Transmutable Explorations

Category: Life

  • My Alcohol Dichotomy

    My Alcohol Dichotomy

    I love beer… but I also strive to live the healthiest possible lifestyle.  I often encounter people that think I’m embellishing my beer resume since I guess I don’t look/act like the typical 40+ year old beer drinker.  I have enough proof that I’m not beefing up this resume 😁 Read on if you’re interested in understanding more how I combat the alcohol dichotomy in my life.

    The Alcohol Dichotomy in my Life

    There was a time where studies thought that drinking a small amount could have positive health benefits.  Newer studies have been pointing more and more to there being zero level of alcohol that has health benefits.  I’m such a fan of alcohol (especially beer) that I can’t really imagine a life without imbibing a bit.  Dropping this vice, would likely make an immediate net positive increase in my health.  Because of this, many people who know how much time and resources I spend on optimizing my health, ask me why I don’t do it.  The simple answer is: I enjoy it immensely!  That doesn’t mean that I don’t do things to make the most of the vice that is most detrimental to my health.

    My love for Alcohol (Beer)

    Beer is a weakness of mine.  I love the taste and the variety.  Even before Untappd gamified it, I was a big fan of the social aspect.  The chemistry and biology involved in creating it throws me back to what it must have been like to be an alchemist.  Understanding the history and geography of how ‘styles’ evolved lured me into becoming a beer judge.  All of this led me to eventually holding beer education events and guided tastings.

    Impact on Health

    At the same time, more and more research is showing that no amount of alcohol is healthy.  Ingesting it, in many ways, goes directly against every other thing I do throughout my day.  This definitely puts me in an ugly situation.  I’m going to argue that there is some good that comes from drinking beer.  At the same time, I’m also going to enumerate the bad that I’ve seen as well.  Keep in mind that everything I’m going to mention is either indisputable fact, or things that I’ve seen directly in my N=1 experiments.

    The Bad

    • Ethanol is undoubtedly a toxin to the human body.  Your liver will go into overdrive the moment it detects its presence and will focus on eliminating it rather than on other more beneficial reactions that the liver is typically involved in.
    • Alcohol dehydrates the human body.  This is part of what often leads to the dreaded ‘hangover’.
    • Alcohol is mostly an ’empty’ calorie.  It’s also the most calorically dense macronutrient after fat (7 calories per gram).  These calories add up!
    • Alcohol negatively impacts sleep, HRV and heart rate.  I’ve conducted numerous experiments related to this using my Oura ring.  For me, crossing beyond two drinks within a few hours of going to bed is extremely detrimental to all of these biomarkers.
    • Frequent drinking leads to a reduction in free testosterone.  I’ve verified this through blood tests via InsideTracker.
    • Heavy drinking seems to induce higher levels of anxiety and depression the day after.  This is subjective as I have no objective way of measuring it.
    • Beyond a point, drinking leads to poor decisions.  These take many forms, but one of the worst for me in terms of health is that I find it very easy to choose less than ideal foods.  This is exasperated by the fact that many places that serve alcohol rarely have healthy food choices to begin with.
    • Drinking has a tendency to destroy any hope of being productive afterward.  This is definitely the case for the day of drinking, but often the hangover effect makes it carry into the next day as well.

    The Good

    Despite this extensive list of bad things, there are a few things that I consider ‘good’ about drinking ‘real’ beer.  I consider anything unfiltered, brewed without extra sweet adjuncts to be ‘real’ beer.

    Real beer is a good source of B vitamins.  This is a byproduct of the yeast used to make it.  If you’re drinking beer that has had this filtered out, you’re not getting the goodness that you should from your favorite fermented beverage.  There’s a reason why health conscious folks have been adding brewer’s yeast to their food for years.

    I’ve noticed that ‘real’ beer (in moderation) seems to have a positive benefit on my gut health.  I started by measuring this subjectively, but have since confirmed using Viome tests.  Beer is fermented (hence a probiotic) and often is a rich source of polyphenols.  Hops used in beer are a unique source of many plant compounds that have several health benefits.

    Moderate drinking helps me keep my blood pressure lower.  This is a fine line, one drink can easily put me over the edge and raise it instead.  The occasional drink definitely seems to help with stress.

    The biggest ‘pro’ of drinking beer to me is it’s positive impact on my mental health.  Kicking back a few sessionable lagers with friends is one of my favorite ways of socializing.

