#she was squatting in an under-construction hotel

[swan2swan]

Reminder that Brooklynn and Soyona absolutely had a breakfast together in Dubai.

[saxonspud]

The Outlaw and the Treasure Hunter - Chapter 19 - A Hanging

Izzy woke up as sunlight filtered through the windows of the cabin. She hadn't been able to bring herself to wash the scent out of Dutch's shirt. In fact, she had taken to wearing it. Each day his scent faded just a little bit more. Some days she would just sit in the cabin, on the floor leaning against the wall, smelling the shirt and thinking what might have been. Other days she would tell herself not to be so stupid. She would sit out on the jetty, on the edge of the lake, and fish. She'd found a fishing pole in the cabin. She wasn't the greatest at fishing, but had caught some small fish, enough to cook for herself.

She had been slightly surprised, when no one had returned to the cabin. Especially since it was so well stocked with food. But it was pretty much out in the wilds, so it wasn't really a surprise.

She had only been there a day, when her treasure hunter instinct kicked in. Or maybe it was her fathers words, which still echoed in her ears, "keep your wits about you."

She still had the treasure, that she had recovered from the little island. She decided to hide it. She found an old sack, and tied it under the jetty, so that it was just above the water. That way, if she had to travel, which she was sure she would do at some point, it would be safe. Especially if someone else decided to squat in the cabin, when she was away.

Izzy got up, and made herself some coffee. She would need to decide on a plan of action. She couldn't sit around here day after day. She needed to buy a map, so she could get to work on the treasure map she had found. It was the only one she had now. She should also think about visiting a fence, to get some money for the treasure she had collected. She still had a fair bit of cash, so that wasn't a priority.

Izzy was woken from her day dream, by a loud bang at the door.

"Isabella Pickett. You better get out here now!"

Izzy went to the door.

"Who's there?" she asked, nervously.

"We're here on behalf of the Valentine Sheriff." The man yelled.

Izzy opened the door, a crack.

As soon as she did this, the door was pulled out of her hands, and yanked open.

The man on the other side of the door, pointed his revolver, in her face.

"raise your hands, you can either come quietly, or I'll shoot you where you stand," he growled.

Izzy swallowed hard, and raised her hands. "What do you want, I don't understand?" she gasped.

The man grabbed Izzy by the shirt, and threw her onto the ground. Pinning her there with his foot, he holstered his gun, and started to tie her hands behind her back.

"I'm taking you in for murder," he snarled.

"Murder! I haven't killed anyone!" She exclaimed.

"You would say that," he laughed, humourlessly. He picked her up by the shirt, so that she was standing. Drawing his revolver, he smashed the butt, into her jaw. Knocking her senseless.

He quickly tied her ankles together, and stowed her on his horse.

"Easiest bounty, I've ever collected," He chuckled, and mounted up.

Arthur woke, as the sunlight shone through the curtains of the St. Denis hotel room. He couldn't remember the last time he had slept in a bed. Although, from what Dutch had told him last night, it seems he couldn't remember much at all. He glanced over to the other side of the room, Dutch was sitting in the chair, just looking at him.

"Did you stay there all night?" he asked.

Dutch smiled, and nodded. "I thought I was gonna lose you, Arthur." he whispered.

"Or are you afraid I might go crazy again." Arthur sighed. "Are you sure you made the right choice, between me and the girl. Sounds like I ruined her life." he added, sadness clouding his face.

"No son. I couldn't let you die." he replied.

Arthur shook his head, "she might die now, because of me. If they think she murdered all those people, when it was me. If they catch her and hang her. How will I ever live with that. Bad enough I killed all those people."

Dutch stood up, "I ain't gonna let that happen." He walked over to the bed, and sat on the edge of it.

"And I wont let you keep blaming yourself for what happened, either. So lets talk no more about it." he demanded.

Arthur nodded, "guess we better go see the doctor, let him check me over."

"I'll meet you downstairs." Dutch said, as he walked to the door.

Arthur was a bit steadier on his feet today, and managed to climb onto the back of John's horse, without any help. He'd managed to put his hat on at such an angle, so that the metal patch, wasn't so noticeable. John had stopped staring at it now, but he didn't think that the denizens of St. Denis, would find it so easy.

When they arrived at the doctors office, he walked in. The doctor was somewhat surprised, to see how calm and relaxed Arthur was.

Arthur smiled, and extended his hand. He shook the doctors hand, "I think I owe you a debt of gratitude." he said.

Nathaniel smiled. "You were the first person to have this done. You have no idea what good you have done, by letting me do this."

Arthur took a deep breath, "Its never gonna make up for all the bad things I did, but I guess its a start."

Nathaniel, pointed at his head, "Any pain, headaches?"

Arthur shook his head, "No. Guess it may take a while for people to get used to seeing it," he replied, as he gently touched the plate.

"With a bit of luck, the hair will grow around it, and hide it a little," Nathaniel continued, "I think, you can go home, where ever home is!"

Arthur laughed, "not even I know that."

Dutch interrupted, "we better get going. If you ever need anything Nathaniel, send a letter to Tacitus Kilgore. It will reach us, one way or another."

"Thank you, Mr Van Der Linde. I hope I never have to, but the sentiment is appreciated, none the less."

John, Dutch and Arthur, left the doctors office. Leaving Hosea to say his goodbyes to his brother.

After several minutes he joined them outside.

They all mounted up, and headed out of St. Denis.

Izzy opened her eyes, everything was a blur. Her face hurt like hell. She squeezed her eyes closed, and reopened them. Allowing them to focus. She was in a jail cell.

At least she wasn't tied up. But that was small consolation.

She sat up, and looked out to see Sheriff Malloy, sitting at his desk.

She stood up, her head spun, for a few seconds.

"Sheriff, there's been some sort of a mistake." she pleaded, as she wrapped her hands around the bars of the jail cell.

The Sheriff looked over at Izzy. "No mistake, Miss Pickett. You were seen with that Outlaw, and that Mexican. But taking over the murdered man's cabin, well that was just foolish."

"Murdered!" She exclaimed, "I thought it was just abandoned. I never killed anyone."

"Your parents were good people. You're a cold blooded killer, walking around like nothing happened. And poor Ethan. You played that boy like a fiddle." He snarled.

"Please! You gotta believe me. I haven't killed anyone. I was kidnapped. Then I got attacked by wolves."

The sheriff laughed, "I guess being the daughter of a treasure hunter, I might have guessed you could tell a good story." He sighed, "I feel sorry for your family, that came visiting. Now all their gonna see is you hang."

"Hang! I haven't done anything wrong!" she cried.

Sheriff Malloy, glared at Izzy. "Now I suggest you shut the fuck up, unless you want another bruise on your cheek, to match the other one!" he threatened.

Izzy felt her cheek, where the bounty hunter had hit her. She walked over to the bed and sat down, holding her head in her hands. This was it. She was gonna die.

Leopold Strauss, stepped off the train. He felt that this was getting rather tiresome. Everyday, he'd made the same journey. It was quicker to go to Rhodes, then catch the train to Valentine. Rather than ride. He didn't particularly like riding anyway. The tiresome part, was that the same thing happened everyday. He'd check for post, there would be none, so he'd make the same journey back home. A complete waste of time. When he could be doing something far more constructive.

But he had promised Dutch, that he would do this, so do it, he must.

He walked to the counter and sighed. "Any mail for Tacitus Kilgore?" He asked.

"Oh yes," the clerk said, "it was dropped off this morning. Marked urgent."

he handed him the envelope.

Leopold Strauss, opened the envelope. He read it in disbelief.

"When is the next train to Rhodes?" He asked, a sense of urgency in his voice.

"Should be one along in about twenty minutes." The clerk replied.

Strauss looked at his pocket watch. He could only hope, he made it back in time.

As soon as the train arrived in Rhodes, he ran to his horse, which was still hitched at the station.

He rode as fast as he dared, back to the camp, at Clemens point. He ran over to Charles, who was talking to Javier.

"Gentlemen, quickly. The Sheriff has Miss Pickett. They are going to hang her for murder this afternoon."

He passed the letter to Charles, who quickly read it, and passed it to Javier.

"I'm going to get her!" Javier exclaimed.

Charles put his hand on Javier's shoulder. "You can't, they're looking for you as well. Dutch told you not to go into Valentine."

Javier shook his head, "Dutch isn't here, I'm the best shot. We can't let her hang. Dutch would never forgive us, and besides she's innocent. All the people she's accused of murdering, were killed by Arthur!"

Javier, shrugged away, from Charles grip, and ran over to his horse. He pushed it straight into a gallop, not slowing down for anything.

The four outlaws rode back to camp at a relatively steady pace. Mostly because Arthur was riding as a passenger, and the extra weight would have tired the horse anyway. By the time they reached the camp, it was mid-afternoon. As they rode in, Bill who was on guard duty, stared at Arthur, as he rode by.

"It's ok Bill," Dutch commented, "he's back to normal."

Bill rolled his eyes, "You better go see Charles, something's happened."

Dutch frowned. Quickly dismounting, he left Hosea and John, to help Arthur.

He rushed over to Charles, who was talking to Strauss.

"What's going on Charles, Bill said something has happened. Where's Javier?"

Charles took a deep breath. "The Sheriff arrested Izzy, for Murder. She's due to be hanged this afternoon. I tried to talk him out of it, but he's gone to Valentine."

Dutch, dragged his fingers through his hair, then scratched the back of his neck.

Strauss looked at him. "Javier is probably her only hope now. She was due to be hanged at Four O' Clock. It's now three. You wouldn't get there in time. I'm sorry."

Arthur walked across to where Dutch was standing.

"What's going on?" he asked.

Dutch pinched the bridge of his nose. "The Sheriff has Izzy. They're hanging her this afternoon. For murder." He sighed.

"No! They can't. She's innocent." Arthur held his head in his hands, "god dammit, this is all my fault."

Dutch looked at Arthur, he bit his bottom lip, and closed his eyes. "I know. But we're too late!"

The Sheriff, walked over to Izzy's cell.

"Turn around, and don't give me no trouble," he warned.

Izzy did as she was told.

As the Sheriff, bound her wrists behind her back, she sighed.

"You're making a big mistake. I haven't killed anyone."

He grabbed her roughly by the arm, and marched her out the jail house, just around the corner was the scaffold. She felt a knot in her stomach. She hoped it would be quick.

There was a large crowd already gathered. A lot of people she knew.

"Murdering bitch!" she heard someone shout.

She felt tears, pricking her eyes as a tear fell on her cheek.

Izzy stood at the top of the scaffold, as the Sheriff placed the noose around her neck. He walked to the lever.

Izzy closed her eyes. She kind of wished the wolves had eaten her now. It would be preferable to this.

"Isabella Pickett. You are being hung for the murder of..."

Izzy, heard a scream, then a gunshot. She opened her eyes. The rope that had been attached to the scaffold, now hung loose. Shot in half.

"Izzy, run!"

She looked up, and saw Javier, next to the Scaffold, on his horse.

She ran, and leapt towards him. He caught her.

She adjusted herself, so that she was sitting in front of him, astride his horse. He wrapped his arm around her, so that she didn't fall.

As he pushed his horse on, Javier heard a couple of gunshots, and felt something whizz past his left ear. He heard Izzy scream, and felt her body go limp.

As he galloped away, he lifted his hand, and saw blood.

Izzy was still breathing, but unconscious. He looked down at her shirt, and saw a red pool forming. He pressed his hand to the wound in her side. Praying he could stem the flow blood for long enough, until they got back to camp.

[johnfkennedyjunior]

Citizen Kennedy On the run from the press all his life, John F Kennedy Jr. joins the media pack. (September, 1995)

It is an overcast, chilly Friday, but the crowd in the ballroom of Detroit’s Westin Hotel is feverish. In the Adcraft Club’s ninety-year history, only Lee Iacocca has drawn more people to a speech. But today’s guest has set pulses revving faster than even Iacocca ever could.

Sighs (“I made eye contact with him!”) and whispers (“His jawline is perfect!”) and four burly guards accompany John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. as he circles the room to the blue-swagged dais. Women creep forward, their cameras flash-framing to capture that famous, evocative face.

After lunch, Phil Guarascio, the sleek advertising master of General Motors, takes the podium and ticks off the handsome young speaker’s accomplishments: his education at Brown University and NYU Law School; stints with the United Nations in India, with economic-development outfits in New York, and with the U. S. Attorney General’s Honor Program; his role in founding a group that helps educate health-care workers; and, most notably, his four years as an assistant district attorney in the office of New York City crimebuster Robert Morgenthau.

But it’s not his resume that’s brought this mob out to hear the thirty-four-year-old son of the country’s thirty-fifth president and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the eternal icon. It’s not even their moist interest in his celebrated romances with Daryl Hannah and other beauties. Nor is it to stare at the buffed pecs and thighs, often captured in Central Park grab shots by New York’s tabloids but today hidden under a dark, conservative suit. No, this crowd has come to learn about the future of the man they still think of as John John.

“I’m well aware of the expectation that sooner or later I would be giving a speech about politics,” he says. “So here I am, I’m delighted to say, fulfilling that expectation.” He speaks a bit more about his career, his prospects, his hope that he’ll do the right thing. Finally, the excitement building, he tells the crowd what it wants to hear.

“I hope eventually to end up as president,” says John F. Kennedy Jr. Three beats. “Of a very successful publishing venture.”

The nineteen hundred car and ad people explode into laughter and applause. They know that this charmer has come to their city to flack the riskiest venture of a pampered life indelibly marked by tragedy: a magazine he’ll launch in September about the family business-politics. More than a few of them will buy ad pages in the publication curiously named George (for George Washington), gambling that Kennedy’s sizzle will attract readers to a subject that Americans love to hate and have never much wanted to read about.

What they don’t fully realize is that they are present at the creation of the latest and most dramatic chapter of the Kennedy saga: a rite of passage of the family’s-if not America’s-crown prince. For much of his life, John F. Kennedy Jr. has been what he seemed-a dilettante, unable to commit to a woman or a career. Now he thinks he has found a way to fulfill his daunting genetic destiny-one that shows his sure grasp of what being a Kennedy is really all about. In his grandfather’s day, money was power. In his father’s day, politics was power. In his own day, media is power. By charging boldly into its realm, John Jr. may prove to be the most genuine Kennedy of his generation.

* * *

“DON’T LET THEM STEAL your soul,” Jackie Onassis would warn her children. John has seemingly spent the last dozen years trying to distance himself from the family legend. Until his full name turned into an advertising draw, he preferred to style himself simply John Kennedy, like at least a half dozen other New Yorkers.

For most people, the montage of images,, triggered by mention of this John Kennedy begins with the picture of a little boy saluting his father’s coffin on a gray November day barely within his memory’s reach. Ever since, he’s held himself a little apart. At the fashionable parties he frequents, he’s had a way of inching his back around to fend off the approach of strangers. That practiced self-protective instinct, the flip side of the intense attention he pays when he does decide to engage someone, has usually served to wall him off from unwanted overtures.

That wall was constructed, solidly and with great difficulty, by his mother. From the moment of her son’s birth by cesarean section on November 25, 1960, two and a half weeks after his father was elected president, the new First Lady tried to shield him and his older sister, Caroline. But President Kennedy didn’t play that way. He plainly understood how the image of a happy family could protect him, as it had his own father, from the consequences of his own philandering. So when Jackie was out of town, he’d contrive to sneak photo opportunities with the kids in the Oval Office.

President Kennedy was assassinated three days before his son’s third birthday. Within a year, Jacqueline Kennedy had created a new life for herself and her offspring in New York, where she later enrolled John and Caroline in private schools. The children became independently wealthy in 1968 when their mother married the squat Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. By the terms of President Kennedy’s will, a trust fund he’d inherited from his father passed to his children upon his widow’s remarriage. John H. Davis, a Bouvier cousin, believes that trust fund doubled in value during the sixties, leaving John and Caroline with about $10 million each.

Onassis helped shield the Kennedys from prying eyes and provided them with the money to support a lifestyle even more lavish than the one they’d experienced in the White House. But the billionaire degraded Jackie by blatantly continuing his longtime affair with diva Maria Callas. And when he died in 1975, he showed his contempt for her by leaving her, John, and Caroline a pittance in his will. An ugly legal battle with Onassis’s daughter, Christina, ended with a settlement that gave Jackie more than $20 million. Maurice Tempelsman, the diamond merchant who became Jackie’s consort in later life, helped her invest that money and plump her estate to somewhere around $100 million, Davis estimates.

The money didn’t free John Jr. from his family’s past and expectations-at New York’s Collegiate School, he was shadowed by Secret Service agents and regularly saw a psychiatrist-but his whispery lioness of a mother raised him to sidestep the family’s darker edge. His cousins might act like a pack of druggy Keystone Kennedys, Uncle Ted might screw and screw up, and Aunt Lee could wind up a fashion flack, but John and Caroline kept their heads down and emerged as decent, intelligent, modest, and good-natured young people.

* * *

POLITICS BECKONED early; public service had a strong plan on John. “He has a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility” his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a few years ago. “Whenever any of the cousins need help on one of their projects-whether it’s the Special Olympics or the RFK Human Rights or journalism awards or the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation awards John participates.” He helped his cousins Joseph and Patrick Kennedy win House seats and pitched in on cousin Kathleen Kennedy Towns end’s successful bid for lieutenant governor in Maryland. He showed up in court for his cousin Willie Smith’s trial on rape charges. “He’s got a very strong sense of responsibility, but he’s not overwhelmed by it,” said Bobby Jr. “He’s very comfortable with it.”

Comfortable, perhaps, but strangely without passion. When Kennedy went to law school, he was following his sister and six cousins who had studied or were studying to become attorneys. Even his mid-1989 decision to become an assistant district attorney in New York tracked the family record: His uncle Ted had prepped for his first Massachusetts Senate race by serving as an assistant DA in Suffolk County. “John said his heart was never really in it,” says someone who served in the DA’s office with him. “He was doing it for his mother.”

While he waited for the verdict on his New York State bar exam, which Caroline had passed on her first try a few months earlier, John started work as a $30,000-a-year prosecutor. Although this was a competitive position, Bob Morgenthau’s office was also a hiring hall for famous sons. Andrew Cuomo, Cyrus Vance Jr., and Dan Rather Jr. have worked there, as have the sons of Rhode Island senator John Chafee, labor leader Victor Gotbaum, and New York City Council speaker Peter Vallone. So had John’s cousin Bobby Jr., before his resignation amid charges of drug abuse.

John was assigned to the Special Prosecutions Bureau, which handles low-level crimes ranging from corruption, fraud, con games, and check bouncing to arson and car theft. Kennedy was placed thereat first because “we clearly didn’t want him in the trial division,” says Mike Cherkasky, then chief of the DA’s investigative division. “We didn’t want the attention to distract him.”

That fall, John learned he’d failed the bar exam. “John didn’t take the test seriously,” says a fellow assistant DA. He learned he’d flunked a second time (by 11 points out of a needed 660 at the end of April. Although more than half of the other twenty-five hundred aspirants failed as well, only Kennedy was ridiculed on the front pages of the New York tabloids, all three of which used variations of “Hunk Flunks.”

Even so, John kept his cool. “I’m clearly not a major legal genius,” he said.

“He held up under unbelievable pressure,” says Owen Carragher Jr., his officemate at the time. John even kept smiling when a maitre d’ with wobbly English accosted him while he was having a consolation beer, and said, “I heard news you failed! I’m glad!”

Kennedy played his part in the public perception that he was a lightweight. He made his first courtroom appearance as a witness in a case against an immigration officer who’d been charged with making illegal raids and pocketing confiscated money only to have to admit that he didn’t know the title of the landmark Supreme Court case that made the Miranda rights part of every cop’s lexicon. Even after Kennedy laid out $1,000 for a six-week bar-review course, it wasn’t clear that he cared about the exam, especially after he was photographed “studying” poolside at a Los Angeles hotel. But he did pass, earning a $1,000 raise and the right to try cases in court. In his first solo prosecution, he went up against a burglar who was caught asleep in his victim’s bed, his pockets stuffed with her jewelry. He eventually graduated to bigger cases involving Mafia families, labor racketeering at a big newspaper, and construction fraud, but one state-supreme-court judge before whom he’d appeared said, “I don’t think he had the potential to be a great trial lawyer. His passion lies elsewhere.”

Eventually, he won a share of respect from bosses and coworkers. “There’s a premium on certain intellectual as opposed to advocacy skills in investigations,” says Cherkasky. ` John fit that.” Working on what’s called “intake” once a month, interviewing complainants off the street, he proved a natural at getting people to open up and at judging when they were telling the truth.

After two and a half years in the DA’s office, Kennedy transferred to a trial bureau. “He wanted something quicker,” says Carragher. “He wanted the action. He wanted to do a trial where the defendant wasn’t asleep.”

In his first case in the trial bureau, he prosecuted two men who’d run a chicken stand in Harlem that burned down just after they took out fire insurance. An accelerant had been lit with a match in the store, but the evidence against the owners was circumstantial, and the only witness was a felon who didn’t want to testify. Kennedy extracted the testimony he needed during a complex, three-week trial. “It was a loser and John won it,” says Carragher.

That, and others. In four years as an assistant DA-a year longer than the normal term of service-Kennedy had a perfect 6-0 conviction record. A political career now seemed logical. When Kennedy had introduced Uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, he’d electrified the delegates by invoking his father’s name. “So many of you came into public service because of him,” Kennedy said in a prime-time speech. “In a very real sense, because of you, he is with us still.” The two-minute ovation that followed seemed a fitting kickoff to his first campaign.

During John’s law-school years, he and several friends had convened weekly “issues meetings,” sessions that Bobby Kennedy Jr. characterized as “just a private thing that he does.” Might they lead to elected office? “It’s something that, you know, you never say never and it’s obviously a source of interest, but I’ll just see,” John equivocated shortly before quitting the DAs office. “I don’t really know.”

