Travel Workout Tips

For better or worse, I’m getting to travel for work more and more these days. Here are a few tips for making the most of your hotel gym away from home.

1. Set a time limit

Decide before you walk in the gym how long you have to work out. It’s easy to wander in circles wondering which of the broken equipment you should avoid or which of the novel equipment you should include in your workout.

2. If there's a pool, you better swim

This is more of a philosophy than making sure you swim. Use the opportunity to work on a weakness. For a lot of people, swimming is a weakness because they just don’t get to do it often. Working on swimming away from home is something to keep in mind, because although it will be difficult to lift heavy or do the workouts you’re used to, by focusing on a weakness you can still make progress.

3. Use the "weird" equipment

Your workout is meant to be fun. Fun often means not having an expectation of what score you’re “supposed” to get. So hop on that recumbent bike, do some bicep curls, jump on that weird Bosu ball thing that’s been sitting there for 10 years. Have fun, and do something weird.

4. On the third day, see the sun

You’re on a trip. See the surroundings. Get outside on a run, or just go for a walk. If you’re on a work trip grinding, most likely you won’t get too much chance to wander. If after 3 days, you haven’t been outside, revise your workout plans to include a run or just bring the dumbbell outside.

5. One more round? One more burpee.

If you don’t know what to do, do a burpee. You can do a burpee in your hotel room without workout gear. You can do a burpee on the sand without equipment. You can do a complicated burpee variation that includes whatever’s around you. Be creative, but don’t make paralyze yourself with choices.

The other side of this is nutrition - ask yourself if you would do a burpee if you had one more drink or one last handful of fries. If you wouldn’t want to do a burpee after one more round, probably a good idea to call it quits. Enjoy yourself, but don’t get out of control.

6. The clock is your competition

It’s hard to stay motivated by yourself. If you don’t know how long a workout should take, time your first round and try to beat it on the next one. Set a goal for every minute or every five minutes. Look at your past results, and try to beat those. The clock can be your friend, if that’s what you need.

7. Athletes warm up, injuries lock up

You’re still an athlete, even though the heaviest weight in the room is 12.5 pounds. Athletes are smart and warm up, no matter what they’re doing. Getting injured using a light weight is still possible, so be smart and still warm up, even though no one’s watching.

8. Save 10% for tomorrow

You made it to the gym. Congrats! But it’s still day 2 of a 4-day trip. You can crank up the intensity if you want to using the steps above, but your overall goal with travel workouts is to maintain your fitness level and return home without a major setback. So save a little bit for tomorrow.

Eating for longevity

So for 21 days, you've suffered through some challenge posts. 

For all the complexity of the nutrition info out there, it really is summed up best by Michael Pollan:

"Eat (real) food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

It's simple to say, and hard to practice.

I've been slacking on the plants part, and even with this challenge, eating plants that aren't starchy or have gluten is difficult. If you can do the above for 3 months straight, then I'd say you can start to worry about other things like measuring and supplementation.

In other words, I'd boil it down to:

1. good food quality (and water)

2. then think about food quantity

3. lastly think about hydration, supplementation and blood testing to refine the above

My main goal was to:

1. avoid added sugar and sweeteners

2. avoid gluten

3. record my food for 21 days

(4. avoid alcohol, although that's pretty much covered by the sugar goal)

Note: I was not trying to stick to a particular macro ratio

The first picture is my "progress". Admittedly, there's not a drastic difference. The day 15 picture shows the biggest difference and came before I had to travel for work for 5 days and made some questionable choices while eating out. 

So what did I learn?

1. Any noticeable change is going to take time. I generally eat this way, going up and down with how strict I am. So to see progress, you're going to have to stick to it -- you're trying to change habits that have built up over years. 21 days is less than 6% of just one year. Patience is key.

2. For the first week, even though I avoided sugar, I was eating a lot of fruit and dried fruit. A sweetener is a sweetener no matter if it's "paleo" or not. Don't be surprised if you're not seeing much progress if you're eating larabars and paleo "donuts" during a challenge.

3. Even on the best week, the amount of fiber I ate was way low. I need to eat more leafy vegetables. A lot more.

4. I really don't see a need to count calories. If you don't eat a lot of dense carbs, it is soooo difficult to over-eat on quality foods. You will be cooking meals and eating celery all damn day.

5. Keep it simple.

6. Limit the decisions you have to make. On day 21 I wanted to quit early. But it was more effort to buy some junk to eat than it was to make a decent meal.

7. Make a goal for what you want your body to be able to do rather than what you want it to look like. I'd love to be able to overhead squat my body weight 10 times, run a 5 minute mile and do 10 muscle-ups. I for sure won't be able to get there if I look like a slob.

8. Have fun with it. Challenge some friends. Host an iron chef meal prep day. Buy a random vegetable you don't know the name of.

