Words cannot express my disappointment when the trailers for “Devil” started including his name. Up until that point they looked pretty promising.
You know your career is over when it’s possible to have a very spirited argument about when the defining moment you jumped the shark was. Personally, I think it’s when he inserted the critic character into Lady in the Water specifically to spitefully kill him off.
So lately, when we’re not spending spare evening time bashing our heads against Icecrown Citadel and achievement whoring playing Warcraft, we’ve been playing Mass Effect 2, which is our favorite entry in one of our favorite game series. We’ve long since both passed the “beat the game and get the optimal ending” point in both our playthroughs, and are now screwing around with difficulty modes, different classes, different romance choices, and other flavor additives to ways to experience the game. Since Mass Effect is a Bioware series, this also means trying to pursue other options in the game’s morality system. Originally I played a sickening goody two shoes with just enough badass quotient to maybe intimidate a bunny, and he played more of a mix but still ultimately leaned well to the heroic end of the spectrum. Since the whole point of subsequent playthroughs is to experience the game in other possible ways, we’ve both been at least attempting to play “renegade” instead of “paragon” this time.
The problem, we are both finding, is that more often than not the bad-guy option is by far the stupid option. Instead of coming across as cool and ruthless, taking the renegade option in a given conversation is harrowingly likely to result in the main character opening his or her mouth and, out of the clear blue sky, saying something stupidly aggressive that is usually a massive overreaction to whatever the conversational trigger was. It’s like having your cool battle-hardened military veteran intermittently possessed by the spirit of Yosemite Sam. Just for icing on the cake, not infrequently it also turns out to be a conversational option that closes off your opportunities for future interaction and gain from that character; playing “renegade” isn’t just choosing the less goody-two-shoes option, it’s also very often the objectively stupid way to play.
To give you an example, there’s a point in the game where you decide the fate of two characters, one of whom is dedicated to upholding justice and virtue and one of whom is a sociopathic serial killer; one of them will be your loyal crew member and one of them will be killed. Stingray is encouraging me on my second playthrough to choose the serial killer because he didn’t have enough renegade points at the time to save her, but I’m having a really hard time with the idea less because I’m that dedicated to the cause of virtual truth and justice than because I do enjoy the game as a story and the characters as characters, and I’m having a really hard time with making a game decision that ultimately amounts to my protagonist making a transparently retarded human resources decision. Not only is the alternative character unambiguously evil, you can actually end the game by allowing that character to seduce yours, which is fatal. Hello, I’m Commander Shepard, and I’m going to save the entire damn galaxy, unless I decide to screw this black widow killer first.
The basic problem is that Bioware, whose main strength as a gaming company is that they produce tightly written and plotted games with deep characterization, has to have a strong skeleton of a story no matter what choices you make, and the basic skeleton of Mass Effect is that Commander Shepard is a heroic character. The game steers you toward that flavor of choices, because it all feels very bizarre to have the entire galaxy’s respect and adulation when your behavior is consistently that of someone who has a severe and violent impulse control disorder. And it is very, very difficult to earn that status, because often the game defines doing anything at all to help someone else- which is how experience and money are earned, and money is tight in that game- as heroic and therefore worth some paragon points, where refusing is worth some renegade points and nothing else.
Lionhead Studios is another game company that has repeatedly attempted to introduce a functional morality system in their games, and they’ve had no easier a time of it. Their first major dip into this pool (which as all Lionhead games do suffered from Peter Molyneux’s tendency to promise the sun, moon, and stars with each release) was Black And White, a “god” game in which your choice of actions not only determines how your worshippers interact with you, but also changes the landscape and many other visual elements of the game. A game where you can either be a pitiless demanding smiting sort of God, or a benevolent blessing sort, cool!
Problem was, as everyone who played the game found out, that you don’t really have a choice between good and evil. You can either choose to play evil and win as long as you’re not so gratuitously evil you wipe out your own worshippers, or you can play good and become the much put-upon maid of a rapidly expanding population of whiny ingrates who will do absolutely nothing for themselves that could be produced by a miracle and have zero interest in either fighting your enemies or defending themselves. The moment a sufficiently competent rival god comes along, your group will be wiped out, probably whining as they go. Instead of lawful good and chaotic stupid, you get stupid good and effective evil. Miracle-based economies, it seems, are only productive if the relevant miracle is “I will strike you with lightning on the spot if you even think about goofing off.”
