Aiming for Pain: Fitness, Aging and the Moving Target of Peak Performance TPS-0070

I've been a very athletic person, though I never got to a professional level.

There were a few very small chapters in my life where I wasn't in a very peak performance athletic state of fitness, pushing the limits of physicality and not just to be the best at a competitive sport, but in the real world pressure of resistance.

My martial artistry the eco wars and the drug wars. Politics as survival, the combat of politics in the street and in the forest, with varying degrees of brushes with death and injury.

You're not fighting in the street every day, but the culture of resistance that I was cultivating within the movements that I was in, we were all bicyclists. We would all climb trees and hike and build things in be extreme musicians, a lot of time sweating and training.

A lot of movement, not so much gaming, not so much keyboard warrioring, but out there in the real world, in real life, on our feet, in action.

Most of that was peak performance, high alert, high risk persecuted activities, being enemies of the state, but friends of the earth and lovers of each other.

Not all of us made it out alive. Not all of us made it out without being crippled. Not all of us made it out free.

I'm no longer fighting street battles, but I am still, to this day, pushing for peak performance and aiming for pain.

Aiming for pain, the moving target of peak performance, I live in a lot of pain now. At this site, more than any other site that I've ever done permaculture on, even mostly by myself, because a lot of times I've been the tip of the spear of a project.

I'm not gonna be dependent on anybody else meeting me halfway. I'm gonna do it because it needs to be done, in my opinion, and I'm not gonna shame people or drag people in. But I would attract volunteers, and they would step up in many ways.

Past projects for the most part, in most places, have been beautiful potlucks of energy, where I'm just astounded by the fact that you do need at least one or two or a few project leads that are willing to spearhead it, but they gotta do it with the right attitude and not project animosity on people who they try to expect more from...

You gotta take responsibility and lead by example, establish something that people wanna contribute to, but it's mostly gonna be on you to make it happen.

Just accept that from the beginning, I learned that, and I've lived it, and good things have happened since.

So I'm used to doing things, mostly by myself and having help come in.

I remember one time I went to Quail Springs, when Warren Brush was onsite. We were there to work trade and volunteer and participate in workshops for the weekend, rebuilding, replanting a food forest after a storm.

I got to learn a lot of things. That's the whole point, hands on experience in trade for your efforts involved in the project.

I remember to this day so distinctly, how Warren went out of his way more times than I could count, to look us in the eye and thank us profusely for showing up to help.

He came up to us multiple times while we were digging in the sun, rolling up our sleeves and helping out. I know what it feels like to really value when people come and step up and help you with something.

He's a teacher of a lot of good habits. He inspired me to start a meal with people sharing a circle of sentiments of gratitude for things that happened that day as a tradition. That's just a little branch coming off of this sense of what it's like to be that tip of your own spear.

Doing permaculture, or even more broadly, just rugged, off grid homesteading, without a lot of help, on a shoe string budget, or trying to just be frugal and not burn out a nest egg, or whatever it is.

You can't just hire a bunch of people to help you do it or pay a contractor to do it. And as you age, things are gonna start just blowing out. To this moment, I can hear the words that another mentor said who was ten years ahead of me doing what I'm doing now.

He said starting around age 35, you start to experience your body falling apart because of all of the bad food you ate and all the stress and all of the ignorance and negligence that you had about this biological machine that you didn't know how to maintain, because you were never really trained to and you never really lived in a holistic society.

You weren't just naturally healthy so you could work hard into old age and not suffer as much.

He knew a lot about pain. He knew a lot about peak performance and persistence and perseverance and building freedom for yourself, even if you have to do it through agonizing pain.

In my words, it's this art form of how far do you push it? Because there's no one around to impress. I'm not pushing myself so that other people can clap for me or fall in love with me.

Certainly, I've done dumb things like that in the past, bloodied myself and injured myself to try to get attention, hoping that somebody would see me and think I was I was a tough guy. We do a lot of that kind of stuff, us dudes, but no out here, nope.

Make each day more ecologically secure than the day before on this site for me to inhabit it. As I get weaker and older and more disabled because of the pain...

The debt that I have to pay in pain for the poor life decisions that I made up to this point...

Luckily, I don't think I have a lot of that relative to some people, because of my body mass index and the fact that I got into being a health nut in my twenties.

But even then, it can betray you, because you might have been the wrong kind of health nut, and you could have been actually doing more harm than good.

Some of these extremist health nut diets, if you sign up to the wrong program, can do a lot of harm.

I shed and eliminated in different chapters at different times ultimately most of, the offending macro nutrients. I'm getting closer and closer to a one hundred percent homegrown, totally organic, nontoxic, perennial, minimal to no cereal grain, fermented, ancestral diet.

Daily peak performance building an off-grid, off-road homestead alone, with a body that was built out of a lot of garbage, trying to re-mineralize it and re-hydrate it and keep its ph right, and keep the elements in the extreme wild conditions of the desert from just grinding me into dust...

Even if I was healthy as an ox, even if I hadn't put mileage in my back, doing all kinds of very ergonomically incorrect and inappropriate tasks for other clients, where I'm moving giant pieces of flagstone and boulders and chunks of concrete, all these things, these backbreaking, toe crushing objects that should never be moved by human beings.

At a certain point, I said, if I could ever afford to be free, I never wanna touch anything that I can't lift myself. And I never wanna move anything that I own that could possibly injure my back. That used to mean anything over 25 lb.