* * *

JOHN MAY HAVE OWED at least some of his indecision to a more pressing interest in the Kennedys’ other familial pursuit: sexual conquest. A glorious mosaic of women threw themselves at John Jr. At the district attorney’s, a cleaning woman who’d squabbled with Carragher and stopped cleaning his office began spending hours a day in it once John moved in. “She dusted the underside of the desk,” Carragher says. “She just wouldn’t leave.” Paralegals had to screen deliveries and open John’s mail, which often contained unsolicited pictures of women. Once, an admirer sent a cappuccino machine.

Kennedy is a gentleman. “He doesn’t pick up girls and screw them and dump them out of the car,” says a woman who has known him a long time. “He’s pretty tame for a guy who’s that good-looking.” But at the same time, he’s no innocent. Womanizing-and pride in it-is, as historian Garry Wills has pointed out, “a very important and conscious part of the male Kennedy mystique.” John, blessed with looks almost as stirring as his name, was an early enthusiast. A prep-school classmate, when asked what he thought young Kennedy would be doing in ten years, answered plainly: “Dating.”

As an old friend puts it, “He got around a lot. He didn’t capitalize on it. Things just came his way.”

John’s one foray into filmmaking, a 1990 coming-of-age movie written by, produced by and starring college friends and called A Matter of Degrees, played on the young man’s studly proclivities. Identified in the credits as a “guitar-playing Romeo,” he had a tiny role as a fellow consumed with coupling. In one scene, he strums his instrument and tunelessly proclaims to an adoring paramour, “Oh, baby, I can’t live without your love.” Moments later, he is shown quarreling with the woman.

“What does it matter what we do when we’re not together?” he pleads with her.

“Because when we’re not together,” she answers, “you’re fucking Alison,” referring to another of his love interests.

Like his grandfather, who used to keep Gloria Swanson around even while his wife, Rose, was on hand, and his father, who pursued Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, and Gene Tierney. John Kennedy Jr. has long favored actresses. His longest and most notable liaison was with Daryl Hannah, herself rich and social. They first met as youngsters on vacation with their families on St. Martin. They met again after John’s aunt Lee Radziwill married Herb Ross, who had directed Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias.

That this affair-and numerous others-was carried on in public showed John to be more like his mother than his father. Just like Jackie O., her son can be a furtive exhibitionist. When he strips off his shirt to play Frisbee in the park, when he smooches girls on street corners or coaxes them into shorts at sea, he’s cruising for the cameras, just as his mother was when she unknowingly “posed” for her famous topless photos on Ari Onassis’s island, Skorpios.

Kennedy has kept his voice out of the public record except in carefully crafted snippets, but he puts himself on view with insouciance. He can afford the privacy and luxury of limousines, yet he propels himself around town on Rollerblades and a bicycle. “Aristocrats are dangerously uninhibited men,” writes Nelson W Aldrich Jr., a chronicler of the American upper class. “Like David the King and [Fitzgerald's] Tom Buchanan, they are sensual, ruthless, and intemperate.”

The story is told that John used to walk around the campus of Brown in gym shorts so brief they emphasized an endowment almost as impressive as the university’s. In New York, he has continued to flaunt himself. When he lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, even after he was declared the sexiest man alive, he used to sprawl at an outdoor table at the Jackson Hole hamburger joint, shirt off. One neighborhood woman says Kennedy would stop her to ask for the time. “My sense was that he was dying for attention, dying for people to look at him,” she says.

* * *

JOHN KENNEDY DEVELOPED a public image as a dilettante and nourished it as he grew. As early as 1983, he was dubbed “the least competitive Kennedy” in a book about the family. Once, asked whom he had admired as a child, he said, “I guess I have to answer that honestly. My role models were Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali, actually.” Even as he spent his days prosecuting petty thieves and swindlers, he seemed to pour his heart mostly into partying and exercising; at one point, he belonged to three Manhattan health clubs at once. “If I had to pick a defect on him, I’d be hard put to find one,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. once said, “except that he pays more attention to his clothes than the rest of us.”

The effect wasn’t always salutary. He showed up at his thirtieth-birthday party in a custom-made maroon zoot suit and leopard wing tips.

His one consistent interest apart from women-acting-heightened the impression that he was unserious. By many accounts, he was a natural and precocious actor. “He’s got an incredible ear for mimicry, and he used to tell us all stories in an Irish brogue or in Russian character or Scottish,” his cousin Bobby once recounted. “This is starting when he was nine or ten years old, and he’d have all the grandchildren listening to him … A lot of us were a lot older than him, and he could keep us entertained.”

It didn’t take long for Kennedy’s hobby to bloom into a potential career path. He was only eighteen when the film producer Robert Stigwood offered him a role playing his father as a young man. That. didn’t happen, but other professional parts did.

Jackie Kennedy soon showed the world how iron her will could be when it came to her son’s future. “Jackie was a loving but extremely demanding mother,” says her cousin John Davis. “John wanted to be an actor, and she dissuaded him. She didn’t think it was a dignified profession. She didn’t like Hollywood at all.”

But Jackie’s friend Rudolf Nureyev criticized John for giving up the stage. “Show some balls!” the ballet star told him, according to author Diana DuBois. “Do what you want!”

One of John’s closest friends heatedly denies that his mother’s influence steered him from his own chosen path. “John has a compass,” he says. “He’s usually pointed in the right direction. Did Jackie guide him? Probably. But he went to law school because he likes to learn and law was a natural thing for him to do.”

Whatever the reason, John abandoned acting for membership on the board of Naked Angels, a society-oriented company that produces plays in Manhattan and benefit galas in the Hamptons.

With an acting career out of the question, John left the district attorney’s office in mid-1993 and seemed to plunge ever deeper into triviality. A very public manwithout-anything-special-to-do, he grew a goatee, showed up at parties for rock groups, and appeared at the opening of a technology installation created by his brother-in-law, Ed Schlossberg, that was held in the lobby of an office building.

He glided around the city like a tomcat. He moved from the Upper West Side to an apartment he shared with Daryl Hannah, then bought a loft in TriBeCa. It looked as if he was finally going to marry the big blond starlet: She was spotted buying an antique wedding dress at a flea market, and the couple went on a scuba trip to the South Pacific and Asia. “Daryl really liked him,” says Chicago gal-about-town and novelist Sugar Rautbord. “She was desperate to marry him.” But John couldn’t, or wouldn’t, commit. Only two months after tabloid reporters descended on Cape Cod, expecting a Kennedy-Hannah wedding, John was seen kissing Carolyn Bessette, a PR woman for Calvin Klein, near the finish line of the New York City Marathon.

* * *

FOR ALL HIS LESS THAN ZERO gadabouting, John was still struggling with the driving Kennedy will to succeed. “You don’t want to be a passenger on the liner,” he’d told Carragher when he quit as an assistant DA. Would he enroll at Harvard’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government, or join the Clinton administration, or perhaps even run for Congress? Nothing came of any of it. (He turned down a House race, says Carragher, because “any semblance of privacy John has ever had, he’s had to fight for. The only claim he has to keep it is to remain a private citizen.”)

But the dynastic imperative can overwhelm an American aristocrat. “If society as a whole is to gain by mobility and openness of structure,” a former Harvard president, Charles W Eliot, once said of his class, “those who rise must stay up in successive generations, that the higher level of society may be constantly enlarged.” As Aldrich puts it, this craving for success follows a set pattern. For the founding generation, it’s all about money, ruthlessly acquired (by, say, bootlegging. For the next generation, public service (serving as senator, attorney general, president, for example becomes the vehicle, because nothing better highlights the freedom money conveys than selflessly boosting the commonweal.

The third generation, though, is often swept away by the liberties unsheathed by trust funds. They “exert a terrific centrifugal force on the spirits of their inheritors,” writes Aldrich, “constantly threatening to shoot them out into trackless space.”

Young John Kennedy has certainly seemed more trackless than most. But he was actually trying to keep his end of what Garry Wills calls the “Kennedy contract,” a compact whose components are “power, money, fame.” John Jr. had the latter as a birthright. He had enough of the second to keep him comfortable. All he lacked was the first.

* * *

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS died of lymphatic cancer at 10:15 P.M. on May 19, 1994, in her Fifth Avenue apartment, with John, Caroline, and Maurice Tempelsman at her bedside. “John was at his desk at 8:30 A.M. the day after the burial,” a friend says. “He did exactly what Jackie would have done. He went back to work.”

What he was working on was a magazine. It was the first real risk of his professional life.

The idea had come to him a year and a half earlier, on a night shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president. Over dinner, John and a pal, Michael Berman, started talking about how the way people looked at politics had changed. “Politicians have taken their cue from the entertainment industry” is how John puts it. “Al Gore on David Letterman was that show’s number-one-rated show for that year.” He pauses and shakes his head in wonder. `Al Gore.”

Was there something in this for them? No one is sure who said it first, but the question was asked that fall night: “What about a magazine?”

The idea was intriguing. Existing political magazines, Kennedy believes, haven’t “caught up with the moment.” Then there were the other, larger issues a publication could capture-”power and personality, triumph and loss, the pursuit and price of ambition for its own sake and for something larger,” all subjects with which John has more than a nodding acquaintance. Despite the irony inherent in running precisely the sort of venture he’d been running away from all his life, he and Berman decided to give it a try.

They’d been friends for years. The son of a real estate developer from Princeton, New Jersey, Berman had prepped at Lawrenceville, earned a degree in history from Lafayette College, and then gone. into public relations. He met Kennedy through mutual friends on the city’s party scene in the early 1980s.

When John entered law school in 1986, he stayed in touch with Berman, and in 1988, they first went into business together. Kennedy had gone kayaking and come home raving about some handmade boats he called “the Rolls Royces of kayaks.” John wanted to buy out the small company in Maine that made them, manufacture kits, distribute them nationally, and teach others to make the kayaks. Nothing came of the plan, but the two men never abandoned the corporate entity they’d established to do the deal. It was called Random Ventures, which for the next six years seemed an apt description of John’s approach to life.

After Kennedy became an assistant DA, Berman evolved into John’s Sancho Panza. “The press became an issue,” says a close friend. So whenever a media problem came up, John suggested that the DA’s overworked press office hand it off to Berman. “At first, it was once every three months,” John’s friend says. “Then it was every three days.” After John failed the bar exam for the second time, the calls started coming every couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Berman was building his own PR business, representing clients like Cointreau, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, DuraSoft, and the Mexican tourist board. Although he was and remains a Democrat, he also helped run the annual White House Easter-egg roll throughout George Bush’s presidency. But by mid-1993, Berman was as eager to move out of PR work as John was to find a direction, so when the men came up with the idea for a magazine, they threw themselves into it with equal fervor.

Working first at a desk at Kennedy Enterprises and later from space in Berman’s office in New York’s Flatiron district, John used his name to secure meetings with potential backers, including Edgar Bronfman Jr., who, like young Kennedy, traced his money to the liquor business but wanted to make his own mark in the world. “Every door was open to them,” says a friend of John’s. “But that was good news and bad news. Did these people believe, or did they just want to meet John?” Berman and Kennedy would joke about charging a million dollars for a first meeting with potential investors, because that was really all many of them wanted.

Kennedy’s mother set up a meeting between John and her friend Joe Armstrong, who’d worked in magazine publishing for twenty years. “John was determined not to do what people expected,” Armstrong says. Soon, he, Kennedy, and Berman were meeting regularly.

The impulse behind the magazine, at least at first, was high-minded. Berman and Kennedy wanted it to be populist, nonpartisan, and centered on process instead of personalities or party politics. They thought that would appeal to people aged twenty to forty who felt disenfranchised by politics but still wanted access to the circles of power. The magazine would have a small circulation based more on subscriptions than newsstand sales. “Publishing,” says Armstrong, recounting his meetings with Kennedy, “looked like a way to approach public service and keep a balance in his life.”

Unfortunately, few of the people they talked to were interested in helping young Kennedy work it all out. When Jann Wenner, a longtime Kennedy-family friend, heard of the project after reading about it in a media newsletter, he was irate. “What’s this about?” he allegedly asked John. “You better see me immediately. Politics doesn’t sell. It’s not commercial.”

Using some of the family’s media contacts, Kennedy and Berman wended their way through the tight inner circles of the New York-based magazine industry, a gossipy enclave whose nervous denizens simultaneously pray for new publications that might employ them and denigrate any new idea that isn’t their own. In connect-the-dots fashion, they talked to several former editors at 7 Days, an upscale New York weekly that flamed and then flopped in the early 1990s. “It was very much amateur hour,” says one of the many people whose brains were picked.

* * *

BY FALL 1994, BERMAN AND KENNEDY were getting dispirited. “People didn’t get it,” a friend of John’s says. “It wasn’t an easy sell.” They’d won the promise of about s3 million in funding, but their advisers warned that it wasn’t enough. Finally, to scare up more interest, they leaked the venture to the gossip columns.

Some were surprised that Kennedy was joining the very craft that had hounded him so mercilessly throughout his life, forgetting that his grandfather had palled around with journalists-had even chased skirts with New York Times Washington columnist Arthur Krock-decades before. His mother, too, had built a sweet career in patrician publishing, editing celebrity and art books at Doubleday, and President Kennedy, so his son was told, had hoped to run a newspaper after leaving the White House. “I think the idea was somewhat inevitable,” John says of the magazine he’d started calling George. “Both my parents not only loved words but spent a good part of at least their professional lives in the word business.”

Undeterred by the naysayers, Berman and Kennedy decided in late 1994 to test their idea by mailing solicitations for the nonexistent George to 150,000 people whose names were drawn from other magazines’ subscription lists. The offer, for a twenty-four-dollar-a-year charter subscription, was aimed mostly at media junkies; the copy said less about George than about other magazines. “George is to politics what Rolling Stone is to music. Forbes is to business. Allure is to beauty Premiere is to films,” read the piece. It was a “soft” offer that didn’t require a check, but the response was encouraging. Mailings that didn’t mention Kennedy’s name got a solid 5 percent response; those that did attracted even more, 5.7 percent.

Sensing, finally, that something might happen with their project, Kennedy and Berman also began changing. The high-mindedness with which they’d originally approached the venture began slowly giving way to a desire to succeed, whatever changes in tone, look, or content that required.

George Lois found this out shortly after he got involved with George.

The rumpled veteran adman, whose Esquire covers in the 1960s set the pace for international magazine design, was one of the many approached by the duo for input. “I’m the kind of schmuck, I got excited,” he says. “And suddenly I was designing his magazine.” Lois designed a logo-a truncated version of George Washington’s signature, pared down to his almost unreadable initials. Beneath it, Lois put the words WE CANNOT TELL A LIE.

Using his own money, Lois also produced a series of outrageous covers. Richard Nixon had just died, so he got Alger Hiss to pose for one, over a headline derived from a classic Esquire line about Nixon: WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING? A photograph of a torso in a pinstripe suit was captioned, TOTALLY NEW ADVICE TO FUTURE CANDIDATES: KEEP IT ZIPPED! A photograph of Barbra Streisand with a smudge on her nose ran with the line BROWN-NOSING: HOLLYWOOD DOES WASHINGTON, WASHINGTON DOES HOLLYWOOD.

Kennedy and Berman loved the covers-at first. “A week later, they’d tell me, `Everybody says you can’t do that,”‘ said Lois. After a few more meetings, he gave up. “If you want a safe magazine,” he told them, “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Eventually, the notion of using George to stimulate involvement in politics joined irreverence on the sidelines as John and Berman started talking about politics as theater and their magazine as a glossy journal for the not entirely engaged.

“The basic concept,” says Roger Black, the design director of Esquire, who was consulted by the pair at that point, was “to be a half-fan, half-insider magazine, not a New Republic or a political-science journal. They felt people were ready for a magazine treating politics like entertainment.”

“Michael positioned it as a Vanity Fair-ish product,” says one of their consultants. “That wasn’t necessarily John’s first instinct.” But Kennedy quickly got with the program. “They wanted Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, nonpolitical writers,” says John’s close friend.

They edged even closer to glitz after Hachette Filipacchi Magazines got involved. The American arm of a giant French media company, Hachette is the nation’s fourth-largest magazine company, with twenty-two titles and $750 million in revenues. The company, which owns Elle and the successful but unglamorous Car and Driver and Road & Track, has expanded mainly via high-profile acquisitions. Here was an opportunity to get credit for starting something hot and turn America’s crown prince into a corporate hood ornament.

Hachette CEO David Pecker had been pursuing Kennedy and Berman ever since he’d heard about George at a benefit dinner in June 1994. After several months of unrequited messages and letters, John finally called him back. “I just want you to know we have a lot of interest, and not just in having lunch with John Kennedy” Pecker told him.

They finally met in December. Pecker subsequently studied the George projections and called some key potential advertisers, concentrating on the Detroit automobile manufacturers he’d dealt with in his fifteen years as a publisher of car magazines. Other meetings were arranged, with Jean-Louis Ginibre, Hachette’s editorial director, and then, over lunch at Le Bernardin, with Daniel Filipacchi, its chairman.

A fifty-fifty agreement was signed in mid-February between Hachette and the duo’s company, Random Ventures. Their venture wasn’t random anymore. Berman, now George’s executive publisher, sold his PR business and, with editor-in-chief Kennedy, moved into a conference room on the Hachette floor where Elle is produced. Not long afterward, they moved to a floor they share with, among others, the staffs of Elle Decor, Family Life, and Metropolitan Home.

Hachette, a company with a strong newsstand emphasis, isn’t interested in an earnest subscription-based magazine about issues and ideas. “Suddenly, the struggle over the direction of the magazine is very serious,” says someone who’s been inside George. “There are different conceptions. John is smart, but he lacks an edge. He’s one of the least assertive people you’ll ever meet; he’s never had to assert himself-he’s John Kennedy! Now, suddenly, he’s in a huge corporation. He wants a magazine of ideas with a sugar coating. They want a political People.”

Early on, Ginibre suggested renaming the magazine Criss-Cross, after the lines of power, money, and culture that circumscribe the fluid boundaries of its beat. Then, when some of the initial designs seemed to resemble Elle Decor and one of the editors expressed’ his doubts, the art director assigned to the project supposedly snapped, “I was hired by Hachette-I work for Hachette!”

“They got off to a bad start,” John’s friend admits. It was worse for Berman than for Kennedy. Walls had to be torn down to make the executive publisher’s office comparable to the editor in chief’s, although Kennedy’s still has the better view of New Jersey Central Park, and all of northern Manhattan. Pecker won’t discuss the reports of internal discord, but he seems to refer to them in one pointed comment: “Normally in business, the person who puts up the money has the last say.”

Pecker is a happy guy these days, and not just because he has America’s prince in his pocket. George has booked 160 pages in ads for its first issue. “We’ve already sold ads for eight issues,” Pecker crows. “We know where we’re going to be.” It’s said that Ginibre has suggested in a memo that the magazine must go all soft and gooey toward the powerful people it hopes to feature in its pages in order to gain their cooperation, and that John must be as public as Tina Brown. How he’ll cope with that expectation is yet to be seen, but he’s already been reported to have interviewed George Wallace and to have requested a chat with everyone’s favorite undeclared presidential candidate, Colin Powell.

* * *

SO IT IS THAT THESE DAYS, John Kennedy has finally abandoned his directionless life, all but vanished from the club scene, and joined the working class. He gets up early every morning and exercises, then bikes from TriBeCa to his midtown office, carrying his front wheel upstairs in elevators where JFK Jr. sightings have ceased to incite hormonal frenzies. In an office decorated with images of the magazine’s namesake (including a blown-up dollar bill on Kennedy’s door, he meets writers, makes ad calls, and often works late. He’s even issued a memo instructing his staff that he expects them there when he arrives at 8:30 in the morning.

Off-hours, he still sees Bessette, but there are others. “We’re talking about John Kennedy!” his friend guffaws. Finally, he has bigger things on his mind than whom he’ll be with at night; he’s made his bed in a much different place than the one he and Berman first imagined that night after Bill Clinton’s election.

Initially Hachette promised only to produce and distribute two issues of George. But soon, the company upped its commitment, pledging to go bimonthly early in 1996 and monthly in September ’96, two months before the next presidential election, at a total investment it puts, vaguely, between $5 million and $20 Million. “I pushed them to do a magazine that connects with a lot of people,” says Ginibre. From Kennedy and Berman’s original idea of a small journal that encouraged participation in politics, George has grown into a magazine its publishers hope will sell three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand copies on newsstands each month-or about what vanity Fair, with its Hollywood covers, manages to sell.

If George does, the magazine will connect not through the language of politics or journalism but through the new voice of success in America: entertainment. John has made this clear in the way he has described George to potential advertisers. It will showcase “politics as miniseries, suspense thriller, comedy, sometimes even great drama,” he’s said.

Examples? George has commissioned an article on Newt Gingrich’s lesbian half sister, a piece by Roseanne titled “If I Were President,” and a review by James Carville of the new A1 Pacino film, City Hall, which a source says will actually be ghostwritten by a George staffer, and it has considered a story by a New York gossip columnist on fundraising benefits. But the biggest tip-off is George’s covers. The first issue will likely feature Cindy Crawford, shot by Herb Ritts and posed like Washington. Anthony Hopkins, made up for his role as the star of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, is in the running for cover number two.

“They don’t even feel the need to pretend to serious intentions,” says rival Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and owner of The New Republic, a magazine that became indispensable for a time when President Kennedy made it a favorite read (right up there with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels). “A magazine like this will reflect the interest of the public but cannot stimulate it,” Peretz sniffs.

Samir Husni, the acting chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, has made a ten-year study of consumer magazines. “So far, George has had a great reception in the advertising community because of JFK’s name,” he says. “The danger, of course, is that when you have this high expectation, everyone is going to judge it with a sharp razor edge.”

The big question, concludes Husni, is this: “Is there a magazine behind the hype?”

Even some of the people who worked on the prototype of George are leery about its intentions and prospects. “Glitz is a tightrope walk,” says one. “Run enough stories on Hillary’s dressmaker and Tabitha Soren, and serious people won’t return your phone calls.”

But perhaps they will anyway-showing that John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. may know more about the power of politics and the politics of power than anyone suspects.