The apparent solution is to divorce the individual choices you make from gameplay consequences as much as possible, which is what Lionhead did with Fable, touted as the ultimate sandbox RPG. It’s true, you can make nearly any choice and customize your character in dozens of ways with both the original Fable and the sequel- but it turns out to be even less satisfying. Yahtzee pretty perfectly summarized Fable 2 and its expanded list of choices as “Yes, you can do all these things, but why would you want to?” The effort to divorce choice from overall consequence (aside from having to pay fines to law enforcement from time to time) results in a character that technically has a story that is carried out over the course of the game, but has no personality whatsoever no matter what heroic or evil choices you’ve made. Rescue villagers, flirt with them, fry them, impress them with your epic and highly developed farting skill, it all loses its charm very rapidly.
The only way I can think of to solve the story/choice problems without making your hero Blandy McBlanderson is to, functionally speaking, create two different games, with different but equally strong fundamental storylines built around the different styles of doing things. Evil, selfish bastards generally aren’t cut out to go on suicide missions to save the galaxy, and dewy-eyed altruists generally aren’t in a good position to conquer the world. Creating an RPG-style game like this would be incredibly difficult and resource-consuming, but I’d play it in a heartbeat.
Meantime I think I’ll go back to Civilization IV. I can achieve a cultural victory if Stingray doesn’t crush me with his navy first, but I think I might be able to bribe half a dozen cash-poor allies or so to deal with him…
A rainstorm washing some of the thick haze of sagebrush pollen out of the air gave me a one-day reprieve, and yesterday’s post was the result. Now it’s back to the current choking haze of plant bukkake and my brain has run out my nasal passages again. It’s sad, really; I attempted to write a rant and collapsed in a pile of failure when I realized I really wasn’t going to get much farther than “Bill Maher is a miserable asshole”. Blogging low point to be certain.
So in the spirit of “go there and look at this”, here: Opinionated Star Trek Episode Guides. These are fairly amusing if you’re a Trek fan. Go watch the one for Samaritan Snare. The Pakleds are doing a really good impression of how I’m feeling today.
One thing that I see pretty commonly in discussions of rape and criminal violence against women in general, especially in the firearms community which is very used to the idea of shooting bad guys to stop them, is that women should simply be armed and shoot anyone who’s trying to seriously fuck with her. In basic principle, I agree with this; the only way to stop someone who has decided to do you serious violence is to return it in kind and hopefully in a terminal fashion, and if you are in the majority of the population that is less skilled and determined at assault than most violent criminals, then you had better be armed if you want a good chance. So yes, I agree with the principle and premise that a part of an overall solution of sexual violence against women by violent men is for women to be more capable as a class to respond with terminal violence.
What I see as a problem is when it’s put forth as a truism that women, if they don’t wish to be victimized, should just shoot the bastard and be done with it and if she didn’t she’s weak, silly, stupid, or on some level actually wanted the violence. In cases of rape this is especially problematic because most rapes are acquaintance rapes rather than “a stranger jumped out of the bushes” crimes and about the only way a woman doing such would be ruled as a righteous shooting rather than a homicide is if she was attacked on her way home from church group in a public park while wearing a snowsuit and the dead perp was out on parole for sexual assault, but when I started out mulling over writing something about exactly that issue, it occurred to me it’s rather a broader issue.
The issue with women and violence in self-defense in general isn’t as superficial as “the media and debased Western culture have taught us that all violence is bad and women are particularly susceptible”, it’s that even in a more traditional age and more traditional subcultures, boys receive a great deal of cultural training from birth giving them instructions on circumstances in which they might have to be violent in a justified way, and girls typically receive none at all. Boys are taught by, if not their fathers, than by fiction that part of the nature of manhood is that at some point or points you’re going to have to put up your fists and defend either yourself or your honor. Girls receive no equivalent messages; while a boy might grow up with the understanding implicit that at some point he might get into a fight with his schoolmates or a bully might try to push him around and he should be able to fight back if only to stop the bully, a little girl’s cultural experience of violence is that it’s something boys do, and that if it is any sense relevant to her, her experience of violence will be with a shadowy caricature of “bad guy” whose mental picture is something of a menacing version of the Hamburglar. When it comes to more mundane violence- boys’ violence- that’s the sort of things that, if her honor requires defending, will be covered by her fathers and/or brothers, and if they aren’t available, with a knee to the groin and a withering comment.
