Milo of Croton--A Model for Crossfit...

Making the rounds in Crossfit Circles for a number of years has been the story of Milo of Croton picking up a bull calf at infancy and then picking it up every day until it was fully grown, an apparent lesson in the ability to incrementally increase weight lifts until they are extraordinary.

Milo of Croton is essentially an ancient Greek Paul Bunyan. He is very probably an historical person around whom incredible tales of physical prowess collected.

Very interesting to me is the story of how he met his demise. Milo reportedly came upon a tree trunk split into wedges. When he inserted his hands to split them, they somehow shifted and crushed his hands, trapping him. Unable to escape, he died, devoured by wolves.

It's the ultimate tale of hubris followed by dike, judgment.

There was very likely a great athlete named Milo from Croton. However he met his end, rest eternal upon his soul. 

Do you even lift, bro? Etiamne tollis, fra?

Travel back in time to Ancient Rome. In Saecula Saeculorum. Sword fights. Chases on horseback. Adventure. Love. Loss. Latin.

Do you even lift, bro?

As a Latin language scholar who also does Crossfit and lifts, I just couldn't resist offering a product on this meme.

Click on the image to buy the shirt. You can also change styles and sizes on the site itself.

The shirt features Hercules and Atlas lifting the earth itself. The letters are in Roman Royal Purple.

There are some erroneous translations of this into Latin already in circulation. I've seen, for instance, "Etiam tollisne?" (What's wrong with that explained below.)

I translate it as follows:

Do you even lift, bro?
Etiamne tollis, fra?

Here is the grammar lesson and textual support for my version.

First off, Plautus gives us a near perfect parallel in Mostellaria 4.2:

"Heus, Tranio, etiamne aperis?"
"Hey, Tranio, are you even going to open?"

The enclitic -ne creates a question. But it absolutely has to be put on the first word of the phrase. 

The use of "tollere" for "to lift" is justified by the idiom "tollere libramenta (weights)." 

Worth learning are the famous words St. Augustine heard outside his home, "Tolle, lege!" (Pick up, read!), which prompted him to read words from the Epistle to Romans that led to his conversion.(Confessions 8.12)

"Fra" is short for "frater" in the same way "bro" is short for "brother."

There you have it. If I could ever jump on a meme when it is first going, maybe I'd achieve my dream of revenue streams that let me sleep in every day and just study languages. Until then, back to the grind... 

If you're interested in my research into the continued knowledge and practice of the Paleo diet in ancient times, check out my book, Original Thin: the Paleo Diet in the Bible and Ancient Literature.

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If you're interested in Latin or ancient history, or even just an entertaining read, check out the time-travel thriller In Saecula Saeculorum. Click to learn more.

It's a bargain at 0.99 cents on Kindle (or affordably priced at $11.90 on paperback). 

You'll travel back to ancient Rome on a harrowing mission to save the modern world. It's the adventure of four lifetimes.

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Welcome to Uzina Crossfit - Bucharest, Romania!

[Warning: Redshed Crossfit specific blog post. You're welcome to read it, but if you haven't drunk the Crossfit kool-aide, you might not enjoy the post.]

We're kicking ourselves that only a few days ago, a week before we fly home, we googled "Crossfit Romania" to see if maybe it has found its way here.

Adriana does KB's at Uzina

We find there's a box called "Uzina Crossfit Romania." Uzina means "plant" (as in a huge factory). Uzina is open for a structured one hour WOD, group warm-up, skills, and WOD four times a week.

Tonight we went and in spirit it was as if we walked into our beloved Crossfit home at the Redshed. 

Everyone in the room, more than a dozen athletes plus the two coaches, shook our hands and introduced themselves. 

They've got some very nice facilities, as you can see. The rubber floor will go down soon. While they wait for their weights to arrive (they're stuck in customs in a port on the Black Sea), they focus on what they can do in that place. Which is plenty. You've got all your body weight exercises, kettle bells, rings, and pull-up bars. 

Here's the WOD (Work Out of the Day). And just like the Redshed, I thought it didn't look so bad, until Adriana and I finished it dead last after all those kids! 

