: 24 mph.

You can use Endomondo to try to set your speed and vertical records for the year. At the very least, it's cool that you can generate these graphical displays by just letting an app run in your pocket!

Is Vitamin C 'The New Vitamin D'?

The answer to the above question is probably "yes." Of course, you could probably say that about any vitamin or mineral; none of them are "less important" than another.

I interviewed Carol Johnston, a leading vitamin C researcher and a professor at Arizona State University, as part of research for a book I'm writing. She told me about some National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data from 2004 that showed 31 percent of Americans to be either “scorbutic” (vitamin C blood levels indicating scurvy) or having “marginal vitamin C status” (meaning that “your body tissues are not operating optimally because there is too little of vitamin C there for optimal pathways and metabolism”).

She had me convinced; vitamin C is a wicked important, underappreciated nutrient. Scurvy is a potentially fatal disease (involving the disintegration of your collagen!), and while the vast majority of people are not getting scurvy, less alarming levels of deficiency cause fatigue, because you're not making enough carnitine.

Vitamin C must be present to produce collagen, the super-strong connective tissue protein in tendons, cartilage, bone, and blood vessels. However, collagen has an important immune-system role as well, according to Johnston.

“We have defense collagens, little toll-like receptors on immune cells that actually recognize pathogens,” Johnston explained. People who are deficient in vitamin C (up to a third of Americans) have a “marginalized ability to stay infection free.”

Vitamin C is also a cofactor for making carnitine, a pivotal protein that shuttles fatty acids into the cell’s mitochondria to be burned for energy. “A lot fatigue associated with early marginal C status could be related to carnitine [depletion],” Johnston said, because your metabolic system for using fats energy is compromised.

The fatigue “could [also] be related to norepinephrin,” she said. “No one’s really looked at that” from a scientific research standpoint. Vitamin C is necessary for the production of norepinephrine, which the adrenal glands release as part of the “flight or fight” response. It’s also a neurotransmitter that affects how the heart contracts.

The typical adult stores about 1,500 mg of vitamin C in their body, mostly in the liver and adrenal glands.

What about the mega doses some people shoot for, such as 40-50 times the RDA for C? “Vitamin C requires a transporter and you can saturate that pretty quickly,” Johnston explained. “When you start taking over 200-500 mg you are really decreasing the amount you can absorb. I don't see a lot of benefit in consuming those high doses if you want to maximize tissue storage. You really need to take small amounts over the course of a day.” For example, 200 mg two or three times per day – if you think you need that dose.

So make sure to chow your oranges, lemons, apples, tomatoes, broccoli (however that idea makes you wince); you need to keep the vitamin C stores up!

The picture, by the way, is of apples I picked yesterday for breakfast (about the extent of my own hunter-gathering). A handful of small apples off a tree are better than one big store-bought apple, because they tend to have less sugar, and you eat more skin, which increases the antioxidant amounts you are consuming.

Disc Golf is Awesome

Disc golf is a healthy activity for reasons that seem to distinguish the difference between over-training type sports and more optimal ones. I urge anyone who has a park or mountainside with one of these courses to take part.

My son and I did the lower-mountain nine holes at Sugarbush in Vermont yesterday, two hours and a mile and a half distance between holes. You end up, however, greatly exceeding that distance, because you spend a lot of time scrambling around looking for your wayward disc.

The benefits are:

* You're outside in the sun the whole time, getting in a great hike in a playful, less grinding manner;

* You're not maxing out your heart rate at 80% or more with unhealthy "chronic cardio," because it's just a walking, playful, chatty activity.

* You have to make a lot of strong, random all-body movements, like climbing in and out of gullies, balancing on fallen tree runks, and heaving large tree branches. For example, my son's disc ended up stuck high up in a tree. To get the disc down, we found a birch branch about 30 feet long, carried it over to the tree, and then I kind of hoisted it straight up like a vertical spear to knock the disc down. Who needs weights!

* Not to hyper analyze everything but ... the latter activity did involve a lot of problem solving skills to engage you and your child's brain with something basic and natural; how do we get the disc down? How do we cross the stream? etc. Just going out and having a cardio mountain workout is mostly static, repetitive, and doesn't engage your wits.

Believe it or not, disc golf is probably more evolutionarily appropriate than just hiking or biking straight up a trail, and certainly superior to the video game I wrenched my son away from before we went to the mountain!