The cultural construction of manhood is wrapped up in violence; no matter what circumstances a boy grows up under or what his opinions of the rightness of it all might be, a boy does not grow up without a variety of what-if manhood tests in his head, like what to do if he encounters a bully in public that’s harassing him or his wife or girlfriend, or what to do if threatened by a mugger. From a woman’s perspective the degree to which many men dwell on such scenarios is often rather bizarre, because women are not initiated into and not held to the standards of manhood and manliness; manhood qualities and tests are far more on a man’s radar than a woman is, even if her presence and opinion is part of the scenario*. This can be taken to a scary unhealthy degree for men in general, as when there is the unspoken assumption that a man should be able to fight off overwhelming odds or else he’s less of a man, but the key point in general is that the possibility of violence among peers is part of the male cultural experience and identity from early childhood on, but not so for a woman. Women have extensive social rules and contexts, but none of them really include violence except in terms of the “catfight”, which is much more male fantasy than female experience for the most part- and is not a fantasy that ever includes real injury or death.
Male roles and fantasies and female roles and fantasies play out in fiction; nowadays girls get more role models that are active rather than passive, but the traditional girl adventurer isn’t the violent type. These types of characters usually solve their monster and bad-guy problems with wit rather than with force, and while it might be fitting for a girl adventurer to be good with a sword, she’s rarely good with a gun, and if part of her background includes such proficiencies, it’s rarer that she puts them to serious use in killing rather than using the skill itself for some other plot reason or just stating that the skill is there and proceeding as though it weren’t from there. Actual action-oriented heroines usually tend to be expilictly superpowered/far-from-normal, and whether she’s a presented as a more or less normal human or not, there’s a huge temptation on the part of writers to create drama by having such characters killed, de-powered, or raped.
This is starting to take on a resemblance to a feminist rant, and I suppose in part it is, but I want to stress that I don’t think these patterns are necessarily the result of misogyny or sexism; these are simply the fictional patterns that occur to writers and their audiences as the way the world works, and are happily consumed by women and men alike. The primary fanbase of some of the most egregious examples of extremely gender-polarized fiction are often women as well. It works precisely because it’s an easy mental role for women and girls to occupy and project themselves in as part of the fantasy. Rape and/or a truly severe beating occurs as a dramatic idea to so many male writers not because they hate women, but because they are horrified by the notion and therefore it seems like a natural dramatic direction. A male character being similarly treated could not come through the plotline without being seen by most of the audience as having been emasculated and therefore no longer eligible for heroic status, therefore it doesn’t happen to them nearly as often.
This isn’t mean to be about fiction any more than it’s meant to be about feminism, but fiction and fantasy are mental models that both reflect and shape how their creators and consumers see themselves. It’s merely meant to be a powerful reflection of my primary argument: violence and how it relates to themselves is as much a part of men and male experience as sexuality, but it’s not nearly so much a part of women and female experience. Men play out in their heads how they might deal with a violent encounter, with whatever mixture of dread and bravado, but most women simply don’t think about it unless forced to, at which point fear and confusion tend to reign because it is so outside their experience and mental modeling of the world and themselves.
On a less explicitly violent level, this is reflected in the kinds of cultural training boys and men receive to be assertive or to push or reinforce boundaries; standing up for yourself is again included implicitly under the umbrella of manhood. Women and girls, on the other hand, are encouraged not to be loud or rude or overly assertive- the idea being that her role is to be polite and cooperative and that people will respect a nice girl like that. Respect is received for being “good”, not earned by standing up for it. Women and girls who are aggressive in establishing and enforcing boundaries usually wind up with some variant of the “bitch” label, depending on context; mean bitch, crazy bitch, frigid bitch. Some don’t mind, but another thing that tends to be tied up in the “girl” experience is that social acceptance and social alliances and ties are emphasized- being an outcast comes with punishment and usually lacks recourse to any sort of “cool loner/rebel” alternative image.
All of this translates into a basic tendency- and desire- to fit developing social situations into one of the categories that are mentally familiar and seen as applicable to the girl or woman in question. This is the primary ground in which sexual predators operate; as long as doubt can be maintained that his intentions are truly predatory, then desire to not be bitchy and a belief that behaving correctly will protect her boundaries can be pushed all the way into a rape that she may not even fully convince herself was rape, or a belief that the blow was earned or somehow accidental. Violence is what the shadowy Violent Man does: so long as he can maintain he is not Shadowy Violent Man, then that must not be exactly what happened. Defending herself with force is not in the mental checklist of “ways to respond to an unpleasant situation”, so having it occur to her that that was even an option may come late or not at all- and in the meantime, the message from outside suddenly goes from “do not be a bitch at any cost” to “why didn’t you defend yourself (did you want it?)”