    Mitigating the Bad

    Do the ‘pros’ of drinking beer outweigh the ‘cons’?  Definitely not!  Because of this, I’m always striving for new ways to mitigate the ‘bad’.  Here are some of my tips and tricks.

    Before Drinking

    Mitigation starts long before you start drinking.  First of all, to combat the productivity destroying aspects of a few drinks, I make sure to get all important things for the day out of the way before starting.  Now before you start calling me Captain Obvious, note that this doesn’t just apply to work related items.

    One of the highest priority things that I make sure before I go out for a few drinks is to make sure I get in a good resistance training.  Now this won’t account for all the ’empty’ calories you’re about to consume, but getting your large muscle groups moving helps make the best of the large amount of carbohydrates that will soon be flooding your system.  Didn’t ensure you did this before going out?  I’ve found that something as simple as a few air squats and wall pushes in the bathroom seems to make a big difference.

    Before going out, it also pays to eat something on the healthy side.  This will hopefully make you less likely to gorge on more calorically dense, nutrient devoid bar food throughout the night.

    If you’re into supplements, and a regular drinker, it helps to have a go to stack of liver builders to try to offset any damage to your liver that you’re likely causing.  I have a group of things that works very well for me based on measuring blood levels of liver enzymes.  I’ll also take a binder before leaving the house.  I used to use activated charcoal exclusively, but recently have been preferring algae in the form of both chlorella and spirulina.

    Finally, I’ve recently become a fan of ZBiotics.  This probiotic that helps your body breakdown acetaldehyde has become a great tool for making my next day more productive.

    While Drinking

    I don’t really have anything groundbreaking to offer here.  This is mostly all been said before.  Stay hydrated!  If water doesn’t always cut it for you, you can mix an electrolyte powder in every few glasses.  Respiration helps to eliminate alcohol from your system, so if you can get some steps in while drinking, do it!  I’ll also do my in bathroom workout routine throughout the night.  Just a few wall pushes/air squats is all it takes!

    After Drinking

    Again, nothing that hasn’t been said before here… Remember how important hydration is?  Keep doing it!  Now is the time to replace electrolytes, B vitamins and magnesium.  Definitely do not go to sleep right away!  Try to put as much time between that last drink and sleep as you can because that’s going to negatively impact your next day.

    If you’re interested in really taking things to the next level though, I recommend using much of my sauna cocktail (you can skip the niacin and taurine).  I initially developed this to support detoxification pathways while in the sauna but in general it’s great overall liver support.  In addition to this, I add glycine and NAC as these both upregulate the production of the most powerful endogenous antioxidant: glutathione.  I’ve also started taking DHM at this point as well.

    Other General Rules

    I have a few other general rules.  I feel like these rules have the biggest positive impact for me other than maybe the pro-liver supplements.

    First, I try to always stick to ‘real’ beer, fresh from the source.  I’ll sample a ‘lactose’ beer, but I’m avoiding drinking those by the glass.  I want something as close to what my great great grandfather drank as possible.

    I try to separate days where I have more than one drink by at least two days.  In my experience, drinking more than this tends to start a negative trend with regards to body composition.  There are likely several reasons for this.  This could create a tendency to short your workout routine.  There’s obviously the extra calories factor.  I also feel that, at least for me, this seems to cause body changes that slow fat burning.  I don’t have ways of easily measuring the biomarkers that I believe are involved, but the moment that I can, I plan to conduct an experiment into this.

    Many people feel that day drinking is the ultimate Degen move.  I drink during the day whenever possible.  The detrimental impact of drinking on sleep is so obvious that I want to put as much time as possible between that last drink and bed.  Just make sure that you shift your drinking window rather than elongating it 🤣

    Always eat a healthy meal before drinking.  If you must eat while you’re out, opt for healthier options.  Stay away from the fried stuff and desserts.  Avoid the pizza.  Go for lean protein, undressed salads and sides of vegetables when possible

    Conclusion

    So there you have it.  This is how I try to incorporate something that I love into my life while recognizing it as inherently ‘unhealthy’.  Everything here allows me to go out for a few drinks while still remaining productive the next day.  Maybe these things will work for you?  Maybe you have something that you do that I haven’t tried?  If so, drop me a line… or better yet, let’s discuss it over a ‘real’ beer!