By: Michael Gross for Esquire Magazine

[coyotebombsquad]

Bikepacking down the California Coast

Words and photos by C.J. Foster

Prologue:

Last April, I was transitioning between jobs and scored nearly two weeks off; enough time to throw together an adventure -- something that would offer a moment to reflect, reset, and prepare for the road ahead.

I set out for the California coast. I rented a car and drove to Crescent City (20 miles shy of Oregon). This is where I would begin my real journey -- pedaling home to San Francisco -- a grand total of 420 miles and 32K of elevation, after all was said and done.

Leaving behind the city, I began to feel a quiet peace settle upon me. It was the sense that a chapter had ended and a new one was beginning. There were big changes to ruminate on, something that journeying through forests helps coax along, but still I was eager, anxious, and nervous about taking on a solo trip of this magnitude.

Day 0 (SF to Crescent City -- 355mi + 100 bonus miles due to rerouting )

Heavy rain was in the forecast; just what California needed to replenish our depleted water table and reservoirs. More roads were washed out with each downpour, serving a deterrent for this bike packing trip. Despite poor conditions, I retrieved my rental car, picked up some last minute provisions, and impulsively purchased a quality point and shoot while on a lunch pitstop at In N Out -- this wouldn’t be a road trip without it.

I crossed my fingers that the rain wouldn’t be too bad or last too long.

While on the road, worst case scenarios played out in my mind and doubts churned in my head. Questions about my fitness levels, on-the-fly bike maintenance, and my safety all nagged at me. I have taken numerous solo trips before, but I was still greeted by familiar doubts. I warded off these old friends and pushed the accelerator, willing this trip into fruition.

A landslide had occurred the night before just North of Leggett, which closed highway 1 (just North of where 101 merged with 1). I thought I could outsmart the landslide and the CHP by taking a route that I found on my phone, but the locals and tow trucks dissuaded me. There were potholes that my rental car wouldn’t negotiate successfully. A CHP officer suggested that I drive back to highway 20 and cutover to highway 5 and back on highway 36 -- an extra 7-8 hours of driving to get around one landslide. I was highly motivated to find an alternate route and was successful! There are some windy gravel mountain roads that cut through Covolo to Zenia off highway 162. They were sketchy, pocked with potholes, and many blind corners had cattle hanging around them. Nearly 4 hours and 135 miles later, I was dropped back onto 101. Just in time for a wild downpour to obscure my visibility nearly entirely for the last two hours of my drive. As the wipers whipped away, there were a few moments that I questioned if I should abort the trip and go find a B&B somewhere to lounge around and take it easy. Where’s the adventure in that though?

I made it to Crescent City after numerous bursts of sketchy downpours and 11 hours of driving. At a cheap hotel, I took the last hot shower that I’d have in several days and drank an IPA to settle all my nerves from the drive.

Day 1 (Crescent City to Clam Beach) -- 75mi/4.2k ft

https://www.strava.com/activities/948298792

When you roll out of bed and see your bike next to you, you know it’s going to be a good day. The storm had ended (for now). I returned the car at the world’s tiniest commercial airport after running a few last minute errands (patch kit and lighter are crucial). A polite and professional looking middle aged woman in a knee high skirt helped check the car back in. As I went to check the mileage a man with a mangled undercarriage came driving back up with a dumbfounded expression -- the cowling of the car was dragging on the ground, making an infernal noise. The rental car woman casually walked back in to grab a pair of tin snips. When she returned, she squatted down and removed the offending piece, then informed the man that he was all set. What service!

From there, I was free, off on my two wheels, fully supported. The day was sunny, dry, and a bit windy, but still gorgeous. The road felt solid under my self-propelled vehicle; my legs marginally ready for the physical challenges ahead. The cliffs along the ocean fell away like they had been cleaved by the great Paul Bunyan himself. The ocean would be my comfort, my well of motivation for the next several hundred miles.

The miles of coastline stretched endlessly in front of me. I rolled along undulating roads that led to tiny coastal towns; nearly forgotten, yet timeless. The forest stood sentry over the towns, over the coast, and over me.  

Several hours of headwinds and roughly 40 miles in, I stopped in Klamath Falls to admire the 40 ft tall Paul Bunyan and Babe the Big Blue Ox. It dwarfed me and my bike. My hunger had built, so I indulged in a plate full of chili fries and a sandwich at a nearby cafe in False Klamath; got to love being a cyclist, you can eat anything and it’s all considered fuel for the next ride. I had been cruising at 13 MPH, slow and steady, and this would be pretty much the fixed speed that I’d be moving at most of the trip.

After lunch, there were a few decent climbs: one up to Prairie Creek Redwoods and another out towards the stunning Patricks Point. A few lagoons loomed in the distance, they distracted me well enough for about 10 miles as I rounded my way to the campground.

I landed in Clam Beach State Campground after deciding to press on passed Patricks Point (my original stopping point for the day). The tent was a small project, as it was my first time pitching this new 1p tent, which proved to be a trivial task. The hunger was driving me to skip the backpacking meal and opt for some pizza at a local joint in McKinleyville. The kids working did not care if I brown-bagged it while eating a few slices in their store -- likely not their first dirtbag cyclist. Four slices and a 22oz of IPA prepped me pretty well for passing out. There was a slow ambling pedal along the airport road that led me back to camp. A few small planes landed during the sunset and I soaked in how light everything felt, nothing was tugging at me or compelling me to do or be anywhere, I was exactly where I needed to be.

Day 2 - Clam Beach Campground to A.W. Way County Park (Mattole Road) -- 75mi/5k ft

https://www.strava.com/activities/949287569 https://www.strava.com/activities/950851373

The first light of the morning woke me and I felt rested. I wanted to get an early start on the morning since rain was in the forecast, but not until afternoon. I planned on covering a fair amount of ground before the rain came (hah). As I packed up, my camp neighbors warmly offered me a cup of coffee, they lived locally and told me they were getting ready for work -- made me reminisce about camping up at Hawk Camp back home during a work night. The kindness of strangers would be a recurring theme during my trip.

Breakfast was eaten on the bike; the convenience of a breakfast burrito and a chocolate milk on the road. It conjures up an image of a train engineer shoveling coal into his engine to keep it chugging along. The morning was beautiful, I mostly pedaled by coastal farmlands and a smattering of small towns. The headwinds were ever-present, but I felt strong nonetheless. I caught up to another cyclist in Eureka who looked like he was out bikepacking with his loaded panniers, I excitedly asked him where he was off to. He was commuting to work and wasn’t on much of a journey. I wouldn’t encounter another cyclist until my last days of riding.

The farm roads gracefully lead me to Ferndale (my halfway point for the day) where I loaded up on provisions. While visiting a grocery store, I absentmindedly left my sunglasses on a rack and left for a pastry and coffee (I retrieved them). A local who had been in the store had noticed me down the street and flatly observed “you didn’t make it very far” when he saw me in front of the bakery. I’ll call that small town humor.

The climb out of Ferndale was absolutely brutal. It felt like hitting a vertical wall and only the powers of levitation would be able to lift me up the ridgeline that I was attempting. I was desperate to move quickly, but humbled by the aggressive grade and the howling winds at the top of the climb. The threat of rain was no longer merely a threat, I donned my rain gear quickly and prayed that I’d stay dry and cool enough to finish out the next 30 miles. From Ferndale, I covered about 4.2k ft in 35 miles. Brutal with packs, brutal without them.

Needle like rain stung my face for over an hour, my amusement during this section quickly changed. A sketchy winding descent led into Capetown, where I lost one of my water bottles and I narrowly missed being crushed under a dump truck’s wheels. The trucker that was just a tad too comfortable with the roads and cyclists on them.

Following the descent into a cove, a local in a green Tacoma stopped ahead of me and dangled a construction high-visibility vest out of his truck window and stated “dude, you need this!” His name was Oliver, and again, strangers with endless kindness had been looking out for me with safety and hydration (Oliver gave me a water bottle to replace mine, it was even alkaline, for sensitive stomachs). My flickering flame was ablaze for the adventurous path again.

A few miles ahead there was the town of Petrolia with a little gem of a bar called White Rose. I saddled up at the bar to wait out the storm. A beer would revive my sense of humor and the locals were entertained by my very presence. Who bikepacks in the rain, they asked? A few randos contributed to a hot shower fund in their own amusement since AW Way Campground had a coin-op hot shower. The kindness of strangers also contributed another gift from Humboldt county too, a special little doobie hand rolled under the bar. Despite the fact that it had only been two days of pedaling, I felt the beginnings of loneliness assuaged by strangers. I was striving to stay open to any experience along this road.

The campsite was a few flat miles from The Rose (as the locals referred to it), I even turned down several ride offers, told them that this was my journey to power. The campground boasted 30 soggy sites, they were all empty, so I had my choice. The hot shower was restorative, a bit of magic for a renewal that I would need for tomorrow.

Day 3 (AW Way Campground to Wright Beach 76mi/10.3k ft via Usal Road)

https://www.strava.com/activities/950851391 https://www.strava.com/activities/951928834

There’s always an odd sense of waking up in a campground without anyone else around; it’s a bit eerie, but also deeply peaceful. Rested, I packed up and hit the road, noticing a new lovely creaking noise my bottom bracket had developed due to all of the rain.

The plan was to take Mattole Road and connect to Usal road despite most people informing me that Usal road was still closed, but I felt that I didn’t have much of a choice since the reroute due to all the highway road closures would climb up and over Garberville and add an extra 70-80 miles (I had no idea how much climbing it would add). The folks from the White Rose had informed me that the Bryceland Market would be a good place to stop for food and road intel.

Still groggy with sleep encrusted eyes, I rounded a bend, and from the shoulder of the road a blur of black streaked ahead and veered into the center of the road and turned around to face me. It was a bull, of sizable proportions! He pawed at the ground as if to feign a charge. This frightened me, but I took comfort in the fact he didn’t have horns, nor did he have testicles (minor thing noted when he ran ahead of me), but I was leery of this 1500lb bulldozer and hoping he wasn’t too aggressive. I stopped about 50 yards away from him, facing him down like it was a standoff (it felt like a David and Goliath faceoff). I first yelled at him, then rang my bell, tossed small rocks in his direction to get him to move out of the road. He wasn’t budging. Then I thought to channel my inner cowboy spirit, and boldly rode towards him, yelling at the top of my lungs “GO ON, GEEEIIT!!”. This magically compelled him to turnaround and he trotted in the direction that I was rolling in. My inner childhood cowboy was giddy and terrified all at the same time. Such power I yielded. The bull veered off the side of the road before we got to a cattle catcher and I was free from my escort/keeper. I pedaled off to safety, and continued binging on serial killer podcasts, such a odd choice for a sojourn on desolate mountain roads.

Honeydew was a good restocking point where I pounded yogurt like it was water. They had a map of the area and informed me that Usal road was still closed, but I should check in with the BLM office in King’s Range. Just outside of Honeydew, there is a massive climb that aggressively stretches up to King Peak. It humbled me. I stopped several times to give my knees a break and to lube my chain. At one mini pitstop, a local named Grant stopped to check in on me, and I informed him that I was ok, and instead of speeding off to his day, he casually chatted with me for a few minutes. I inquired about Usal road, but he didn’t know much about its current state. The next several hours were a virtual elevator of careening ridgelines, towering forests, washed out roads, and serial killer podcasts.

Dropping into Thorn Junction, I crossed paths with Grant again, he was hauling a load in his truck, and chatted with me briefly and offered up an apple juice. I was thankful for the offer, and took him up on it. Each drop was refreshing, the kindness of strangers continued.

The BLM office was down the road another mile. There was one woman with a colleague there, they both heavily advised me not to take Usal, not that it was a fool's errand, but pretty close, saying that I needed a mountain bike or something beefier than my cross bike (on semi slick 32s). They weren’t exactly too far off, but I decided Usal was my best option, considering my current location and what I could physically tolerate (at this point I was 40 miles in and nearly 5k ft climbing).

There was a awkwardly situated cafe in a lumberyard called Caffe Dolce. Their pastries and sandwiches were exceptional. Both the fuel and the rest were a much needed respite. I was surprised at how busy the cafe was. There was a constant stream of people coming out to pick up a sandwich, I surmised that they were all potentially pickers at some of the farms in Humboldt county. I overheard an Aussie gal talk about going back to the farm.

Back on the bike, there was a smell of dank herbal piney resins wafting at me, I was definitely in Humboldt county. To punctuate that point, I was nearly at Usal road, pedaling along fern laden roadways, when a women walking along the road was most certainly on a different plane than I was. She stated everything is beautiful and asked me for a hug, which I complied and listened to her delve into hyper connected beauty and how we’re all one. I was grasping for an understanding of what all she was conveying to me. I pointed her the way that she should continue walking, and hoped that somebody would return her to wherever she had come from. Bizarre.

Usal’s beginning was a formidable muddy clay-like road, deeply rutted and pocked. The mouth of the whale that would swallow me up and eventually spit me out some ~30 miles and 4k ft climbing later onto highway 1. I ignored the closed gate and passed by. There were rollers that climbed and descended into expansive groves, with each descent typically requiring me to dodge pond-like flooded sections of the road. At least 3 cars were abandoned, a Honda Civic had no chance, the two trucks, despite having 4 wheel drive, succumbed to the relentless muck.

I pushed on. I was grinding away at 6-7MPH for the next 6 hours. I had to dig deep and find humor in the pain and to not let all the beauty wane. My nerves were starting to wear and my body was feeling tired of endlessly riding the brakes and carefully choosing my line, which was even harder with a load. The risk was high since both ends of Usal road were closed and I didn’t have any phone reception. A single mechanical issue could ruin the trip, a fall was a different story… actually, I laid the bike down on one slick descent and took a tumble. I was incredibly thankful -- no mechanicals or injuries.

After a few more hours of rocking out (fittingly enough to If These Trees Could Talk) and noting the descending sun, worry began to set in. I wondered if I’d ever get through this seemingly endless road. My strength was waning, but mentally, I was committed to getting through this. After rounding one of the innumerable bends, Usal beach revealed all its glory, just in time for the sunset. This helped to steady my nerves, as I knew there should be a camp nearby. Indeed there was a camp at Usal Beach, but I was pumped and ready to bid this road farewell, so I cranked on into the night. I climbed another 2k feet and rode another 16 miles in the dark. Thankfully, I had my headlight that was charged, but unfortunately, my taillight died on me. There were just a few cars that passed me (it was 9pm on a Thur night with a highway closed just North of me, hence why I decided to commit to Usal route).

Haggard and nearly broken, I arrived at Westport-Union Campground. I had been on my bike for nearly 15 hours that day. The campsite was on a bluff, the chill winds were refreshing, and helped to cool my nerves. What a day.

Day 4 Westport-Union Landing to Russian Gulch (28mi/1.5k ft)

https://www.strava.com/activities/951928593 https://www.strava.com/activities/953575322

There’s a smile that creeps across your face knowing that you accomplished something that most people wouldn’t dare to attempt, it’s not like I rode a 24 hour endurance race, but it still something to take some level of pride in the accomplishment. As the sun crept up and the ocean sang it’s morning chorus, I couldn’t help but reflect on the tough day; my body was spent. Thankfully, there was a short road to a recovery day, as I was meeting the rest of the Coyote Bomb Squad in Russian Gulch for two chill nights of camping.

I pedaled through Westport, a quirky little coastal town (more like a hamlet), with a tiny cemetery situated on the bluffs and some funky whale mosaic fountain. I savored my breakfast sandwich from a small market run by sweet earthy ladies and then slowly rolled towards Fort Bragg. Coming into Fort Bragg, I stopped in the local coffee shop before hitting the local bike shop, Fort Bragg Cyclery, and chatted with the owner, Mark. Later, I picked up some Teknu since I had managed to hit some poison oak on Usal road. After scarfing on the best pizza in town, Piaci Pizza, and sharing a surprise beer with Mark (bike shop owner), I cruised off to the campsite to meet up with my friends.

Several days on the road riding solo can be a great time for self-reflection and really stoke the fires of your inner hobo, but there are those moments when you’re inundated with gratitude for good friends and their adventurous spirits. I was happy I didn’t have to ride any further and more importantly, elated to be around the warmth of friends and the warmth of my first campfire of the trip. The sunset on the bluffs was of epic proportions.

Day 5 Russian Gulch Exploring, Canoeing, and Hardcore Chilling

Nothing is sweeter than sleeping in and waking up to the smell of hot buttermilk blueberry pancakes cooked on cast iron. Resting, chowing, and some mellow canoeing was on the agenda for the day. We gawked at the ultra-marathoners running through our camp; a funky route, and oddly enough, the canoeing location was the finish line.

Catch a Canoe and Bicycle Too was a quirky shop filled with collectors bikes suspended in the rafters, a series of beautifully crafted “toy” rockets, which looked like they could deliver at least a marmot to outer space, all run and owned by an idiosyncratic shopkeeper. He seemed half-wizard, half rocket scientist, and likely was the most intriguing person that I had encountered while on the trip. His knowledge of photography and rockets was astounding, and he ran a bike shop and a canoe rental business too. And these weren’t just any canoes, these were real works of functional art, just like one would imagine with a beautifully crafted bike, these were easily the most beautiful water-worthy canoes I had ever seen, not to mention the fastest; replete with outriggers for stability. I can’t recommend this experience enough; anyone can manage to enjoy a languid paddle up a gentle river in one of these. On the river, there’s a calm that’s induced that coaxes one to slow down to drink in all the fresh air and sights. Even a handful of seals with pups laid around without a care in the world. A few hours worth of this and it’s like hitting reset on your body. Just mellow; nowhere to be, but right where you are.

The remainder of the day was just chilling with friends, scarfing yet another burrito, and roaming around the bluffs followed by an epic paella cooked by the birthday boy himself, Youngblade.

Day 6 Russian Gulch to Bodega Bay (102mi/6.5k ft)

https://www.strava.com/activities/955648904

These are the types of days that most riders dream about: a good deal of rest, a pancake breakfast, and an epic tailwind that would leave most vikings envious. Despite the fact that the option to hop in a car was there, I opted to pedal the remaining miles back home in 2 days. This might have been one of my favorite days of riding. The hills were fast rolling, each corner plunged down toward the ocean and climbed back up along a coastal bluff. The farmlands added to the serene and bucolic views that elicited a smile. Such a beautiful coastline, such a simple life that calls you to standstill, reflect on a slower pace of nature and the simplicity of it.

Each descent propelled me closer to home and I began to squirm a little thinking about joining the fray again. I pushed on.

Point Arena is a small town that boasts having one of the oldest lighthouses on the coast. It’s a cute and quaint little pitstop close enough for a number of motorcycle riders to reach it from the Bay. A weird sight: hippy/coastal/biker community. California is filled with contradictory juxtapositions, but that’s one of the reasons I love this state. After a solid lunch, I caught up to a crew of riders bikepacking, the only legit riders I had seen! The trio were Canadians heading down from, well, Canada and going down to LA. I was impressed with the amount of beer they were loaded with and sad to turn them down to join them. I had hoped to finally exchange some road stories with fellow riders. There was a brief stop at Salt Point with them, but I felt great from that luscious tailwind, even after 75 miles, and decided to push on to Bodega Bay, about 30 miles down the road.

I rolled into Bodega Bay around 6pm and treated myself to a quality glass of wine and a massive fillet of halibut. So perfect, so nourishing. The campsite at the dunes was a windy one, and made it challenging to sleep despite wearing earplugs. No wonder it’s a favorite spot of windsurfers. Some peculiar dreams crept in that night. Maybe the corporate lifestyle or the dread of the routine that was right around the corner.

Day 7 (Bodega Bay to Larkspur to SF 65mi/3k ft)

https://www.strava.com/activities/956749405

The morning dew hung tightly to everything in sight, it limited my vision, and would eventually morph into a full rain. Undeterred, I knew a hot bath and a cold beer was at the end of my road, but first, I needed a solid breakfast. Estero Cafe delivered. Seated just outside of Marshall, it’s a quaint little organic farm to table type of place, but felt more like a cafe that you might encounter in anytown USA with the local sheriff stopping in and a few regulars just picking up their morning joe. The mist had built up to a sprinkle after I finished my last bite, so it would be a drizzly ride home. Another 60 miles of meandering through dairy farmlands and verdant hills. A  host of classic porsches from the 50s zipped along the same roads, they respected me and I certainly marveled at their classic contours.

Fairfax is always a favorite destination of mine, as many bikers can attest. There is a shared love for bikes in this upper-crust hippy town (seemingly contradictory). Gestalt was on my mind, after collecting rain in my shoes for the last 50 miles, I was ready for a beer and a sausage. Both were savored. I felt lonely and wanted to share my journey with someone like I had done the previous year after a longer tour, but nobody extended me the pleasantries. A tired and weariness settled in from the week of riding, yet there was a lingering satisfaction from knowing what I had accomplished.

I opted to take the ferry back to save a few miles and to soak up the bay and the bridge from a different perspective. The quiet Monday afternoon in the city made it feel like a distant stranger, as the streets were quiet. The city towered over the mouse in a familiar concrete cornfield. It felt good to be home; an appropriate way to close out one chapter and start a new one. The cycle continues, as does the adventure, it always will.

[newstfionline]

Saudis Come To Grips With Swift Changes

Jackie Northam, NPR, May 2, 2018

On a balmy Thursday evening, dozens of young Saudis stream into the AlComedy Club in the western port city of Jeddah. It’s the start of the weekend, and the crowd snacks on popcorn and ice cream before grabbing some of the sagging seats in the theater.

Comedian Khaled Omar takes the mic and begins his act, lamenting how he has no baby pictures of himself. His parents ripped up the family photos in the early 1980s, when ultra-conservative religious authorities deemed photographs haram--forbidden, they said, by God.

The audience is lively. Some women wearing abayas and headscarves banter with Omar and men in the audience.

Omar’s punchline gets a good laugh: Now, he says, not only are photos suddenly not forbidden--but all the people who banned or tore pictures up are now happily posing for selfies. He still wants to know what happened to all his baby pictures.

Omar’s routine is a gentle dig at the Saudi government and religious establishment reversing decades of social restrictions. Much of what was forbidden in Saudi Arabia--cinema, music, theater, women driving--is suddenly acceptable. In fact, the Saudi government is encouraging it. But for many Saudis, their whole way of life--their whole belief system--is being upended.

