… as in “no pain, no gain.”

Special sets are a way of working your muscles that produce more spectacular results. It is a good idea to not do this until you’ve gotten pretty good at doing the exercises properly and your body is used to this sort of work.

There are three kinds of special sets that I know of, and they can be combined. Giant, super, and breakdown. I often confuse Giant and Super, so this definition may be reversed, but it hardly matters.

In a Giant Set, you do an exercise, wait one minute (or some other time, depending, but usually a minute) then you do it again. Then you do that again. Usually, a giant set is three goes at the exercise. Each time you try to reach exhaustion (I explain exhaustion below). You use the same weight, and you will often be able to do the same number of reps.

In a Super Set, you follow the pattern of a Giant Set but you use a different exercise on that muscle each time. So for a Super Set on your chest, you might do a bench press followed by dumbell press (same as a bench press but with dumbells instead of a bar) followed by a butterfly machine (one of those machines that you move with your upper arms, so you hit your pectorals without using your triceps). Different exercises work the muscles at different angles and thus work different muscle fibers, so a super set can be quite effective.

In a Breakdown Set, you do two or three (or more if you are crazy) instances of the same exercise in a row (like in a Giant Set) but you don’t wait between efforts. Instead of waiting, you (quickly) drop the weight by some percentage so it is possible to do the exercise again without rest. And I do mean quick. You can’t do this with a free weight bench press unless you leave the safety clips off and have a person helping you, to remove the outer weights as fast as possible. With a machine where you can quickly move the weight picker rod thingie, this can work quite well. With dumbells, you just have two sets of dumbells, one heavier and one lighter, ready to grab.

The thinking here is that some of your muscle fibers did not engage in the first set, so they are recruited in the second set if you do it right away. Then the third set, if you do one, gets the remaining loafers. If you go to exhaustion for two or three breakdowns in a row, the immediate effect is that the muscle you just worked is temporarily immobilized. You’ll feel like the muscle died. The longer term effect is that this muscle is dramatically strengthened.

Reaching Exhaustion. This is key. You can do all sorts of exercise at the gym, with all sorts of objectives having to do with flexibility, endurance, etc. etc. But if you want to build muscles you must work your muscles, one at a time, to the point of exhaustion.

This should be your mantra: The only rep that counts is the last one, and it only counts if you can’t do another one because you have killed the muscle (temporarily). Not very poetic but it is the key principle in weight training.

If you get half way through the last rep and have to stop, you lose. If you do the last rep but have enough in that muscle to have done another one or part of one, you lose. The whole trick is to use the right weight and he right number of reps that the last rep is perfect. There can be no more reps, and you completed the rep all the way through the required motion.

If you have a plan to exercise five muscle groups in one session and manage to get to perfect exhaustion at the end of each set for all of the muscles, then you’ve reached Gym Nirvana. Most likely you won’t reach perfect exhaustion with every attempt. But, over time, you’ll get good at reaching that point most of the time. It may help to keep a written record of what you’ve done. You may add a symbol (I use an explanation point) to indicate that a certain weight and number of reps reached perfect exhaustion. You can then use that combo the next time, or up the weight or reps by a small increment, to hit the same point again.

One way to increase the chance of reaching exhaustion is to use assistance. Often, this involves another person, and that person needs to do it correctly. Here’s how this works: You set things up so that you are able to do N-plus reps, but not a full N+1. Then, the person giving the assist helps you, ever so gently, with just a tiny little bit of pushing or pulling along with you on the weight or machine, to get through that last (N+1) rep and reach exhaustion. Most people who try to help with this but don’t know what they are doing try to hard. They help out to much, and you are not killing the muscle. The way to learn how much to help a person is to help yourself with some exercises first, and indeed, this is how you can do an assisted rep without another person, which is good, say, if you have no friends.

Take, for instance, the bicep curl. You sit on a bench, you have a dumbell in one hand and you are dangling it down near the ground, and you curl your arm up to lift the dumbell to your shoulder. Your elbow is resting on your leg just behind your knee when you do this.