  • Sauna Protocol and Benefits of Sauna Use

    Sauna Protocol and Benefits of Sauna Use

    Fairly early on in my journey toward better health, I kept running into all the research touting the benefits of sauna use.  None of these prescribed a specific sauna protocol, but noted that there seemed to be many benefits that correlated with regular use of sauna.  Sauna use wasn’t really foreign to me.  I had traveled to Ukraine where it was a part of the culture.  Some Russian-American friends of mine had also introduced me to the ‘Banya’.  I always sort of dreamt about having my own traditional sauna, but the cost and other considerations just always made it seem so impractical.  Would I really use it often enough?  How would I find the time to incorporate it into my schedule?

    Traditional vs Infrared

    Research started to show the mechanisms of action for why sauna seemed to have such positive health benefits.  Most of this was done using a ‘traditional’ Finnish style sauna.  These are often wood fired and include steam.  I kept looking into what it would take to build and maintain one of these and kept deciding that it was too much for me to take on.  A spa that I went to for my regular massages had an infrared sauna and I started to add that into my routine.  I noticed that my massage seemed to be much more effective when I started with a sauna session.

    An infrared sauna is different from a traditional sauna in that they are ‘dry’ saunas.  No steam is used.  Instead of the air being heated via convection, these saunas used near and far infrared to heat your body directly.  In addition to the lack of steam, these saunas stay at much lower ambient air temperatures compared to a traditional sauna.  More and more people were using infrared saunas, but it was unclear if these had the same health benefits.

    Eventually, studies started to show that infrared saunas not only conveyed many of the same benefits as traditional saunas, but in some cases, provided even more!  At this point, I started to seriously investigate this style of sauna.  During 2020, I ended up purchasing and constructing one that my research showed was one of the best models available at the time.

    What are the Benefits of Sauna Use?

    So what was I trying to accomplish with regular sauna use?  Originally, I wanted to use it as a recovery tool.  I was hoping to ‘destress’ and heal my sore joints and muscles from upping my workouts.  I had known from my use at the spa that it seemed to be very effective at this.  While researching infrared saunas it seemed that this was likely due to the ability for them to lower inflammation.

    There were also numerous studies touting the cardio protective effects of frequent sauna use.  Lowering my blood pressure was something that I also was very interested in doing… Especially through ways that did not involve pharmaceuticals.  There was conflicting information early on about using infrared sauna for detox purposes.  It seemed reasonable though, that if were causing you to sweat, it was likely helping in some ways with this.  More recently, research into sauna’s ability to raise human growth hormone production has been very appealing in terms of taking my workouts to the next level.

    There are many other benefits of sauna use, but these were the main ones that initially interested me.  Many research papers now have been focusing on how sauna upregulates the production of Heat Shock Proteins and the cytoprotective benefits that they convey.  It seems like regular sauna use is one of the best things you can do in order to create a better healthspan.

    My Sauna Protocol

    Initially, I just sat in my sauna and listened to music or podcasts.  Soon I was spending between 20 and 40 minutes 4+ times a week in there.  My productivity obsessed mind started to preoccupy itself with other ways that I could be making the most of this time.  Moving my meditation practice to coincide with sauna time was a natural progression, but I quickly developed a sauna protocol that I follow just about every time I use it.  This protocol centers around a few central themes:

    • I want to make the most of the time that I spend in the sauna.
    • Most of the time, I want my session to focus on maximizing my recovery.
    • I want to enhance the benefits of my work out.  To me, this is still focused on losing fat, while maintaining/building muscle.
    • I want to make the most of any detoxifying benefits that the sauna provides.

    With all of this in mind, my sauna protocol begins even before I turn on the sauna.

    Before Sauna Protocol

    With very few exceptions, I almost always workout before I use the sauna.  Most days, I work out in a fasted state.  On days that I don’t, I still make sure I’m at least 2 hours fasted before using the sauna.  This is so that I can go in with lower blood sugar levels and to help maximize fat burning.

    About 30 minutes before I get into the sauna, I drink a large glass of water loaded with the following supplements:

    • Taurine
    • Trimethylglycine (TMG)
    • TUDCA
    • Niacin
    • Artichoke Extract
    • Liquid Zeolite

    Along with this pre-sauna drink, I take a few capsules of Calcium D-Glutarate, and liver supportive herbs.  Milk thistle has become one of my favorites for this.  The purpose of most of these items is to get my liver in a state where it’s a toxin processing machine.  The others are for binding toxins for excretion later.  The TMG is because I’m a poor methylator and optimal methylation is important for great liver functioning.  The niacin should be taken in an amount that is just large enough to induce a flush response in you.  This helps to liberate toxins from your fat tissue.  Side note for anyone looking for a great place to buy supplements… check out my link for BulkSupplements on my affiliate page for a discount!