Obviously there are lots of women who are completely capable of using force in their own defense or in the defense of others; I’m making a broad generalization, not a statement of absolute truth. What I AM saying is that broadly speaking, men and women grow up with far different mental modeling and training for seeing situations as ones in which some defense, small or large, is required- and that for a woman who has been brought into contact with cold and violent reality by force, often the situation is not nearly so simple as “buy a gun and next time shoot the bastard”, or “learn martial arts”. It’s one that has to start with her own identity and the core assumptions and values of how she views the world and others.
*One bizarrely common thing I’ve seen is the idea that, if a man is harassed and humiliated in public by a rude, pushy man in front of his girlfriend, she will be attracted to the man who successfully dominated him. Guys, this is exclusively a male fantasy/fear; the woman in question may have be alarmed by the situation, but she experiences a strange bullying man chiefly as a threat of male violence, not sexy masculinity. She may be dismayed if she feels suddenly unsafe, but only men experience this scenario as a manhood contest.
So yeah. Things are worse, not better, in that no matter what I do I’m sleeping terribly because I keep waking up due to not being able to breathe through my nose and consequently losing all my body fluids to the air and snapping out of a dream about dying of thirst. If this keeps up too much longer I may drag myself to the doctor and beg for something stronger than what I’ve got, regardless of normally regarding hayfever as something to tough out. The cat has it as badly as I do and we’re having to clean up after a lot of very productive body-wracking sneezes from him. I blame the sagebrush, or at least that’s what I should blame according to weatherbug.com. Suffice to say I think I had a good idea for a post, but it either vanished under a tidal wave of Benadryl or the Benadryl caused me to hallucinate having had a good idea. Same difference in the end.
So belatedly, here’s the most recent Vicious Circle. I think at various points stabs were made at having a topic, but my memory of the whole thing is rather colored by the aforementioned antihistamine haze and I wound up having the attention span of a squirrel. I definitely recall being rather confused by the end.
And just so you don’t leave completely bereft, this is what you do the next time the subject of lunch, or scaled up some, dinner comes up.
Get yourself some hot Italian sausages next time you’re at the grocery store. When food o’ clock rolls around, slice the sausages in half, and also slice some onion up into thin strips, how much depending on how many people you’re feeding and how you feel about onions. Mix up a sauce composed of one part dijon mustard to one part mayo, and stir in some hot sauce and minced garlic or garlic powder. (I just used garlic hot sauce.) Fry up your onions in butter until just beginning to brown. Push the onions off to the sides of the pan and brown each sausage half on both sides. Remove from heat and apply the sauce to the insides of either hot dog buns or split rolls, depending on size of sausages. Fork in the sausages, then the onions. Total time consumed, roughly fifteen minutes, and a VERY satisfying lunch.
So we’ve declined to talk about the Koran burning thing or the Ground Zero mosque because we felt neither deserved a fraction of the attention being paid so far. And I’m not going to say anything substantive about either for that reason.
But it turns out the story as it stands is the Koran-burning pastor has offered to cancel the book-burning if the Ground Zero mosque people move the mosque, which the relevant imam isn’t biting on but IS happily milking this for extra media time. Donald Trump likes that idea and is willing to pay handsomely to get in on that, which the lawyer for the mosque declared to be a “cheap attempt to get publicity”, and proved on the spot that there is no God because he was not struck by lightning or swallowed into the mouth of Hell. Sensing that other packs of media-whore lunatics were getting far more attention than them, Westboro Baptist Church has stated that they will burn some Korans if the other book-burners back down. Because there’s a law of Conservation of Sacrilege that would otherwise go unsatisfied, I guess. The White House is on it. And to top it all off, the media camped out at the church where the burning was to take place have snapped and started ranting about how they’re being used.
When I look back on my life, I will recognize exactly this moment at which current events become totally indistinguishable from satire and caused a singularity of Poe’s Law.
Yes, we’re busy- Kang is off to show again.
