alternative titles: yielding isometric mid-thigh pin pulls, isometric deadlift 'holds' for fun and climbing Introduction A few months ago, I began some barefoot sprints up a hill at a local park, and discussed also adding heavy kettlebell swings. My back started feeling great, along with my feet, my legs, the bones and connective tissues and muscles. Truly, i’m now four months in and this is all still part of my toolkit. It also feels great to walk my bare feet across grassy surfaces. The kettle bell swings transferred strongly to climbing. After building skills and strengths around one-handed heavy kettlebell swings (and giggling to myself over how fun it was to feel so much stronger while climbing). I found myself wondering ‘what will I do when I max out the kettlebells’, also, ‘I do not currently have any interest in maxing out the kettlebells, but I am curious to perhaps incrementally practice some of the same general pattern’ I remembered how I’ve always appreciated things about the deadlift that I’ve never quite managed to embody, or make part of my training, and some of the core parts of the deadlift are pretty unappealing to me, too. I appreciate the whole ‘strengthen the posterior chain’ thing, but I really, really, really do not care about having any particular deadlift “number”. And the few times I’ve spent a few sessions in a row deadlifting, I’d get to something around 200 lbs and then start getting anxious about how my back would be feeling, because of a prior injury/weakness. AND because of that weakness, I’ve long wanted to get a ‘strong(er) back’, to reduce the chances of an injury, but kept running into that weakness along the way. hm. so anyway, my back has been feeling great, and I was sorta thinking about deadlifty type stuff again. I was noticing how little portions of my back would move with the kettlebell swings, thinking about that hip hinge motion. I decided that I could replicate some of the motion simply by ‘pinning’ a bar with a bunch of weight on it close to the top of the deadlift position, and I could then pick it up and hold it. My first experience of this particular exercise I had been thinking about the motion/exercise for a while, but not quite set it up, I’d never used the pins like this before, and a friend gave a helpful nudge while we were exercising together, and I got it set up right, fiddled with it, started adding weight, slowly, seeing how everything felt as I went. AND I WAS SHOOK! The way the exercises felt while I was doing them and the ways my body felt fatigued, sore, later that day and the next day, the day after, and even three days later, was extremely thought provoking. I’m attuned to interestingness. these were interesting. From a proprioception point of view, there was lots of input and awareness throughout the lifts, AND for hours and days in the soreness and sensation generated by the strain and repair. Photos and videos and timelapses of the exercise, for context Here’s a still from a video, showing the entire thing. It’s a mostly no-range-of-motion exercise, so I pick it up from close to this ‘finished’ position: I will tell you about them, but first, it might be best to simply look at the video of the workout: 🎥 google photo album of the lifts It’s a few short videos, one showing a single heavy-for-me lift. You might notice I hold the bar up for only maybe three seconds. The timelapses show how fast the whole workout can be, and how little time is spent doing anything, and how small the range of motion is. I spent more than one session googling around, trying to find a useful name that described what I was doing, and finally, iteratively, with the help of two friends, walked into a title for it. I was describing it: Okay, so, you know the ‘top’ of the deadlift position? [shifts hands into this sorta stance] I’ll put the squat rack safety bars to this level [lowers two inches] and load a bar there, start with a single 45 plate on both sides… [more gesturing, miming] … I kept adding 45s until I was quite a bit past my regular deadlift weight. It was so interesting to hold a heavy, heavy bar for 5-10 seconds, with almost zero movement. Based off the soreness and fatigue I felt immediately and the following day(s), I could tell the ‘transfer’ to climbing-specific strength was very high. Not 100%, but close. This would be considered an isometric lift/hold. Google told me that “traditional” barbell isometrics would be pinning the bar in place and then pulling up on on it, rather than lifing it and holding it in an raised position. So, this is a ‘yielding isometric’ hold, in that we are activating muscles to avoid yielding to the weight. This is opposed to an ‘overcoming isometric’, like pushing on a wall (or lifting a bar against a pin), where the entire load is delivered by the body trying to overcome the immovable force. I’m so bad at counting weight plates, it takes a long time to figure out how much weight is on the bar, but I absolutely thought “well, I can easily hold my body weight with one arm hanging from a pull-up bar, so I wonder if I can do my body weight from each hand at the same time on this lift?” and started adding weight towards 140 * 2, or 280 lbs. Turns out it’s pretty easy for me to hold 280 lbs up there. I was going slowly up in weight, but even on my very first day, I think I went to 320 lbs. (!!!). I always, always evaluate how a back thing feels the day after the exercise, so I eased into these gently. But each time, the day after, things felt good. So I kept the lifting going, and very quickly saw wild numbers, all the way up into the very low 400s eventually. Mostly I stay at a lower weight, maybe 80% of a max, and aim for longer holds, and other forms of improved holding. For example, I can find ease with my breathing (slow exhale vs fast exhale and hold) and many versions of trying to keep my shoulders “packed”, and “holding them up” instead of letting them get pulled down (in most of the footage in the album, I’m letting them sag more than I do now). I’m not trying to get injured. For instance, breathing is difficult when holding this much weight, but if I’m holding it for a ‘longer time’ (>5 seconds) I can exhale and take a half-inhale. When I’m closer to my limit, there’s no way I can inhale under the tension. Anyway, there is tons of good stuff out there about isometric exercises. As a climber, nearly 100% of my finger flexor training is isometric, and I’ve noticed over the years more and more of my exercises tending towards isometrics. For example, I virtually never train pullups, but will do lots of holding a 135 degree arm position isometrically in various ways. It’s easy(ier) on the elbow tendons, etc. I expect this exercise counts as elbow tendon pre-hab, as I appreciate the soreness I sometimes detect, in the elbow joints. Ditto re knee and ankle and foot tendons. I get tons of proprioceptive input from those places, after holding sufficiently heavy weights. Contrasting this strange lift/hold to a look-alike exercise, the deadlift (lifting a much lighter amount of weight from the ground) Tons of obviously coherent, rooted-in-reasonableness ideas float around out there about why deadlifts are a nice thing to give to the human body, but again, I don’t deadlift, I’m not a gym person. I don’t view this lift as even remotely related to a deadlift. There’s no ‘reps’, there’s no movement, it’s just holding it at the top of the position, stressing out the upper body more than a full range-of-motion deadlift ever would be able to do, noticing what I’m feeling as I hold the weight. Even rock climbers sometimes talk about deadlifts, and some of the other ‘core’ barbell exercises. I’ve never cared for benching or squats, either. I’m not a gym person, though I love as much as anyone else the concept of ‘being strong’. Years ago, I injured my back in a severe-to-me way. Ultimately found it was ‘just’ a pulled psoaz muscle and not a herneated disk! how nice. the effect on my life and mobility for a long time was that of a severe back injury. Possibly I’ve got a slight congenital back issue (someone thinks the bottom vertebra is maybe partially fused to my pelvis or something, but the x-ray was unclear). I’ve simply always had tightness in my lower back. It’s part of why sometimes I look like I stand up very strait, I think. Anyway, old back injury + legit sensitivity + proclivity to back pain. I still don’t ‘run’ (besides those barefoot hill sprints I mentioned, and that’s been only a very recent addition), but things about that portion of my back is still a point of physical sensitivity, and emotional sensitivity, for me. Every time I’ve tried deadlifting from the ground, I can see, feel, witness in video recordings, errors in form and technique, and could not generate for myself the collection of body queues I seem to need to get the form right. I’ll maybe hire a coach for IRL training someday. Imagine how thrilled I was, then, to have stumbled across this thing that gets me more of the best parts of what I always wanted from the deadlift, and less of the parts I didn’t want, from the deadlift. I’m thrilled to have discovered this vastly-more-relatable-to-rock-climbing, lower-risk-to-the-back, no-range-of-motion exercise. Where did the name come from? I watched portions of a painful amount of youtube videos, trying to find a video of someone doing this exercise like this, and couldn’t find any. It’s not often I discover particularly novel things, and I’m pleased when I do. This feels like one of ‘em. 1 It’s a no-range-of-motion isometric deadlift pin-pull. Or yielding isometric mid-thigh pin-pull-and-hold I don’t know how to signal in the name that the point of the motion is the holding, and not reps, per se. I can find zero footage on youtube of anyone doing anything quite like this. I’d like to emphasize, again, the point is not reps, the point is time under tension. Here’s the videos I collected, again: google photo album of the lifts. Maybe I’ll make Why does this feel so transferrable to climbing We’ve perhaps seen people doing the ‘no-hang’ tension block weighted pulls. I think of this exercise as a version of that. I’ve tried those exersises, I like them well enough. I don’t mind that the tension block is a one-handed thing. these yeilding isometric barbell pin pulls feel conveniently two-handed. I can feel all the columns and structures and musculature and connective tissue of my upper body (and lower body) working, hard, to maintain the position throughout the hold. When I climb right after these exercises, I can feel lots of overlapping use. Or, I do these exercises after the climbing, and can feel it then, or in the soreness. The commonality of energy pathways is distinctive. It becomes very apparent why this