9. Surround yourself with supportive people.

10. Figure out what you're living for. If you want to be around for your kids or your career impact, the path to more years to attain that goal isn't lined with donuts and cigarettes. It's probably lined with vegetables (and the occasional slab of bacon).

I always thought my Grandfather was Puerto Rican

I always thought my grandfather was Puerto Rican. I realize for most people this would be a simple problem to fix, you would either ask your grandfather directly where he was born and where his parents were born, or if he had passed away, ask his wife or children where he was born. For me, and for my Mom, neither was a possibility.

Raised by her Mom and for a brief period, her foster family, my Mom never knew her biological father. Add to that the abyss of record keeping for African Americans before 1870 or so, and you end up with a person (me) who has never really been sure where his nationality lies before distant relatives "immigrated" (according to Ben Carson) to North Carolina. They probably read a nice brochure and weighed their options between that spot or somewhere in the Caribbean and chose the balmy tobacco fields of Tarheel country. Snarkiness aside, I have always wondered about my pre-American heritage.

For those of you who can trace your relatives back to the colonies or a specific ship, I am in awe. Growing up in a predominantly Italian town, I learned that families' records were sometimes murky, but common family names and Ellis Island archives have allowed many people I know to be able to trace how their last name's spelling has changed over the years, the town in Italy where their family spent much of their lives, and other knowledge tidbits that allow them to proudly fly an Italian flag below the American one.

For me, my knowledge of Africa is sparse at best. American history was the largest segment of history I learned, and that was heavily centered on lessons of the first Thanksgiving, Civil War battles and other trivia which I appreciate but leaves many other parts of the world forgotten. So, with a very thoughtful gift from my girlfriend, I sent in to AncestryDNA to have my heritage defined more explicitly.

AncestryDNA takes the data from my DNA markers and compares it to population data from 26 different regions. After running this comparison 40 times to get the best estimate of what regions my family genetically connects to based on current research,  AncestryDNA gave me an ethnicity estimate. It is just that: an estimate. The estimate could change over time, depending on what new research might reveal. 

After this whole process, my results narrowed down to the regions below. West Africa, parts of the Mediterranean and a concentrated area of North Carolina.

My first reaction was frustration. Really - after years of science progress, I know now that my roots are somewhere on the coast of Africa? Some economics and straight lines drawn with a ruler could have given me that answer.

But, I suppose there's more.

The results show me a lot about what's not there. I had always been under the impression that I had some Spanish or Latin American heritage from what my Mom told me about her father and where he and her Mom met. The numbers show differently. Not a trace of Spain or Latin American anything are in the results. I had taken a kind of DNA grouping test before and had results come back from Sudan and other parts of Northeast Africa. I am told I look Ethiopian by many Ethiopians. Nope, not in the numbers.

It appears that whether it's Nigeria, Cameroon or Benin, my family's roots are in West Africa. I know there are debates about how accurate these results are, how they are populated by a small number of black or African samples, and other evolving scientific conerns. But what do these results tell me? With this process, I was hoping to have a better answer for the eternal ambiguous question "But where are you from?" which follows the question "where are you from?" From these results, I do not have a solid nationality I can point to. But at least now I have a place I can start.

I can start with the basics of these countries - Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin. I can begin to follow their news, I can begin to learn about their leaders. I can read basic history and start to understand how such a vile slave trade began. I can visit.  I can read the countries' literature and solidify my family's connection to other countries before America at family reunions and gatherings. Down the road, I can point people in a better direction when they group Africa into one country or appropriate what they do not know much about.

And most importantly, I now have a legitimate excuse to learn how to make another great rice dish, some Jollof Rice to be exact. What's more exciting than learning about a new country through their food?

However, the exact percentages above made me think of some other questions. Above what percentage do you get the right to claim a country as your own nationality? What is the highest nationality percentage out there? Is a 90% nationality something to be proud of at this point in human history? What answer from Ancestry would have satisfied me?

I don't have the answer to any of those questions right now, and if you take a DNA ancestry test, I'd love to know your reaction and what you did with the information. President Obama had a unique perspective on matters of race and an outlook that he shared more and more in his second term. In his graduation speech to Howard University, he said: 

"We cannot sleep walk through life. We cannot be ignorant of history. We can't meet the world with a sense of entitlement... We have cousins and uncles and brothers and sisters who we remember were just as smart, just as talented as we were, but somehow got ground down by structures that are unfair and unjust and that means we have to not only question the world as it is, and stand up for those African Americans who haven't been so lucky."

I know now that my grandfather probably wasn't Puerto Rican, and I also know that for whatever reason, I have been lucky enough to have been born in a time and place where many things are possible. More background in my heritage gives me a greater personal reason not to be ignorant of history and to not only question how many of us got here, but more importantly, where we can go from here.