Perechi means "Pairs." This was a couple WOD, partition as desired, but only one partner works out at a time. 

And here's the whole group after the WOD. The man directly

in front of me is "Romanian Pat" (George). The woman at the far right with thumbs up is "Romanian Janine" (Didn't catch her name, will when we WOD again on Thursday). The guy in the white t-shirt I'm calling "Romanian Kieran" because he's a lot stronger than he looks. The guy with his shirt off is "Romanian Marc" because, well, if I looked like those guys, I'd always take my shirt off too.

Turns out, they run a deal where your first WOD there is free. Normal price is 10 lei per session (about 3 US dollars). I told the coach that we were so happy to have found the place that we insist on paying. She told me, that the free first WOD rule is absolute and she would not take my money. That's class.

Thank you so much, Uzina Crossfit, for making two Americans feel so at home. And that's what the spirit of Crossfit is all about. Looking forward to WODing with you all again on Thursday.

The Saga of the Smuggled Meat...

My wife Adriana and I visit her native Romania every summer. We try to eat pretty strictly Paleo. But that is enormously difficult in Romania because the meat here is simply horrible. First off, you probably heard in the news about the controversy wherein Europe learned

what it thought was beef was actually at least half horse. That meat reportedly came from Romania. Now, I'm not actually opposed to eating horse, just so long as it's fresh and clean and I know what I'm getting. But you can understand that a place where what is marketed as beef is anything but is just not a reliable place to truly enjoy meat.

What meat you do see in stores you can just tell is shot full of chemicals and hormones, not to mention hygienic standards that saw that meat from slaughter to the plate.

This year, however, we conceived a risky endeavor. What if we attempted to smuggle excellent organic meat from the United States to Romania? 

Here was the plan. We would put into our checked luggage a quantity of frozen meat and hope that it would still be there when we arrived in Romania.

I tried to look online as to whether this was really prohibited. I couldn't find clear directives regarding Europe-bound travel. But it is very prohibited if you are going from Europe to the United States.

We decided to go for it. One bag received eight pounds of a combination of packs of ground bison and organic grass-fed ground beef. (That luscious stuff simply doesn't exist in Romania.)  I formed it into a cube to reduce surface area and then put it in a plastic bag. Then it went in an insulation bag, which I pulled tightly around the block with duct tape. The other bag received a similar eight pound block of beef and bison, but additionally ten pounds of organic chicken breast. Same treatment with the insulated bag. 

Both blocks were put back in the freezer, which I then set to the lowest possible temperature setting, 14 below zero.

We didn't take them out of the freezer until we went out the door to head for the airport.

The clock starts ticking: 1:00PM Eastern Time, Monday, July 1.

We were scheduled to take off at 5:30PM and arrive in Copenhagen for a connection that would leave for Bucharest, Romania at 8:10AM local time. We would arrive in Bucharest at Noonish and be putting that meat in the freezer an hour later. If everything went according to plan, that meat would spend 16 hours out of refrigeration. We were confident that, between the deep freeze, the insulated bags, and the fact that checked bags fly in a pretty cold cargo hold, the meat would still be at least cold when we unpacked it.

But things did not go as planned.

We arrived in Copenhagen and saw on the board that our flight to Bucharest did not yet have an assigned gate. We waited and waited. We were getting nervous when we still saw no gate a half an hour before we were supposed to board. And then, the electronic board changed.

Copenhagen - Bucharest: Cancelled.

WTF?????

We ask around and find out that we need to go to the Transfer Center to receive further information about

rebooking, etc. But my first thought was, that meat is officially in jeopardy. Luckily for us, all the signs in the Copenhagen Airport are in both Danish and English. So you can see to the left that we had no trouble finding the Transfer Center and our Gate.

I'm also pleased to report that we had no trouble finding the Assistance Center. Again, the inclusion of English on the sign was key to our success.


It was all very civilized. We took a ticket and waited our turn. We heard other Romanians similarly grounded around us. Our turn finally came. A very helpful woman informed us that the best she could do for us was to book us on a flight to Brussels at 3PM, with a follow-on flight to Bucharest, Romania that would arrive at 10:30PM. I immediately did the math. By the time we could get that meat to the freezer it would be out for 28 hours. I sighed. There's no way that meat's surviving outside the freezer that long. But that's no longer something we can control. The Airline was very kind and gave us a generous food voucher for the airport to get a meal before our continued flight. 