    During Sauna

    Once I’m in the sauna, I continue to hydrate.  Some days I’ll sit in the sauna starting at 80 degrees F while it warms up.  Most days, I’ll wait to enter the sauna until it’s over 150 degrees inside.  There is research that shows different benefits using both of these approaches.  Warming up with the sauna seems to convey more noticeable tissue related benefits.  The higher temperatures encourage heat shock protein production and is a cardio mimetic.  This also more closely approximates what is seen in the traditional sauna studies.  Either way, I’m staying in the sauna for at least 20 minutes and most of the time go for 30 minutes plus a cool down period.

    I still listen to music/podcasts while in the sauna.  Depending on the day, I may do a meditation practice or some stretching/yoga during this time.  Most days a breathwork routine is also included.  This is either Kapalabhati or Nadi Shodhana pranayama.

    After Sauna Protocol

    When the sauna ends, the protocol continues… sometimes I’ll prepare a cold plunge for as soon as I’m finished.  Most days, I’ll just hop in a shower.  It’s important to get all of the excreted toxins off your skin.  If I don’t do a full cold shower, I always end with a few minutes of cold.  Studies have shown this hot/cold contrast to impart even greater benefits.  Note that it’s very important to always finish with cold.  No matter which option I choose, I drink another glass of cold water with added electrolytes.  I drink this with either activated charcoal or chlorella (more binders).

    Additional Benefits

    So is all of this ‘worth it’?  I still use the infrared sauna 4+ times a week.  My biomarkers related to the items I was looking to improve with sauna have all trended in the right direction.  Based on before and after readings using my BPM Connect, my blood pressure was lower.  I’ve also noticed some additional benefits.

    It Feels Great

    The sauna/cold plunge combination just generally makes me feel like a million bucks.  My overall mood has improved dramatically since I’ve started using the sauna.  It’s guaranteed that no matter how I go into the sauna, I’m going to feel better when I leave.

    Improved Sleep

    I’ve noticed (and Oura confirms) that my sleep is much better.  This is especially true if I use the sauna later in the day.  Something about the raise in body temperature about 2 hours away from bedtime that really makes me sleep great.

    Better Skin

    After months of following this sauna protocol, I continually had people that have known me for years comment on how great my skin looks.  When strangers find out my actual age, they often say the same.  Since I don’t really do any thing that’s focused on improving the look of my skin, I attribute all of this to the sauna.

    Heat Tolerance

    This has been most noticeable on my backpacking excursions.  I used to dread hiking in the heat of the summer, but it doesn’t really bother me anymore.  In general, I never really liked doing anything outdoors in the heat.  I can tolerate the heat much more now.

    Improved Immunity

    There’s no doubt that I’ve had fewer colds since I’ve started using the sauna.  When I did get sick, the duration has been shortened compared to prior years.  Recently, I’ve started using the sauna multiple times a day for shorter periods if I feel a potential cold coming on.  This seems to have had a positive impact on the course of any illness.

  • In Pursuit of Metabolic Flexibility

    Origins of the Pursuit for Metabolic Flexibility

    There was a time when I was a big advocate of ‘grazing’.  Everything I was taught growing up emphasized this.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  When I began playing sports, it was crucial to be eating constant small meals in order to ‘maximize gains’.  I figured the people telling me this must know best, so I never really questioned it.  I experienced midday crashes for years without really thinking about this practice.  The fact that I got extremely ‘hangry’ any time I missed a meal or snack just seemed to reenforce that this practice must be correct.

    Realizing there was a problem

    Eventually, I didn’t workout as much and I started putting on extra weight.  I started looking for a quick fix to drop the weight.  I read about different diets and saw firsthand how many friends of mine seemed to just melt it off following a ketogenic diet.  Just about every one of those people found that this diet worked until you no longer strictly adhered to ‘Keto’ and then you would quickly put the weight back on.  Even worse, some of these people developed issues with being able to eat the foods that they did before adopting Keto.  Carbs and Gluten became issues for them.  This pretty much confirmed that Keto was not for me.  This eventually lead me to Intermittent Fasting or my preferred term for what I was doing… Time Restricted Feeding (TRF).