is an interesting exercise as one approaches ‘heavy’, whatever that is for you. Here’s a list of some of the priprioceptive interestingness: The ‘meaty’ parts of my hands are sore, again, in a delightful way, with the effort of holding the bar. the pad at the base of the thumb is sore, in a nice way the weight is very heavy, so I absolutely MUST have my hands on opposite sides of the bar. Either direction feels like a direct mimic of the ‘base’ climbing movement. An undercling or ‘regular’ palm-facing-away position I feel soreness in the intercostal muscles across the tops of my ribs, in a way that makes sense when you appreciate how much force is being carried with the the lungs acting like a balloon, rigidly working with the ribs, shoulder structures, to carry the load. delightful soreness all across the forearms, and the rest of the arm and shoulder i was having issues with callouses building (and tearing. ick. happened once. did not like it.) and found that if I set an intention of gripping the bar really really tightly, my skin sloshes around under the bar less, and skin that gets pulled at less tears less. Also, my hands get even more sore! the ways the specific shape of the bar transfers directly, directly to certain hand positions on the wall is wild. I never had considered this before. It feels like I can hold a ‘c’ shape in my hand more, and thus feel improved on crimps in different/better ways, especially roofy crimps. I can kinda curl my wrist and hooked hand + crimped finger more into a hold, and achieve an improved body position on it, as a result. To appreciate the above, perhaps hold your hand in front of you, rigidely, as if your hand and thumb were wrapped all the way around a bar bell. Flex the hand. flip the thumb over into a half-crimp position. I can now imagine stronger intercostals at the base of the knuckles, and stronger wrist flexors. Before a few months ago, it would have been hard for me to imagine how this little chain of pulling could be made independently stronger by pulling hard on a bar, and now that I’ve experienced it, it seems of obvious why these exact pulls make this complex of muscles and structures so much stronger. 2 I can feel soreness in the bones and connective tissues in the a2 pulley region and pip joints, which obviously are frequently injured structures in the hands of climbers, and being able to systemically apply load in such controlled fashion feels great for prompting the whole tissue injury/repair cascade. tendon injuries are most likely during highly dynamic moves, or after a lot of wiggly back-and-forth sawing motion has already been applied to the tendons, these lifts are none of that. Theoretically, big early strength gains of some exercises are not the muscles getting any definition of stronger, it’s that the muscle fibers are becoming coordinated; it’s that the load is so high, they’re learning to all apply force at the same time. getting from 88% muscle fiber recruitment to, say, 95% muscle fiber recruitment, seems worthwhile, right? Lots of climbing-specific exercises talk about this principal. It’s sorta like ‘free strength’. “I don’t need more muscle to pull harder, nor do I need more force to be generated by any particular muscle fiber, I simply have some muscle fibers that are not trying at all when I am pulling really hard? And I can simply ask them to try alongside the other muscle fibers already trying? heck yeah.” I have no idea what sort of numbers anyone actually has, just that there are known ways of improving the coordinated activation of muscle fibers, and as I reflect on the way these exercises work, I note the same principle being applied. Similar to the kettlebell swings, holding a round bar feels like an ‘active’ position for the palm and structures of the hand. I could easily feel an interesting and useful transfer to crimping holds, and being able to more easily hold a rounded palm when crimping, vs it flattening out into more of a drag. Because the range of motion is tiny, this feels relatively easy on my metabolic system and muscles. Again, early gains are at least partially muscle fiber recruitment type things, perhaps, and I’m thrilled for it, and don’t mind at all when that is not an avenue of further improvement. Please don’t get me wrong, my nervous system felt absolutely emptied of something I didn’t know I had, the first few sessions. The entire body is working so hard - The first time I had the weight of one of me, hanging from each arm was very interesting. I then had one-of-me plus a 25 lb dumbbell, hanging from each arm. this is difficult to me. 3 Over the last two years, I’ve had several friends go through heavy-duty surgical interventions for damaged tendons in the ankle and knee. What they have experienced, I would love to avoid. I am THRILLED to be providing stress to the whole system right now, in such safe ways. I can feel things like my achillies tendons, and lots of things inside my knees, expressing a perception of having been used, the day or two after an exercise like this. For the next three days my entire body felt like I’d stretched in a way I didn’t know I could. It feels very useful from a climbing pov to be building capacity for this sort of energy output. It’s become perceivably less effortful to hold certain body positions on the wall, now, in ways I didn’t even know I was struggling with, or realizing I could have a certain competency with. In certain moves, I kept feeling like I was “clicking”, like a magnet tile, into ideal body positions during/between moves, with the improved ease with which I could move all of my body around, because of my stronger shoulders and back. Climbing is a skill sport, and I’m pleased to use my stronger body to develop my skill. Guess what one can do more of, with a stronger body? More practicing-by-trying difficult, skillful moves! TODO add video of my surprise casual send of first v9 on the tb2? I added the video to the photo album of the lifts. or click here to view it directly. It had been months since I’d tried that boulder problem, it was the first of the grade I’ve done on the tension board. I could tell my shoulders and back felt SO STRONG in ways that were not available to me from when I’d last tried it. In the video, especially compared to earlier attempts, it’s obvious to me that I am feeling so solid in each body position throughout the climb. Sometimes it’s obvious that I’m barely holding various body positions, and in this video, it’s that obvious that each of these body positions is secure. This sensation keeps getting born out on ropes and bouldering in many different ways. I keep telling people that I climb with that it feels like I’m playing a video game, and I cashed in accrued points for a character upgrade, and I just spent it on stronger shoulders and back. It’s like my joints and the holds I’m holding onto are more inclined to ‘snap into place’ once I grab them. Fantastic, and delightful. Even if I was not climbing, though, I think I would really like these exercises. If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely spent about 20 minutes on this piece and the videos, which means you’ve spent more time reading than I usually spend doing the entire isometric pin pull exercise. So, next time you’re around a squat rack, maybe you’ll think of me and this idea and try it yourself. If you do, I’d love to hear your experience of it. I subscribe to write it now philosophies, and this exercise is now pretty familiar to me, even as it’s still novel. I anticipate I’ll keep going with it, I’ll drop updates to this post now and again. Footnotes a few of the other novel things, which I think counts for something: I was the first one I’d heard of that rode a scooter as far as Denver>Canada>Seattle>Denver, photo album though turns out now people ride their scooters literally all around the world - findable on youtube. between when I encountered scooters as a useful vehicle in the usa (2022) and made that trip (2023) I had not. Even in the decades of experience among the people at the local scooter dealer, no one had heard of someone going so far on a scooter, and they were impressed. I’m counting this as ‘genuinely novel’. It wasn’t just a long scooter trip, but skillful managing of the logistics, the route, the pacing, the sleeping. I genuinely do not like to ‘work hard’ or to suffer, so a trip like this would be unappealing unless it was also deeply comfortable, most of the time. Secondly, I’ve never seen someone else collect, render anyone’s mobility data in such granular way as this: https://josh.works/mobility-data. Lots more could be said about that. Started as a very simple basic idea that grew into something quite interesting, rendering thousands of precise trips all at once on a single global map. Are computers not amazing??? Also I feel an odd awareness of my own lived experience, being able to zoom out and see evidences, breadcrumbs, sometimes whole meals of lines, evidences of trips, life lived. mm. the data is possibly self-explanatory? A third point of interestingness, novelty, that I am pleased to have encountered, that is close-enough-to-original: ‘coning’ an intersection, aka fixing the common american-style road junctions with traffic cones. I also do interesting/novel stuff with drone footage in cities, but don't yet anything super easy to link. jk, sorta: example 1: follow-along of a group on bikes thru a park/neighborhood in Denver, example 2: smooth timelapse footage of a stroad, example 3: trader joes paring lot timelapse ↩ In certainly one of my less sufferable traits, sometimes after I have what seems like an insight, to me, it becomes clear, obvious, and then I talk to others like it’s as obvious to them as it is obvious to me, even as I have clearly never arrived at this insight until {age_at_which_insight_was_gained}, and I can “be pushy” or at least experienced as “pushy” in some ways. I don’t deny it at all, also, possibly, I am sorry/i don’t disagree with you. 😬 ↩ I’ve often used unconventional units for calculating things. I sometimes still calculate the cost of items in burritos. “{such and such} is three burriots, with quacamole, is it worth that much?” from the job where I earned about one chipotle burrito per hour. ↩