The founder of the comedy club, Yaser Bakr, says the changes are long overdue.

“I think that this is what to do after 40 years of being asleep, honestly, in Saudi Arabia,” he says. “Honestly, this is what you need to do. Some of it is dramatic, some of it is extremely fast, but it is the way to do it.”

Bakr points to his own club, which operated in a low-key way, largely underground, when it first started. Now it’s sponsored by the government’s General Entertainment Authority. Until recently, it was strictly segregated--women sat in one section, men in another.

“We used to have partitions in the first five years. This is the first year where crowds are sitting mixed together,” he says. “It surprises me how fast all of these changes became normal.”

The social liberalization is being driven from the top, by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The hard-charging, tech-savvy 32-year-old launched an ambitious plan called Vision 2030 to open the kingdom, diversify its economy and create jobs, especially for young people. More than 70 percent of Saudis are under 30.

Many of the social changes are popular with the kingdom’s younger citizens.

“I’m really happy that it happened now that I’m young, and, like, I can live all these changes,” says a 19-year-old woman at a café in Riyadh who asked that her name not be used so she could speak freely.

Others--like her own sister, who is 29--are nervous about the sheer breadth and pace of the social changes underway.

“We have to change, that’s something I know is a fact,” the sister says. “Just, the way we are changing, I wish it was mindful of everyone. I talk to younger people, they are happy with it. But older people are not.”

Rules about music, cinema and the like were supposed to be based on guidance from God. Government-issued edicts came via clerics. So far, the new rules are coming directly from the Saudi government. It has been confusing for some Saudis.

Consider the changes in April alone: The kingdom rolled out its plans for its first-ever tourist visas, held its first Arab fashion week and opened its first cinema in 35 years.

A 26-year-old man in Riyadh, wearing a thobe, a long white gown, says the changes are nothing short of shocking.

“I’m not sure if one can have a culture shock within their own country, but that’s what I’m experiencing right now,” he says.

He describes himself as a traditionalist and says he comes from a large and conservative family. He asked that his name not be used so as not to anger his family by talking to the foreign press. The man worries his family members will be alienated and left behind because they’re not fully on board with all the recent changes, and feel they can’t express their concerns publicly because it is dangerous to appear to criticize the government.

“So on a personal level, when I see them just shrinking and excising themselves from the public sphere--for me, that’s a bit sad,” he says. “That’s sort of upsetting that they believe that the future doesn’t include them. You know, Saudi Arabia should be big enough for all people.”

Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, a cousin of the crown prince, runs the Saudi General Sport Authority, which is allowing and encouraging more girls and women to take part in athletics--in schools, at gyms, or even just attending sporting events like soccer games. She’s making the rounds to promote the changes abroad, but acknowledges the government and the religious establishment needs to do a better job explaining them at home.

“When you live in a community where, overnight, what was a ‘no’ is a ‘yes,’ it’s very hard to rationalize if there’s no ‘why,’” Bandar says.

It reminds her of raising her kids. “They’d ask me why, and I’d be, like, ‘Because I said so.’ That’s not an answer that most people can accept anymore,” she says.

Some Saudis wonder if these sudden changes will last. Abdulrahman Khawj, a filmmaker in Jeddah, says all this is happening because of one man’s vision.

“If another man comes and takes his place and he has a different vision, it could go away,” he warns. “So [Crown Prince Mohammed] is good for us. But who knows who’s going to be next.”

Some worry that even with the changes, there is still no room for dissent. Last September, the crown prince cracked down on and jailed opposition figures, including clerics, economists and journalists and bloggers.

Two months later, about 200 government ministers, businessmen and members of the royal family were rounded up and detained without due process at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, as part of the crown prince’s anti-corruption crackdown. Most have since been freed, after paying large settlements, but in certain cases, the whereabouts of some detainees are unknown.

Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, says he doesn’t want to belittle some of the crown prince’s moves, such as allowing women to drive. But political repression in Saudi Arabia, he warns, is extremely high right now.

“If you criticize [the crown prince] or the king, you not only have exposed yourself to arrest, you will be likely charged with a terrorism crime carrying a sentence of between five to 10 years,” he says.

While some rumblings of discontent are apparent in the kingdom’s big cities, it’s more obvious in smaller towns, such as Huraymila, about an hour’s drive north of Riyadh, past plenty of camels and new construction in the desert. The town of wide boulevards and squat, sand-colored buildings has a conservative reputation. You can’t buy cigarettes, and music in public remains unwelcome. When the government entertainment authority tried to stage a concert here a few months ago, the town refused to attend it.

[creativitytoexplore]

In the Land of the Rain Gnomes by Harrison Kim https://ift.tt/2Zs6XQa A retired social worker takes his lady friend for an adventure in a creepy ghost town accessible only by boat; by Harrison Kim. 

Decaying isn't that bad. It's a unification with your beginnings, a melding into the earth, a relaxing absorption where you do nothing but rot. The ego humbles itself before this ultimate dissolution, this disintegration of body and mind, this unthreading and wasting towards lightness. I live in the ghost town of Nitnat Falls. I pace its abandoned, crumbling streets under drizzling skies, bed down on tree boughs at night, cool and damp in my lean-to under huge cedars. I've cut myself off completely from my old life. This wasn't quite what I had planned for my retirement, but it's stress-free. I've never felt such calm, such a letting go. I trace the lichen patterns growing from my navel, and wet my face in the mist. Two months before I arrived in Nitnat Falls I'd retired from thirty years as a social worker at Riverview Psychiatric Hospital. I was ready for a lift from the bondage of routine, a permanent vacation from listening to people's delusions, being exposed to their madness day after day. I looked towards a life of travel and good times with my new friend Amanda, a thin, elegant lady semi-retired from the real estate business. This first trip of our relationship involved taking a boat up the remote west coast. The cargo boat stopped at fishing camps and Indian villages to deliver mail and supplies. Its halfway destination was Nitnat Falls, an abandoned pulp mill town located under towering mountains, with only a score of diehard inhabitants left living in a few moldy, crumbling buildings set against a view of dark clouds. I wanted to re-experience my adventurous youth, explore remote places. I'd always been fascinated by local history, and the story of Nitnat Falls intrigued me, how it began as a planned village built for the mill workers, laid down eighty years ago in one huge period of construction. The industry thrived until the company went bankrupt in the Seventies. More rain fell here than any other place in North America, no way in but by boat. The ruins of a hotel and indoor swimming pool molded away. Residential streets slowly lost their neat rows of houses to storms, floods, and decay.

As our boat pulled into Nitnat Falls, Amanda and I viewed the pulp plant's abandoned, skeletal hulk, its mossy, collapsed roof and smashed in windows open against the drizzling sky. The vessel anchored to deliver mail and other supplies for the diehard twenty-five inhabitants, and to give adventurous tourists a chance to walk the town while the ship's workers took their lunch break. "Get back by four," Earl, the tattooed, snuff-chewing captain told us. "We leave on the dot, whether you're back or not. If not, we'll pick you up in two days on the return trip." He spat out a wad of brown goo. "This is not a warning, this is a promise." We stepped off the ferry and into the drizzle. I wore my giant backpack, stuffed with food and a sleeping bag in case of emergencies. A short, grey-bearded man pushing a homemade cart full of scrap metal stood at the end of the rotting pier. He said, "Hello Mr. Frattura. What are you doing up here?" I almost tripped into a hole. "Ron Cardinal?" I exclaimed. I couldn't believe it. After all the trouble I'd gone to escape thirty years of job stress and burnout, the first person I encountered in this wilderness was an ex-client. "You bet!" he confirmed. Moisture dripped from his filthy baseball cap. "I thought... I thought..." "Yeah, that I jumped off a bridge. That was a ruse, man. I needed some time to disappear, find a new life away from what you call civilization." He regarded Amanda and I with one hand over his forehead. "You came to check up on me?" "I'm retired," I said. "We're here on an adventure tour." "Pleased to meet you, Ron," Amanda said, presenting her most congenial smile. "We won't tell anyone you're here," I assured him. I glanced towards the town. I could just make out high mountains closing in on either side, like granite pincers. "Does it ever get completely light?" I asked Ron. He grinned. "No, Mr. Frattura. The rain gives us back our own shadows." He paused. "That's where I like to see my darkness, on the outside." Ron appeared far more gnomish than I'd remembered. His ears stuck way out from his unkempt curls, his smile widened huge and wet, revealing a few missing teeth. "There's no drugs up here. I'm clean," he said. "Congratulations, Ron. We're going to take a walk to the old dam. The boat's leaving in a couple of hours." "Don't go too far," said Ron. "Time has a way of getting away on you in these parts." Amanda laughed uneasily. "We have two hours here," she said. "You must be very strong to pack that wagon around." We hiked the main street running uphill from the harbour; Ron stared after us, tightly holding onto his cart so it wouldn't roll down into the sea.

"That dam once provided power for the town and mill," I told Amanda. "Apparently, it's a work of engineering genius." I didn't tell her, but the coolness of the mist ahead attracted me more than viewing the dam. Greyness enveloped us as we walked hand in hand past the shell of the old grocery store. Beside its fallen and shattered sign, a rusted-out logging truck lay on its side. I felt lighter and lighter, all the locked-up thoughts and images of thirty years working with the mentally ill lifting as we climbed higher up the main street. "Jackson, this place kind of scares me," Amanda said. "Don't you think the mountains are closer now than when we arrived?" She paused. "And what about bears?" "We're more likely to see porcupines," I said. I told her that the squat, quilled creatures roamed Nitnat Falls at night, chewing on plywood and rubber to keep their teeth worn down. "Otherwise their incisors will grow right up through their jaws." "Sounds creepy." Amanda gave a nervous laugh. She stayed skinny and fit, gregarious and hyper, in contrast to what I considered my laid-back calm. Our relationship was a case of "opposites attract." She began to talk about how much Nitnat Falls properties would be worth on the real estate market if a European investor seized an opportunity. I felt an urge to move in silence. Her talking pierced and interrupted my enjoyment of the ghost town ambiance. We hiked by the old hotel where a few lumber-jacketed men sat around a camp stove lit on a table in the doorless lobby. Amanda waved at them. "Would you like some porcupine stew?" said a skinny rail of a man with a huge stubbly jaw, stirring the contents of his cooking pot with a pair of deer antlers. I moved closer, could see black mold along what remained of the plaster walls beside him. I glimpsed the bubbling mass in the pot. "Thanks, but we're here for hiking," I replied. "Smells good." "Suit yourself, you're welcome anytime," the man nodded. "Thanks for the offer," Amanda called. "That food stinks," she said to me as we left. "Like rot."

We climbed up past the remains of the outdoor swimming pool. Big cracks fanned out from its cement bottom. The tallest black toadstools I'd ever seen grew from these fissures. As we moved past a crumbling brick fire station, the mountaintops disappeared in the mist. Skeletal remains of houses gaped through from time to time, and a few rusty, bent street signs announced each corner. "We must be almost up at the dam by now," Amanda said. "To me, it feels like we just left the boat," I replied. "Time's moving so fast." She let her hand free from mine, then clasped it again. "Do you hear a drumming?" she asked. "Like something trapped in the earth?" I stopped and listened. "There is a weird sound," I agreed. "Could be my heartbeat." Amanda grinned slightly. "That would be a good sound," she said. "This feels like a dead place, Jackson. It'd take quite some initiative to get tourism to invest here." "It's a ghost town," I told her. "It's supposed to be dead." The further we moved into the mist, the calmer I felt. My old world had been so cluttered and frantic. Over the years I'd absorbed all the information and stories that psychiatric patients told me. I'd been on the scene during dozens of critical incidents, and witnessed the aftermath of scores of suicides and assaults. This constant exposure to troubled, often shattered lives affected me deeply at first, then after a while it all became normal. "You have to detach," my boss once said. "Or you'll end up like them." I tried to follow the boss's advice. After work, I'd hike for hours in the mountains. Then I'd drive home, turn on the TV, and watch history and adventure shows. Below that routine there remained a constant anxiety. Keeping the memories in closed-mind compartments caused difficulties. I awakened often in the night, sweating and yelling out of nightmares set in the psychiatric hospital. Within these bad dreams I often couldn't tell if I was the patient or the staff, if I was the one out of control, or the one controlling. Here, though, the mist penetrated through me. cooling the fever of the years. "Shouldn't we be getting back?" asked Amanda. "The dam's just up this way," I continued. I could hear the spillway roaring. We rounded a corner to view the cascading, violent water, and above it a white-capped grey lake curving around under granite cliffs. I could indeed hear a pounding here, coming from inside the dam. "Maybe that's the drumming you heard," I said to Amanda. "The old turbines still work." "It's quite a savage land," she replied. She tried to laugh. "Now I know why it's not a great real estate market." "In its heyday, it was like anywhere else," I stated. "When we go back, we should check out the old bowling alley." "You're really stuck on this place," Amanda said. "You've got the whole map of it in your head."

I took off my backpack, pulled out my camera and snapped some photos of the dam. Amanda checked her phone. "We've got to return now," she said. "It's twenty minutes until the ferry leaves." "Alright," I nodded. "We can jog down the hill." However, I couldn't exactly remember the route, even though Amanda just told me I knew the town well. "I'm sure it's this way," said Amanda. "No, we go down here!" I shouted, louder than necessary. I very much wanted to see that old bowling alley. We walked along some side streets, I couldn't resist taking photos of the old crumbling porches, roofs thick with moss, mushrooms poking out through gaps in the rot. A sweet odour wafted through the trees, like chocolate or patchouli, then disappeared. "What a stink," Amanda coughed. "I wonder where that's coming from." "They closed the pulp mill forty years ago" I told her. "So it's not from there. I did smell chocolate, but it's gone now." "Come on, Jackson," Amanda insisted. She held her nose. "Let's go. That captain meant what he said." We heard the cargo ferry whistle, and were stepping quickly past the old hotel when the mist lifted for a moment and we glimpsed the boat moving out into the inlet. "I told you we were late!" Amanda leaned against an old railing, it fell back and I grabbed her. She sat against a tree, breathing hard. "It's ok," I said. "We can stay here a day or two. I brought the tent." I indicated my backpack. "There's an extra-large sleeping bag in here." "I don't like this place," Amanda said. She took out her cell phone and pushed some buttons. "Just as I thought. No service." She began to run down the street, waving at the boat as the mist closed in again, shrieking, "Stop! Stop!" "Let's not panic," I yelled. I'd already scoped out a place good for a tent on the way up. My pack contained candles, food, survivor blankets. "We're prepared for a night or two," I shouted at Amanda, who was still running for the wharf, though our boat had already rounded the corner of the inlet. At the waterside, Ron Cardinal sat on a broken sewer pipe, gutting a fish. "You guys missed the boat!" he exclaimed. "I told you the hours can get away on you." He wiped his hands on a filthy towel. "Especially if you're committed to the shadowlands." "Is there any other way out of here?" Amanda pleaded. "Do you know where there's a washroom?" Ron nodded. "Yeah, I've got a pit toilet and a CB radio up at my cabin. You could call a helicopter or a float plane. It'll be expensive, even if they can get through." "Let's do it, Jackson," Amanda said. "It's only a couple of days," I told her. "We can live here free from noise, in perfect silence, away from all distraction. It'll be a Zen thing." "There's a terrible stink in the air," she said. "I can't detect a thing," I said. "Apart from a slight perfume." "Neither can I," Ron agreed. "Lots of off-the-boaters say they smell the surfer stink from the old pulp mill, but if you stay here a while it goes away." "There hasn't been a functional mill here for forty years," I said. "It stinks more like rot," Amanda told me. "Like dead bodies." She lifted her head and listened. "Can you hear that pounding?" "Native legends say these mountains have beating hearts," Ron said. "It's a calming place to be if you hallucinate," He laughed, tilted his head in Amanda's direction, and winked at me. "They say the pounding drowns out all the evil spirits." "I don't hallucinate," said Amanda. "I know what's real and what's not." I felt light headed, almost high. I stood up and breathed deep in the misty air. "So fresh here," I said. "What's wrong with you?" Amanda ran up onto the wharf and scanned the horizon. "Do any hunters come in on float planes? We could get a ride with them." "She's always looking for the easy way out," I whispered to Ron. "In the end, there isn't any." He seemed so friendly and open, squatting there with his wet fish knife, successful and happy with his catch of the day. I felt I could ask him anything. "Do you still hear voices in your head?" I said. He shook his head "No. Everything's clear for me now. I'm completely normal in this ghost town." He grinned, showing his black edged, yellow teeth. "I caught three fish today," he said. "All you do here is relax and fish, and then eat the fish." Amanda ran back from the wharf. "I need to use your CB radio, Ron," she stated. She turned to me. "We have to call a helicopter. I'll pay for it." "It's no problem," Ron said. "Come with me, tourist folks." He picked up his fish and threw them in his cart, then began pushing the cart up the hill. Amanda followed closely, I dawdled behind, admiring the skeletal walls of the old pulp mill. "They're still pretty solid after all this time," I thought.

Ron led us up towards the lobby of the moldy hotel, where the three skinny, long-haired fellows we'd met before sat on cracked white plastic lounge chairs eating their stewed porcupine. I stopped; Amanda strode on, her expression set in frown mode. "Do you guys hear any drums?" I remarked. "Yeah, man," said a short, big-eared guy, holding a tiny steel fork. "It's something to do with the dam, how the water bangs those old turbines." I ran to catch up with Ron and Amanda. "Those guys told me something very interesting," I exclaimed. "What would be interesting is getting out of here," Amanda coughed. Ron led us into a small refurbished cabin, with a roof and sides of many colours. I felt the cool, slightly slimy walls. "You've got a bit of mold in here," I told him. "I've taken pieces from the other houses, built myself a hovel," he grinned. "But yes, the spores get everywhere." "What about electricity?" I asked. "I have a gas generator, I fill up the can when the cargo boat comes in." I looked into Ron's misty, red-veined eyes. We smiled at each other. He was so much improved from his days back at the hospital. As a psychiatric patient, he could barely string two coherent sentences together. He remained unshaven and ragged, sure, but who needed to shave or wash up here? "Where's the CB radio?" Amanda asked. Ron came out to the front porch carrying it and laughing to himself. "I'll call, but choppers can't come in here," he giggled. "They won't fly in mist. And it's always misty." "How the hell do we get out of here then?" Amanda said. "Why did you say you could call a helicopter?" Ron hesitated. "You were the one who wanted to call," he told her. Amanda sat on the ground, her hands over her face. "This is crazy," she said. "You tell us one thing, then you tell us the opposite." "Would you like some fish?" Ron asked. I felt sorry for Amanda, though she was a bit too hard on Ron. She couldn't appreciate the joys of the wilderness. The place made her sick, she perceived it so much differently than I. Ron stood behind her laughing, holding a greasy frying pan. "Sure, I'll have some fish," I told him. "Thanks for inviting us."

I put the tent up under some giant cedars, and let Amanda use my sleeping bag. I didn't have much use for sleep in such a mysterious, intriguing place. I spent the night walking among the waddling porcupines, following them through the darkness. I sat with my back against a disintegrating backhoe scoop, watching the mist swirl as morning light tried to penetrate the inlet. I witnessed a couple of bears lumbering around the hotel lobby, sniffing where the men cooked their meat. I chuckled at their huge, ursine shadows dominating what used to be luxury accommodation. When I strolled down the street to be closer, they snorted and kept moving along the waterfront. "You seem very friendly," I called out to them. "Don't go away."

Amanda spent most of the next day in the tent, trying to get her phone to work. "I can't stand that stink," she said. "You could be hallucinating," I told her. "I hope you don't have a fever." I liked the damp closeness, it kept my thoughts and anxiety contained. I relaxed deeply as the foggy ambiance surrounded and held me. Amanda developed a persistent cough, then a cold, and a serious wheeze. I'd never felt healthier, striding the hills of the town with a gnarled old stick Ron said came from a cedar root that penetrated his cabin's crawl space. On leaving day, I slowly packed up the tent. "I'm exhausted," Amanda whispered. "How could you do this to me?" She had barely talked during the two days, and wouldn't eat the freeze-dried food I provided. She did drink a lot of Ron's hot tea, which I never told her was made from tree moss. "You fit in here, Mr. Frattura," said Ron, as I said goodbye. "I like the place," I said. "There are long term side effects," Ron continued. He put a finger to his lips, "Sssh," and we stepped out to the sagging porch. "See this?" He lifted up his shirt. I observed what looked like wet lichens patterned in wavy lines flowing out of his belly button. "What are those?" I asked. "They seem to be moving slightly." "It's the Wasting Away." Ron traced his little finger over the grey patterns, then lifted his finger to his lips and spoke in a whisper. "It's all inside me now, just starting to come out. Happens to everyone here." He grinned. "But the more it happens, the better you feel." "So you're turning into some kind of plant creature?" I asked. "I'm shedding all my stress and anxiety," he continued. "I'm becoming part of this place, and it's becoming part of me."

Amanda and I stepped up the ramp to the boat. Earl the skipper grabbed both her arms and she leaned on him, coughing. He lowered her to the deck. "Thank you for saving me, sir," she said to him. "Now I need an actual coffee!" She shuffled towards the passenger area without another word, my sleeping bag wrapped around her bowed, stooped shoulders. "She looked so tall and elegant, getting off the boat," said the Skipper. "But now..." He gestured, "Come on, get on board." "I dunno," I said. "Do you have a few cans of soup and a camp stove I could buy?" "You need to order by computer," he grinned. He pointed to the shore. "Or you can buy stuff off that guy." A short, stocky long jawed man from the hotel lobby leaned against a hand-made wagon, piled high with assorted objects. I waved. He gave a big toothless smile and saluted by lifting a bent piece of pipe over his head. "Do you really want to stay in Nitnat Falls?" Earl asked. He chewed hard on his snuff wad. "It'll suck you in. Lots of folks have just plain disappeared into the moss." "I don't think I belong out there," I said. "There's too much light." I paused. "Do you at least have a spare couple of blankets?" "Too much light!" The Skipper laughed, and spat his snuff into the harbour. "You're gonna leave your lady behind?" "She's pretty sick," I told him. "Yeah, she coughed like she had bronchitis," the Skipper agreed. "Do you detect something rank in the air?" I asked. "Like sulphur?" "Yeah, I can smell it," the Skipper nodded. "Anyone who doesn't live here can. People say it's the ghost of the old pulp plant," he guffawed. "If you can't smell that, then you've been at Nitnat Falls too long." "When I sniffed," I told him, "the air was perfume." "I'll tell your lady friend you're staying," the Skipper said. "I can throw you a tarp."