    What I thought was the solution

    TRF was initially very difficult for me.  The blood sugar rollercoaster that I had been on for years did not want me to get off.  Initially, I cut out late snacking and eventually breakfast.  I used Zero to track my fasts which helped gamify things.  Zero also turned out to be a wealth of information.  I kept up with and actively participated in the research being conducted by the Zero team.

    Eventually, I worked up to following a strict 18:6 protocol every day except for Saturday and Sunday (almost anything went on the weekend). Occasionally, I’d alter one day a week to 16:8 to accommodate any meetings or events that I had scheduled. I chose the 18:6 protocol because around this same time, I was reading about the benefits of autophagy on someone my age.  Research showed that longer periods of fasting have a more profound impact on autophagy.  So I strived to do at least 18 hours of fasting and occasionally stretched to One Meal a Day (OMAD).    Around this time, I started measuring the impacts of my experiments in TRF using Levels and a breath-based ketone monitor.

    Fueling the Human Machine

    All of the research I had done into Keto, opened my eyes to the fact that the human body operates on two main fuel sources… fat oxidation and glucose oxidation.  Keto was so appealing to me initially, because why not use the thing to fuel my body (fat) that I was most interested in losing?  TRF started to have a profound impact on my blood sugar spikes, but I wasn’t satisfied with the level of ketosis that I was achieving.  How am I going to lose fat if I’m barely ever getting into a base level of ketosis?

    Feast and Famine

    This lack of ketosis, combined with the pursuit of ever more autophagy, eventually led me to adopting a 24+ hour fast at least once a month.  Research was starting to point to regular fasting having many positive benefits for the common diseases of aging.  This made sense to me.  The longer fasts definitely resulted in me losing weight, but DEXA Scan testing showed that much of that weight was muscle mass and not fat mass!  More research would eventually educate me why this was so.  My body wanted to be fueled by glucose and it would do whatever was necessary to make that happen.

    General consensus is that the current abundance of over nutrition is a very recent phenomenon for humans.  Our hunter gatherer (and even more modern) ancestors likely spent much time in a ‘fasted’ state between meals.  Before the advent of grocery stores, it wasn’t so easy to constantly graze and any excess nutrition would likely either be consumed immediately or if possible saved for times of famine.  Maybe it’s not so much a coincidence that the issues that just about every one develops beyond a certain age might be related to this relatively recent change in our eating habits?  More in depth reading on how the body stores fat and how it powers processes in the absence/presence of glucose eventually led me to discover the concept of Metabolic Flexibility.

    What is Metabolic Flexibility?

    Metabolic Flexibility is the ability for your body to easily switch between burning glucose or fat for fuel.  Things like insulin resistance and the grazing that I used to advocate for destroy metabolic flexibility.  Unfortunately, insulin resistance is not something that you can easily monitor in real time.  If you have a high fasting glucose though, you are likely insulin resistant (and therefore metabolically inflexible).  If you are metabolically inflexible, your body will tend to prefer processes that it can go through in order to create glucose rather than start burning fat.  Due to this, the fat burning process won’t really get turned on.  You can also experience metabolic inflexibility if you stay in a state of ketosis and then have an influx of carbohydrates come into your diet.  The goal of Metabolic Flexibility is to be able to seamlessly switch between fuel sources based on what is currently available.

    What’s even better?  Achieving Metabolic Flexibility appears to be one of the most effective things you can do to combat metabolic disease.  What is metabolic disease?  There is a growing body of evidence that this is the precursor to just about every one of the diseases of aging that plague our modern society.

    Achieving Metabolic Flexibility

    There are many ways that you can achieve metabolic flexibility.  They all involve having awareness of how your body uses glucose, paying attention to your diet, exercise, some form of TRF and appropriate recovery.  I’m going to discuss the approach that I have been taking in order to increase my metabolic flexibility.

    Exercise

    I have a workout routine based on progressing every 7 days.  My workouts consist of bodyweight exercises that I can do anywhere.  When I’m home, I have additional equipment that allow me to increase the difficulty.

    I used to do a version of this workout early in the morning, but have moved the bulk of strength training to immediately before I break my intermittent fast. The reason for this is due to a number of studies that have shown interesting things that occur to the AMPK and mTOR pathways while strength training in a fasted state. I can talk about this all day, but the basic gist is that training while fasted and then immediately breaking that fast with the right type of meal has been shown to have positive impacts on muscle preservation while fasting as well as fat loss and insulin sensitivity. Working out fasted also depletes muscle glycogen setting things up to replenish this when you do eat rather than moving it into other unwanted forms of storage.  When I first read these studies it sounded too good to be true, but I’ve verified the results in my own testing and the analysis from Levels also confirms these benefits for me.  Occasionally, I will break my fast first in order to prevent anything from becoming too routine.  