We did get a nice visit last night, though. Back around in June we had to rescue a baby bull snake from Kang, who dislikes snakes and always lets us know about them at volume. He was an awfully cute little fellow, trying as hard as he was to convince us he was a mean, dangerous rattlesnake by puffing himself up (this achieved the same rough result as DJ Qualls flexing menacingly) and vibrating the end of its tail until it blurred. Unfortunately for him, since he had no dry grass to “rattle” against, all this accomplished was getting us to loom over him going “D’AWWWWWWWW SUCH A CUTIE” longer. We chased him out of the back yard (away from Kang) and wished him luck; we enjoy seeing bull snakes about the place, as they eat rodents and compete with rattlers for territory. A very beneficial species. Here’s his portrait from June, which you can click for big:
Well, he’s still around. Kang found him in the ash cleanout on the fireplace last night, and we once more oohed and ahh’d a little bit before gently chasing him off. He’s gained a few inches and a satisfyingly large lump in his midsection that we take to have been something we’d not have wanted in residence. We feel downright proprietary; our little boy is growing up! If we’d had a spare terrarium around the temptation to make a pet of him might have been too great, but he’s doing more good where he is- haven’t seen any mice at all around since last winter. We’ll just maintain our caution on the residential roads, which is the main threat to a long adulthood for him along with Kang and raptors.
Fidel Castro declares that Cuba has too much state involvement in economy. In all likelihood this is just code for “please drop the embargo”, which I actually think would be a good idea, but it still penetrated my histamine fog enough to get a “bzuh?!” out of me.
Congress maybe taking a look at shaping up the BATFEIEIO regulations to permit less random harassment of gun dealers and fewer headaches over issues that should be common-sense. Probably itself translates to a Democratic congress going “PLEASE DON’T FIRE ALL OF US YOU LIKE GUNS NOW RIGHT”, but if this goes anywhere (or is even what it appears to be, which isn’t certain) it’d be very good news.
Stingray wouldn’t let me get away with not linking to melon face, which he’s been sadistically giggling at all day. Be sure to watch the full video, as to me the best part is the bit at the end. I’m fairly certain that if there had been fewer cameras the whole thing would have ended in a homicide.
We sneezy and sleepy. Read the previous post. Come back tomorrow.
Now that we’ve covered what food consists of from the body’s point of view and what it does with it once you’ve swallowed it- gaining, storing, and mobilizing energy- we move on to how the body actually uses it.
The word “metabolism” technically means the process of biologically transforming one kind of molecule into another kind of molecule; catabolic metabolism refers to breaking something up, usually for the purpose of gaining energy, whereas anabolism refers to building something from more basic components. In the context of the human body, we usually refer to the concept “metabolism” to describe as a whole our body’s systems for storing and burning energy as though it were a single variable; a “slow metabolism” is one biased to storage, where a “fast metabolism” would be one more biased to burning energy. “Basal metabolism” is usually used to describe a general “set point” for an individual’s metabolism when not actively busy exercising or otherwise stressing the body’s need for energy. We tend to think of “burning energy” as something we exclusively do when exercising, but basal metabolism actually accounts for the primary bulk of our energy requirements; as mammals, simply regulating our body temperatures to stay at a constant, warm set point is where most of our consumed calories go. Activity* and repairs account for the remainder of the body’s calorie needs; the reason that the bulk of the burning of fat stores a person will go through in a day occurs during deep sleep is that this is when the body is busy repairing and rebuilding from whatever insults it suffered during the day- and, if the day included significant exercise, building it back a little better as a training adaptation.
Basal metabolism will vary a great deal across individuals just as a matter of genetics; some people are built with “thrifty” metabolisms that diligently store energy and don’t let it go readily, others are high-burning, store little, and experience the excess as “nervous energy” if they don’t put it to some use. While everyone seems to have a natural set point, other variables will still influence them powerfully in various directions; age, activity level, hormonal fluctuations whether natural or medically induced, illness or injury, or an experience with starvation**. Any significant push on any of the variables that change the body’s energy needs will reflect in basal metabolism; although we usually don’t think of temperature as a factor because most of us sensibly inhabit temperate climes that don’t significantly push us, extreme cold will create pressure on the metabolism that translates into a significant chunk of the massive calorie needs for arctic explorers and others forced to spend a great deal of time coping with it. Body composition also has a significant effect on basal metabolism; fat is energy-cheap to maintain and a few pounds more or less of it don’t alter the budget much, but muscle is very expensive and more or less muscle mass has a much more dramatic effect per pound on the metabolic rate needed to maintain it, let alone put it to serious work.