I shouldered my belongings and headed down the wharf, stepping carefully to avoid the rotted holes. I never looked back. Amanda was an extrovert, always reaching for brightness. She was outwardly healthy, undamaged that way. She never saw the world like me, through the eyes of others' delusions. I liked her confidence in objective reality, in the value of real estate and money and success, but in the end, I chose the shadows. There was no pretence there. "You were a good social worker," Ron told me as we sat on his cabin porch, listening to the rain and eating mushrooms with seaweed fried in porcupine grease. "Mr. Frattura! You crossed over to our side." "Please, call me Jackson." I lifted up my stained shirt. Below my belly button, I thought I could see a tiny bit of grey lichen poking out. I pulled my shirt back down, released the image from my mind. I would live within the moment, and accept this reality. I stepped from Ron's porch into the Nitnat Falls rain, let the cool ghost town mist wet and wash me through and through. Then I continued walking, clean and free. Up the road, between two towering mountain peaks, the remaining dam turbines shuddered, drumming a steady beat against the river.

I thrive in this mountain darkness, even as I disappear into its ground.

[artificialqueens]

Trixie's day out 3- Return of the jedi (Trixya) ~ hobnob

A/N: Luke Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine in an attempt to rescue his friend Han Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt. Little does Luke know that the galactic empire has secretly begun construction on a new armored space station even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star. When completed, this ultimate weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of rebels struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy.

“TRIXIE” Katya screeched, spazzing out on the floor.

“Tf cunt” Trixie awoke, rubbing some of those crispy yellow balls out of her eyes graciously.

“We’re out of milk go get some” Kathua cried, looking down at the milk she just spilled.

Trixie couldn’t believe her ear nubbs. She’d have to pop down to Tesco extra and miss Antiques roadshow on telly.

“Not today satan, im having…Trixie’s day in” she spoke softly, sneezing into katyas wig.

“You have to what are we going to eat with our weetabix” Katya said, stealing a pack of haribo from the mini fridge.

Katya did make a compelling argument. Every morning they would talk about last nights Britains got talent and eat weetabix.

Trixie grabbed her Jacamo coat and wellies. She was out the door like a vegan in maccies.

The streets were surprisingly quiet apart from a few D list queens sat on a bench, making audition tapes. Today she may actually achieve what she set out to do without any wacky antics.

Just then Trixie fell, making sweet tender love to the floor as her dentures fell out.

“Ur mum drinks spaff!” Trixie yelled in pure unadulterated rage, getting up and dusting off her boy body.

She looked around to what caused the accident.

It was the head of ivy whinters, rolling around in panic. “Woo0ooah!” She tumbled, blood spewing everywhere as her decapitated head made circles on the ground.

“Hows ur head” Trixie said drenched in blood.

“Ive been having some complaints” Ivy cried, licking a garden snail. “Somebody stole my body-ody-ody!”

“I could get you 2 litre bottle of tizer” Trixie said sympathetically, picking up ivy’s head. Tizer always made her feel better.

Ivy, shook her head, though it was really more of a vibration because she had no neck. “I want you to find who did this to me”

Trixie nodded, throwing the decapitated ivy to the floor as she rolled down a storm drain. The dairy goods would just have to wait.

Trixie walked over to the bench of D list drag queens, they all eyed her down apprehensively. She needed information.

“Wott do you want?” Vander von odd spat, sticking our her forked tongue.

“Yeah, piss off!” Evah destruction hissed, ripping trixies skin with her talons.

“Tf u doing you rat bastard?” Trixie said slapping away eva’s hand. “I just need to ask if-”

“We ain’t saying nothing!!” Soju snarled, lifting her microphone to Trixie’s face. “However, do something for us and ill give you answers”

The girls on the bench nodded in agreement, going back to making audition tapes.

“What you want”

“Im out of alcohol to give to my guests” soju cried, her fake microphone crumbling apart. “Im under 18 so i need you to go to get me some bevs”

“Im about to pop into tesco, i could get you the latest beano and a kopparberg” Trixie offered, dressing her open wound in spongebob plasters.

“Yh peng”

A few minutes later and a quick chat with pete behind the till, Trixie had a bag of cheap booze. She slammed it into soju’s belly.

“Ah” soju thumbed up, clasping her chest in pain. “Rad, how can we help u”

“There was a decapitated head rolling around”

“Word on the street is” Evah destruction leaned in “there’s been a body snatcher goin round, nabbing queens!”

“I saw a shadowy figure jump into that there bin” Vander van odd pointed, taking a puff oh her novelty oversized pipe.

Without hesitation, Trixie leapt into the bin. It smelt of old gum and used condoms, much like katya. It was nothing but a plain bin! She’d been dooped!

Before a disgruntled trixie could react, the lid was slammed shut. She heard cackling as the bin moved. She was going on her biggest day out ever!

After about 7 hours of squatting in a bin, the lid lifted. She found herself in an underground science lab surrounded by tubs of body parts and leftover curry.

“Nice of you to join us miss mattel” a shadow figure said, all intimidating like.

“Wasn’t voluntary was it you daft cunt” Trixie retorted. At some point her hands had been tied up.

Trixie looked over to the table. An abomination of human limbs and makeup lay on there, covered in blood and wig hair.

“Intrigued?” The shadow stepped forward. Making them not a shadow. By teresa may’s sagging ballsack, it was karen from finance!

“Karen you old slag! Let me out ill be your bff”

“No trixie, i shan’t fall for that again. See i need your body-ody-ody for my experiment”

This wasn’t an ideal situation, Trixie just wanted to watch Antiques roadshow with weetabix.

“You see, we are the forgotten queens!” Karen monologued “None of our shows get booked because of people like you!! But thats about to change. I am creating the perfect queen, to outbook all other shows in england!!!”

Trixie nodded.

“Ive used the legs of Naomi smalls, the body of Courtney act, the collar bone of Alaska, and i was going to get ivy’s head but she got stolen by sewer rats idk where she is”

“Karen m8 i have to call the police this is well messed” Trixie said, busting out her phone and contacting the authorities.

“How in the dickens did you escape from the rope?”

“You tied me up with strawberry shoelaces you berk”

That very second, Laganja estranja slammed down the laboratory door. Her half reptilian body shone in the UV lamp rays.

“Oh yall wanted a rescue??” She deathdropped, making her way over to karen from finance. “You going straight to jail you best believe mamawww”

“Im in a secret location, how did you find me” Karen panicked.

“I got my snapchat location services on” Trixie said, getting out the bin and giving laganja a scooby snack. “Were in the middle of sheffield”

“Im young and hung and clearly march to the sound of my own drum” Laganja shrieked. without hesitation, she whipped out a gun and shot karen square in the face.

“Shit thanks laganja you can go now” Trixie nodded, poking Karen’s lifeless dead body with her foot.

“Okuuuuur mamaw” Laganja sashayed. She really hadn’t been the same since the accident.

Another job well done. The killer had been caught, with a little help from her friends of corse!

Trixie looked over to the rotting pile of flesh. Karen was some form of mentally disabled, it would never of worked.

She made her way back to camden. She spotted evah, vander and soju still on the bench, chuckling to themselves menacingly.

“Lads that prank was shit” Trixie said, shaking her head.

They all began to cry, hanging their heads in shame. “We had to let karen slice you up. How else would we get money?” Evah sobbed.

Trixie gave them all a knowing smile “investment…”

They all nodded in agreement, looking into the sunset. She would be seeing more of these girls, possibly on bbc news in some form of scandal.

Trixie bought the milk and got back to the hotel room. Katya was sat on the bed watching the biggest looser on telly.

“Its been about 5 days trixie where you been” Katya said, her eyelids peeled back from dehydration.

“I had to walk from sheffield to london :/”

They both sat together and watched telly, eating weetabix as the day came to a close.

“We not only have a parliamentary democracy, but on questions about the arrangements for how we’re governed, there are times when it is right to ask the people themselves, and that is what we have done. The British people have voted to leave the European Union, and their will must be respected.”

-Rupaul

[umi-thurman-blog]

Dormant Dragon

Parings: Undetermined.

Summary: This was written and inspired by the Yakuza series better known as Like A Dragon. I absolutely love the game and it’s deep story and wanted to create something similar in tone and setting so here you go. The story of Sonoda Umi and her life in the yakuza, serving under the Kurosawa family.

Words: ~4,800

Tokyo 2008

The bustling nightlife of the streets of Tokyo were the perfect cover for today’s debt collection. Tucked away underneath a long since forgotten construction site of an ambitious plot of land laid a business man, caked in dust, dirt and sweat. Beads of blood blotched onto his white dress shirt as he cowered across the ground. The crimson splats growing in size as the blood evened out.

Standing above him was an average height woman, her hair long and her face shadowed from sight due to the lights that brightened the streets. Looking straight through the passageway, he could see numerous bystanders walking by, minding their own business. The man’s throat grew dry from the amount of times he attempted to escape from her. He opened his mouth to reason with the woman, but his voice crumbled as soon as they exited him, “P-Please! I promise you, I’ll have the 500,000 yen by the end of the week!”

The woman stepped closer, her shadowed figure growing larger and larger with each step towards him. She came to a stop and spoke, “You are 6 months late on your payment, Kurosaki…” her voice was deeper than one would expect. But to the man, it was all too familiar at this point. Before today’s encounter, her voice was always charming and alluring to him. She rarely spoke many words, but tonight changed every opinion he had.

“Please, Umi, let me explain my situation before we go any further!” he begged.

The woman remained firm, “Kurosaki…” He jumped at the sound of his name, “You are expected to return the favor when you borrow from the Kurosawa Family. We have been generous in your case, but this time, I cannot let it slide.”

The look in his eyes showed fear, but he could not back down now, “Umi, m-my business was harassed by the Yazawa Family! They’re the ones to blame!”

The shadowed figure shook it’s head, “I’m done talking, Kurosaki. Where is your payment to the Kurosawa Family?”

“C-come on, Umi, I’m begging you…” he pleaded again, only this time he sat on his knees bowing as his life was on the line.

The woman sighed and turned her back, “I can't return to the Kurosawa family without some sort of payment. You should know this, Kurosaki.”

“What do you mean?” he asked wearily.

“The Kurosawa Family, graced you with a lower interest rate than most of their clients. They made an investment, and you failed to deliver on your end. How do you think the Chairman will react once they know of your incompetence…?” she warned.

He gulped in preparation for his answer, his throat ran dry as soon as he thought of what he must do, “Y-You don’t mean, I have to cut off my finger?” he panicked and stood up quickly, rushing towards Umi and grabbing her shoulders, “Hey! Answer me!”

His eyes saw the shadowed figure twist and felt something crash against his solar plexus, knocking him back a few steps before falling onto his knees again. A small amount of blood pooled in his mouth, but he chose to swallow it down, “U-Umi…?”

“Offering your finger is something only a Yazuka can do. You are nothing more than a civilian,” she answered coldly.

“T-Then does that mean… You'll kill me?” he replied. His voice cracked and his breath hastened.

“Well that would most certainly be the case…” Umi replied quietly enough for him to hear.

His eyes flared. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fist in a fit of rage, “Y-You can’t kill me! I'll murder you and the rest of the Kurosawa Family before you can kill me! To hell with your money!” he stood up and assumed a fighting stance.

Umi observed him. During the entire shakedown, she had been the one pushing and beating him when he was fearing her. But the look in his eyes now showed desperation. She sighed and stretched her neck before hopping lightly on her feet a few times. Staring right back into his eyes, she raised her hands and taunted him, “Come at me.”

The man let out a battle cry as he rushed at her, he swung with a wide right hook that was easy for her to block. She stepped in close and used her underarm to lock his right arm in place; using her free hand to smash down on it, causing a fracture in the arm. She let go and the man retreated back, but not before she used her now free hand to land a powerful hook on his cheek. The man stumbled back and managed to stay on his feet, but only by a margin.

“M-my arm…” he mumbled before attacking again. This time he tried a forward kick, aiming for her abdomen, but it was easily caught. She kicked at his balancing foot and sweeped him to the ground, landing a hard-hitting punch against his jaw as he crashed onto the ground. With the air knocked out from the sweep, his arms fell weakly onto the ground and he laid in pain.

Umi stood up, her breathing a little heavy, “You shouldn't have done that, Kurosaki…”

He used the bit of strength he had to lift his head up, “I-I'll never… let you… kill me…” he muttered before passing out.

Umi sighed and squat down, turning the man over and checking for his wallet which she managed to find. There was only a couple ten thousand yen bills which she collected and tossed the wallet onto the now unconscious body. She stood up and placed the bills in her pocket before pulling out a cigarette, “We may be Yakuza, but we don't kill civilians…” she muttered before flicking her lighter.

She inhaled deeply before blowing out the smoke as she glanced at the night sky. The lights of Tokyo were too bright for the stars to shine. After one more hit, she tossed the cigarette onto the ground and stomped it out. She made way towards the street, making sure to straighten up her suit before emerging from the shadows.

Her eyes dilated from the sudden stimulation of neon signs and bright lights. Her ears rang with endless chatter as high schoolers, businessmen, and shady characters walked past her. It was too loud for her to think, but she didn't mind. To her, these streets were something like home, it has ceased to changed ever since she became yakuza 3 years ago. It was known as Kentobori.

A vibration from her pocket broke her out of the nightlife trance. The flip of her phone revealed a message from her longtime friend, Ruby. The message read, “How did the shakedown go? Sis wants to hear from you ASAP. Get down to HQ right away.”

Umi closed her phone and made way to the nearest taxi. The Kurosawa Family headquarters was located 10 minutes away from Kentobori. The standard fare was about 800 yen which was fine for her. She spent most of the time during the ride just staring out the window, people in general could tell she was yakuza by the way she dressed so any sort of small talk with the cab driver would be accompanied by a nervous and cautious tone.

The cab came to a stop in front of a grand hotel named “The Diamond Heights” it was a hotel constructed under the influence of the Kurosawa Family and it served as a headquarters for the family chairman and the rest of the captains. She made her way inside and entered the elevator. Her finger moved and pressed on a combination of buttons that lit up periodically once she finished. She leaned back against the wall of the elevator and waited for her ride to finish.

After a few moments, the elevator doors opened and she stepped out, only to be stopped by guards, “Hold it, what is a low ranking yakuza like you doing on the chairman’s floor? This is for captains and the chairman only.”

“I was asked to speak with the chairman by Ruby,” she replied.

Just as the guards were to respond, a cheerful light voice broke the tension, “Umi!” she strut over to the guards and grabbed Umi’s hand, “Sorry to bother you boys, but Sis would like to see Umi right away.”

The guards immediately stepped away and bowed, “Yes! Of course Miss Kurosawa!”

Umi followed Ruby and spoke, “You could have at least told them I was to be expected.”

Ruby shrugged, “Meh, I forgot.”

“And how long are you going to hold my hand?” Umi added.

“Whoops!” she let go immediately and laughed, “Guess I got carried away.”

“How’s Dia doing?” Umi asked.

Ruby looked down, “I don’t suppose you happen to have Kurosaki’s payment for us, do you?”

Umi shook her head, “Other than a couple ten thousand yen bills, no.”

Ruby sighed, “Sis is going to be mad…”

Umi nodded and replied, “Yeah, I know.” The two arrived in front of a decorative door. Ruby knocked onto the wood and waited for a response.

“Come in,” a firm voice replied.

The two glanced at each other and nodded before entering the room. At the far end of the room sat a strict looking woman behind a desk. Her face stained with what looked to be anger and irritation, “Umi, how was the collection?” she asked immediately.

Umi stood firm before bowing, “I regret to inform you that Kurosaki is unable to repay us.” She kept her head down until Dia would respond.

The woman let out a groan and slammed her hand against her desk, “Son of a bitch!” her voice raised and so did her body. She stood up and made way to the nearest window that overlooked Kentobori, “Do you know how much money we lent that rat?!”

Umi nodded and responded, “500,000 yen.”

“And how much has he paid back?!” Dia continued.

Umi pulled the bills from her pocket and counted them, “After today, 30,000.”

Dia sighed and paced around the room, “We’re losing money investing in this man. Tell me, Umi. What did you do with him?”

“He attacked me and I had no choice but to rough him up,” Umi responded.

Dia nodded in approval and made way to Umi’s side, “You can stand up straight now, you don't have to be so formal with me.” Umi straightened up to see the stern face replaced with a soft one, “You smell of blood, you must have roughed him up quite a bit,” she sharpened up Umi’s clothes and pat her shoulder.

“Thank you, Chairman Dia. Kurosaki was nothing I couldn't handle,” Umi replied.

Dia smiled and chuckled, “That’s why I send you after the stubborn ones.”

Ruby joined into the conversation, “Hey Sis? Do you mind if I take Umi to go have a few drinks now?”

“Oh, yes. I must get back to work anyways.” Dia gave Umi a hug and a pat on the back, “You go have some fun, you've earned it tonight,” she said, handing back the 30,000 yen Umi had brought.

“C-Chairman, I can't take that, that’s for the family,” Umi declined.

Dia remained persistent and pushed the bills into Umi’s hand, “Don’t worry about it, I've got it covered.”

Umi reluctantly accepted the money, “T-Thank you, Chairman.”

Ruby burst with energy, “Let's go drinking at Moonlight!” and pulled Umi by the hand once again. Umi glanced back as she was dragged away by Ruby to see a sullen look on Dia’s face, even if it was for a brief second.

The two arrived back in Kentobori and made way to their most frequented bar known as Moonlight. It was tucked away in a crowded and claustrophobic district in the city, well hidden from the general public. Because of this, the two could have peaceful drinks without any goons or rival yakuza bothering them. Ruby went through the door first and greeted the barkeep, “Heyo, Hanamaru!”

Umi walked in seconds after and greeted her as well, “How are you, Hanamaru?”

The woman smiled and replied, “Welcome back, you two. Will it be the usual?” The two women took their regular seats as their favorite drinks were served to them, “Since you're both here, I guess something good happened?”

Umi shrugged and Ruby took the lead, “Umi over here roughed up a scumbag who still hasn't paid us back.”

Hanamaru knew that the two of them were yakuza. It didn't surprise her that stories like these were common with the two of them, “Who was it this time?”

“Kurosaki,” Umi replied, “He owes the Kurosawa family 500,000 yen.”

Hanamaru sighed, “So this Kurosaki has been avoiding you and the family for quite some time now, huh?”

Ruby took a sip of her drink, “Yeah, I just wish that good for nothing would pay up. He’s stressing Sis out!”

Umi pulled out a cigarette and glanced up at Hanamaru, “You mind?”

Hanamaru shook her head and Umi continued to light it, “Hey, hand me one too,” Ruby demanded. Umi did as she was asked and lit Ruby a cigarette as well.

Umi took a deep hit before continuing with the conversation, “Has the chairman mentioned anything about what she's planning?”

Ruby shook her head and took a hit, “You know how she is. She's too stubborn to let anyone else help.”

Umi sighed and continued to smoke, “Well, whatever she does, I'll follow her.”

“Same with me,” Ruby replied, offering her drink up for cheers. The two clanked their glasses and gulped down their liquor.

The bell attached to the entrance door rang and a young woman stepped in. She was blonde and wore her hair in a ponytail, she was suited and wore an eyepatch over her right eye. Umi took notice and immediately greeted her, “Anego!”

The blonde smiled and strut her way over towards Umi, taking a seat and smirking at Hanamaru, “You know which drink.”

Hanamaru smiled and nodded, “Of course Eli.”

Eli peered over Umi at Ruby, “How's it goin’ Little Ruby?”

“Just enjoying some drinks with Umi,” she replied.

Eli made a grandiose movement and grabbed the drink Hanamaru just set on the counter, “So you wouldn't mind if I joined ya?”

“Of course not, Anego,” Umi replied.

“So what's the deal? I heard they had you do another shakedown tonight, Umi,” Eli asked.

Umi nodded, “Yes, it was Kurosaki again.”

Eli’s eyes widened, “Kurosaki?! He still hasn't paid?!” Umi nodded and Eli let out a groan, “Man… I'm tellin you two, Chairman Dia is way too kind, if it were me, I’d have whacked him by now.”

“H-Hey!” Ruby shouted in protest.

Umi held up her hand, “I know you wouldn't do that, Anego. Although, you probably would have beaten him until he was an inch away from death.”

Eli smirked and threw her arm around Umi for a half hearted embrace, “You know me so well, Umi.”

The four women in the bar enjoyed most of the night together, sharing stories and tales with one another until the dead of night. Umi had fallen asleep on the counter, Eli on one of the cushioned couches near the back, and Ruby, still awake with Hanamaru, “So you have this… plan?”

Ruby nodded, “Yeah, once the Kurosawa family is back to where it was financially, Sis and I were thinking of making Umi a captain for the family.”

Hanamaru showed curiosity, “A captain?”

Ruby grabbed another smoke before continuing, “You can think of captains in a family as big as ours to be like advisors or the second highest seat. There's the chairman who sits up top with a personal lieutenant, that’s me. Then there are captains, and underneath them are lieutenants and foot soldiers,” she detailed. Hanamaru nodded as Ruby explained, “The only problem is that for Umi to become a captain, she has to start her own family and gather up members which can take a very long time.”

Hanamaru wore a confused look, “Wait, if she is a part of the Kurosawa family, why would she need to start her own if she's already in one?”

Ruby took a sip of her drink before answering, “You can think of the Kurosawa family as a giant machine. The entirety of it is called the Kurosawa family, but all the parts inside are composed of multiple families. For example, the Ayase family and the Watanabe family serve under us. If Umi were to become a captain, then she would be in charge of the Sonoda family which serves the Kurosawa family, you understand?”