Do that a few times and when you get to the last rep, since this is a very long rep (arm all the way out to arm all the way bent is a long distance) you may not be able to finish that last rep. But you’ve got this other hand that is not doing anything … you can use that hand to ever so gently assist, in the smallest way possible, your working arm to finish the rep, but pushing up on your working hand or on the dumbell itself as you lift it through the last half, or third, or whatever, of that motion.

When you do that notice how often you need very very little extra help to assist the almost killed, exhausted bicep to finish the rep. If you help someone else, remember that.. they are doing all the work. You’re just helping with that five, ten, fifteen percent of force that they cant’ muster. Assisted Rep Nirvana is when the person helping someone bench pressing over two hundred pounds gives the assist with one finger on each hand helping to lift the bar.

And, putting it all together, if you want, eventually, you can do a Super Set of Giant Sets in which you use Breakdown with Assistance on the same muscle. But you will die. But just before you die you will be really buff.

Symmetry is healthy

Symmetry is important because without it your spine will curl up or you’ll walk in circles or who knows what else may happen.

When you use the average weight machine or a bar on a bench press your muscles may fail to act symmetrically. One muscle, perhaps your dominant side (i.e., your left arm if you are left handed) may do more of the work. Or, after you’ve done that for a while and moved to another machine but sticking with the same muscle group, the other side may do more work because it is less tired. It is very difficult to force your muscles to act symmetrically.

There are two tricks to obtain and maintain symmetry. First, you use dumbells (or the equivalent, a machine that truly treats the limbs independently). With one dumbell in each hand, your contra-lataral muscles can’t help each other. Second, you do self administered forced assisted reps on the weak side. Say you know your left bicep is weaker than your right. Do as many reps as you can (with the last one assisted) with your RIGHT (stronger) arm. Then, do the same thing with your left arm. You will be forced to assist the left arm through the last two or three reps, often not just the last one. But this forced assisted rep will make that left arm get more out of the exercise than your right arm did. Do that every other day for a couple of weeks and your two biceps will be the same.

You can do this on machines that normally use both limbs. Just set the weight low and use one limb. This works nicely with some machines and allows for a comfortable assist. Avoid getting your fingers caught in the machine while playing around with this method.

… Continued …

Obsession can be a good thing. And I’m not talking about some dumb-ass perfume.

But that would not be enough. I needed more.

Our field survey required that we have a truck and a trailer. So, I bought a complete dumb-bell set at a store in Pretoria and packed it into the trailer. When I purchased the set, I told the clerk that I did not need the full length bar, just the adjustable dumb-bell bars. He insisted that I take the large bar because I had paid for it. I said I really didn’t want it. He checked with the manager. I had to take it. I said no. He said yes. So I said OK, I’ll take it. Then when I packed up all the stuff I had bought at that store (which included a lot of field gear as well as the weights) I “accidently” left behind the large bar.

I assume it is still there.

Anyway, whenever we set up camp somewhere, I’d pull out the weights. Lynne accompanied us to most of our field sites, but was not there all the time, so she rarely used them. Rather, she ran whenever she had the chance. There were, variously, four or five other people with us, but only two Americans, a grad student from The U, and my BFF, Stephanie. They decided they wanted to get buff, so they used the weights as well. So, after a day of survey, we’d come back, have some food and drink, and then get down with the weights out in front of the cabin. We stayed most of the time in a tourist rest camp near the Kalahari. Tourists would walk by and openly stare at us as we took turns lifting, spotting each other, writing down our progress on gridded note paper.

This worked. Before going to South Africa, I did a series of calibration exercises to establish the strength and endurance level of various muscle groups. When I got back from South Africa, I was ahead of where I had left off in all areas. Lenora was impressed.

Funny things happened at the gym in Kimberly. I remember three in particular.