“Traffic Cones and Junction Fixes: A DIY Guide” ? this is very drafty This post is probably best viewed on desktop, with some links opening new tabs, viewed, closed, and then this post returned to. There’s a lot of videos farther down, some of them are tiktoks (sorry) and some of them are youtube videos (that’s not my stuff) and then some of my stuff is also embedded via a service called “Wistia”. I hope you watch at least some of the videos below. maybe the piece still stands up well enough without the videos. maybe. Introduction Here’s a new word, I am introducing to the lexicon: Coning, verb to place traffic cones at specific points in a road or junction to shape how people travel through the intersection. Simplifies and smooths complexity, increases safety for everyone. Dramatically reduces the four types of vehicle emissions: engine exhaust, brake dust, tire rubber microplastics, and noise. Any vehicle that is accelerating from a stop to, say, 15 miles per hour, is generating all of those emissions except brake dust, and when that vehicle has to stop again, it’ll generate the brake dust as well. The noise of a vehicle is not just it’s engine - lots of noise comes from the rolling of tires over a surface, and the sound of displaced air is quite loud. Brakes also often-enough generate noise. 1 Another unique form of engine noise pollution is that based on how the driver uses the engine, the driver can signal to everyone something about the driver’s internal emotional state. I resent this. Compare accelerating and stopping behavior to travelling smoothly through a 50 meter section of road, without using the brake or gas pedal. The engine would be operating at an idle, instead of under accelleration. no brake dust, and the tire rubber microplastic generation would be at a much lower level than those same microplastics would be generated if the car was being stopped by the brakes or accellerated by the engine. This seems audacious/unreasonable, josh, because… Consider a junction in Poynton, UK. Here’s a link to the 8 minute mark of a youtube video about this ‘shared space’ road junction. I wrote a bit more about Poynton on substack: Interlude: A Pattern of Repair, and then again, applying the concept to an intersection that I (unfortunately) must interact with regularly: A Pattern of Repair: The ‘traffic bean’ ‘coning’ an intersection would be less intensive a treatment than a traffic bean, yet both obviously move with the same sorts of energies. A few times I’ve had the priviledge of stumbling into an idea, act, or articulation that, while firmly rooted in banal phenomena in one domain, feels quite novel when applied to a new domain. This thing I’m discussing in this post is one of those novel things. ‘coning’ a road, street, or junction is one of those banal-and-novel acts. I’ll explain below, and I hope you might try something similar some day for yourself. Examples of my own coning adventures Here’s one of the very first traffic cones I set out, in my whole life, with the goal of creating/providing safety in mind. 1. South Denver, a pedestrian crossing of a residential road One rainy day, I observed from my bedroom these traffic cones floating down the street. The video tells the rest of the story: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240202349451595054 I started with what most traffic planners in America would start with: Bulb-outs As you can see in the end of the video, nothing really seemed to change. I ended up with a small change in placement (instead of bulb-outs, I placed the cones where the lane divider would be), and a HUGE change in behavior: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240611295966268718 please notice in all these timelapses that people are walking down the street, the length of it. See how they scurry out of the road when a car is present, and how confidently they walk when there is no car. Anyway, ^^ that video above was my first foray into this coning thing. Here’s a reminder of what the street looks like without any cones: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7250134620694482218 As I say in that video, the mom who walked by was wise to warn her kid about the dangers of the road. Isn’t it a bummer? She’s using the road exactly like a car would, why does she have to be threatened with horrible violence continuously by passing cars? 2 The following https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7250134620694482218 another view of the same treatment: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240680684472274218 These cones remained in place for weeks. No one moved them for such a long time. Now, the above videos all highlighted the placement of the cones. Here’s a different view, I think the drone perspective is very interesting. From most points of view, the cones are almost invisible. what an elegant intervention: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240668293420322091 another view: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240665861508402478 another view: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240639996917632302 At this point, the satisfaction I derive from this kind of stuff is undoubtedly similar to what some people experience with public art, graffiti, etc. Here’s the lightest-weight intervention I’ve ever did, that worked shockingly well: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249134328502947118 2. South Denver, noise reduction on an arterial going past cafes, breweries, lots of outdoor seating This treatment was excellent, I’m pleased with the results, the noise level came down by so much, AND things were made way safer. The cones were taken away after a few hours That idea gave birth to the second iteration, sorta on the same walking path two blocks down: wistia-player[media-id='lqt60rz6m1']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/lqt60rz6m1/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } Another intersection, later in time: wistia-player[media-id='kuqbgipm8a']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/kuqbgipm8a/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } The way one might use this phrase/concept is like so: Ick, this street is loud and dangerous, I wish someone would put some cones down. or that person almost hit that other person with their car - if that intersection was properly coned it wouldn’t have happened. or The noise along this road is wild. if the area got well-coned, it would be way quieter. Here’s another denver-area coning, very close to a few different climbing gyms, schools, parks, apartment buildings. I was very pleased with this one. All of these intersections by the way are STILL INADEQUATE even with these cones: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249752983481732394 A fully complete intersection would have something like a built-in ‘traffic curve’, either a traffic bean, or if that is a bit too big, the ‘coning’ of the intersection could cause a small deviation in vehicle path. The big issue is: if the intersection accommodates vehicles passing through it fast, say, 35 mph, without any change in direction, even a slight wiggle/deviation, it’s not fully fixed. In all these intersections, I didn’t place any cones that wasn’t delimiting what is already theoretically delimited, It’s a good enough proof of concept, though, and shows that with a tiny bit of work, any unwanted speed can be filtered out, by these cones, and building little gates, defined curves, turn radii, etc. The experience of everyone NOT in a vehicle goes up enormously in these situations. It’s almost dedignifying to enumerate the ways. I am extremely aware of how dangerous roads and junctions are. 3 Cars feel to me as dangerous as guns, and I’m accutely aware of when a car is pointed at me, if it is in motion and when it’s stationary, if there is someone in the driver’s seat, same as I’d be aware of a gun being pointed at me. The driver of that car could kill me with the press of a foot with a car, just as the user of a gun could kill someone with the press of a finger. Check out my piece on bollards for more: Bollards: What and Why. I am unable to dissociate from shit roads and dangerous dynamics created by those road designers, and the people who use them. I’ve slightly unusual points of view, but I am aware of feeling something similar about roads my whole life. I am sensitive, sometimes extremely sensitive, and in ways that unavoidably inconvenience others. If you talk to some former partners, you could get long lists of ways my sensitivity and emotional delicacy has been experienced as extremely inconveniencing. Cars, even when the engines are idling or the vehicle is electric are so loud, and one can infer so much about a vehicle and its driver from things like: relative ratios of accelerating, coasting, braking. (In a 100 second segment of driving, what is the ratio between accelerating, coasting, braking? How quickly does the driver cycle between the three, and how smoothly or sharply?) speed in many different ways - speed through curves, speed through turns this list is simply some of the things one can infer about cars from the noise. Just the noise. 3. Centeral Denver, reducing noise, improving awareness https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249752983481732394 My friend and I did this, as we rode our scooters past, a few blocks from his house, a few blocks from two climbing gyms, grocery stores. There’s a school directly adjacent to the intersection. It is not tolerable, the speeds that can be accessed by people going straight through the intersection, and how crossing it requires one to deconflict with so much space, in both directions. The cones we put down obviously changes the turn radii for cars, and created little ‘protected pockets’ for passers-by, without causing a foot or bike barrier for anyone not in a car. 4. Loveland, pedestrian crossing of a four lane road with sometimes 50+mph traffic, I got to plan a project with the local city engineer I later spent some time living adjacent to this intersection, which had a whole fascinating saga. Here’s what happened. First, I lived next to this wildly unsafe junction that feels both rural and urban. Rural, in terms of how fast/straight the roads are, and the spacing of lights, lane widths, etc. Most people driving through this intersection are coming from ‘rural’ points of origin. Eventually, in talking to neighbors, I heard stories of many car accidents, deaths, vehicles bouncing into yards, fences, trees, etc. I found a bunch of traffic cones a short walk away, and the ideas started to emerge. wistia-player[media-id='iobo0kmb31']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/iobo0kmb31/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } I planned where I’d put cones, and then did so, and got the whole before/during/after on video via drone. The improvements were magnificent. Unfortunately for all of us, this was an event witnessed almost exclusively by me. No one else was there to agree with me on how much better it was, besides the people using the junction. Most drivers simply let off the gas and coasted straight through the intersection. Those that turned reduced their speeds appropriately to turn. It