Hanamaru’s face showed small signs of confusion, but it seemed like she got the gist of it, “So if things turn out well, Umi could become a high ranking member for the Kurosawa family?”

Ruby nodded, “Yup, that's pretty much it.”

“So why didn't you just make Umi a captain from the start?” Hanamaru asked.

Ruby sighed, “It’s a little complicated. Our father ran the Kurosawa family when Sis and I were still children. Once we became teenagers, that's when the Ayase family began serving under us.”

“The Ayase? So you mean Eli’s…” Hanamaru mumbled.

“She’s the head of the family now ever since her father was killed while in Okinawa years ago,” Ruby replied. Hanamaru looked down apologetically and Ruby continued, “Anyways, I'm sure you don't know this, but Umi was orphaned at a young age.”

“Oh my, I had no idea,” Hanamaru reacted.

Ruby nodded, “She was taken in by the Ayase’s and that was how we met. Our father introduced us to Eli and Umi once the Ayase joined under him. Eli was always busy with her father, so that left Umi to spend a lot of her time with Sis and I.”

“Huh… I see,” Hanamaru commented.

Ruby drank again, “And you can imagine what it would look like to the rest of the family if someone like Umi, technically a nobody, were to suddenly shoot up the ranks of the family and start her own. Sis always said that making Umi a captain so soon would make it seem like she would have only gotten that position because of her relationship with us. That would make the other members of the family jealous because becoming a captain makes you one step closer to having a chance at being the Chairman.”

Hanamaru nodded and listened intently to Ruby’s explanation, “But now that Umi has proven herself quite a bit over the past 3 years she's been yakuza, I think it’s a good time for her to finally get promo-” Ruby jumped at the vibration that came from her pocket and she quickly opened her phone, “H-Hello?” a few seconds passed before she stood straight as a board and knocked over her drink, “What?! S-Sis…?!” Umi woke up slowly and looked up at Ruby.

“What’s wrong… Ruby?” she asked with a yawn.

Ruby ignored her and immediately ran out of the bar. As she passed, Eli awoke and sat up straight, “What’s goin on, Umi?”

Now more alert, Umi stood up, “I-I don’t know, but we should hurry and follow Ruby.”

Eli nodded and headed out the door without another word. Umi looked back at Hanamaru, “T-Thanks for the drinks Hanamaru, here, keep the change,” she said, leaving the 30,000 yen she received from Dia on the counter.

Hanamaru bowed, “Thank you for visiting, I hope things go well on your end.”

Umi nodded and bolted out the door, crashing against Eli’s back, “A-Ahh! Anego?”

“Sorry, Umi, a lil dizzy from the drinks,” Eli replied.

Uni shook her head and squeezed past Eli, “Did you see which way Ruby went?” she asked looking around frantically.

“I think she headed south,” Eli replied.

Umi nodded, “I'll check that way then, you head north and if you can't find her, meet me back at HQ.”

Eli nodded and Umi sprinted off down the street. She looked left and right, scanning the crowds and stores for Ruby’s distinct hair, but to no avail. She ran further down the street and managed to catch a glimpse of Ruby entering a cab, “Ruby!” she shouted. But it was useless because of all the endless chatter that cluttered the streets. The only ones who could hear her were the strange faces around her immediate vicinity. The cab sped off and Umi made a break for it, only barely touching the trunk of the cab before it returned to the street. Umi looked around to see no cabs left and shook her head, “Goddammit!” and began sprinting towards HQ.

20 minutes later, Umi arrived in front of the hotel, leaning onto her knees and breathing heavily to catch her breath from the run. As soon as she had the strength, she jogged into the hotel to see that the front lobby was completely empty. Or rather, it sounded like no one was working in the building at all. She made way for the elevator and entered in the button combination to the Chairman’s floor.

The doors to the elevator opened and she was immediately greeted with the intense smell of blood and gunpowder. Not only that, but the guards that attended the elevator lied on the ground dead from gunshot wounds. Umi stepped over them and ran down the hallway towards the Chairman’s room.

She slowed down at the sound of yelling, “Sis?! SIS!” it was muffled and came from the other side of the door.

“Ruby?” Umi muttered to herself.

She leaned against the door to listen in on the yelling. From what she could make out, Ruby was directly on the other side, “How could you do this?!” Ruby yelled.

“No hard feelings little one, it’s just part of the job,” another voice replied.

“I won’t let you get away with this!” Ruby barked back.

“I'm afraid I don't have the time to deal with small fry like you, once your big sister is dead, Kentobori is ours for the taking,” the voice mocked before the distinct cocking of metal echoed the area.

Umi’s eyes widened and she went for the handle, “Ruby! Get ou-!”

A ear-piercing blast attacked Umi’s ears before she could realize the warm liquid materializing around her abdomen. The door in front of her broke open as another shot was fired and her friend propelled towards her, knocking the both of them against the opposite side of the hall.

Umi tried to sit up but the sharp pain in her abdomen refused her to. She had taken stray shotgun pellets to her stomach. She managed to move her arms and shake Ruby, “R-Ruby? Hey, get up!” she attempted to lift the girl but the pain refused to let her. “Ruby!” Umi groaned. She managed to get her head above her friend’s shoulder before her eyes widened. The white dress shirt that Ruby wore under her suit jacket was stained with red, and the pool grew larger with each second.

Ruby coughed and more blood spilled onto her shirt, “...U-Umi…?”

Umi’s voice was caught in her throat, her eyes widened with disbelief, “R… Ru...by…?” Her friend managed to turn her head and make eye contact before her eyes closed, “H-Hey, Ruby! This is no time for jokes, stay awake!” Umi managed to slide herself from under Ruby despite the pain in her stomach and apply pressure to where Ruby had been shot, “Come on Ruby, don’t die on me! HEY!! RUBY!!!”

The girl managed to open her eyes slightly, “Umi… there is… a tra...i...tor…in...the...family...”

“W-What?!” Umi replied belligerently with tears welling up in her eyes.

“S-Sis… you… have to… help… si….s….” Ruby weakly muttered.

Umi looked around in panic, all she could do was keep pressure on Ruby’s wounds despite having wounds of her own, “Hey… Ruby…!!” She watched as the life slowly left her friend’s eyes, “Stay with me, come on… Don’t leave me!!”

Ruby opened her eyes again slightly and raised her hand towards Umi, “....te...ll….hana….maru….i...ca...n’t….make….our….ne....xt....drin….k….”

Umi’s tears began to roll as she grabbed a hold on Ruby’s hand as tightly as she could, “I will… just stay with me!!” Her eyes closed and her head fell back, the grip around Umi’s hand loosened and fell to the ground, “R-Ru..by…?” her emotions poured out as she laid over her friend’s limp body, “RUBY!!!!!!!!”

“Oh my god, would you give it a break? The bitch is dead!” the voice from before yelled. Umi turned around to face the voice she had heard from before. It was someone she wasn't familiar with, and tied up next to her feet was Dia.

“Chairman!” Umi yelled. She stood up but stumbled, reaching for the closest wall to support her. She was losing blood and the pellets from the shotgun were lodged in her body.

“Umi! You have to get out of her-” Dia’s warning was cut short when the unfamiliar woman bashed her head with the butt of the shotgun.

“Now now, Chairman Kurosawa, you wouldn't want Umi here to end up like your dead little sister now, would you?” she teased.

Umi winced in pain and grabbed her stomach, the blood was leaving her body fast, and her hands were stained with both hers and Ruby’s blood, “Who… sent you…?”

“Me? Oh, don’t you worry about that, love. I'm sure you won't live long enough to know that anyways,” she said with a snicker.

“Then… who are you?” Umi muttered.

With a nonchalant swing of the shotgun and a bow, “Yazawa Nico, at your service!” she replied with a smug grin.

Umi spit out the blood that welled in her mouth, “So you’re part of the Yazawa family that has been causing trouble here lately…”

Nico tilted her head, “Part of? I'm the leader!” she set down the shotgun and began preaching, “And let it be known that it was me who took down the Kurosawa family! Kentobori is now under the property of the Yazawa family.”

“Not if I can do something about it…” Umi muttered.

“Umi, now!” Dia yelled. She grabbed Nico’s legs in attempt to create an opening for Umi to attack.

Umi sprung herself forward using the wall and lunged for Nico, “You bastard!!!!”

Nico shook Dia off and stomped her head against the floor, “You bitch! Stay down!” and reached into her suit to pull out a pistol.

“Yazawa!!!!” Umi cried.

Nico quickly adjusted her aim and took her shot, hitting a clear mark on Umi’s chest, sending the woman flying past her, rather than at her. Dia’s eyes widened in disbelief, “Umi!!!”

Nico began laughing, “Can you believe that?! She actually thought she could fight me when I have guns?! That’s fuckin’ hilarious!” Umi groaned and attempted to lift herself up, but the pain was too much. She couldn't even find the strength to speak. All she could do was lie on the ground as her own blood began pooling around her. “Now, it’s your turn, Chairman…” Nico sat Dia up and pressed the barrel of her pistol against the back of her head, “Bye bye~” Dia shut her eyes in anticipation for the bullet, and all Umi could do was watch.

Nico pulled her pistol away and leaned back just in time to dodge a large knife that was thrown from the shadows, “What the…” another was thrown and Nico yelled in pain. Her pistol fell to the floor along with two of her fingers, “GODDAMMIT!!!” she screamed.

From the shadows emerged a woman who gave a swift kick to Nico’s stomach causing her to propel backwards, crashing through the window. She was able to grab a hold of the ledges before falling off, “Jesus christ, what the hell just happened?” she cursed. As if on queue, a helicopter appeared in a matter of seconds and retrieved Nico from the ledge. It was obvious that whoever was helping the Yazawa family had connections and money, “I'm not done with you, Kurosawa! Soon you will die just like your useless little sister! And Kentobori will be mine!”

The sound of the helicopter grew quieter and quieter until all she could hear was the breathing and voices in the room with her. “Chairman, are you alright?” the woman asked.

“Yes, but Umi…” Dia responded.

The woman made way towards her and checked Umi’s pulse, “It’s faint, but if we can get her to the underground infirmary, we might be able to save her.”

Dia nodded and tears began to stream down her cheeks, “Please do… I don't want to lose anyone else…” she said as she looked over at Ruby.

The woman glanced at Ruby before placing her hand on Dia’s back, “I'm sorry I wasn't here in time, Chairman…” the woman apologized, “If I had arrived sooner…”

Dia shook her head, “No… there is only so much you can do, you are not to blame. Right now, you have to save Umi.” she replied with a shaky voice, “I'll take care of Ruby…”

“As you wish, ma’am…” the woman carefully picked her up to avoid further injury. Umi looked up towards the woman as her vision began to blur, but she knew who the woman was,

“Ane...go…”

[thisdaynews]

Boris Johnson loses Commons majority as Tory MP defects

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/boris-johnson-loses-commons-majority-as-tory-mp-defects/

Boris Johnson loses Commons majority as Tory MP defects

Latest

9/3/19, 5:22 PM CEST

Trump knocks London mayor and defends golfing as hurricane nears

‘He is a terrible mayor who should stay out of our business,’ US president tweets.

9/3/19, 3:47 PM CEST

Pence aide defends VP’s stay at Trump resort in Ireland

US Vice President was invited, not instructed, to stay at Trump-owned resort during his trip to Ireland.

Open end funds are dynamic and robust — even under stress

These funds have a proven track record of meeting investor redemptions, even during times of market stress. It’s time for a constructive conversation based on the facts.

9/3/19, 4:00 AM CEST

The battle for Budapest

Opposition joins forces to try and loosen Viktor Orbán’s grip on power.

9/2/19, 8:50 PM CEST

Q and A: India’s foreign minister on Kashmir

New Delhi’s top diplomat talks about Kashmir and Pakistan, and trade relations with the US and Europe.

9/2/19, 2:46 PM CEST

Trump administration wants to ‘reset’ relations with EU

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Brussels Monday to meet new EU leadership team.

9/2/19, 2:15 PM CEST

Why Trump may protect 1 group of immigrants

The president may offer Venezuelans protections, in a move that could help win over Hispanic voters in Florida ahead of the 2020 election.

9/2/19, 9:42 AM CEST

London mayor mocks Trump for dealing with hurricane ‘out on the golf course’

Sadiq Khan renews beef with US president, criticizing him for canceling trip to Poland to commemorate start of World War II.

9/2/19, 5:00 AM CEST

The Brussels coffee guide

Where to get the best brews in the EU quarter and beyond.

9/2/19, 5:00 AM CEST

5 takeaways from Germany’s regional elections

The far-right Alternative for Germany scored second place in two state elections Sunday.

9/2/19, 4:55 AM CEST

My trip down the Brexit Party rabbit hole

I’d find Nigel Farage’s latest effort funny, if its consequences weren’t so serious.

9/1/19, 5:39 PM CEST

German far right surges in eastern elections

Alternative for Germany makes significant gains in Saxony and Brandenburg but fails to win either.

9/1/19, 12:36 PM CEST

German president asks for Polish forgiveness at World War II commemoration

Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his counterpart Andrzej Duda mark the 80th anniversary of the war’s outbreak on Sunday.

8/31/19, 12:55 PM CEST

Meet the AfD youth

The Alternative for Germany hopes to recruit young voters ahead of Sunday’s regional key vote.

8/31/19, 11:25 AM CEST

Migration commissioner calls on EU countries to step up resettlement

Dimitris Avramopoulos urged member states to take in refugees evacuated from Libya in particular.

8/31/19, 7:40 AM CEST

Trump’s personal assistant fired after comments about Ivanka, Tiffany

Madeleine Westerhout also jokingly told journalists that Trump couldn’t pick Tiffany out of a crowd.

8/31/19, 4:02 AM CEST

World’s cartoonists on this week’s events

Drawing the top stories around the globe.

8/30/19, 11:30 PM CEST

Berlin hit job could blight German-Russian relations

A Chechen rebel was gunned down in the German capital, allegedly by a man authorities believe to be a Russian agent.

8/30/19, 11:03 PM CEST

India sees Kashmir restrictions easing in ‘coming days’

Foreign minister Jaishankar rebuffs a call for talks from Pakistan’s Imran Khan.

8/30/19, 5:27 PM CEST

EU backs new diplomatic efforts but Iran deal must stay: Mogherini

The nuclear deal will continue to serve as the basis for the EU’s engagement with Tehran, the bloc’s top diplomat said.

8/30/19, 4:58 PM CEST

AfD candidate attended neo-Nazi march in Athens

The far-right politician participated in a trip that saw a swastika flag hung from a hotel balcony.

8/30/19, 2:52 PM CEST

Rotterdam to host Eurovision in 2020

Glitzy music event famous for its politics heads to the Dutch port city.

8/30/19, 1:49 PM CEST

Juncker to resume full duties next week

The Commission president underwent surgery earlier this month.

8/30/19, 11:06 AM CEST

Hong Kong police arrest protest leaders

Pro-democracy figureheads held on suspicion of unlawful assembly.

8/30/19, 4:50 AM CEST

German vote gives periphery a chance to strike the center

Traditional centrist powerhouses are under siege in the capital’s commuter belt.

8/30/19, 4:47 AM CEST

The Trump-sized hole in Warsaw’s wartime commemoration

Mike Pence doesn’t have the star power of his absent boss.

8/29/19, 10:56 PM CEST

Trump cancels Poland trip amid hurricane threat

US president was scheduled to attend a commemoration event for the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II.

8/29/19, 10:09 PM CEST

Ruth Davidson’s ‘heavy heart’ poses problems beyond Scottish Tories

Resignation raises serious questions for the Conservative Party north and south of the border.

8/29/19, 7:02 PM CEST

New Greek government cracks down on migrant squats

Police raids anarchists’ collectives sheltering asylum seekers.

8/29/19, 3:56 PM CEST

Italian PM Conte starts work to form new government

Matteo Salvini’s League will end up in opposition if the 5Stars/Democratic Party alliance succeeds.

8/29/19, 1:29 PM CEST

Mattis says he owes Trump silence, but won’t keep quiet ‘forever’

‘If you leave an administration, you owe some silence,’ former secretary of defense says.

8/29/19, 12:27 PM CEST

Suspending UK parliament as bad as banning saunas in Finland!

Finland’s employment minister says UK decision is ‘unbelievable.’

8/29/19, 11:35 AM CEST

Trump slow-walks Ukraine military aid meant to contain Russia

US president asked his national security team to review the funding program.

8/29/19, 11:07 AM CEST

How the G7 fell for the Amazon scam

The fires aren’t an epochal event, and aren’t the spontaneous result of global warming.

8/28/19, 8:25 PM CEST

5Stars get green light to form new Italian government with center left

Parties agree to reinstate Giuseppe Conte as prime minister.

8/28/19, 4:12 PM CEST

Trump bashes Jeremy Corbyn, praises ‘great’ Boris Johnson

US president says Labour leader will have a hard time calling a no-confidence vote in UK PM.

8/27/19, 6:07 PM CEST

Eurovision winner to stand for Brexit Party

Bucks Fizz singer chosen as parliamentary candidate for Nigel Farage’s party.

8/27/19, 5:40 PM CEST

Trump backs reappointment of ‘very talented’ Italian PM

US president tweets his support to Giuseppe Conte.

8/27/19, 4:53 PM CEST

Russia violated whistleblower Magnitsky’s human rights, says court

Judges in Strasbourg say the auditor, who died in jail in 2009, had been ill-treated in prison.

8/27/19, 4:07 PM CEST

Johnson’s Brexit plan has a hole so big you can swim through it

The UK PM swam out to a rock off the French coast. So did our man in Biarritz.

8/27/19, 1:49 PM CEST

Iranian president says he’ll only meet Trump after US drops sanctions

‘Without the U.S.’s withdrawal from sanctions, we will not witness any positive development.’

8/27/19, 11:26 AM CEST

Brazilian ambassador: Brigitte Macron ‘is very beautiful’

Emmanuel Macron and Jair Bolsonaro have been trading barbs for days.

8/26/19, 10:27 PM CEST

Relief and trepidation as Trump looks to rebrand the G7

A 2020 summit in Miami means the G7 will have survived Trump’s first term, which some leaders hope will be his last.

8/26/19, 9:15 PM CEST

Italy’s 5Stars, center left close to forming alliance, officials say

President Mattarella is expected to announce a way out of the government crisis on Wednesday evening.

8/26/19, 8:45 PM CEST

Romanian government in crisis after junior partner exits coalition

The ruling Social Democrats say they will negotiate for support to continue governing.

8/26/19, 5:19 PM CEST

Macron says he expects meeting with Trump and Rouhani

US president says he does not seek leadership change, but Iran must relinquish weapons.

8/26/19, 3:17 PM CEST

Trump calls Merkel ‘brilliant woman’

US president says he will visit Germany ‘very soon.’

8/26/19, 1:43 PM CEST

Boris Johnson tells a porky

Why the prime minister should get on the dog and bone to his Chinas before opening his north and south.

8/26/19, 1:06 PM CEST

Trump denies suggesting nuclear strikes on hurricanes

US president reportedly talked about bombing hurricanes on multiple occasions.

8/26/19, 11:24 AM CEST

How Bernie Sanders and Cardi B became 2020’s oddest alliance

‘She’s a no-B.S. person,’ says one aide to the Democratic hopeful. ‘And Bernie Sanders loves no-B.S. people.’

Read More

[esprit-de-corps-magazine]

Damage Control: China pulls out all the stops in an effort to denounce international claims of human rights abuse

By Scott Taylor

In early June, a group of 22 countries including Canada, Japan, the U.K., France, and Australia, signed a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council calling upon China “to end the mass arbitrary detentions and related violations against Muslims in the Xinjiang region.”

Although they are not the signatories on that letter, the U.S. administration has also voiced critical concern over China’s religious crackdown. At a July 16 conference in Washington, D.C. regarding global religious freedom, the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence claimed “In Xinjiang, the Communist Party has imprisoned more than a million Chinese Muslims, including Uighurs, in internment camps where they endure round-the-clock brainwashing.” Taking things up a notch, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged, “China is home to one of the worst human rights crises of our time… It is truly the stain of the century. 

In response to these charges, the Chinese government has steadfastly maintained that the facilities in question are in fact vocational schools aimed at poverty alleviation and as a means to curtail the spread of Islamic extremism. To bolster their case with the U.N., China managed to solicit the support of 31 nations – including Russia, North Korea and Venezuela - to write their own letter to the Human Rights Council, expressing their collective support for China’s anti-terror measures and the policy toward ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

In a further attempt to prove their claims, the Chinese government organized a seven-day international media tour of Xinjiang, which included a total of 27 journalists from 24 countries. Media outlets represented included ABC News, the Irish Times, Australian Financial Review and the Corriere Della Serra of Italy. I was the sole Canadian representative. 

The tour began in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China’s largest and westernmost autonomous region. This area is home to approximately 11 million Uighurs – an ethnic Turkic minority, but also includes ethnic Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Tajiks as well as a steadily growing number of Han Chinese.

The first exhibit we were shown was a graphic display of the violent insurgency, which first erupted in this region in 2009. Photos and videos depicted in gory detail all of the terrorist attacks, which have killed a total of 197 people to date. Victims shown included small infants, women, and even the corpses of murdered policemen. In the centre of the hall was a vast collection of captured weaponry and home made bombs. 

The subsequent Chinese crackdown has been largely successful and it was noted that the last terror attack occurred more than 30 months ago. This was the start point for our education as the Islamic extremism threat is the lynchpin for China implementing its policy of re-educating the Muslim minorities.

The Chinese wanted to make the point that the terrorists had in fact hit them hard, and thus they are justified in taking strong measures to reduce future threats.

However, during our subsequent seven days travelling throughout Xinjiang one did not get the sense that this was a region still living with the fear of imminent violence. There were an abundance of security cameras around public spaces and airport style body searches were conducted at entrances to crowded centres, but police did not wear body armour and there were no sandbagged bunkers in evidence. This was definitely not Kandahar, Afghanistan, or Baghdad, Iraq. 