Perhaps an ideal “case in point” example of the degree to which one person’s basal metabolism can differ from another’s is swimmer Michael Phelps, who famously subsists on a 12,000 calorie a day diet. (In contrast to the 1500-3000 daily needs of an “average” nonathlete, depending on age, sex, and size.) Phelps probably has a fairly high basal metabolism by genetics, and being a young man gives him another bump up, but the entirety of the rest of those calories are going toward maintaining the gargantuan energy output allowing him to spend five hours a day on intense exercise, and then repair his body from the damage done and turn it into training adaptation. None of those calories, regardless of source, are sticking around as fat- all of them are used to maintain his muscle mass and put it through daily strenuous effort. The fats and carbohydrates are turned into massive stores of glycogen, and then burned during training, rather than being stored in adipose tissue. All of this is normal for an Olympic-level athlete during training-and the high basal metabolism itself, the muscle mass, and the upper limit of glycogen storage in skeletal muscle are all trained responses rather than what the metabolism of an average sedentary adult would do under the same conditions.
Having discussed the gestalt effect of energy demands and output we refer to as metabolism, let’s have a look at how that’s actually accomplished. For the purpose of generating energy, the human body relies on three major systems. For the first two, everything begins with glycolysis, the conversion of a molecule of glucose into pyruvic acid. What then happens to the pyruvic acid depends on whether oxygen is present or not.
Aerobic respiration is our body’s main glucose-burning, energy generation system. (High school flashback trigger: the Krebs cycle!) This is where we get the bulk of our energy, and it is by far the most efficient way to use glucose to produce ATP. When you’re doing anything that doesn’t rapidly require you to slow down or stop and catch your breath- within about two minutes or so- you’re relying mainly or totally on this primary pathway. During aerobic metabolism, one molecule of glucose yields 30-38 ATP. This is why oxygen is so popular with life on Earth. Most people are familiar with exercise as defined by “aerobic” or “anaerobic”, but there are actually two “anaerobic” pathways.
The lactic acid system is what happens to the pyruvic acid in the absence of enough oxygen for aerobic respiration. The pyruvate becomes lactic acid, which becomes lactate and free hydrogen. The lactate circulates to the liver to be reassembled into glucose, the buildup of free hydrogen ions then begins interfering with respiration. This interference is what puts the hard upper limit on lactic acid metabolism and creates the sensation of pain and fatigue. You can run for about a minute and a half this way. The net yield is two molecules of ATP per original molecule of glucose- vastly less efficient than aerobic metabolism, but not dependent on your ability to rapidly supply vast amounts of oxygen to your tissues.
The phosphogenic system is the shortest of the short term for energy generation. Adenosine triphosphate becomes adenosine diphosphate when one of its phosphates is ripped off (producing the energy), and is resynthesized back into adenosine triphosphate by ripping the phosphate off a molecule of creatine phosphate, which can last for as long as the supply of the latter lasts. This is the only energy system that is truly local to a muscle cell, as the supplies of ATP and CP live within the cell itself rather than being delivered by the bloodstream. This system is for short-term, maximum-effort energy bursts: the available supply of ATP and CP in combination lasts no longer than a maximum of about eight to ten seconds. When the ATP runs out, energy drops, the other systems replenish ATP, and the cycle can continue, though it will be always running at a deficit relative to that first big burst.
Any and all exercise can be roughly broken down by the degree to which it leans on these pathways; sprinters and weightlifters rely on a combination of the lactic acid and phosphogenic systems, while a distance runner (or any endurance athelete) is working as aerobically as he or she can. Aerobic exercise can be maintained for far longer, but anaerobic exercise burns the glucose much less efficiently and thus tends to go through a great deal of it in those smaller chunks of time. In either event, after the activity is at an end and the body’s owner peacefully asleep, training adaptations occur in response to how the body was challenged; in terms of activities that were limited by oxygen, building more and further extending capillaries enhances the body’s ability to deliver oxygen to tissues, as well as strengthening the heart and lungs. Activities that were limited by maximum muscle fiber recruitment, lactate threshold, size and capacity of muscle fibers, and neurological efficiency will produce improvements in these areas***.
If you’ve ever heard the term “VO2 Max”, it measures an individual’s capacity to utilize oxygen; it measures the maximum amount of oxygen in milliliters that the individual can use in one minute per kilogram of body weight. Effectively speaking it’s a measurement of an individual’s capacity for maintaining aerobic metabolism; running at a pace of 5 mph is easily sustainable aerobic activity for one person and more anaerobic for another who will be out of breath in a few minutes because the first person has a higher VO2 max than the other. A large number of variables- metabolic ability to rapidly and efficiently handle lactic acid buildup, cardiovascular strength, capillary network, volume of blood plasma and density of red blood cells, and more- go into what raises VO2 max, but the principle “if you want to improve it, train it”- in this case by repeatedly doing things that bring you to running out of oxygen for aerobic respiration- always apply. The explicit purpose of Tabata intervals, for example, is to spend as much time as possible using the anaerobic pathways, using only enough rest to get enough oxygen back to restore them as possibilities before returning to the work****.