was glorious. Eventually, I went back out with more cones, and city employees followed me, and tried to get me to take the cones down. (using implication, never threats or demands). I simply did my normal word-vomit when talking to authority figures: I flood them with polite, relentless, technically-laced monologue. References to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, street typologies and the implication on sightlines, speed calculations, grief (over all of our loved ones killed on/by american roads), ‘we are all out here, together, united by our desire for us and our loved ones to continue to survive’. Usually they glaze over, like a dog that licked a toad and now wants the taste out of its mouth. They left, and returned with a member of the local deputized slave patrol. She did the threatening and provocative “I need your name and ID, any prior arrests or anything I should be worried about?” routine. (Isn’t it funny how slave patrollers will weaponize their own discomfort, in a way that makes it obviously a threat?) Again, I did the verbal vomit thing, as only a wealthy-enough-to-have-access-to-lawyers-passing, white-passing american man can do. I have the privilege of treating the deputized slave patrol as a tool for people just like me. I can embody this energy, as I was raised by a person who was also a preacher and a doctor and a military pilot and a supremacist and a military officer and had a penis and was white-passing. He huffed hard on the ‘authority and patriarchy/supremacy’ pipe. Me: How often do you deal with car accidents? Lots, really? Isn’t that annoying? Here’s a way to make for less car accidents, obviously this shouldn’t be your problem, it’s an engineering thing, maybe you can help me find the person in the city responsible for the road right here? she gave me a hint (“talk to {so-and-so} in the city admin office”) which I kept ‘privilege escalating’ until I was wandering around the city of loveland department of works office building, and found my way to the city engineer’s office, Matt. The admin person gave me his email address, phone number, his physical address. It was a few blocks away in a different building so I popped over and the door I parked my scooter next to was unlocked, so I wandered inside. I’ve never been inside a municipal streets authority building before, and having read the power broker I was attending to every detail. Lots of interesting stuff inside (a sign making shop, feeds from traffic cameras) and implications for anyone who’s read seeing like a state, like… I see why big ugly rural intersections seem so important to municipal people. They have billboard-sized TV’s displaying dozens of feeds of intersections. It was one of the ugliest and most depressing things I could imagine looking at all day. traffic beans, remember? Breaks my heart to see an intersection empty, with cars sitting around waiting to go through. The rate at which people’s time is being wasted is stunning Anyway, Matt had time, and was thrilled to nerd out about road junctions. hardly sixty seconds of conversation elapsed, as I gave him a short version of how I ended up in his office, before he had google earth open and we were zipping around Loveland ‘looking’ at intersections. We spoke for a while, it was all interesting. He seemed to obviously want at least some of the same safety outcomes I wanted. What I soon ran into is the very american assumption that ‘fast vehicle movement’ correlates at all with ‘good enough trip time’, among other assumptions. He and I swapped emails, and eventually met up again at a few different intersections within loveland, him in his city pickup truck, me on my scooter, to walk around and look at different bits of ‘pedestrian infrastructure’. I kept gently pushing my goal along (a coned-and-traffic-bean’ed intersection) and eventually got permission from him to treat with hay bales a connected series of road segments/junctions, including the one directly next to the house I was living in, that I could see from my front window. The plan was: using hay bales, the smallish rectangular ones, I could build roundabout/traffic-bean-type junctions, defining the inner and outer edges of the junctions with hay bales, leaving the open space free to people walking/biking, and shaping the flow of traffic to that traffic-bean-vibe We were going to treat a series of connected intersections, including the ones closest to where I was living at the time, NOT including, in the first pass, the intersection I had first treated I was thrilled, even as it was the smallest definition of the experiment. My plan was, upon my return to that house, try to obtain a pile of hay bales and then, while he stood next to me, start arranging them on the various junctions. I obviously had a plan in mind for where bales might go on each junction. I’d ended up travelling out of contry while he and I was discussing it, was gone for a while, ended up moving, and i returned to loveland only for a few hours to collect my stuff. That hard-won project never moved forward. I am still proud of how far I got with my hay-bale traffic bean plan, though. 5. Humboldt & 16th I moved back to Denver. Soon ended up living where I currently live, as I write these words. Near this intersection at Humboldt and 16th ave. Colefax is the name for 15th ave, so this street is but a single block from Colefax. If you live in the Denver area, you know Colefax. This street-level video shows a family driving on bicycles, then a bunch of passing cars. Can you see the obvious danger? I sometimes fear I’m belaboring the point, yet I still encounter people that can look at obviously dangerous interactions and not see them. wistia-player[media-id='m8dkzdxell']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/m8dkzdxell/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } wistia-player[media-id='kuqbgipm8a']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/kuqbgipm8a/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } another view of the same intersection: wistia-player[media-id='dpgunuzdcy']:not(:defined) { background: center / contain no-repeat url('https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/dpgunuzdcy/swatch'); display: block; filter: blur(5px); padding-top:177.78%; } Misc other intersections Long ago, around the time of my first ‘coning’: this drone video of this walk with someone using a wheelchair is interesting to me. Explains why I don’t always hew to sidewalks like some people would want me to, as if they expected me to act obedient to their entitlement. another video from the above walk. Again, I think the minimum reasonable starting point is close most roads to vehicle throughput, and can you see how an arterial functions as a wall? General complaints about inadequate and dangerous and inefficient American intersections Oh, I have beef with American intersections. I hate to use them, to even witness them, so I don’t travel much by car, and when I do, it feels emotionally expensive. Feels like I’m walking on the graveyard of evidence of ethnic cleansing, and I cannot help but feel affected by the weight over the years of the death, bloodshed, misery, destroyed places and humans, that this whole regime represents. Intersections in america are as consumptive as any other part of a colonial culture. They perform unimaginably inefficiently. I wish all junctions could be evaluated by the vehicles per square meter per second standard. Here’s a bit more about that, on my/this substack Common complaints/FAQs: But Josh this is non traditional and I don’t think it will work or should work. How interesting. Here’s another video for how land is modified in expensive places to accommodate cars I contend that any modification or change to the norm is, in principal, possibly worth entertaining. Related Reading the ‘shared space’ concept in Poynton, UK (youtube.com) my words on the above shared space concept (substack.com) “Jaywalking” is a propagandist term I’ve excised from my vocabulary Evaluating Junction Function sorta off-topic, I really like this drone video I obtained, sorta a ‘in praise and hate of intersections’ I went on a walk with someone else who was using a wheelchair. this video of the walk is interesting to me. Explains why I don’t always hew to sidewalks like some people would want me to, if they expected me to act obedient. another video from the above walk. Again, I think the minimum reasonable starting point is close most roads to vehicle throughput, and can you see how an arterial functions as a wall? one of my all-time fav drone videos I made, isn’t it breathtaking, the amount of space given to these little metal boxes? and the gravitational effect they have on the buildings/environment around them. The ‘building line’ and setbacks are based on the roads, so every house is built up to a spot determined by the road. Even non-road space is dictated by roads! Footnotes The noise cuts through walls, in sometimes wildly-distracting ways. It’s hard to write about the experience of noise, since the happen in such different mediums. Should I add a 🚗 emoji every time my brain notes a car driving past, while I write this? It’s happened three times in the last sentence. 🚗🚗🚗 catches the car counter up to here. It’s not rush hour, sometimes the vehicle frequency is much higher. 🚗 Not so long ago, I 🚗 got permission from the city engineer and mayor of Golden to try cone-based speed shaping experiments in Golden, and since then have replicated the treatment and results on many different intersections. There’s a clear chronological 🚗 unfolding. I’m pleased to have video footage of almost every treatment I’ve ever done. The ‘treatment’ always varies, by the way, based on the junction, how people already use it, how many cones are available, and more. The exact treatment also unfolds🚗 with some iteration, 🚗 as you’ll see in some of the videos. A lot of walking around and making small adjustments. 🚗 🚗 i’ll stop with the “🚗 every time a car 🚗 drives past” because it’s annoying enough to experience, let alone accommodate in my writing now. I imagine you can sympathize with me being at times resentful of how an engine or a vehicle passes by and I hear it so loudly. Cities are not loud, cars are loud. When cars are not driving around (like ‘a sunday morning with 2 inches of snow on the ground’) the entire area is so, so quiet. When it’s really quiet, you can hear car engines from blocks away, sometimes. Sigh. ↩ some people might say ‘well the danger from cars is a fact of life’ and I’d retort that just as cars have streets that connect them to places, a sane mobility network would have a similar level of ‘street ennervation’ via car free streets, as well. If even one out of five of every north/south and east/west streets was shut down to cars passing through via modal filters, and slight traffic bean type treatment at the junctions where cars pass, the network would be transformed. It’s not ‘complete streets’ it’s ‘connected car-free streets’. Linear park type vibes would be the obvious upgrade to car-free streets. ↩ Many, many people seem disconnected, emotionally, physically, with something about the experience of being in/around personal vehicles. I could rant/rave about americans, but it’s really american-ness, which is a certain form of supremacy thinking. How many of your friends need to have been killed by a person driving a car, for you to have some unenjoyable emotional experiences with aspects of being around anyone who is driving? How many people that you know need to have been hit by someone in a car (but not killed!) for you to sorta not be down with the whole thing? How about animals killed? ↩