The second stop on our tour was a boarding school and a Mosque, where a new generation of Imams are being taught Islamic studies. With the world accusing China of committing cultural and religious genocide of the Uighurs, we were shown that the Beijing regime is actually funding schools to produce newly minted Muslim clergy.

To counter international claims that Uighur culture is being suppressed, we were shown a brand new $100 million Arts Centre, which is home to a professional orchestra and dance troupe. To further drive home this point we were treated to a full fledged Uighur cultural spectacle at the Xinjiang Grand Theatre in the city of Changji.

This celebration of the history of China’s Silk Road featured a cast of hundreds, live camels, horses running on treadmills, water cascading over the stage, the world’s largest video screen, and women in traditional garb dancing on Segways. It was essentially Las Vegas on steroids.

Of course, the key sites we were to see were the controversial vocational training centres, which are alleged to be re-education detention camps by the Western media. Our group visited two of these facilities – one at Shule County on the outskirts of Kashgar, and one in the city of Atushi. The first housed approximately 1,000 Uighur students, and the second held around 200. In both schools the student age ranged between 20-40 years old with a fairly even male-female ratio.

They were housed ten persons to a room, with bunk beds and a single squat toilet per dorm room. There were no guard towers or barbed wire and we were told that there were only eight security guards on the premises. This is less than one would find at the average hotel in western China.

It was noticed that the doors to the dorm rooms only locked from the outside. We were witness to a meal serving which featured generous portions, and no one in the two schools appeared malnourished. We were shown classrooms where students were chanting out their lessons in Mandarin, and others were studying Chinese laws. There were also study areas for vocational training such as computer skills, sewing, automotive, cooking and basic electrical.

Through the official translators, and under the steady gaze of our Chinese government minders, we were able to speak directly with several of the Uighur students. They had a very interesting story, and I deliberately use the singular as they all had almost the exact same story.

Every one of them claimed to be their of their own free will. Every one of them had a tale of how they had become radicalized by Islamic extremism. Every one of them claimed they were willing to commit violence against non-believers when they had been discovered either by the authorities or in some cases a friend or spouse. The story was that they then saw the light and enrolled in the vocational training program.

One slight young man, 25 year-old Qurbanjan, claimed he had actually procured bomb making equipment prior to his village police suggesting he enter the school and forget about waging Jihad.

In total we interviewed three young women who all claimed to have been radicalized by Islam, all claimed their husbands were unaware of their thoughts, and all three had left toddlers at home in order to attend the boarding schools. Gulmire Azair is 29 years old and a graduate of the vocational school program. She presently has a factory job as a seamstress in Kashgar. Her story mirrored the others in that she had found herself wanting to “kill pagans” after visiting some Islamic websites. 

This is of course the narrative that the Chinese government wants to communicate to the world. These educations centres are, according to the official line, part of an anti-terrorism effort. The problem was that it was all too staged. The students would invariably rise at their desk, stand at attention and deliver their statement while staring straight above your head. It was very reminiscent of prisoners of war reciting their name, rank, and serial number to their captors.

Throughout our entire tour, the Chinese authorities overlooked no detail as they attempted to present to us a picture perfect glimpse of ethnic minority utopia in Xinjiang. When we visited a newly constructed relocation site for Kirghiz herdsmen for instance, everyone had a brand new white and black traditional Kirghiz hat. Those elderly residents, who just happened to be playing a game of cards in the common area, had a pristine deck of cards. When we entered family condos to witness the living conditions, there would be a feast awaiting us on the coffee table. When visiting a second similar site, hundreds of kilometres away, we were treated to the exact feast – as if there was an actual playbook detailing what the local party officials were to provide to our tour.

I am under no illusions as to the fact that the Chinese government showed us exactly what they wanted to show us. The schools we toured were prepared well in advance of our visit, and in both cases they treated us to Uighur cultural displays of folk dancing complete with elaborate costumes. In other words, how could the Chinese be suppressing Uighur culture when here they are teaching them dance numbers celebrating their unique heritage? The fact is that our media tour did not see all the camps, and in fact we could not get a straight answer from any official as to how many people are presently enrolled in this project.

If the Chinese government wants to seriously refute these serious allegations that they are perpetrating the ‘stain of the century’ upon Muslims of Xinjiang, they are going to have to provide unfettered and unlimited access to international observers.

Captions for photos above Left to Right:

Photo One: There are nearly 1000 students enrolled in the Shule vocational school. 

Two: Twenty five year old Gulmire Azair, mother of one and a self pro-claimed former Islamic extremist. She had desires to kill Pagans before her friends convinced her to enrol in the vocational school program. She now works as a seamstress in a factory near Kashgar.

Three: Basic automotive skills are taught at the Atushi vocational school

Four: One of the vocations taught at the Atushi school is esthetician.

Five: The vocational school at Atushi has no guard towers, simply a high wall surrounding the complex. The yard includes volleyball courts and table tennis facilities.

Six: Cooking classes are a popular course at the vocational school. Students can learn either western style or Chinese style cuisine.

Seven & Eight: Lunch is served at the Atushi vocational school. Serving were generous and students did not appear malnourished.

Nine & Ten: In an effort to illustrate the extent of the islamic insurgency in Xinjiang, we were shown a large cache of captured weapons. These included crossbows and swords and a collection of antiquated rifles.

Eleven: This relocated Kirghiz herdsman all had bright new traditional white hats for our visit.

Twelve: Uighur students in Urumqi study the Koran as well as Mandarin language and China’s legal system, on their path to becoming Imams

Thirteen: The Chinese central government has built a mosque and boarding school to train a new generation of Muslim Imams.

Fourteen: Traditional dance routines are taught to the Uighur students, complete with elaborate costumes and a fog machine.

[haggertyadventuretime]

Good morning, Vietnam!

Actually, it’s night time for us here, but the rest of y’all are just waking up, so hello!

(TL;DR: Vietnam is beautiful and crazy, the museums are eye opening and depressing, and some crazy shit has happened to us already and this post will slightly scare at least one mom... Sorry mums and dads! We are ok and loving it!)

Today is our third full day in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon). Definitely the sketchiest place I’ve ever been, with the craziest traffic, and we are LOVING IT. No travel book or YouTube video can really prepare you for the onslaught of sounds/tastes/smells/sights that are packed into every square inch of this place. It’s also an area with very high crime, mostly petty theft via motorbike (or motorbike/cyclo gangs luring you into alleyways), so we have not been taking as many pictures like we would like, even though our phones are not the most desirable... We just don’t need to be targeted like other tourists! I am also wearing a face mask for the smog/exhaust while walking around since I had an athsma issue right before we left the US (although it is much better now! Yay!).

In terms of attractions, we have visited the War Remnants Museum, the colonial district, and the former US Embassy where that one famous picture was taken of a chopper evacuating Americans and Southern Vietnamese refugees.

This next part of the blog is going to be a little disturbing, so if you don’t want to re-live the horrors of war for a minute as I discover them, please skip the next full paragraph.

The War Remnants Museum is amazing and devastating. It is a three-story building full of artifacts from the Vietnam War, or as it is referred to here - the War of American Agression. It was heavier than going to Hiroshima for us, especially the exhibits about Agent Orange and ‘ordinance’ aka bombs/mines/grenades. At the entrance of the museum there is a group of individuals who are children (some third generation) of people who were exposed to Agent Orange and were thusly deformed and injured and it is HEART BREAKING. One man who was born without eyes or eye sockets was playing ‘Imagine’ and ‘Let it Be’ on the organ the entire time we were there. There was an exhibit about the photographers (on both sides) who captured the war and died doing so, noting how important it is that journalists keep lawmakers and generals honest about the truths of war. It was refreshing to see how appreciative the Vietnamese people are of those even on the US’ side who captured pictures of atrocities just before they happened. For example, there are several photos of Vietnamese families begging for their lives (children, women, elderly), and often the caption says under the photo, “[the journalist] told the soldiers to not do anything while [the journalist] took the photo, and as [the journalist] walked away, gunfire was heard and the pleading stopped.” There were pictures of people after they had been shot apart by bullets or torn apart by grenades. It was at the site (I’m think? Or a reconstruction of) where a POW torture area was for the Viet Cong, complete with tiger cages and torture devices (and pictures and figures to match). It’s crazy to think that all of this happened not so long ago in this same city, but you can see the scars. You can tell that these are buildings that have been bombed out and rebuilt, the dirt and fire marks are still there. Quite an experience for someone who was taught in middle school (incorrectly) that the US had never lost a war. If anything, we all lost, and people still suffer on both sides. Really, if you are human, is there any side other than that of the living?

OK, end of the super heavy stuff!

Food here is amazing. We have pho (beef broth noodle soup, about $3 each with vietnamese coffee [extra thick coffee with condensed milk]) every morning for breakfast, 50 cent beers and water bottles to drink, and 75 cent bahn mi (skewered minced beef sandwiches) as a snack. We had a full-on feast last night with a friend of a friend who had recently moved here (Meredith) who is also an IC alum and former Ithaca bartender. She gave us lots of great tips about getting around and out of the city and how to haggle effectively, not that I have had any problem with that 😼. It’s part of the culture, and even if it’s just a matter of a few cents, you are participating in the game, and you may get a few laughs and more respect as well as a better deal in return.

We are definitely staying alert as we walk around the city. Taking cyclos/unlicensed motorbikes is inadvisable, as many are just scams to take you to a back alley and rob you. It rains often and unexpectedly, and on our first night we had to turn back during a walk because the streets were flooded over a foot high. That night, funny enough, as we were wading, I felt something on my leg, and it was a GIANT cockroach (I’m talking over an inch long), which I flicked off and it subsequentially SWAM AWAY. The Vietnamese people are tougher than us, they just wade through the water in their flip flops. I have yet to see any Vietnamese person in anything other than flip flops or thin flats, including construction workers. I lied, the trash guy working the street today was wearing rain boots. That’s it. There are also lots of exposed wires on telephone poles, although I’m not convinced that they are active rather than just being old and been replaced by covered wires with the old ones never removed. Either way, we warn each other every turn as we approach those at our height.

We took a stroll through the catacomb-like alleyways today looking for a new cheap/slightly sleazy spot to squat and drink (DURING THE DAY, MOM. Ok? We were being careful as well as curious) and saw what it is that I’m sure other tourists don’t realize some of the people live in... Apartments that are one room for many people, only four or five feet between the floor and the ceiling, just a cot on the floor and all kitchen supplies stacked around with no running water source that I could see. I’ve never witnessed this type of abject poverty, and I’m astounded that people can still be so kind to strangers from another country like we have experienced thus far despite where we are from. The Vietnamese are truly an amazing and tough people. That being said, we have to stay on our guard everywhere we go, because we obviously stick out from a crowd. We are definitely not the only westerners staying here though, this is the backpacker’s district, so once you hit the main road, it’s white people, Chinese tourists, and Vietnamese street vendors hawking knockoff Ray Bans everywhere you look!

Finally, I will leave you with a list of the craziest things that have happened to us thus far/weirdest stuff I’ve seen in our first few days of Vietnam: We took a 25 cent bus ride for 30 mins from the airport to our hotel, when all other foreigners were taking $15 flat fee busses to the same area (being the only westerners on the bus= winning!); On the 5 min walk from our bus top to the hotel we were propositioned for marijuana three times by roaming cigarette vendors; An old lady punched me in the butt yesterday to get me to move out of her way (she was hunched over, so it was in line with her hand, and she was probably about 200 years old, so I don’t blame her); We made friends with a Canadien named Brock who was “robbed” two days ago in Hoi An by a motorbike gang because he was dumb and didn’t have a fake wallet like we do; We keep on watching creepy middle aged Australian men hit on teenage waitresses when there are hookers LITERALLY EVERYWHERE in all of the massage parlors, but today we watched one shopkeeper’s dogs bark at this one guy who was hitting on the daughter till creepy dude shut up (yay!); In the same place met a very affectionate (and tiny!) cat who has doggy sisters that chase her into her ceiling bedroom; Last night a drunk person wandered into our hotel and must have tried to open our door, because we heard drunken stammering and our (obviously locked) doorknob wiggle, so Brendan and I, decked only in underpants, listened to the hotel manager calmly tell the guy to leave, while we (ears pressed on the other side of the door) were ready with empty beer bottles and a shoe ready for a fight (as if we needed it/would be ready for it... we must have been quite the sight if you saw us!😹)...

Despite the negatives/craziness, we are loving it here, but cannot wait to escape to the countryside soon in the next couple of days! Saigon/HCMC is the craziest of all the cities in Vietnam, or so we are told, so if we love the rough and tumble here, we have been told we will love it everywhere.

[dorothyd89]

How Ruth the Physician Lost 10 Sizes and Renewed Her Life

Meet Ruth O’Mahony.

She’s a 49 year old physician-turned health content manager who struggled for years with unhealthy eating, yoyo-dieting, lack of movement, and a constant struggle to stick with anything for more than a few weeks before life got in the way.

This is something we can all relate to!

Although she found Nerd Fitness in early 2015, she spent months telling herself “I’m not ready yet, I’ll get started someday.” So she signed up for our email list, said “eventually!” and did nothing.

Sound familiar? 

After she could barely close the seatbelt on a flight to Disney (where just walking was a chore), her mentality started to change “maybe ‘someday’ will never happen…I need to change my strategy on this.”

Fast Forward 7 months…. and she had a support group to learn from, a basic plan to follow, and excitedly started her push towards a better life.

So WHAT happened?  Why, after 11 months of reading Nerd Fitness did she FINALLY take action? How did she go from “I’ll level up someday” to “I level up every day”? How did she drop 70+ pounds, go down 10+ clothing sizes, and radically transform her life?

Keep reading!

Ruth’s Story

Steve: Hi Ruth! Thanks for being here to share your whole story. I know after a YEAR of reading Nerd Fitness, you finally invested in yourself and joined the Nerd Fitness Academy. I’d love to hear about those first few workouts and diet changes. How did that go when you first started?

Ruth: When I first started the workouts, I couldn’t do all of the reps, so I did what I could. I also had to modify almost all of the exercises. I did pushups from a bookshelf that was high enough that it was effectively the wall. I did box squats and assisted split squats and leaned super heavily on the counter. I took a mindset of ‘can I do a little more?’ with every workout – can I lean on the counter less, can I get a little lower to the floor, can I do one more rep? Trying to do just a little more each time has really led to giant progress.

At this point I was still having “meh” days. I occasionally had a day where part of my brain says: ‘Why is this so HARD?’ but the NF Academy Women’s FB group was awesome when those days hit. I used it as a place to check in, for accountability, for feeling like part of a community on similar journeys. I realized how important that was the first time I posted an ‘I need encouragement, ladies’ thing and IMMEDIATELY got tons of encouragement.

Steve: I love that, because I know how important a community can be that will support and help you (and keep you accountable!). Now I hear, you fell in love with the idea of the Academy Boss Battles. What was it about them?:

Ruth: I remember when I defeated General DOMS [our level 1 boss] and moved on to Level 2 workouts. What was surprising to me is that I shortly after that went on vacation in July and I didn’t get derailed! I walked and WALKED on vacation, and put together a plan to get back into the workouts, which I stuck to. By that time, I’d defeated The Widowmaker, so I went on to level 3…and even tried the GYM!

And since then I eventually scraped up the courage (20 seconds of courage for the win!) to go to the gym I was actually paying for, and I couldn’t even lift my feet to do a proper bar hang at first. Now I can! Now I can do 25 lb farmer’s carries, 6 pushups with decent form, and I use less and less assistance on the pullup machine each day.

Steve: YES! Nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody (male or female) kicking ass in the weight section of the gym. After all, you have just as much of a right to be there as anybody else. High five! 

I want to know, have you tried and failed to get healthy before in the past? What made this time different?

Ruth: I have. I was pretty fit at one point in my late 20s thanks to the US Air Force, but I hated the fact that it was mandated and stopped almost everything when I got out. I tried a few different things in the interim (Tae-Bo, yoga, a treadmill, even a couple of Xbox Kinect games). It was all-or-nothing, boom-or-bust, and nothing to show for it.

Steve: Now, judging by these recent photos you’ve lost a TON of weight. What else has changed about you? 

Ruth: Yeah, I’ve gone from a Size 28 to a Size 18, and I’m doing it SUSTAINABLY!

I can fasten a seatbelt on an airplane without difficulty. I ran around Disney without having to stop and catch my breath – and I walked all over London (so many stairs!) without thinking about “I’m going to get tired, how will I get back to the hotel”.

I can pick up my neighbor’s three and a half year old who is the size of a five year old and swing him around, much to his delight. I lift big boxes into the house rather than waiting for my husband. I have enough energy to car dance – you know, when that awesome song comes on the radio and you dance in your seat?

Steve: Dancing and singing is the #1 reason for having a car. 

Okay so it took Ruth 11 months to get her mindset right, and now she’s a badass! What did she do?

How Ruth Became a Badass

Steve: You adapted a mindset of leveling up and progression that’s helped you get excited to work out. How did those workouts develop?

Ruth: I’m working my through the different levels of Academy workouts, and I’ve ‘levelled up’ almost all of the exercises in that level which keeps me excited about what I can do.

On other days, I’m either walking or doing what I’ll call ‘running training’ every day – three days a week, I’m out in the morning and doing run/walk intervals. I started with CouchTo5K but couldn’t ramp up that quickly. Old me probably would have thrown in the towel. New me bought an interval timer app and constructed custom intervals that ramp me up a little more slowly, but at a pace that works for me.

On the days that I’m not doing that, I’m still walking.

I had a bad week a few weeks ago, and the old me would have given up. New me reached out to the ladies in the NF Academy Facebook group, got reassurance that ‘eh, bad runs happen sometimes, and if it gets to be a pattern, talk to your doc about it,’ and got back out there the next time I was scheduled to do it.

Steve: I love that you’ve got ‘hooked’ on getting better. It’s definitely a mindset shift from “I have to work out” to “I GET to work out…what can I do today?” So talk to me about support. It sounds like you have both one in real life and the online support group too here at NF.

Ruth: Yea, the NF Women’s FB group is an amazing and special group of women – they have been massively supportive.

In my regular day-to-day, I also have two neighbors who have said that if I pick a 5K race, they’ll come run it with me – and they mean really run it with me, every step by my side. The across the street neighbor runs marathons and has said that she HATES running shorter distances, but she wants to support me, so she’ll run a 5K with me!

Steve: Perfect. So that covers your mindset and workout strategy: “get better, surround yourself with supportive people!” Let’s talk about your nutritional strategy!

Ruth: Eat real food, not too much of it, don’t eat too many carbs, and track everything. I use MyFitnessPal and track everything. I kind of find it weirdly freeing.

When my neighbor comes over with dinner, instead of trying to figure out whether or not I should eat that delicious rice dish, I pull up my tracker and I know exactly how much of it fits into my ‘budget.’

I’ve also tried to take a sensible approach on sweets – if there’s a dessert that I know is absolutely phenomenal and it’s a special occasion? I have it, and enjoy every single bite. I eat it mindfully, and savor it, and by doing that, I find that I don’t really want it very often.

Steve: “Eat Real food, and not too much of it” – amazingly simple philosophy. And I love that you don’t feel guilty about eating something that might not be super healthy. It’s a conscious decision to eat it, just like it’s a conscious decision to get right back on track after!

Are there any tricks you used to get yourself to a point where you could follow it regularly?

Ruth: In the beginning I got into the habit of batch cooking things for lunches and making sure I have 2-3 weeks worth of healthy, tasty, homemade frozen lunches, and had really good stuff in the house for breakfasts and dinners. It takes the cognitive load out of eating healthy – AND it actually makes getting breakfast or lunch from a fast food joint into the more difficult option, because I have to get in my car and drive somewhere to acquire the junk food as opposed to eating the healthy thing that’s in my desk at work.

Steve: Brilliant…working smarter, not harder. Make the healthy eating option EASIER, and the fast food even less convenient! Okay, you changed a LOT. What was the toughest change for you to make?

Ruth: I think it was mindset, really. I had to abandon my “all or nothing” mentality because it was sabotaging me! I had to be OK with slow and incremental progress. I had to become okay with taking tiny steps that continually went forward instead of doing everything all at once and flaming out which I had done in the past.

Steve: So, how did you get there? What was the biggest change that helped you succeed

Ruth: Making fitness and nutrition into habits. Habit gets me out of bed at 4:30AM to go for a walk when the motivation fairy has flown off. The motivation fairy is a flaky friend – she never hangs around for long. Habit and discipline get me through and help me chase the Sloth Demon away.

Steve: What about tracking your progress? Did you use a scale, measurements, or photos?

Ruth: I weigh in once a week or every other week, and I measure neck, biceps, bust, under bust, waist, hips, thighs, and calves once a month. I also see my doc as scheduled, and the biochemical measurements are also changing for the better.

Steve: “That which gets measured gets improved.” You’re proving that adage true! What would you tell others in your “start” situation who is ready to try again and succeed this time?

Know that you are worth it. You deserve to be healthy and fit, you deserve to carve that time out for yourself.

It is 100% OK to start with tiny baby steps. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk for 10 minutes, try 5. Then build on that.

Your big why has to be YOUR big why – not what you think society thinks it should be.

Steve: Now that you have conquered this phase of the journey, what’s next?

Ruth: Working on pull-up progressions and handstand progressions on the workout front, also on increasing number of pullups, etc. I just beat “Berserxes the Squat King” and advanced to Level 4 on the NF Academy workouts, so plenty of challenges there!

On the personal development front, I recently finished a foundation course offered by an international organization and found out I’ve been accepted to their content development course starting in January!

Steve: Okay, on to the important stuff: Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?

Ruth: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left shoulder – so definitely Lord of the Rings. I love both, though!

Steve: Favorite video game of all time?

Ruth: Mass Effect (all three of them, despite the ending of ME3, and I am SUPER STOKED for Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Steve: Quote to live by?

Ruth: ‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on,’ Jimmy Buffett.

How Ruth Did It. How You can too.