First funny thing: There was a series of machines laid out in a very logical fashion, organized anatomically in the order one would ideally use to do a full set of exercises covering all muscle groups. Thinking this rather convenient, I did an exercise on the first machine, a leg press of some kind, then moved on to the second machine, a leg lift. While I was using the leg lift, doing a few sets, a woman came over and waited for me to finish. I wasn’t sure why she needed to use this machine because there were other similar machines, but I did not think about it too much. When I fished the machine, she jumped on it like a Texas ranger on his horse.

So I moved on to the next machine, working hamstrings. While I worked, I noticed these funny lights, like traffic lights, up near the ceiling. They’d go from green to yellow then back to green in a cycle for several seconds. As I was wondering what those lights were for, that same woman, was suddenly there waiting for me to finish again. The next machine was calves, but I didn’t like that particular machine so I skipped it and moved on to a bench press kind of machine. I was using that machine when I noticed the woman who had been following me was using the calf machine. I then moved on to a back machine of some kind, as the woman moved to the machine I had just been on. She finished there and came over to me while I was still working my back, and started at me until I was done. Then she took over the back machine as I moved to the next machine, feeling this was all kind of strange, and stared working my abs.

I decided to really hit my abs because this particular bench thingie I was using was working really well. So I did a bunch of reps, rested, and did a bunch more, then adjusted the machine to make it harder, then did a bunch more, and then I was resting again when I noticed the woman was standing next to me, looking down at me, ready to say something.

So I gave hear a look like “Huh?” and she said, “What are you, a moron????” And I was like “Huh?” and she was like, “Do you not know that this is a circuit?” and I was like “Huh?” and she pointed to the traffic light thingie and gave me a really dirty look.

Suddenly I realized that these machines laid out in this order constituted what is called a “circuit” which is a series of machines laid out in a certain order with a timer attached to a flashing light of some kind. You were to move from one machine to the next as the light flashed. Like a trainer telling you to keep moving and work harder. A dumb robotic trainer attached to the ceiling.

So I looked at the woman and said “Well, that traffic light of yours is certainly no Lenora!” and she was like “Huh?” and I got the hell out of her way.

Oh, I see I have run out of time. I’ll tell you the other two stories next time.

… Continued …

When it comes down to it, it is all a matter of just how hard you are willing to work. Then, you start with that and work harder.

We were efficient. I would arrive at the gym way before hand and do all my warm-ups. I’d do my post-workout stretches after the session, as well as selected exercises that Lenora would specify … but she never left any category of exercise entirely to me. There are certain exercises one should do last in a weight training session, so Lenora would schedule the occasional session to focus on just those particular things rather than letting me only do them on my own.

Lenora was relentless. She knew that no matter what I did, as long as I did it correctly, I would probably not die or injure myself. So she had no compunction whatsoever of pushing me beyond what I thought I could do. With every exercise. Every. Exercise. She timed how many seconds I had to rest between sets. She calculated things out so we would never have to wait between machines or free weights. She warned people off of equipment that we were about to use. She came up with diabolical plans whereby I would get absolutely no rest at all for long periods of time as I shifted focus from muscle to muscle.

I learned about isolating muscles and why it was good to do that. Related to this, I learned why a lot of guys and some gals at the gym have back braces, and I learned how to not do that. I learned about breakdown, giant sets, super sets. I learned about pain. Good pain.

Over a period of a few months, my body weight did not go down more than a few pounds, but my muscle mass went way way up. My relative body fat dropped to an acceptable level (as measured using a couple of different techniques). I became big and strong. I was able to leg press 800 pounds. I’d always been fairly fit, able to walk great distances, dig deep holes, all that sort of thing. But now I could lift larger objects and move heavier things as well. I walked around town waiting for some poor sap to get trapped under a car so I could lift the car off him.

But then it was time to return to South Africa. After seven months of intense work, I was pretty much obsessed with working out, which is how one has to do this, really. I was worried that three months in the field would set me back. Never mind that field work itself is exercise. I did not believe that I would be able to maintain my condition from just field survey and a lot of driving.

So, I needed a plan for how to stay in shape while I was away. For several sessions, Lenora trained me in gym-free exercises, which helped. But I knew that would not be enough. To really stay in shape in the field, I’d have to do something drastic.