Fatigue is what ultimately limits exertion. Most of us are familiar with fatigue due to exceeding our lactate threshold- which boils down to the working muscle cells, and the metabolic processes they use, becoming acidotic, which interferes with muscle contraction and the smooth operation of the ATP factory. This is not, however, the only process that produces a sensation or effect of fatigue; the nervous system will also experience a burnout effect when repeated, intense muscle contractions are demanded, as the supplies needed for motor neurons to deliver constant “CONTRACT HARD NOW” messages to the muscle fibers can exceed the body’s ability to quickly recycle them*****, especially when there are a lot of hydrogen ions already floating around from a lot of anaerobic glucose-burning. These are what will stop a sprinter or a power-lifter; what stops an athlete working at endurance activities that let him get the majority of his energy from aerobic metabolism will ultimately be his supplies of fuel and his body’s ability to use it efficiently.
To illustrate this, let’s go back to our marathon runner. We’re going to assume that this runner is extremely fit and also intelligent about what his limiting factors will really be in a race; he’s spent the previous five days or so going very light on his running and chowing down on tons of carbohydrates in order to top off his supplies of muscle glycogen, and more of the same the morning of his race to make sure his liver is nice and stuffed with yet more glycogen. He’s excited and moving about, and the hormonal response from his adrenals is blunting what otherwise might be a big insulin spike. As he begins running, he has plenty of glycogen for his body to readily convert to glucose, and he’s maintaining a pace that allows aerobic respiration to dominate. As this goes on, cortisol becomes the hormone dominating his metabolism; as far as his body is concerned, it must be experiencing a stressor that for some reason causes running miles and miles to be a good idea. Aside from continuing to burn up his existing stores of glycogen, his body starts burning his fat stores; since there are double the number of metabolic steps that need to be taken to turn fat into glucose than there are to glycogen into glucose, this is necessarily a much slower and less efficient process; fat is like coal compared to glycogen’s refined gasoline as a fuel, and what will limit the runner won’t be the extent of his fat stores but rather his body’s ability to rapidly convert the fat into something useful while still relying on the glycogen as what will allow him to take his next stride; the fat is more a supplement that will stretch the life of his glycogen than itself a primary supply of energy. All of it still boils down to glucose, but his body simply can’t turn fat (or protein, for that matter, which the cortisol is also stripping for glucose generation) into glucose fast enough to make it primary distance running fuel, though it’s good enough for walking.
If our runner hadn’t been so careful to make sure he had as much glycogen as possible stored in his muscles, at some point as the miles stacked up he might run out; in this case he would experience “hitting the wall” as still feeling relatively alert and energetic but his legs simply refusing to continue working. Since he has plenty of muscle glycogen to burn, his limiting factor then becomes liver glycogen, which is what his brain the energy pig is drinking from. If he runs out of liver glycogen, he will experience his wall as an overwhelming loss of motivation or sense of fatigue, loss of alertness, or even hallucination or other clear manifestations of cognitive dysfunction. His muscles have the fuel and the energy efficiency to keep going, but his central nervous system needs its fast, rich glucose supply to keep running them. Aside from breakfast, one thing he can do to stave this off is to make sure his supplies of fluid also represent a supply of very simple sugars- sports drinks rather than simply water******. He needs cool fluids in any case, since overheating or dehydrating will put so much stress on his cardiovascular system that fatigue and forced cessation of activity will arrive rapidly. In theory, as long as he can keep getting glucose to stave off the collapse of his stored energy and fluids to keep his body temperature regulated and his blood pressure up, he can keep going like this until his tissues actively start to break down from the overuse without the chance for a good long sleep and repair cycle- which is exactly what ultramarathoners do. (Our marathoner will be content with 26 miles, a nice pasta dinner, and a really long nap.) All of this, however, requires the runner to have trained well enough to have a very high VO2max to limit the amount of time he spends in anaerobic energy pathways, an efficient metabolism, and muscles and bones conditioned to the long work. A completely untrained individual probably won’t be able to walk 26 miles no matter how much glucose you throw at him, let alone run it.