3PM finally rolled around. We were working on little sleep at this point. I can personally never sleep on planes. We fly to Brussels. I'd never been there before. At least I can add Belgium to the list of countries I've visited.

We had another long wait in that airport. We found a nice airport bar to relax at. We drank a few glasses of red wine. Our follow-on flight was finally ready to board. What a long day this had turned into. 

At 10:30PM local time, Tuesday July 2, we land in Romania. We're Zombies at this point. We're waiting for luggage that we fear now holds rancid meat. We wait and we wait. And the luggage carousel stops. Our luggage did not come with us. Priceless.

Adriana goes and fills out the necessary paperwork. She learns that our luggage didn't get put on our flight. It would fly to Romania the following day. And then be delivered to us by taxi--on Thursday morning.

We both just laughed at that point. I mean, pity the poor taxi driver who has to spend time with luggage that will certainly be smelling like a garbage dump. 

The following day comes and goes. We get a call in the evening from the airline that our luggage is indeed at the airport in Bucharest but it would not be delivered to us until the following morning. 

Thursday morning comes. We get the call that the driver has arrived. We take the luggage from him and head back up to our apartment. Adriana suggested that we just plug our noses and throw the meat bags down the garbage chute without even bringing them into our apartment. I suggested that we just carefully open them in our apartment to see what the damages are, ready to hurl them out depending on what we find there.

The meat had been out of refrigeration for 63 hours.

We open the suitcase with the smaller amount of meat. We can see the wrapped insulated bag in the middle of the clothes. I pick the thing up as if it were plutonium and set it on the kitchen table. I carefully tear away the tape and open the bag. We're both bracing ourselves to gag as I slide the meat out of the insulated bag.

And strangely, I feel quite cool meat come out of that bag. It wasn't exactly cold. But it was truly quite cool. Not a little cool. Quite cool. We examine the meat. These single pound hermetically sealed packs of meat were just fine. No air bubbles, no discoloration. We put them in the freezer.

On to the larger block. We open it and see blood all over the inside of the bag. But this one was actually still officially cold. One pound pack of ground bison had clearly somehow opened. It had air inside the package and no blood around the meat. We threw that one away. All the rest of the beef, bison, and chicken breast were still quite cold and hermetically sealed. We rinsed the blood off everything and put them in the freezer.

Against all odds, our meat had survived. All we can figure is that the combination of deep freezing, insulated bags, and the cold storage areas meant that the meat arrived to us still fine, but in the final hours of being fine. 

If our connection had actually happened, that meat would have still been frozen when we arrived in Romania. If the luggage had come with us, it would have still been largely frozen and quite cold. And, it turns out, 63 hours after we took it out of the freezer, that meat was still fine.

I ate a burger from that meat yesterday to celebrate the Fourth of July. Here's a Chili I made with it this evening.

Between various social engagements we know we will attend and evenings to cook at home, we have enough excellent organic meat to survive until the end of July, when we will return to the United States.

God Bless America. God Bless Us All.

You Know You're Paleo If...

You know you're Paleo if you have a collection of 29 surplus wishbones (and you break them for wishes regularly):

These birds were so delicious...

Paleo Does Paris!

We got on the plane for Paris in the best weight since we had started the Paleo Diet, two years ago. I’ve lost now forty pounds. Adriana is fifteen pounds lighter than when we started. We are both very happy with our weight and we are not actively planning dramatically further weight loss. We are, of course, planning further progress at RedShed CrossFit, where we lift weights greater than we ever could have imagined two years ago.

Now, we had no intention of spending four days in Paris living strictly Paleo. But we’re pretty strict at home. In March, via a Paleo challenge at our Crossfit Box, we stopped eating any dairy products. Coming from Wisconsin, I never imagined I could give up milk and cheese, but I was amazed how little I missed them. The only thing we continue to consume that Paleo Purists would not allow is dry red wine, which is pretty low in carbs anyway.