So, I did something drastic. ….

… Continued …

When working with a personal trainer, the first thing you have to do is to calibrate. Then, if the trainer does not crank it up to a higher level, she’s probably not worth her fee.

As part of the deal, I got six hours of trainer time. I knew from my reading that working with a personal trainer was a good idea if you don’t know what you are doing, and I didn’t know what I was doing. A good personal trainer could save you from injuring yourself, and help you to be more effective in your training. I’ll tell you about some of the things I learned about this later.

Lenora was one of the personal trainers at this gym, and it eventually became clear to me that the sales rep and head trainer with whom I’d met when I joined up figured out that I wanted to work with a serious personal trainer, and so they matched us up. And I’ll tell you this, since that time I’ve watched a lot of trainers working with various clients, and there is a great deal of variation across trainers, and across trainer-client relationships. There are people throwing away their money, and there are people who are getting a very, very valuable service.

I was determined to be in the latter group, and as a trainer, Lenora was determined to be in that group as well.

Lenora is medium to tall in height, and thin like a stick. She has a sweet face with soft brown eyes and a pleasant countenance, a quiet conversational voice and a very polite manner. When we first met she was very formal in her introduction, and after a few pleasantries and technicalities, she came to the key question.

“How hard do you want me to make you work.”

“Well, harder than anyone else you’ve ever worked with.”

A pause.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I figure that if I don’t work hard enough to puke at least once every few sessions, we’re not working hard enough.”

She looked at me for a moment, trying to read how serious I was being. Then, just as she turned away to lead me to the evaluation area, she said, “Very well. We can do that.”

She may not have realized that I could see the grin appear across her face in the mirror towards which we were walking. Within three weeks I was to throw up once, and I was to collapse on the floor once. And those were the only times I was to see her grin in just that way again.

… Continued …

Back from South Africa and with some time on my hands, I was hell bent on keeping the promise I had made to myself to get back into shape. For most people I know, this would mean eating better and going to the gym more often. But for me, it meant eating better and going to a gym for the first time in my life.

When I did eventually join a gym, and I’m going to tell you that story in a moment, I was an adult in my 30s, and the first time I went into the men’s locker room I saw more naked men all at once than I had seen in my entire life previously. That was also the first time I smelled a real gym locker room. Talk about sensory overload.

So, I went to a gym not too far from my house, and told them I wanted to join. This led to a meeting in an office with a couple of guys: a sales rep and a trainer. I had no idea that joining a gym would involve a committee meeting, but what the heck. The two men asked me a number of questions that I did not expect. They wanted to know why I wanted to join the gym. What were my objectives. At first I didn’t really have an answer for them, so they kept talking about why one might want to join a gym, a bit about their own personal experiences, and so on. They kept mentioning Thailand. I began to think that there was a connection between the Southeast Asian Sex Industry and joining a gym. Or maybe it was just these guys. I was confused.

Now, I should mention that as a biological anthropologist I was not totally ignorant of some of the fundamentals of diet and exercise, at least at the theoretical level, and before joining this gym, in the first two days after returning from South Africa, I had purchased and devoured a couple of fitness books. (In case you are interested, the most useful book I read was the then current version of Covert Bailey’s The Ultimate Fit or Fat) The point being, I did have some idea of what I was doing there, I had just not articulated it yet. But while these guys were talking about Thailand and other stuff, I formulated the answer I should have given them when I first walked in. So I interrupted their conversation and told them.

“I know why I’m here.”

“Huh? Wha… Oh, OK, why are you here?”

“I want to be the kind of person who sits down in a public restaurant and orders three pieces of pie, and while I’m eating the pie other people in the restaurant look over and say to each other, ‘Wow. Look at that guy. How does he eat that way and stay so trim and fit?'”

They looked at each other. They laughed. They looked back at me. I was not laughing.

Then one of them said, “Let me introduce you to Lenora.”