    Diet

    All of my research and monitoring has lead me to prioritize a whole food diet and I split up the month into ‘weeks of focus’.  The areas of focus include:

    • Strength
    • Insulin Sensitivity
    • Autophagy
    • Thyroid

    For each week, I tailor my diet, supplements and TRF around the current area of focus.  Each day within the week gets tailored further based on the workout that I’m doing.  For the most part, I’m following a modified cyclical Keto diet, lower carbs and calories when I’m focusing on catabolism and higher carbs/calories when I want to be more anabolic.

    TRF

    I moved away from TRF with strict long periods of fasting.  Instead, I try to fast for a minimum of 13 hours every day, ramping things up when I’m in catabolic periods.  During Autophagy week, there’s usually at least one 24+ hour fast.  Again, the more complex schedule is to prevent anything from becoming routine.

    Glucose Awareness

    I’ve been using a combination of continuous glucose monitoring with Levels and blood tests from InsideTracker.  In an effort to level off spikes in blood sugar, I use several combinations of things that work for me based on monitoring with these devices.  Some of the things I use include: Apple Cider Vinegar, chromium (when favoring anabolism) or berberine (during catabolism) before meals.  During meals, I mix some glycine in my beverage to assist even more.

    Repair/Recovery

    When focusing on recovery with regards to my approach to improving Metabolic Flexibility, the most important things are good quality sleep and keeping your thyroid in good health.  I plan on writing a post in the future on my journey to get good quality sleep.  Keeping your thyroid happy, basically boils down to carb refeeds and relaxing use of some supplements during ‘Thyroid week’.

    Metabolic Flexibility Marathon

    The journey to Metabolic Flexibility is definitely a marathon and not a sprint!  Even though I’ve made some progress, I still feel that I have some way to go.  Each time I retest, I see incremental improvements and I feel better than I have in years.  I’m constantly tweaking this program as I learn more and intend to update this post.  What are your thoughts? What are you doing differently?  If there is something that I glossed over that could use more information, let me know!

  • The Joys of Backpacking

    The Joys of Backpacking

    When I stopped working a corporate job, one of the first things I started regularly doing in my ‘new found’ time was to go backpacking.  Why can’t I get enough of Backpacking?  Why do others find it so frightening?  Let me show you some potential ways to loving the many joys of backpacking.

    Initially, my main goal for experiencing the joys of backpacking was to spend time in deep nature.  Most of the hiking trails around me are very crowded (even more so since the pandemic).  Many of the people there are loud… I didn’t really want to hear others’ music and podcasts while I’m out enjoying the sounds of nature.  The crowds on the trails are often disrespectful…  I can complete a loop on a local trail, picking up trash as I go.  Often, when I return to the beginning, I could start the whole process all over again.  Honestly, who couldn’t be bothered to put their slim jim wrapper in their pocket and carry it out with them?  I noticed though, that once you get beyond ~5 miles from the start of a trail, the number of people tends to drop drastically.

    The first backpacking trip… in awhile

    There is a problem with hiking 10+ miles within the confines of daylight.  It can be problematic, especially when you factor in driving to a location, feeding yourself, etc.  I remembered the joy of spending days at a time in the woods with my friends when I was a kid and thought “why not do this again?”.  Time to pull together all my old (heavy) gear and purchase whatever else I needed to get started.  I tried convincing the rest of my family to go, but they weren’t having it.  Why not retrace a trip that I did many times when I was younger?  I thought that it would be an easy way to get started.

    It was mostly a disaster 😉 As mentioned, my 20+ year old gear was HEAVY!  Over the years, people had stopped using the woods/roads/trails in this part of Pennsylvania and everything was overgrown and borderline impassible.  Hiking uphill made me realize how out of shape I really was.  I was rusty in setting up and using my gear and just generally ill-prepared.  Even with all this, there was immense joy in how quiet things were.  Unfortunately, trash from eons ago was still there.  The sky was amazing!  When I got back home, I couldn’t wait to go again.

