Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

3/5. Review of various exercise recovery trends and modalities – specialized hydration and nutrition, cryotherapy, compression, supplements, etc. etc. It's probably not a spoiler to say that the only thing for which we have clear effectiveness evidence is sleep. Everything else is probably a placebo, though there can be some value in that. Worth reading for the weekend warrior (I was one of those once, and hey, I went running* last night after the baby was in bed, so there).

*Well…trotting. Screw my achilles. Screw my weird and somewhat frightening post-partum joint pain.

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

5/5. I have been reading a poem a day from this collection since last August, before my baby was born. (Yes, including the day he was born). I got this idea from a blog post somewhere by a woman who was talking about retiring, and how important it is to have continuity between two very different life states, like a project to carry forward. So I did this, and it was great. Ryan is clever and playful and difficult; her poems offer literary jokes and a sting in the tale.

The idle are shackled
to their oars. The waters
of idleness are borderless
of course and must always
be plied. Relief is foreign
on this wide and featureless
ocean. There are no details:
no shores, no tides, no times
when things lift up and then
subside, no sails or smokestacks,
no gravel gathered up and spit back,
no plangencies, no sea birds startled;
the weather, without the Mathew Arnold.