Now it's a feather. If I twist the wrong way, picking up a feather, I'll be on the floor.

That's because of all that cumulative damage done working for the man in the city, being a share cropper or a landless peasant but basically being in the working class to where my back is a commodity that can be exchanged and replaced by anyone else competing in the market for labor.

That was the definition of capitalism that I learned in college.

I'm also in the in the middle of a capitalism course online from Yale.

It's a monster that's worth digging into the academics of to understand.

Communism is not the only alternative, because we lived on Earth for a long time before capitalism and communism.

Instead of looking to a contemporary reaction to capitalism, I look at what worked before it.

Karl Marx to called ancestral life ways primitive communism. Everyone wants to fit things into their own ideological box. But I know what it's like to be destroyed and reduced into crippling, agonizing pain by being in the working class and barely escaping by age 40 and being at a point where the pain that I live with now and the pains that compound and get revealed as I age...

The way that my mentor warned me about, you get to a certain age and things are gonna start falling apart.

I can't let myself get hangovers. I gotta drink water. I gotta be minimalistic with a lot of things and moderate things.

Can't be a party animal, and I can't work and aim for pain in peak performance without knowing my limits as I age.

So when I say aiming for pain is a moving targeted for peak performance, the real humor in that, the dark humor is that the moving target that is aiming for pain is that the older you get and the harder you worked over your lifespan, that pain threshold...

You can tolerate however much you can tolerate. But the fact is, you won't be working as many hours doing as much crazy stuff that you've done before.

That pain that you're aiming for, or you're brushing up against, that pain threshold, a tolerance threshold where it's pretty sad and demoralizing...

How how little it takes to hit that target of pain, and how fast you hit that target of pain.

Out here, by myself doing this, I didn't no pain like that existed.

And I'm not saying that to be a martyr of my own ruggedness. But that's the thing. If you're not into politics, you're into survival, you're aiming for pain, because politics is how do you shuffle the cards around of society in order to have people work for you and serve you and render you benefits in a certain way.

I think, definitely in a healthy society, as you age and become an elder, then it makes sense for the younger folk to bear the brunt of activities that their backs are better suited to.

That doesn't mean that you need to get lazy or out of shape.

You just might reasonably delegate tasks. That makes sense to me, but what doesn't make sense to me is the politics of the ruling class becoming decadent while all the slaves get ground to a pulp.

I worked in landscaping, doing permaculture with those that were almost twice as old of me and some of them worked me under the table. I could not believe how much pain I was enduring, how much kit I was wearing, knee pads, sunshade hat, gloves, tool belt, fatigues.



They would be out there, no shade hat, no sunglasses, no gloves, no sturdy boots, no knee pads, doing working harder than me and faster than me, all they wanted was a beer at the end of the day. So I'm not even as hard core as them. I'm pathetic compared to some of those folks that I work with.

But I also wanna pace myself, and I'm trying to hold on to what I got, and I'm glad I wasn't working like that, because maybe that dude, maybe he had a nice wife who was gonna massage him, give him a bath, feed him really well and that's why he was able to work like that.

I'm trying to pace myself. It used to take a lot to feel as beat up as I feel on a daily basis now. Then in the summer, you feel beat up all over 24/7, even if you don't lift a finger to work the land.

So I just thought it was an interesting idea that, peak performance in a sense, if you're a football player or kick boxer, you're not gonna be getting any faster as you start getting into your forties and if you were to compete against someone in their prime twenties and thirties, they're probably gonna destroy you.

So there is that one and only peak that is your prime in your twenties and thirties physicality. But like any chart, you zoom in close enough, and it's jagged up to that peak, and it's jagged on the way down.

So there's more than one. There's one ultimate highest peak. But there are countless peaks on the way up and on the way down, before and after.

So for, whatever it is, pain here, pain there, pain in the neck, pain in the back.

Work hard to push through a project. Have to stop for a day or two.

Do something light, do something using the other half of the body, whether it's the left or right half or the upper or lower half, one half just gets knocked out, so be it, that's the way of it.

Get busy living, or get busy dying. But if you're gonna die, die with your boots on kind of thing.

I'm willing to adapt to the peak, not being as high as it once was, where I would do crazy stuff on a job site that I would never do now, not even to impress people, but just because I wanted to get out and get to the party that night and the sooner we got the job done, the sooner I could get in traffic and go to that party.

So I might sit there smash concrete with the sledge hammer ten times faster, or with a jack hammer, ten times faster than I would have if it was Monday morning.

Stuff like that, but none of that now, I'm very sensitive, but I'm still gonna push to the peak.

Now I would say I have what looks like a resting kill face, because everything tends to find a way to hurt.

I'm not gonna project that I'm gonna kill anything other than my inner weaknesses, but also invoke the the tradition of some of the most ancient martial arts warriors that would integrate massage with training.

There's a wisdom to be explored as far as if you're gonna have peak performance as a warrior, as a builder, as a warrior in a garden better than a gardener in a war, you're gonna wanna learn things about how to be ergonomic.

How to use herbs and tinctures and grow the right food.

If I'm gonna suffer, it's gonna be because I broke myself digging ponds, growing healthy, organic, bio diverse permaculture ecosystems, mostly by myself and sometimes with some help.

But I'll die proud, and I will die, at least in most ways, healthy, relatively speaking, even if riddled with ecological sports injuries.