… Continued …

I started out walking a good six feet behind her, to avoid the sand she was kicking up and the occasional thorn-lined branch that might swing back in the wake of anyone walking through the African Bush. We were traversing open country in the Kalahari, in an area sealed off from people owing to the presence of unfriendly lions and other dangers. We were doing this in part because we both felt like we had been locked up for days and needed some freedom; We needed freedom from confinement, freedom from the people we were with, freedom from patronizing park employees, freedom of movement, freedom from the sound and smell of a diesel engine in a “safari vehicle,” and a taste of the freedom, which I can’t describe, you get when you walk through the wild bush in Africa knowing that you are being slightly annoying to the unfriendly lions and have the chance of almost anything happening and no way to stop it. Over every dune was a question, in every cluster of brush and camel-thorn tree was a mystery, in every patch of long grass a cobra or a rodent or a game bird or, at least, some kind of interesting spider or something.

Free in the Kalahari.

By now I was a full 20 or 30 feet behind Lynne, way more than necessary to avoid snapping branches. I decided to catch up a little just as we were about to mount the next dune, a bit larger than the last few. But Lynne took that moment to sprint rather than walk to the top, so while I also sprinted, I did not close the gap. In fact, she was down the other side of the dune before I attained the crest, and it took me a bit of work to get within 50 feet of her.

I hadn’t known Lynne very long, but we had been traveling together now for several days, and for reasons not within the scope of the present essay, we had become fast friends. Let’s just say adversity is to a relationship what a microwave is to popcorn; When there are only two of you in the lifeboat, you either crash and burn or learn to trust each other. And the metaphors. The metaphors become thick and goopy.

I was probably thinking about that, or about the strange holes we kept passing on the lower dune slopes that we later discovered to be silk spider traps, or the bright blue sky and the pleasant afternoon winter warmth when I noticed that Lynne had been out of my sight for a long time.

Finally, a few dunes later, I saw her at the bottom sitting in the shade of a Shepard’s tree. Eventually, I arrived at her rest spot, and we relaxed a bit and talked.

This is when I learned, while trying to catch my breath and not look too exhausted, that Lynne was considering herself to be rather out of shape. She told me that this trip was killing her. She needed to spend some time at the gym, she said, and this walk was telling her that she needed to do it soon. You see, Lynne was supposed to be in training for her first Ultra Marathon, a 250 kilometer race across the Green Kalahari. She had already run a couple of 50 km races that year as part of her prep, and she had also won a regional Ultimate Frisbee tournament and that was good, but with the race coming up soon she needed to be running every day and working with weights at least a few times a week. Neither was possible while we were guiding these tourists, staying mostly in game parks where we were not allowed to wander freely in the bush, and where there were no gyms.

So now I understood why Lynne was so keen on breaking out of the Kalahari rest camp, and I was glad we had done it. But I also realized, as I sat in the shade admiring my new friend’s stamina and resolve, that I had gone from a person who was always in pretty good shape to a person who was in the process of serious deterioration.

When I was a kid, I walked all the time. My parents were forever leaving me in various forests or on the side of lonely mountain roads, and I would always make my way home eventually, on foot. When I was a teenager, I had a girlfriend who lived far away, and a couple of five or six mile walks a day was a virtually daily event for me (I did not grow up in a car culture). At that time, I would also spend a couple of weeks a year in the Adirondack mountains. I would cover between 90 and 150 miles, much of it over peaks reaching beyond 5,000 feet, often trail-less, in a few days. Later, as an archaeologist, I walked and walked and walked, but often carrying piles of equipment and digging dozens and dozens of holes per day, on survey. Eventually, I went off to the Congo for fieldwork. I was famous among the pygmies for my walking there. I would routinely walk 10 miles through the forest one way with an empty pack, then 10 miles the other way with 110 pounds of food, or along the “road” either 10 or 20 miles, depending, to and from market.

I was always the one who was not tired, no matter how far we went or how much I carried.

Then it came time to write my thesis and do some other stuff, so I spent a few years mostly at a desk job and slowly slowly, month after month, my legendary walking muscles turned into something other than muscle, and though I had no more visible body fat than I had ever had I’m sure my muscle had all gone south. And by south, I don’t mean south.