    Joy 1:  Backpacking is a great teacher

    After allowing my body to recover for a few days, I decided I was absolutely out of shape.  Before the next trip, I would definitely need to work on my uphill endurance and some leg/hip range of motion that I didn’t use in my normal day to day life.  It seemed that making some of my gear ‘lighter’ would also help (Did I mention that it was HEAVY?).  I also packed in a bunch of stuff that it seemed I would never use.  Why I thought I needed a frying pan, multiple cups and something to boil water in, and many changes of clothes, I have no idea.  I also did not bring other things that would have been helpful.  There was a light rain that I wasn’t really prepared for and it got surprisingly cold at night.  I started looking into upgrading some of my gear.

    Joy 2: Backpacking is great exercise

    Experiencing my defeated body after this first trip is probably what started me down the path of actually getting healthy.  I realized how when I was a kid, I did this trip easily multiple times without needing a week to recover.  I started looking into creating a plan for allowing me to be able to do that again.  This is what led me to becoming such an advocate for bodyweight based Functional Training.  Over the years, I found that this combined with a little bit of endurance training is the best way to (mostly) stay physically prepared for what backpacking will throw at you.

    As someone who constantly keeps an eye on their HRV, I’ve noticed that generally, backpacking has a positive impact on this metric.  Sure, a grueling day might tank HRV, but in my experience, HRV tends to go up dramatically while (or shortly after) backpacking.

    Joy 3: Backpacking will make you more resilient

    Sure HRV is a good metric for tracking resiliency, but backpacking helps in this regard in other ways.  Many of us in the west live in a constant state of comfort.  This is a reasonably modern human condition.  Even my grandparents had to deal with food scarcity.  Most of us are shielded from the weather and can adjust temperatures of our environment on a whim.  Our lives are packed with stuff and more ways to entertain ourselves than we could conceivably ever make use of.  When it’s just you and the few possessions you’re willing to drag with you out in the backcountry, things start to get interesting.  You hope that you didn’t forget anything crucial.  You cross your fingers that the weather will cooperate.  Roll the dice that you’ll get to a good location and setup camp before the sun goes down.

    And then it gets dark… what was that sound?  Holy shit, the moon is bright… I hope I can get some sleep tonight before I need to hike many more miles tomorrow.  Guaranteed, that on just about any trip that you take, at least one of these things (or something else) will happen.  And guess what?  You will deal with it!  Your only other option is hiking back to civilization.

    Joy 4: Backpacking makes you a better Planner

    There’s nothing like one of these “borderline disaster trips” to make you reevaluate everything.  Every failure is a potential learning experience.  Get caught by unexpected weather?  You will be sure to have some way of making sure that doesn’t happen in the future.  Setup your tent on a slope and the blood rushing into your heads makes it so you’re unable to sleep at night?  You will spend more time evaluating your placement next time.

    Something as simple as forgetting to put your headlamp around your neck or in your pocket after setting up camp will prompt you to run through scenarios in your mind ahead of time even on the next day of your current trip.  I’ve found that as I backpack more… especially solo… I go through visualization exercises in just about everything I do, imagining potential ways that things can go wrong and thinking of potential solutions ahead of time.

    Joy 5: Backpacking is great for evaluating redundancies

    You can easily go overboard with planning.  Just one mini-disaster will have you looking for new gear or solutions to prevent it from happening.  This leads to a gear explosion as you start to pack redundant methods to potentially deal with them.  Extra batteries, several different ways of creating fire, additional clothes and food… The problem is, every extra gram starts to add up.  I’ve started evaluating gear the way Alton Brown evaluates kitchen equipment… look for ‘multitaskers’ 😀 If something is only good for one thing… especially if it’s likely to be rarely used, I actively look for something else that fits the bill that can serve double duty.

    Joy 6: Backpacking will make you respect nature

    No matter how you feel about nature before your first trip, backpacking will give you a new found respect for it.  If you already love it, the first occasion where you are unprepared for the weather that Mother Nature throws at you, you will be humbled.  If you haven’t found any respect for it yet, a few hikes with others will have you well versed in the principles of Leave No Trace in no time.  After a handful of experiences in the backcountry, you’ll be able to fully relax and experience the joy of the sights and sounds that your section of the world has to offer!

    Go for a hike

    If you’ve never spent a night on trail, I hope that I convinced you to give backpacking a try.  If you’re already experienced, maybe I provided some motivation to go more frequently and/or take someone new with you.  Either way, I want to hear from you about your own personal joys of backpacking.  If you’re interested in checking out my current gear list, I maintain it here. If you need to grow/upgrade your gear collection, I have a ‘Hiking’ section on my affiliate page with some discounts.  You can always follow my backpacking (and other) adventures on instagram.  If you want to create the ultimate backpacking experience, check this out.