A sprinter or a weightlifter, in contrast, spends his workouts in a very different metabolic environment. He certainly has enough glycogen to sustain his workout; it’s going to be his body’s ability to tolerate and clear hydrogen ion buildup, the size of his muscle fibers and his nervous system’s conditioning to recruit many muscle fibers per contraction and keep up contraction, and efficiently pump out glucose in a low-oxygen environment that’s going to dictate how much power his body can put over a short period before fatigue stops him in his tracks. High intensity and short time period (it has to be if the work is really high intensity) will also change the hormonal picture for him to favor more growth hormone and less cortisol- which is one reason among many that marathon runners tend to end up looking like this and sprinters like this even though both are training exclusively for running performance rather than any aesthetic purpose.
I promised in the last post that I would at least attempt to translate all of this information into a short guide to how various popular dieting protocols actually work, and that I shall. Fundamentally speaking, all diets intended to alter body composition either focus on calorie content or on controlling hormones.
Low-fat diets are the flagship diets of calorie restriction; when one macronutrient source is worth 9 calories per gram and the others 4, lowering the fat content of any given food item is usually an easy way to lower its calorie content. Low-fat diets *do not* work when overall caloric load is not carefully tracked- if you simply replace the satisfactions of fat with lots of sugar or starch, no matter how little dietary fat you’re eating you can still maintain or gain body fat. Not all calorie-restriction diets are necessarily low-fat- see also Weight Watchers- but you certainly won’t find any fans of NOT carefully watching fat content here.
Low-carb diets are diets of insulin control. There are several variants in this family- Atkins, South Beach, primal/paleo- with different philosophies and different amounts of “allowed” carbs and what kinds of carbs are allowed, but all of them rely on either dramatically lowering the amount of produced insulin (remember, storage hormone) or blunting and smoothing out insulin responses. South Beach, for example, puts its dieters through a period of sharp insulin restriction- a ban on carbohydrates for the first two weeks- and then moves to focusing more on staying low on the glycemic index. Protein and fat both induce a higher satiety response- a feeling of fullness and satisfaction- in normal individuals than carbohydrates do, so calorie restriction tends to happen as a natural consequence. Some of these diets go all the way into advocating staying in a state of ketogenesis- shifting the bulk of the body’s energy needs to burning fat and requiring the brain to run on ketone bodies rather than glucose. (Yes, this can be done. It’s how we survived starvation Back In The Day.) Some people tolerate ketogenic diets much better than others; there seems to be a lot of natural variation in how well or poorly people do with extreme carbohydrate restriction. Perhaps needless to say, 100% of endurance athletes do poorly on ketogenic diets, though some bodybuilders combine ketogenesis with runner-style muscle glycogen loading in a cyclical fashion.
Any diet that produces the desired result for its user- less body fat while keeping a reasonable proportion of muscle mass, sustainability, and energy levels adequate to support activity level- will result in fewer consumed calories and reduced peaks and valleys in blood glucose. Any diet that actually does this is a good one, whatever metabolic lever it relies on, and any that doesn’t is either straight bunkum or really, really incompatible with the needs of the user.
*Believe it or not this includes mental activity. The brain sucks down quite a lot of glucose doing something difficult for it; if you’re struggling through a challenging math test you may as well be running when it comes to how fast you’re going through glucose. Big brains are expensive, which is one major evolutionary reason so relatively few animals bother with them. Given that the glucose needs go down as tasks are learned and mastered, however, you’re much better off with running than math when it comes to planned calorie-burning.
**Extreme calorie restriction counts as a starvation experience regardless of whether it happened because you were stranded in the desert or because you wanted to be in swimsuit shape. This is why crash diets are such a pernicious cycle; each experience trains the metabolism more firmly to store every scrap of energy and only let it go if absolutely forced. Not only does the weight come back, it comes back much faster than it went on.
***Believe it or not strength training is every bit as much about your motor nerves as it is your muscles; you will be stronger performing motions that your nervous system has learned thoroughly. This is also why varying movements- and making sure movements are complex and involve multiple joints- helps in making sure strength transfers from the gym to daily life, and why there is often seemingly poor carryover in strength between two different motions that work the same muscle or muscles.
****The good news about Tabata intervals: an effective workout in only fourteen minutes! The bad news: they will be the most profoundly miserable fourteen minutes in your day unless you manage to run across that lion I kept talking about in the last post. If you’re NOT miserable, you’re probably slacking.
*****I could explain this in more detail, yes, but it would require a really long side digression I think we will all be much happier without.
******Sports drinks will hit your bloodstream even faster than a can of soda, given that doing so is their reason for existence. Sports drinks are not diet drinks.