And I knew this because as I sat under the Shepard’s tree, I realized that for the first time in my life, ever, I had been out-walked by another human being. Never mind that she was a semi-professional athlete marathon runner training for an ultra (which, by the way, she would indeed run, and in fact win now and then even beating the men, several times over the coming years).

So I resolved.

I resolved that on my return to the states, I would get my self in shape. And I did. I got myself very much in shape, and the next time I returned to South Africa, Lynne did not out walk me. And the next time after that, people at the gyms across South Africa found themselves in awe of my physical prowess as I traveled from place to place being … really really fit.

How did I do it? Well, I found Lenora, Inflicter of Pain. And I let her have her way with me. I’ll tell you about Lenora in the next installment.

… Continued …

By this time it had become clear that I was joining this gym with a life membership. I’d lay out a few hundred bucks and be a member for about $50 a year forever after. That may seem like a lot and these sorts of things are not always good deals. But part of my motivation for choosing the super-membership was to put the money down up front so I would be motivated to stick with the program for a long time. In the end, that worked.

As part of the deal, I got six hours of trainer time. I knew from my reading that working with a personal trainer was a good idea if you don’t know what you are doing, and I didn’t know what I was doing. A good personal trainer could save you from injuring yourself, and help you to be more effective in your training. I’ll tell you about some of the things I learned about this in a later post.

Lenora was one of the personal trainers at this gym, and it eventually became clear to me that the sales rep and head trainer with whom I’d met when I joined up figured out that I wanted to work with a serious personal trainer, and so they matched us up. And I’ll tell you this, since that time I’ve watched a lot of trainers working with various clients, and there is a great deal of variation across trainers, and across trainer-client relationships. There are people throwing away their money, and there are people who are getting a very, very valuable service.

I was determined to be in the latter group, and as a trainer, Lenora was determined to be in that group as well.

Lenora is medium to tall in height, and thin like a stick. She has soft brown eyes and a pleasant countenance, a quiet conversational voice and a very polite manner. When we first met she was very formal in her introduction, and after a few pleasantries and technicalities, she came to the key question.

“How hard do you want me to make you work.”

“Well, harder than anyone else you’ve ever worked with.”

A pause.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I figure that if I don’t work hard enough to puke at least once every few sessions, we’re not working hard enough.”

She looked at me for a moment, trying to read how serious I was being. Then, just as she turned away to lead me to the evaluation area, she said, “Very well. We can do that.”

She may not have realized that I could see the grin appear across her face in the mirror towards which we were walking. Within three weeks I was to throw up once, and I was to collapse on the floor once. And those were the only times I was to see her grin in just that way again.

… CONTINUED……..

And as the cattle do, so do Scienceblogs.com bloggers. And the current stampede about to form up is about fitness. I’m not sure where it started, but I first noticed it at ERV‘s blog, but Page 3.14 has also picked it up.

We’re not talking about Darwinian fitness, but rather, physical fitness.

So, because I’m as much a member of the herd as the next cow, I decided to join in and tell you my fitness story … or at least, a version of it. Part I is below the fold.

Africa. Some time in the early 1990s.

I started out walking a good six feet behind her, to avoid the sand she was kicking up and the occasional thorn-lined branch that might swing behind anyone walking through the African Bush. We were traversing, extra-legally, an area people were not allowed because of the dangerous wild animals (mainly lion) and the chance of getting lost on this difficult to navigate terrain. We crossed the parallel linear dunes at a right angle …. up a grass covered dune, across it’s narrow top of red sand, down the next side, then across the bushy flat to the next dune. The reststation we were staying in, along with a dozen American travelers distributed among eight or nine grass-roofed chalets, was surrounded by a series of fences, the largest and outermost one being a 15 foot high affair designed to keep lions out and tourists in. Earlier in the day, I followed some of the camp workers to see where they got through the first fence, to the village they lived in. Then, using this intelligence, Lynne and I passed through that unlocked gate, and Lynne talked our way past a couple of security guards at other gates, then we found what was probably an informal smuggler’s opening in the 15 footer, and we were free.