  • Ghost in the (Google Cloud) Shell

    One of the perks of being a technologist that is not tied to a traditional 9 to 5 is that you have immense freedom in terms of where you can complete your ‘work’ from. I’ve always toyed with the digital nomad lifestyle… but it’s kind of ridiculous when you need to lug around an insane amount of equipment in order to effectively complete your tasks. I have several computers; optimized for specific types of work, or tied to specific clients. This always required me to think ahead before traveling.  Which project I was going to work on while away?  There was a time where I would take everything with me.  Traveling with kids has definitely made me want to pack as minimally as possible.  Since I was spending a bunch of time working on the Google stack, I decided to investigate using Google Cloud Shell as a development environment.

    Problems as a Digital Nomad Developer

    Development and image processing requires horsepower.  Even the best laptops for doing this are big and heavy…. and expensive.  This is definitely something to think about if you travel.  Especially if you’re regularly in a country like India, Russia or China where in today’s political climate the likelihood of your hardware getting confiscated is higher than ever. Having this happen while traveling was what ultimately drove me to become a Chromebook advocate.

    Pros and Cons of the Chromebook

    Losing the hardware is one thing, but losing the data contained on the device is even worse. Chromebooks solved the data problem… You could powerwash the device and then restore it back to its former state at any point in time from the cloud. Worst case scenario, you lose a reasonably inexpensive piece of hardware, but your data is intact. Unfortunately, Chrome OS hardware hasn’t historically been the best option for development… especially if you want to maintain the security offered by the powerwash technique that I mentioned.

    The desire to be able to travel anywhere, any time at a moments notice and feel confident that I can deal with anything that comes up while I’m gone using just my Chromebook ultimately drove me to experiment with setting up containerized development environments. I wanted something divorced from the hardware that I could easily get up and running and know that everything is setup the way I need it to be. This was great, but I still needed someplace where I could access these containers from anywhere. I eventually became more and more a fan of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).  The container centric approach to everything and the fact that the price was right ultimately led me to migrate all of my cloud infrastructure to GCP. It wasn’t long before my containerized development environments followed… and then I discovered Google Cloud Shell.

    Using Google Cloud Shell as a Development Environment

    Google Cloud Shell takes this whole idea a step further. It gives me a 5GB persistent space accessible from any browser. I don’t even need the Chromebook any more. Everything that I store in my home directory stays there across sessions. Even better, it’s directly connected to all of my projects in GCP. I’ve been doing almost all of my recent development using Google Cloud Shell and the integrated Orion Editor exclusively… and I LOVE it! For web based development and microservices, it’s absolutely great. Especially if you’re ultimately deploying to GCP. The only time I’ve gone back to my ‘development’ laptop has been to do Android development as I haven’t really found a good solution for running things like Android Studio or emulators using this approach.

    But I want to develop for ‘free’

    Ok, I can hear a bunch of you thinking that you don’t want to be forced to develop on GCP (and potentially incur costs) before you’re ready to deploy to production. Guess what? ngrok works great in Google Cloud Shell… you can expose your local dev environment securely anywhere on the web without deploying your project to GCP. What about localhost? ngrok exposes debug information on 127.0.0.1, so there’s no way to access that from Google Cloud Shell, right? Wrong… with GCS, you can expose a ‘ ‘web preview’ from any port just by clicking on the icon within GCS, you can map this to expose ngrok’s debug interface.

    Onward to Production

    Google Cloud Shell obviously has all of the Google Cloud SDK integrated by default, so when you’re ready to go to production, it’s a piece of cake. GCS even knows which Cloud Project you’re working on (and reminds you of that fact in the terminal). Turn off ngrok, push to your cloud environment and update your systems to point to the production version!

    Google Cloud Shell Conclusion

    Is Google Cloud Shell the absolutely flawless solution to every development need that a digital nomad has? Definitely not, but it’s pretty damn good. I haven’t found a good way to do Android development this using it. It’s absolutely fantastic for doing Node development though…. especially if you’re deploying to GCP ultimately. Google Cloud Shell does have a usage limit of 60 hours per week.  If you’re burning the candle from both ends, you’ll want to remember to shut it down when you do take a break so that you don’t hit that limit. Give it a shot for yourself and let me know what you think.