Introduction A few months ago, maybe in November, certainly by December, I began this ‘barefoot sprinting up grassy hills’ thing I’m going about to talk about in detail below. Shortly after I started, I began making use of the kettlebells I’d usually ignored at the gym(s) I have access to. I’ve been dual-tracking in time the two topics in this piece, kettlebell swings and sprints, but because of how text works, I must discuss one of them first, and one of them second. I’ve been hustling the kettlebell swings hard lately. If you’re one of the folks I’ve hung out with in-person, you know what I’m talking about. You are reading the blog post I said I’d send you. Someone said, believably, credibly: tell me more about these kettlebell swings, because I will do literally anything to be a stronger climber. Gladly. As usual, I’ve got a page a few pages of paper notes that I’ve put together across time, and am now bringing it to here and organizing it. I first crossed paths with kettlebells, and the ‘heavy two-handed kettlebell swing’ many, many years ago. I wrote my first piece about kettlebell swings in 2013. Did not write about them again until now. In 2013, I was using 55 lb kettlebells, and didn’t have access to other sizes. Now that I have access to real kettlebells, and at a variety of weights, I am find a lot more interestingness for myself. I still stand by that piece, and regularly since then have made kettlebell swings a part of how I use my body. Maybe two months ago I brought kettlebell swings back into my life, first time in many years, and I’m thrilled. My back feels AMAZING, and a bunch of other things. In case this information makes it incrementally more likely that any reader harvests any of the same nice things, here’s all of my beta. I try to write things when it’s first coalecing in my mind, and this current piece is no exception. Kettlebell Swings TODO: Add video of 2-handed swings. Here’s an album showing one-handed and two-handed kettlebell swings. The two-handed swings are me & a 75 lb kettlebell, doing reps 81-100 for that day’s work. The one-handed swing is from a different day showing reps 1-5 on each arm with a 55 lb kettlebell. I believe I did ten total on each side that day. The blog post about kettlebell swings I wrote now 12 years ago is maybe worth referencing. I no longer have the home-made kettlebell. The piece is a good-enough starting point. I remember getting a TON out of kettlebell swings long ago, especially part of training for a high-elevation marathon, and I’m thrilled that I used them then. It helped my back stay healthy, for sure. Then, after I stopped running, I stopped the kb swings, and then WRECKED!!!! my back doing something completely unrelated, and have not run since then… Until now (More on sprinting below) I also didn’t really do kb swings the last few years. Then, for reasons that do not have anything to do with climbing, I found a way to bring back into my life running, and stumbled backwards back into kettlebell swings, and have noticed so many interesting things as a result. In a way that is no longer surprising to me, my climbing has also been nicely effected as well, even though that was never the original intent of the kettlebell swings. Originally, I didn’t expect the exercise to do anything for my climbing, and in fact felt bummed when the kettlebell swings would sometimes leave me tired enough that I felt I was having a lower-effort, ‘maintenence’ climbing session, rather than a fresh, ‘try-hard’ session. Then, because of a slight reframe, I’m now thrilled by the soreness I feel from the kettlebells, and don’t mind that i’ve been carrying fatigue into most of my climbing sessions since I’ve started ‘spamming kettlebell swings’. Here’s misc notes I collected across a few days/weeks: I really don’t like to work hard, or even breath that hard. When doing my swings, I always breath through my nose, per Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I started with sets of 5-10 reps. Then rest until my breath returns all the way to normal, and my heart rate, then i do more. Keep going at a low rate of effort until ~100 reps, if feeling good. If I’m a little sick or whatever, I found myself dropping the weight a lot and still finding 60 reps difficult enough to stop there. (that was part of how I knew I was sick at the time. Came down with a slow-onset illness, and I noticed it first by a stunning loss of power. 60 reps of a 60 lb kb is vastly less work than 110 reps of a 75 lb kettlebell, but when I was sick the 60 reps at low weight were harder than the 110 reps of 75lb swings) It’s impossible to do kb swings well without chalk, I used to not use chalk, or I’d do swings even if I didn’t have chalk, and that is no longer the case. i found the weights I was using to be so heavy that simply holding on to the dang thing was often-enough a hard part of the exercise. I now recall, the last time I did kettlebell swings without chalk, legitimately, correctly fearing the bell breaking free of my hands during some part of the motion. I don’t climb without chalk, I do not swing kettlebells without chalk. As soon as any part of the form would ‘break’, if it ever did, I’d end the set. It almost never broke. both of the videos here have pretty good form. My form isn’t always the exact same, across sets, especially the one-arm swings. In both videos, my heels sometimes come off the ground. It’s reflective of me having to try very hard. Often-enough my heels do not rise off the ground, which feels more correct. Heels up or not, I’m pleased with it, because it shows that my form is and looks quite good, even though I know the exercises were quite effortful. Back and shoulders in particular look “packed”. It looks much more straight forward than it felt in my body. an unexpected crossover: Kettlebell Swings and Climbing I noticed lots of kb-swing-related soreness while climbing. Some climbing moves became for a time very sensory-rich because of how it was interacting with soreness recepters. The soreness in my hands after the KB swings is similar to the soreness in my hands I experienced after trying something from Tyler Nelson’s insta: Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (instagram) sometimes, usually, I’d begin the climbing session with kettlebell swings. Sometimes I’d do the swings at the end. Sometimes I’d do only kb swings, and would not climb, if I didn’t feel like climbing. the gym I use is close enough that I can walk to it, and will walk/scoot right by it often enough even if I don’t seek it out, so it’s trivial for me to pop in for a few minutes of using a single piece of equipment, and then continue on with my day. #scooterthings Often enough, when doing the kb swings before the climbing session, I’d notice how nice it felt to be really warmed up, and warmed up with speed, not just slow ‘warm up’ climbing. The kb is very demanding, and takes speed, the same way that jumping into the air takes certain speed. It’s really nice to soak the nervous system in this level of effort, and helps for the climbing. I’d do the kb swings, and feel really well warmed up for bouldering. I also sometimes would feel really sore from the kb swings in ways that would be EXTREMELY OBVIOUS when I was climbing. I was thrilled bc that meant I was getting a ton of useful crossover. right now, as you read these words, consider ‘shrugging’ your shoulders, up towards your ears, and then pushing them back ‘down’, with firmness, and rigidity - these were very often the muscles that I’d feel EXTREME fatigue in, across days and weeks, and plenty of other muscles, but that these muscles in my body were so sore was continuously surprising to me. I pretty quickly dialed down good-enough technique, and then started adding weight. I got to 75 lb two-arm swings, spent a few sessions there, that was the heaviest kettlebell at that gym, then I found an 88 lb kettlebell at a different gym and have now used that one a few times. The first time I did it, I’d still not tried any one-handed kettlebell swings. I’ve now done a bunch, and the second time I used that 88 lb kettlebell, it felt shockingly easy to hold on to and swing, compared to how it felt the first time. It’s still wildly hard. That 2nd set was yesterday, as I type these words, I can feel soreness in my thumb, if I stretch it, each of my fingers, and much more. update from a few weeks later than that paragraph was typed^^: that 88lb kettlebell, while not feeling light, now feels much, much, much easier to move around. I giggled to myself the last time I used it, because of how easy it was to hold on to, and to swing!!! this kettlebell swing thing is a high-value 5-10 minutes in every session. i almost always do 100 swings. even when moving slow, it’s only like 7 minutes. If you read half this blog post, you’ve spent far longer reading than I spend on most kettlebell swinging sessions, which, for the record, even the ‘active 7 minute workout’ is still mostly me standing next to a kettlebell, not swinging it. I weigh 140lbs and started with a 55lb kb, then 65, then 75, then 88. Spent a few sessions at each weight before going up one. I switched to one-arm work with a 45 lb suitcase/farmers carry a few times, then 55lb one-arm swings, then 60 lbs, and get use from 45lb one-arm swings too. I do between 60 and 130 reps of two-arm swings, and started with like ten reps of one-arm swings, then 20, 30, and have not done more than 40 in a session so far. an unexpected variation: One-handed kettlebell swings I’ve got a video of me doing one-handed kb swings here. I started one-handed swings the very first time on accident, because when I went to the gym, the 70 and 75 lb kettlebells were in use. So I grabbed a 55, and thought “i bet I can still get a version of the exercise I want”. Oh, wow, I was correct. It