Free in the Kalahari.

By now I was a full 20 or 30 feet behind Lynne, way more than necessary to avoid snapping branches. I decided to catch up a little just as we were about to mount the next dune, a bit larger than the last few. But Lynne took that moment to sprint rather than walk to the top, so while I also sprinted, I did not close the gap. In fact, she was down the other side of the dune before I attained the crest, and it took me a bit of work to get within 50 feet of her.

I hadn’t known Lynne very long, but we had been traveling together now for several days, and for reasons far beyond what I can explain here we had bonded rather quickly. Let’s just say diversity makes fast friends, and when there are only two of you in the lifeboat, you either sink or learn to trust each other. I was probably thinking about that, or about the strange holes we kept passing on the lower dune slopes that we later discovered to be silk spider traps, or the bright blue sky and the pleasant afternoon winter warmth when I noticed that Lynne had been out of my sight for a long time.

Finally, a few dunes later, I saw her at the bottom sitting in the shade of a Shepard’s tree. Eventually, I arrived at her rest spot, and we relaxed a bit and talked.

This is when I learned, while trying to catch my breath and not look too exhausted, that Lynne was considering herself to be rather out of shape. She told me that this trip was killing her. She needed to spend some time at the gym, she said, and this walk was telling her that she needed to do it soon. You see, Lynne was supposed to be in training for her first Ultra Marathon, a 250 kilometer race across the Green Kalahari. She had already run a couple of 50 km races that year as part of her prep, and she had also won a regional Ultimate Frisbee tournament and that was good, but with the race coming up soon she needed to be running every day and working with weights at least a few times a week. Neither was possible while we were guiding these tourists, staying mostly in game parks where we were not allowed to wander freely in the bush, and where there were no gyms.

So now I understood why Lynne was so keen on breaking out of the Kalahari restcamp, and I was glad we had done it. But I also realized, as I sat in the shade admiring my new friend’s stamina and resolve, that I had gone from a person who was always in pretty good shape to a person who was in the process of serious deterioration.

When I was a kid, I walked all the time. My parents were forever leaving me in various forests or on the side of lonely mountain roads, and I would always make my way home eventually, on foot. When I was a teenager, I had a girlfriend who lived far away, and a couple of five or six mile walks a day was a virtually daily thing for me (I did not grow up in a car culture). At that time, I would also spend a couple of weeks a year in the Adirondack mountains. I would cover between 90 and 150 miles, much of it over peaks reaching beyond 5,000 feet, often trail-less. Later, as an archaeologist, I walked and walked and walked, but often carrying piles of equipment and digging dozens and dozens of holes per day, on survey. Eventually, I went off to the Congo for fieldwork. I was famous among the pygmies for my walking there. I would routinely walk 10 miles through the forest one way with an empty pack, then 10 miles the other way with 110 pounds of food, or along the “road” either 10 or 20 miles, depending, to and from market.

I was always the one who was not tired, no matter how far we went or how much I carried.

Then it came time to write my thesis and do some other stuff, so I spent a few years mostly at a desk job and slowly slowly, month after month, my legendary walking muscles turned into something other than muscle, and though I had no more visible body fat than I had ever had I’m sure my muscle had all gone south.

And I knew this because as I sat under the Shepard’s tree, I realized that for the first time in my life, ever, I had been out-walked by another human being. Never mind that she was a semi-professional athlete marathon runner training for an ultra (which, by the way, she would indeed run, and in fact win, several times over the coming years).

So I resolved.

I resolved that on my return to the states, I would get my self in shape. And I did. I got myself very much in shape, and the next time I returned to South Africa, Lynne did not out walk me. And the next time after that, people at the gyms across South Africa found themselves in awe of my physical prowess as I traveled from place to place being … really really fit.

How did I do it? Well, I found Lenora, Inflicter of Pain. And I let her have her way with me. I’ll tell you about Lenora in the next installment.

…. continued ….