So our plan in Paris was simple. We were going to indulge in carbs that we would never eat at home. But at the same time, we would load up on meat whenever possible to at least minimize how many carbs our stomachs might demand.

And so, after our arrival, we slept. Before the first day of exploration, we headed down to Le Petit Dejeuner, The Breakfast.

It’s so funny, when you’ve lived Paleo for two years you approach a bank of food with just a different set of eyes. Where other people see a pile of muffins, you see a horrid problem. And then, we saw it. Oh Glory! A platter of ham.

Now, I knew this was not the nitrate-free meats that we consume back in the States. But even so, this was better than eating a piece of bread.

And then we also spied hard boiled eggs. I’ve admitted that I wasn’t trying to stay strict. So I indulged in a single croissant, which I slathered with Nutella.

OMG!!!! It was helpful to me to remember just how seductive sugar can be. I enjoyed it, I’m not going to lie. But there’s no way I’m going back to the habits that made me fat.

Adriana was better than me. She had eaten several eggs and multiple slices of the ham, when she realized there were only two pieces left on the platter.

“Will you eat more ham?” she asks.

“Absolutely,” I answer.

And then we entered upon a cultural divide. We Americans, we Paleo-Americans, approached the wait staff to inform them that we wanted more ham. Now, we had the best of intentions. But here’s what happened next.

The attendant walked to the platter and then looked at us as if we were insane. “There’s still ham here!” she says bewildered.

What she had not understood is that we are Paleo-Americans. Yes, there’s still ham there. But not for long, Madame. What we were trying to prevent is exactly what happened next.

We took the last two pieces of ham. If there had been five pieces, we would have taken them all. So there’s now officially no ham on the platter. A new family comes down to Le Petit Dejeuner. They took what was available. They took no ham because, well, there was none on the platter. They looked at the empty platter. I saw them do it. They had eaten muffins and left when the attendants saw the empty ham platter and repopulated it. We loaded up for some more.

We headed into our day of exploration. I’m not going to lie. They’re not called French Fries for nothing. The French created Pomme Frites. I’ve eaten them in America, Egypt, Romania, Qatar, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Canada, even Iraq, and finally now France. It matters not, they’re simply awesome. And I know they are a big part of what once made me fat. So I eat them with fear and trembling. But I wasn’t going to leave France without eating them.

Now, at our second Petit Dejeuner, we also faced another cultural divide. Our first morning, we had arrived and an attendant asked us if we wanted coffee or tea. We asked for coffee and she brought it to us in a metal beaker.

This second morning, upon entering the room, no attendant was there. Now, Americans didn’t invent coffee. But I think we did invent the coffee addiction. I see several families sitting there, no coffee or tea on their tables because, well, the attendant was not there.

Well, sorry, I am simply not able to sit down in the morning and merely hope for coffee. I need my f*&^%ng coffee.

I went into the attendants’ area and saw the metal beakers. I took one and filled it from one of the full pots of coffee sitting right there.

As I sat down and poured myself and my wife a coffee, they all looked at me as if I had killed a man. Sorry, folks.  Several minutes later, as they all looked longingly upon my coffee, an attendant appeared and met their needs.

Now, if you thought this was going to be a post about how I carefully tried to negotiate my way through two more days in France while trying to stay Paleo, I am sorry to disappoint you. Far from attempting a Paleo Lifestyle, we utterly abandoned that diet. The following morning I had two croissants with Nutella. I ordered food off menus that I have not eaten for months or even now years.

But if you are Paleo you also know that all you have to do after such indulgences is just to get back on track. We’re in Romania now for two months. Tomorrow we go to the big market. We shop like typical Crossfitters/Paleo Enthusiasts. We go to the Produce Section. We go to the Meat Market. We check out. We’ll be back at our fighting weight soon, my friends…

In Search of the Perfect Roasted Almond...

Something in the process my wife invented creates the world's most absolutely delicious roasted almond. Others from our CrossFit Box agree. So to help others enjoy this supernal experience, we've documented the process in detail step-by-step.



If you try this and agree, let me know.