feels so stability-encouraging of my toros, back, spine, ‘the box’ of the upper body, because of it’s asymetric nature. I could feel my spine and the mucles along it, and the entire “box” of my upper body (sides, front, back, bottom of my core), straining to maintain their body position. Straining to resist movement, rather than straining to move. Wildly applicable to climbing movements. My forearms and hands were quite nicely stressed by the effort - I could feel the familiar sense of fatigue in the muscles/connective tissue inside of my hands, the fleshy part of my thumb, I could feel fatigue and stress in the middle bone of my fingers, too. not the bone in the tip, not the bone connecting to the palms. The one in between. How nice. I could feel sensation from the muscles along my spine all that night and the next day - nothing felt painful or damaged, simple soreness and the feeling of use. I could tell the entire system had been thoroughly stressed. It felt so good. I could feel my rib intercostals and so many stabilizing muscles that night, feeling so sore and happy as I crawled into bed and went to sleep. I’ve had that feeling in my body now every time I’ve done KB swings, and usually carry perceivable fatigue into the next day, but it’s partially because I’m often-enough increasing the ‘work’ that I do every session. Once I started one-arm swings, I’d do five reps at a time, per side. I started at 55lbs, then went to 60 a few times, tried 45 lb swings once, liked it, and will probably keep upping the reps and weight as it feels good. I’ll slowly ease the rep count up, and sets. I started with 5 reps per side, then did 8, then reduced the weight and went to ten reps per side, and maybe 40 swings total, across a few sessions. other variations to the two-handed kb swing Hold a kb that’s like 1/3rd your body weight while standing around, or stretching, or shifting weight and doing bodyweight squats and stretches and stuff. Bounce on the toes. Switch it back and forth between your hands often. I started with like a small number of minutes of holding it, while moving around. The one-arm weight/motion is very interesting, both while moving around or perhaps while remaining very still. after a 45 lb/33% bodyweight suitcase carry, a 55lb one-arm kb swing isn’t such a leap, even though at first I surprised myself with how much I could move with the single-armed swing. try to move slowly under/around the kb. Think doing light yoga while holding a kettlebell. mega challenging, interesting. One-leg balancing, golfball pickup type motions, if you want. Felt to me promotive of stability in ways that justified the effort. So much for kettlebells. These have been something I’ve been doing regularly now for a few months. The same length of time that I’ve been doing this sprinting thing… Barefoot Grassy Hill Sprints In The Park I started these sprints I am about to describe before I restarted the KB swings The sprints had been going great for maybe two weeks, and then one of the times I walked past the kettlebells at the gym, I was like ‘my back and legs are already feeling great/tired, maybe i’ll be able to do kettlebell swings without my back feeling terrible the next day.’ I was right. Anyway, here’s free-associating through sprints, as recorded in a paper notebook across a few days: The idea originally had nothing to do with “running”. it started with ‘grounding’. A few friends have spoken in some length about grounding, over the years, the idea always seemed plausible, and I never did any particular action in response to it. years later, another friend that I’d meet at Cheesman Park, throwing frisbee, talked about it as he was taking his shoes off on a warm day in the fall, a few months ago. I thought ‘what a reasonable idea’, as I took my own shoes/socks off and went barefoot for the rest of the frisbee throwing session. Eventually, I started going barefoot often-enough when the weather was nice and we were throwing a frisbee, but usually never took more than a few lazy steps at a time to catch a disk, while barefoot. relevant: years ago (2020) I took a gnarly back injury and basically have not run since then, and for a long time could barely walk. Then even short walks would wreck me. Shortly before the injury, I’d run the Leadville Trail Marathon, and was climbing, so I was pretty abled, and the difference was profound. Deserves it’s own blog post or two, some time. As I think on it, it really changed me, the time of that injury, the things I experienced immediately afterwards. also relevant, years before that injury, after reading the Born to Run book that made the rounds, maybe in 2009 or 2012 or whenever. That was the one and only other time in my 35 years I’d done a specific ‘barefoot run’, for like 12 minutes, on a patch of grass at a park. My calves were DESTROYED, even though it was a short run, and I was used to long runs in normal shoes. I never ran barefoot again, but the memory stuck with me. So, back to 2024… I don’t have running shoes, and didn’t want to have to obtain another pair. I also know that walking up a hill is lower-impact on the body than a level surface or down a hill. I also know that walking on grass is lower-impact than walking on asphalt, concrete, or dirt. It’s gentle on the skin. So, I figured if I ran, and even sprinted, with a strong body position, up a hill, on grass, while barefoot and on the balls of my feet, and went only short distances, while doing lots of walking or standing around, I might not injure my back, and might find it interesting enough. I was right. It was all sorts of interesting, enjoyable, peaceful. I’m calling this ‘sprinting’, but it also involved plenty of ‘meandering back from whence I sprinted at a very, very leisurely pace’. I started with a short distance and a gentle but fast run. More than ten paces, probably less than 20, usually only the distance I could run while holding a single breath, or maybe two, because breathholding and nasal breathing. It’s a hold-over, always-running script in my brain. Ensuring I’m breathing through my nose, and sometimes holding my breath, or breathing in a very controlled way. Sprint sprint sprint, then walk, lazily, back to where I began, then walk around a little more, then sprint sprint sprint, repeat. It is vanishingly rare that I begin a sprint while still breathing hard, at all, from the prior sprint, and I usually let plenty of time elapse after my breath has all the way slowed down again. That was the routine, and it’s been extremely rewarding. TODO: create photo album, link to convey the gist of the vibe of the sprint/walk things 👉 Here’s a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints These “sprints” vs. distance running I’m appreciating how uneasy I am naming things sometimes, and ‘sprints’ is making me uneasy. It’s emphasizing the wrong thing. Alas. So much about the experience compares/contrasts with running. I like easy things, and tend to do more of something if it’s easy than if it’s difficult. Here’s ways this sprinting thing is easy: It’s barefoot, and I’m always close to where I start, so I can show up wearing ‘regular’ shoes, normal clothing, with a backpack, coffee, and more. Drop the bag, take off the outer layer of cloathing (i’ll have shorts or leggings under my pants, pretty much all the time, in the winter), take off shoes and socks, fold it all neatly in the grass/under a tree and I’m ready to run. I started this in the winter in colorado. there’s plenty of sunny days, and as long as there’s not snow on the ground, I’ll run. I’ve run barefoot in as cold as like 21 degrees farenheight. Only because the sun was out, and there was no snow. Again, much of the niceness to me of the sprints isn’t even the sprinting, it’s the walking around on the ground barefoot. Sometimes it’s cold, or the ground is wet in different ways. wet ground still counts as ‘nice’. It’s like a tiny little ice bath, when it’s snow melt or recently frozen. Like I said, I prefer comfort, and I usually run in dry, warm grass, but there’s a blob of trees where I run, and I sometimes interact with the shadow, which keeps ice/swow longer than the spot in the sun. Or I run/walk/stand mostly in the shadows of the trees, in the warmth. The hill I run up is south-facing, and because it’s sloped, water flows off it, so it dries out really quickly after snow, and becomes very usable very quickly, even when lots of the rest of the ground is covered with snow. Having my backpack with water in it, coffee, my coat, extra layers, makes it convenient even in the winter. Since I ride my scooter even in the cold, I’m accustomed to having a pair of leggings (that I can run in) under whatever pants I’m wearing that day anyway. I warm up by sometimes moving at a walking speed, but doing ‘high knees’ or doing a slow, ‘in place’ jump on each leg. It can look sorta like skipping. It can ‘build’ towards you doing something that looks like running through thigh-deep water. My goal was always to simply stress enough that I’d feel it the next day, on the bottoms of my feet. It wasn’t an aerobic workout, it wasn’t a leg workout. I’ll never forget how much a 2-mile barefoot run did me in, when I let myself run barefoot with my normal distance running form, in high school. The first session I did a low number of trips up the hill and back, I stopped while I felt fine and fresh, and I reflected ‘this small amount of movement is still more than I’ve had for a while’. It felt great, and as importantly, felt great the next day. Since I was at the park again anyway, throwing frisbee with a friend, I did some more ‘sprints’ up the hill. I’m a curiosity-driven person, I don’t know if that comes across as why these sprint things are so interesting to me. Eventually, I started jogging slowly back to the start, sometimes, and immediately would sprint again. Or I’d walk back, walk some more, walk even more, stand stationary for a bit, and then sprint again. After my sprints, to continue with the theme of applying impulse to the balls of my feet, I would/will hop on the balls of my feet, bouncing with two feet a few times and then landing firmly on one foot, to try to catch as much force as I could on each side. I could feel the gentle soreness the next day, always. I’d always evaluate how I felt the next day, and never pushed anything ‘hard’ or ‘got worked’ or anything, still have not, in any particular session. It feels so good in the balls of my feet, the arches, calves, supporting structures. I have found tons of interestingness in the simple observation and sensation of the soreness. I don’t count things, either. I don’t count reps, steps, distance, time. I start when my breath is still and slow, and I usually stop before it’s much more than ‘slightly elevated’. I got the entire sprint workout from a recent warm day, here. The first video, it was a bit too sunny, so I moved into the shade of some trees, and finished the sprints, in the second timelapse video. The whole thing took less than ten minutes. It feels so nice getting sunshine on my skin (colorado, afterall) and grass, dirt, moisture on my feet. My body feels so good, months later, still doing these sprint things. SO GOOD! I’ve been doing kettlebell swings throughout, too. Sometimes on days I’d run I’d skip the swings. When there’s snow out and I don’t sprint, I’m vastly likely to do some kettlebell swings. Often I’ll do both, because both the park and the gym is ‘right on the way’ for me, to many places. The park is close enough I can walk there, or I’ll take my scooter and convert a 12 minute walk to a 4 minute scoot. My brain and mood enjoy the experience. I’ll often take a frisbee and text my normal frisbee throwing friend(s), and he’ll sometimes join me for some frisbee tossing. I might frisbee before, during, or after the sprints. I’ve done these sprints with Eden. We were walking through cheesman already, she was asleep in the jogger, so I parked her jogger where I usually sprint, in the shade of a tree, and did the running right next to it. Then tom met me for some frisbee, we tossed for a while, then Eden woke up and was ready to depart, so we did. the whole thing is quite peaceful, full of ease, effortlessness. It’s nice to not spend a single dollar on traditional running gear. I don’t like the impact of doing anything on asphalt, and I won’t run on a road that is cambered, because it feels devestating to one’s body, to run across a slope like that. I don’t have to deal with cars, in this sprinting thing, either, and I don’t hear any engines nearby, unlike running on a road. When traveling, out of town, without access to Cheesman Park, and still wanting to do these sprints, I modified it to run in the playing field of a school near where I’ve visited. It was all fine, by the way. I prefer to run up a hill, yet this format seems to work on a level surface, well enough. The whole workout can be done in 5 minutes, or, if I’m feeling a longer session, it will stretch across many more minutes. Grand conclusions I’m so aware of how some of my skeleton and muscles function together often-enough to maintain the shape of a box, other times these systems function to form something of a column. The column of my spine is very perceivable along side the ‘box’ of my torso. I’m aware of holding tension/stiffness/maintaining a position through my whole body, in various situations. my climbing feels better. way better. My shoulders feel strong, my fingers feel strong, my core feels strong. It’s been interesting to experience the transfer of power from holding the round kb handle, for instance, and the ‘c’ shape one’s hand makes when crimping on steep holds. This is the ‘active hand position’ tyler nelson talks about. Being able to hold that ‘c’ is easier to me now, dramatically so, having ‘trained’ it, unintentionally, with kettlebells. I feel light on my feet when walking around. I still do not like to train, io don’t think it’ll change. I am thrilled that with almost zero time I get so much. The sprinting is also ‘walk barefoot in the grass in a park in the sun’ which obviously we should all be so lucky as to get a little bit of that every day. It’s nice for my 🧠. usually I have earplugs in and can only hear my own breath, when I do the sprints. And kettlebells. I wear ear plugs most of the time I’m not at home, and even some of the time I am. 😬 Ear plug wearing while exercising seems to make it effortless for me to perceive my own breath. I feel light on the wall. the one-arm swings + sprints helped me feel the intense usage of arms/shoulder girdle/the sides/front/back/bottom of the ‘box’ of my core. (Do not neglect the bottom of the box of the core! Kegles & pelvic floor strength is for everyone with a pelvis!) Updates on sprints after two more weeks I’m still quite pleased. I did some unexpectedly long walks on concrete, amidst some of the prior exercise, and I felt much stronger, most of the time, than usual. I think it would have been too many miles if I hadn’t been getting stronger. I did like three seven-mile days in a row, all back to back. I got a slight over-use tendon sensitivity on one of my feet. There was, and to a much lesser degree still is, pain around the movement of lifting my right toe, entirely coherent with a regular walking motion. I modified my gait a little, when it was really bad, and didn’t use it until it felt mostly better, and I’ve been easing back into using it. It was hurting quite appreciably for a few days, and now five days later it’s still delicate and I retain some of my accommodations. Sooo I wish I hadn’t done that to myself. There was a day after the big huge days of walking where I thought “hmm, this feels like it is damaged” and I went on a bit more of a barefoot walk in Cheesman than I wish I had. That night is when I realized it was pretty sensitive. The toe looks/feels like a bruise along the top of it, close to what it would feel like if the nail had been beaten into the nail bed (like after a long run, something I experienced often enough marathon training). Truly, this is the only pain of substance I’ve experienced. All the rest of the pain has been pain of interest, where I note slight sensitivities and sorenesses as I move around, in certain ways, body positions, motions, and it’s all, still, interesting. I appreciate how I’ve felt pleasent stress inside of my knee, the tops of the shin bones. I like how my knees and ankles feel. The sprints still feel worthwhile, and the time walking/bounding barefoot continues to be time very well spent. Updates on kettlebells after two more weeks some gyms have kettlebells that have rough, textured handles. The high-to-me weights are therefore rough on the skin of my hands. some kettlebell handles are too rough for me to feel comfortable with the swings. I could feel myself trying to accommodate it somehow and it was hurting, so I did a lot less reps. The skin at the base the fourth finger always gets pulled by the kettlebell, picks up callouses that have never torn but have sometimes felt close. Ideal kettelbell handles look like brushed metal, polished smooth. Don’t forget the chalk. I’m still getting lots of climbing-specific benefits from the one-armed swings. I’ve now done both lower-weight higher rep one-arm swings, and higher-weight lower-rep schemes. It’s all been interesting to me, which is good enough. It continues to feel deeply supportive of strong climbing. I’m sorta annoyingly still telling lots of people about this strange magic that helps my back feel great, and everything else too. If you’ve done more than skim a few paragraphs of this article, you’ve probably spent more time reading than your first two kettlebell workouts would take. I was having issues where the heaviest swings were pulling at the callouses at the base of each hand’s 4th finger. Eventually I noticed that if I sqeeze the handle a bit more at the bottom of the swing, it seems to pull less hard on the skin. So, if the skin in the hands starts hurting, squeeze harder? My fingers and hands feel nice. I’m not surprised, as often-enough I’ve felt profoundly sore in the small muscles inside my hands themselves, and all over the upper body. Much of the fatigue and soreness moves in waves through the shoulders and ‘shrugging’ motions. I am really curious for someone else to replicate this, doing lots of heavy two handed kettle bell swings, and eventually trying one-handed (heavy) kettlebell swings. I did one arm swings recently with 65 lbs, which is like 48% of my bodyweight. Heaviest I’ve done yet, and felt ‘lighter’ than the first time I tried 55 lb one-armed swings. My form and posture keeps getting better, and have I mentioned I feel stronger? More notes from a few weeks later I’ve regularly been dealing with the skin on my hands suffering under the weight of the kettlebell. HUGE NEWS! When I squeeze the kettlebell handles more tightly, much of the discomfort related to the skin pulling goes away. It took years of swinging a kettlebell for me to make this connection, I’ve never heard it articulated before. 🧐 I was obviously squeezing enough to hold onto it, but the skin was ‘sloshing’ around under the kettlebell. this is now minimized when I squeeze the bell harder. Huzzah. Related Reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (tyler nelson instagram) Driven by Compression Progress a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints a photo album containing two videos - two-handed swings, reps 80-100, with a 75 lb kettlebell, and one-handed at 55 lbs Footnotes

Introduction Yes, peeing. Also called ‘pissing’, or ‘urination/urinating’. I noticed a collection of thoughts emerging in my mind, tied together with a very specific theme. I was pretty grown before I had necessarily encountered any of these things, so if any of this is interesting or relevant to any of you, may it go well for you. Please see todays ten thousand for more context. Also, would you believe this is only the second most contentious thing I am writing today? The piece that is full of actual spicy takes: I think I believe in magic, & implications Elimination Communication (useful for infants and their caretakers) The first way I want to talk about peeing is to bring attention to something that is pretty darned cool, and I was routinely fascinated by my own observations of it. “Elimination Communication” is a strategy of learning to communicate with an infant around its own elimination. It’s a full drop-in strategy/replacement for what someone is talking about when they say “potty training” or “using diapers” today. (Eden never ‘got potty trained’ because she never ‘got diaper trained’.) Babies have routines around when they pee and poop, like you and me. If you leave a newborn naked on a puppy pee pad or a little helper waterproof mat while they’re doing their normal infant thing, you’ll be able to see when they eliminate. You might notice that there is facial expressions or movements or sounds that happen before the elimination, and you might start giving the kid ‘potty-tunities’, where you hold them seated in your lap over a little tupperware, when it seems like a good time. (upon transitions, after they’ve been sleeping, seated for a while, etc) You take a deep breath for relaxation, their back against your chest, and as you exhale you say “pss pss” or maybe ‘mm mm’. If they have a pee, they might pee, a poop, they might poop. Otherwise, they might squirm a bit and crawl right off and carry on with the day. We taught eden how to say ‘all done’ as one of her first hand signals, so she could simply wave a hand in the air when done. You’ll always give more ‘potty-tunities’ than the kid needs, and once you start giving enough well-timed potty-tunities that the kid happens to using the container regularly, you’ll be amazed at how much ease exists in your life. It’s peaceful, and how traditional socieities without industrialized diaper systems would did this. It’s how many people around the world today learn. no diaper changes, can be done literally anywhere, without interrupting anything, like a conversation. If outside, one can help the kid pee into the grass. No container required. Eden wore lots of long shirts, no diaper or pants, and then legwarmers that went all the way up her legs. We could give her a pottytunity with zero fuss, and she quickly learned the routine of it too. She was only a few months old when often enough she would wake up from a long nighttime sleep with a dry diaper, as soon as she stirred, we’d give her a pottytunity, and immediately she released a huge amount of urine, and then was ready to begin the day. It’s an experience. I’d suggest starting with the go diaper free podcast/resources, if you find yourself in this spot. Forms of ease that were experienced were: easy to use cloth diapers, because MOST eliminations would be effortlessly caught in a container zero “diaper rash”. (i didn’t know that the reason some diapers talk so much about how absorbant they are is bc it’s common to leave a soiled diaper on a kid in some situations! Couldn’t be me) eden never had to cry to announce an upcoming elimination, OR to announce that that she had a wet diaper. She usually didn’t wear diapers of any sort, and never when anything was wet. Obv she eventually was able to simply announce to us when she needed help with the bathroom. paired well with a bidet (more on that below) On the Squatty Potty I’ve long been very pleased with the squatty potty I’ve had. I suggest you watch this extremely classic commercial: Squatty Potty Unicorn Commercial One can sorta ‘fake’ a squatty potty by simply squatting on the floor while eliminating, instead of sitting on the toilet seat. It’s more comfortable, though, IMO to squat while using the squatty potty platform, or to prop your legs on the platform while sitting on the toilet seat like usual. I think ‘propping legs on squatty potty while sitting on the toilet like usual’ is how most people use the squatty potty. I put my feet on the squatty potty, and then squat over the toilet, to use it. Very comfortable. Would endorse. Anyone out there who is pooping is sitting or squatting when they’re doing so, regardless of if they have a penis or a vulva. That in mind… not only do I squat/sit to poop, I also squat/sit to pee. On why I sit when I pee For many years, I have almost exclusively sat down to urinate. I have a penis, and I know it’s common-enough for others who also have a penis to stand when they pee. I don’t like to stand when I pee. I don’t remember exactly why I started sitting. It may have been after I took a back injury that left me unable to stand normally or without pain, even for very short periods of time, or maybe was already the case before then. One quickly notices, when sitting to pee: it’s comfortable there’s zero splashing in any way, not on the toilet bowl, the seat, the area behind the seat, ones legs or pants. One notices, if peeing while standing: one feels little dropplets of pee or toilet bowl water sometimes bouncing out of the bowl if one is wearing pants and thus not feeling the droplets on one’s skin directly… one is still splashing urine on one’s pants. When one cleans a toilet regularly, it’s effortless to tell if someone is peeing in it while standing. There’s a yellow gunk buildup behind the toilet bowl from the constant splashing. nooooo thank you. once someone, upon seeing me in the bathroom peeing for the first time, said: that is the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen a man do. 🤷‍♂️. I say this person would be considered a credible evaluator of attractive attributes in people with penises.1 By the way, when I am using public restrooms, I’m more likely to use a urinal and then stand off to one side, aiming to make as oblique an angle between the stream and the urinal, to achieve some of what is achieved with the shape of splashless urinals If I use a regular seated toilet out in the while, I’ll almost exclusively squat over it (for peeing or pooping). I mostly squat over my toilet at home, too, but I combine it with the squatty potty for a very comfortable squat. (by that I mean my butt doesn’t come in contact with the seat often-enough) This isn’t super novel to me. I use my own bathroom many times a day. I know plenty of other people with penises who also sit when they pee. So, if you have a penis, and don’t often pee, consider trying it out more often and see what you think. If you have a penis and want to possibly reduce the cleaning burden of the toilet where one pees, certainly sit down. And if you’re sitting, try squatting, AND try squatting WHILE USING THE SQUATTY POTTY. mega comfy. Bidets and Wand Bidets Since at least 2019, I’ve used a bidet, exclusively, to clean after defecation. I long used a under-the-seat tushy bidet. One still needs to dry oneself after using a bidet, so most people who have bidets still use toilet paper. It is a lot less toilet paper and used in a different way, because it’s needed soley to dry the skin. When the pandemic happened and toilet paper shortages were a thing, it felt satisfying to not be affected. One can completely get off toilet paper by using a designated fabric wash cloth to dry, too. The under-the-seat bidets can be sorta a pain to install. The warm-water function ends up being pointless. I ended up switching to a wand-style, hose-style bidet a few years ago, and never went back. they come as a two-pack from Amazon for like $30, I’ve now installed them in quite a few different houses. A bidet and especially a wand bidet helps with cloth diapers and elimination communication. Effortless to rinse out the container when used, or rinse of the cloth diaper if it has a little poop on it, before running it through the washing machine. A wand bidet helps with cleaning the toilet itself, and if it’s near the tub, you can use it to rinse things off in the tub. A wand bidet doesn’t interfere with the toilet seat. The clip for holding it sits over the toilet bowl itself, so there’s no screws to be dealt with, it doesn’t even need to have a wall-mounted clip. One doesn’t need to really touch oneself when using it - I direct the stream of water into my other hand, which I use to splash around or scrub anything that needs it. Using the second hand is key wand-bidet usage beta. One needs no hands when using a seat mounted bidet, but then one is getting a jet of water STRAIGHT TO THE BUTT! (or the vulva). The wand bidet lets you easily direct the water to flow over, across, parallel to, anything that needs it. You don’t have to spray it straight at your skin. It’s extremely comfortable for anyone with pain or sensitivity in the region. Not having to use paper preserves the skin, if it’s sensitive. If one is pregnant and needing to use the bathroom a lot, a bidet of any sort is gold. Notes on a two-container toilet system Long ago, a friend nerd-sniped me with this amazing book: The Humanure Handbook: Shit in a Nutshell I read it all, found it exceptional. Cannot unread it. Was written by someone a few miles from where I went to college, he said instead of writing a PH.D dissertation about bacteriology that no one would read, I decided to write a book about humanure that no one would read… and now we’re on to the fourth edition. a surprising number of people have wanted to read this. I was so curious by it, I ended up setting up a full, working, two-container toilet system. This was possibly the most interesting thing I did that year, tons of learnings, and I kept being shocked at the convenience and ease that was being experienced as a result. Alas, I no longer live in that house, but I plan on setting this all up again when I next have the opportunity. I wrote in various ways/places a lot of words about what I experienced, and I’ll probably bring that here when I find them. Small people peeing For eden, at home we have a portable toilet that is available to eden at all times. She usually likes to use the regular toilet, which has a stool in front of it, and usually gets a little help, if she wants. She sometimes opts to use her toilet. In her stoller, I keep this portable kids toilet. She knows we always have it, or almost always have it, especially if we’re going out for a while, and we can use it under a tree or in a private-ish place, even when at a park, and it’s provided a lot of ease to all of us, when using a ‘regular’ bathroom isn’t an option. Modern american bathrooms, especially at commercial facilities, have bright lights, bad accoustics, smells, strange sight lines, etc etc etc. Not super kid friendly. A portable toilet is mega convenient, mega peaceful. She also can still simply pee in the grass when she wants, though doesn’t exercise that option as much as she did as when she was an infant. Conclusion I really like ease. I want ease, and usually I want it to be effortless. I know, I know. There’s a lot of ease baked into Eden’s elimination routines. That was a big piece of what I wanted to highlight. If you, or anyone you know, finds themselves on a path of helping a newly-born person sus out peeing and pooping, maybe you’ll think of some of these things. Then, of course, the other main part of this piece has nothing to do with kids and helping kids use the bathroom - it has everything to do with helping me use the bathroom, and I like to be comfortable, clean, and I don’t mind at all being a little unconventional. on that note, I’m gonna go use the bathroom/squatty potty/my ability to squat/a wand bidet/a washcloth, brb It feels strange to type so many words about urination (and, of course, technically, defecation), in some ways, and yet I also know I spend a lot of time/frequency peeing. It’s a pretty core human experience. I like things to be easy (squatty potty for me, elimination communication for infant), clean (wand bidet, sitting to pee), and I like where I’ve ended up. Footnotes I note my language feeling most natural when I use phrasing like “people with penises” and “people with vulvas” as generalized stand-ins for ‘male’ and ‘female’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’-coded language. I’d long disliked the latter language without finding a good-enough replacement until I read Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters–And How to Get It. ↩