What made Ruth find success this time where she had failed tons of times in the past? It started with brutal honesty and ALSO self-love:

She accepted where she was starting from and finally knew where she was going: She decided she was worthy of the life she wanted, and realized that it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing” – that just a little bit is better than nothing. And that a little bit consistently, step-by-step, can go a LONG way.

In her words, “When I think about where I was in January 2015 – if you’d told me then that I would be where I am today, I’d have laughed myself sick!” I love that.

She accepted it was tough work, but possible. We all have to start somewhere, and it can be depressing if we don’t see progress right away. If you can stick with it (THANK YOU SUPPORT GROUP!), you can build small habits. One day, you’ll get to a place (and maybe a LOT sooner than you think) where you’re looking back and saying WOW, I did that!

She started. This might be the most important step of all. Ruth spent 11 months reading Nerd Fitness articles before finally giving herself permission to try, fail, stumble, fall, and take baby steps. She could have overwhelmed herself with how far she had to go, so instead she just focused on what she could do TODAY:

She started walking for at least a half hour every day. (It’s how Tim lost 50 pounds.)

She began making IMMEDIATE incremental changes to her diet. She started tracking her meals, ate a veggie with every meal, and eliminated all white bread.

These changes might seem small, but they added up and made a HUGE difference in a short amount of time. If they seem TOO big of a change to you, make a smaller one!

She gamified her life and fell in love with progress: By tracking her progress rigorously along the way (using the scale and measurements), she could make sure she was still on the right path and course correct when she wasn’t advancing physically (through measurements/photos/scale) or athletically (not making progress or leveling up on the workouts after a while).

Because she knew where she was going, she could make adjustments to her diet or workout strategy and stay on target!

She had a great support team: Life never works out exactly as planned. Shit happens. We get busy. Life gets in the way. If we don’t have a plan to support us during these times, we don’t have an avenue to succeed; it’s that simple!

When things were tough, Ruth had a whole network of people to lean on. The amazingly supportive NF Academy Women’s group and her real life neighbors provided words of encouragement and advice when training got tough or she fell off the wagon.

Follow in Ruth’s Footsteps

If you find yourself in “Before” Ruth’s shoes, here’s what you can do today to change:

Accept this is NOT all or nothing. Small changes and baby steps will win out in the long run.

Accept you ARE worthy of a life and body you’re proud of. 

Acknowledge the journey might be hard, but it is possible and you are capable of change.

Start. Today. Go for a walk. Eat a vegetable. Be deliberate, but start.

Track your progress. Photos, measurements, scale. Do so every 2 weeks.

Get hooked on getting better – You don’t HAVE to work out. You GET to work out.

Surround yourself with positive people, virtually or in real life, who will support you and keep you accountable.

Don’t wait for January 1st, beach season, or your next big event to start. Ruth needed 11 months to invest in herself before she decided “I might as well get started.”

I want TODAY to be the day you get started. Eat a veggie for lunch and go for a walk. Recruit a buddy on your walk during your lunch break.

And then down the road, I want you to email me YOUR NF success story so you can inspire a few hundred thousand people too.

-Steve

PS: We’re really freaking proud that Ruth applied our mindset, nutritional, and workout strategies from the Nerd Fitness Academy to change her life. I’d be honored if you checked it out and decide if it’s something that could help you on your journey. With over 25,000 students, and a 60-day guarantee, it might be the thing you need.

PPS: Seriously though, just go for a walk. That’s all you need to change your life.

http://ift.tt/2m49Cxd http://ift.tt/2lIOdbQ

[fitnetpro]

How Ruth the Physician Lost 10 Sizes and Renewed Her Life

Meet Ruth O’Mahony.

She’s a 49 year old physician-turned health content manager who struggled for years with unhealthy eating, yoyo-dieting, lack of movement, and a constant struggle to stick with anything for more than a few weeks before life got in the way.

This is something we can all relate to!

Although she found Nerd Fitness in early 2015, she spent months telling herself “I’m not ready yet, I’ll get started someday.” So she signed up for our email list, said “eventually!” and did nothing.

Sound familiar? 

After she could barely close the seatbelt on a flight to Disney (where just walking was a chore), her mentality started to change “maybe ‘someday’ will never happen…I need to change my strategy on this.”

Fast Forward 7 months…. and she had a support group to learn from, a basic plan to follow, and excitedly started her push towards a better life.

So WHAT happened?  Why, after 11 months of reading Nerd Fitness did she FINALLY take action? How did she go from “I’ll level up someday” to “I level up every day”? How did she drop 70+ pounds, go down 10+ clothing sizes, and radically transform her life?

Keep reading!

Ruth’s Story

Steve: Hi Ruth! Thanks for being here to share your whole story. I know after a YEAR of reading Nerd Fitness, you finally invested in yourself and joined the Nerd Fitness Academy. I’d love to hear about those first few workouts and diet changes. How did that go when you first started?

Ruth: When I first started the workouts, I couldn’t do all of the reps, so I did what I could. I also had to modify almost all of the exercises. I did pushups from a bookshelf that was high enough that it was effectively the wall. I did box squats and assisted split squats and leaned super heavily on the counter. I took a mindset of ‘can I do a little more?’ with every workout – can I lean on the counter less, can I get a little lower to the floor, can I do one more rep? Trying to do just a little more each time has really led to giant progress.

At this point I was still having “meh” days. I occasionally had a day where part of my brain says: ‘Why is this so HARD?’ but the NF Academy Women’s FB group was awesome when those days hit. I used it as a place to check in, for accountability, for feeling like part of a community on similar journeys. I realized how important that was the first time I posted an ‘I need encouragement, ladies’ thing and IMMEDIATELY got tons of encouragement.

Steve: I love that, because I know how important a community can be that will support and help you (and keep you accountable!). Now I hear, you fell in love with the idea of the Academy Boss Battles. What was it about them?:

Ruth: I remember when I defeated General DOMS [our level 1 boss] and moved on to Level 2 workouts. What was surprising to me is that I shortly after that went on vacation in July and I didn’t get derailed! I walked and WALKED on vacation, and put together a plan to get back into the workouts, which I stuck to. By that time, I’d defeated The Widowmaker, so I went on to level 3…and even tried the GYM!

And since then I eventually scraped up the courage (20 seconds of courage for the win!) to go to the gym I was actually paying for, and I couldn’t even lift my feet to do a proper bar hang at first. Now I can! Now I can do 25 lb farmer’s carries, 6 pushups with decent form, and I use less and less assistance on the pullup machine each day.

Steve: YES! Nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody (male or female) kicking ass in the weight section of the gym. After all, you have just as much of a right to be there as anybody else. High five! 

I want to know, have you tried and failed to get healthy before in the past? What made this time different?

Ruth: I have. I was pretty fit at one point in my late 20s thanks to the US Air Force, but I hated the fact that it was mandated and stopped almost everything when I got out. I tried a few different things in the interim (Tae-Bo, yoga, a treadmill, even a couple of Xbox Kinect games). It was all-or-nothing, boom-or-bust, and nothing to show for it.

Steve: Now, judging by these recent photos you’ve lost a TON of weight. What else has changed about you? 

Ruth: Yeah, I’ve gone from a Size 28 to a Size 18, and I’m doing it SUSTAINABLY!

I can fasten a seatbelt on an airplane without difficulty. I ran around Disney without having to stop and catch my breath – and I walked all over London (so many stairs!) without thinking about “I’m going to get tired, how will I get back to the hotel”.

I can pick up my neighbor’s three and a half year old who is the size of a five year old and swing him around, much to his delight. I lift big boxes into the house rather than waiting for my husband. I have enough energy to car dance – you know, when that awesome song comes on the radio and you dance in your seat?

Steve: Dancing and singing is the #1 reason for having a car. 

Okay so it took Ruth 11 months to get her mindset right, and now she’s a badass! What did she do?

How Ruth Became a Badass

Steve: You adapted a mindset of leveling up and progression that’s helped you get excited to work out. How did those workouts develop?

Ruth: I’m working my through the different levels of Academy workouts, and I’ve ‘levelled up’ almost all of the exercises in that level which keeps me excited about what I can do.

On other days, I’m either walking or doing what I’ll call ‘running training’ every day – three days a week, I’m out in the morning and doing run/walk intervals. I started with CouchTo5K but couldn’t ramp up that quickly. Old me probably would have thrown in the towel. New me bought an interval timer app and constructed custom intervals that ramp me up a little more slowly, but at a pace that works for me.

On the days that I’m not doing that, I’m still walking.

I had a bad week a few weeks ago, and the old me would have given up. New me reached out to the ladies in the NF Academy Facebook group, got reassurance that ‘eh, bad runs happen sometimes, and if it gets to be a pattern, talk to your doc about it,’ and got back out there the next time I was scheduled to do it.

Steve: I love that you’ve got ‘hooked’ on getting better. It’s definitely a mindset shift from “I have to work out” to “I GET to work out…what can I do today?” So talk to me about support. It sounds like you have both one in real life and the online support group too here at NF.

Ruth: Yea, the NF Women’s FB group is an amazing and special group of women – they have been massively supportive.

In my regular day-to-day, I also have two neighbors who have said that if I pick a 5K race, they’ll come run it with me – and they mean really run it with me, every step by my side. The across the street neighbor runs marathons and has said that she HATES running shorter distances, but she wants to support me, so she’ll run a 5K with me!

Steve: Perfect. So that covers your mindset and workout strategy: “get better, surround yourself with supportive people!” Let’s talk about your nutritional strategy!

Ruth: Eat real food, not too much of it, don’t eat too many carbs, and track everything. I use MyFitnessPal and track everything. I kind of find it weirdly freeing.

When my neighbor comes over with dinner, instead of trying to figure out whether or not I should eat that delicious rice dish, I pull up my tracker and I know exactly how much of it fits into my ‘budget.’

I’ve also tried to take a sensible approach on sweets – if there’s a dessert that I know is absolutely phenomenal and it’s a special occasion? I have it, and enjoy every single bite. I eat it mindfully, and savor it, and by doing that, I find that I don’t really want it very often.

Steve: “Eat Real food, and not too much of it” – amazingly simple philosophy. And I love that you don’t feel guilty about eating something that might not be super healthy. It’s a conscious decision to eat it, just like it’s a conscious decision to get right back on track after!

Are there any tricks you used to get yourself to a point where you could follow it regularly?

Ruth: In the beginning I got into the habit of batch cooking things for lunches and making sure I have 2-3 weeks worth of healthy, tasty, homemade frozen lunches, and had really good stuff in the house for breakfasts and dinners. It takes the cognitive load out of eating healthy – AND it actually makes getting breakfast or lunch from a fast food joint into the more difficult option, because I have to get in my car and drive somewhere to acquire the junk food as opposed to eating the healthy thing that’s in my desk at work.

Steve: Brilliant…working smarter, not harder. Make the healthy eating option EASIER, and the fast food even less convenient! Okay, you changed a LOT. What was the toughest change for you to make?

Ruth: I think it was mindset, really. I had to abandon my “all or nothing” mentality because it was sabotaging me! I had to be OK with slow and incremental progress. I had to become okay with taking tiny steps that continually went forward instead of doing everything all at once and flaming out which I had done in the past.

Steve: So, how did you get there? What was the biggest change that helped you succeed

Ruth: Making fitness and nutrition into habits. Habit gets me out of bed at 4:30AM to go for a walk when the motivation fairy has flown off. The motivation fairy is a flaky friend – she never hangs around for long. Habit and discipline get me through and help me chase the Sloth Demon away.

Steve: What about tracking your progress? Did you use a scale, measurements, or photos?

Ruth: I weigh in once a week or every other week, and I measure neck, biceps, bust, under bust, waist, hips, thighs, and calves once a month. I also see my doc as scheduled, and the biochemical measurements are also changing for the better.

Steve: “That which gets measured gets improved.” You’re proving that adage true! What would you tell others in your “start” situation who is ready to try again and succeed this time?

Know that you are worth it. You deserve to be healthy and fit, you deserve to carve that time out for yourself.

It is 100% OK to start with tiny baby steps. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk for 10 minutes, try 5. Then build on that.

Your big why has to be YOUR big why – not what you think society thinks it should be.

Steve: Now that you have conquered this phase of the journey, what’s next?

Ruth: Working on pull-up progressions and handstand progressions on the workout front, also on increasing number of pullups, etc. I just beat “Berserxes the Squat King” and advanced to Level 4 on the NF Academy workouts, so plenty of challenges there!

On the personal development front, I recently finished a foundation course offered by an international organization and found out I’ve been accepted to their content development course starting in January!

Steve: Okay, on to the important stuff: Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?

Ruth: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left shoulder – so definitely Lord of the Rings. I love both, though!

Steve: Favorite video game of all time?

Ruth: Mass Effect (all three of them, despite the ending of ME3, and I am SUPER STOKED for Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Steve: Quote to live by?

Ruth: ‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on,’ Jimmy Buffett.

How Ruth Did It. How You can too.

  What made Ruth find success this time where she had failed tons of times in the past? It started with brutal honesty and ALSO self-love:

She accepted where she was starting from and finally knew where she was going: She decided she was worthy of the life she wanted, and realized that it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing” – that just a little bit is better than nothing. And that a little bit consistently, step-by-step, can go a LONG way.

In her words, “When I think about where I was in January 2015 – if you’d told me then that I would be where I am today, I’d have laughed myself sick!” I love that.

She accepted it was tough work, but possible. We all have to start somewhere, and it can be depressing if we don’t see progress right away. If you can stick with it (THANK YOU SUPPORT GROUP!), you can build small habits. One day, you’ll get to a place (and maybe a LOT sooner than you think) where you’re looking back and saying WOW, I did that!

She started. This might be the most important step of all. Ruth spent 11 months reading Nerd Fitness articles before finally giving herself permission to try, fail, stumble, fall, and take baby steps. She could have overwhelmed herself with how far she had to go, so instead she just focused on what she could do TODAY:

She started walking for at least a half hour every day. (It’s how Tim lost 50 pounds)

She began making IMMEDIATE incremental changes to her diet. She started tracking her meals, ate a veggie with every meal, and eliminated all white bread.

These changes might seem small, but they added up and made a HUGE difference in a short amount of time. If they seem TOO big of a change to you, make a smaller one!

She gamified her life and fell in love with progress: By tracking her progress rigorously along the way (using the scale and measurements), she could make sure she was still on the right path and course correct when she wasn’t advancing physically (through measurements/photos/scale) or athletically (not making progress or leveling up on the workouts after a while).

Because she knew where she was going, she could make adjustments to her diet or workout strategy and stay on target!

She had a great support team: Life never works out exactly as planned. Shit happens. We get busy. Life gets in the way. If we don’t have a plan to support us during these times, we don’t have an avenue to succeed; it’s that simple!

When things were tough, Ruth had a whole network of people to lean on. The amazingly supportive NF Academy Women’s group and her real life neighbors provided words of encouragement and advice when training got tough or she fell off the wagon.

Follow in Ruth’s Footsteps

If you find yourself in “Before” Ruth’s shoes, here’s what you can do today to change:

Accept this is NOT all or nothing. Small changes and baby steps will win out in the long run.

Accept you ARE worthy of a life and body you’re proud of. 

Acknowledge the journey might be hard, but it is possible and you are capable of change.

Start. Today. Go for a walk. Eat a vegetable. Be deliberate, but start.

Track your progress. Photos, measurements, scale. Do so every 2 weeks.

Get hooked on getting better – you don’t HAVE to work out. You GET to work out.

Surround yourself with positive people, virtually or in real life, who will support you and keep you accountable.

Don’t wait for January 1st, beach season, or your next big event to start. Ruth needed 11 months to invest in herself before she decided “I might as well get started.”

I want TODAY to be the day you get started. Eat a veggie for lunch and go for a walk. Recruit a buddy on your walk during your lunch break.

And then down the road, I want you to email me YOUR NF success story so you can inspire a few hundred thousand people too.

-Steve

PS: We’re really freaking proud that Ruth applied our mindset, nutritional, and workout strategies from the Nerd Fitness Academy to change her life. I’d be honored if you checked it out and decide if it’s something that could help you on your journey. With over 25,000 students, and a 60-day guarantee, it might be the thing you need.

PPS: Seriously though, just go for a walk. That’s all you need to change your life.

How Ruth the Physician Lost 10 Sizes and Renewed Her Life published first on http://ift.tt/2kRppy7

[ruthellisneda]

How Ruth the Physician Lost 10 Sizes and Renewed Her Life

Meet Ruth O’Mahony.

She’s a 49 year old physician-turned health content manager who struggled for years with an unhealthy eating, yoyo-dieting, lack of movement, and a constant struggle to stick with anything for more than a few weeks before life got in the way.

This is something we can all relate to!

Although she found Nerd Fitness in early 2015, she spent months telling herself “I’m not ready yet, I’ll get started someday.” So she signed up for our email list, said “eventually!” and did nothing.

Sound familiar? 

After she could barely close the seatbelt on a flight to Disney (where just walking was a chore), her mentality started to change “maybe ‘someday’ will never happen…I need to change my strategy on this.”

Fast Forward 7 months…. and she now had a support group to learn from, a basic plan to follow, and excitedly started her push towards a better life.

So WHAT happened?  Why, after 11 months of reading Nerd Fitness did she FINALLY take action? How did she go from “I’ll level up someday” to “I level up every day”? How did she drop 70+ pounds, go down 10+ clothing sizes, and radically transform her life?

Keep reading!

Ruth’s Story

Steve: Hi Ruth! Thanks for being here to share your whole story. I know after a YEAR of reading Nerd Fitness, you finally invested in yourself and joined the Nerd Fitness Academy. I’d love to hear about those first few workouts and diet changes. How did that go when you first started?

Ruth: When I first started the workouts, I couldn’t do all of the reps, so I did what I could. I also had to modify almost all of the exercises. I did pushups from a bookshelf that was high enough that it was effectively the wall. I did box squats and assisted split squats and leaned super heavily on the counter. I took a mindset of ‘can I do a little more?’ with every workout – can I lean on the counter less, can I get a little lower to the floor, can I do one more rep? Trying to do just a little more each time has really led to giant progress.

At this point I was still having “meh” days. I occasionally had a day where part of my brain says: ‘Why is this so HARD?’ but the NF Academy Women’s FB group was awesome when those days hit. I used it as a place to check in, for accountability, for feeling like part of a community on similar journeys. I realized how important that was the first time I posted an ‘I need encouragement, ladies’ thing and IMMEDIATELY got tons of encouragement.

Steve: I love that, because know how important a community can be that will support and help you (and keep you accountable!). Now I hear, you fell in love with the idea of the Academy Boss Battles. What was it about them?:

Ruth: I remember when I defeated General DOMS [our level 1 boss] and moved on to Level 2 workouts. What was surprising to me is that I shortly after that went on vacation in July and I didn’t get derailed! I walked and WALKED on vacation, and put together a plan to get back into the workouts, which I stuck to. By that time, I’d defeated The Widowmaker, so I went on to level 3…and even tried the GYM!

And since then I eventually scraped up the courage (20 seconds of courage for the win!) to go to the gym I was actually paying for, and I couldn’t even lift my feet to do a proper bar hang at first. Now I can! Now I can do 25 lb farmer’s carries, 6 pushups with decent form, and I use less and less assistance on the pullup machine each day.

Steve: YES! Nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody (male or female) kicking ass in the weight section of the gym. After all, you have just as much of a right to be there as anybody else. High five! 

I want to know, have you tried and failed to get healthy before in the past? What made this time different?

Ruth: I have. I was pretty fit at one point in my late 20s thanks to the US Air Force, but I hated the fact that it was mandated and stopped almost everything when I got out. I tried a few different things in the interim (Tae-Bo, yoga, a treadmill, even a couple of Xbox Kinect games). It was all-or-nothing, boom-or-bust, and nothing to show for it.

Steve: Now, judging by these recent photos you’ve lost a TON of weight. What else has changed about you? 

Ruth: Yeah, I’ve gone from a Size 28 to a Size 18, and I’m doing it SUSTAINABLY!

I can fasten a seatbelt on an airplane without difficulty. I ran around Disney without having to stop and catch my breath – and I walked all over London (so many stairs!) without thinking about ‘I’m going to get tired, how will I get back to the hotel.

I can pick up my neighbor’s three and a half year old who is the size of a five year old and swing him around, much to his delight. I lift big boxes into the house rather than waiting for my husband. I have enough energy to car dance – you know, when that awesome song comes on the radio and you dance in your seat?

Steve: Dancing and singing is the #1 reason for having a car. 

Okay so it took Ruth 11 months to get her mindset right, and now she’s a badass! What did she do?

How Ruth Became a Badass

Steve: You adapted a mindset of leveling up and progression that’s helped you get excited to work out. How did those workouts develop?

Ruth: I’m working my through the different levels of Academy workouts, and I’ve ‘levelled up’ almost all of the exercises in that level which keeps me excited about what I can do.

On other days, I’m either walking or doing what I’ll call ‘running training’ every day – three days a week, I’m out in the morning and doing run/walk intervals. I started with CouchTo5K but couldn’t ramp up that quickly. Old me probably would have thrown in the towel. New me bought an interval timer app and constructed custom intervals that ramp me up a little more slowly, but at a pace that works for me.

On the days that I’m not doing that, I’m still walking.

I had a bad week a few weeks ago, and the old me would have given up. New me reached out to the ladies in the NF Academy Facebook group, got reassurance that ‘eh, bad runs happen sometimes, and if it gets to be a pattern, talk to your doc about it,’ and got back out there the next time I was scheduled to do it.

Steve: I love that you’ve got ‘hooked’ on getting better. It’s definitely a mindset shift from “I have to work out” to “I GET to work out…what can I do today?” So talk to me about support. It sounds like you have both one in real life and the online support group too here at NF.

Ruth: Yea, the NF Women’s FB group is an amazing and special group of women – they have been massively supportive.

In my regular day-to-day, I also have two neighbors who have said that if I pick a 5K race, they’ll come run it with me – and they mean really run it with me, every step by my side. The across the street neighbor runs marathons and has said that she HATES running shorter distances, but she wants to support me, so she’ll run a 5K with me!

Steve: Perfect. So that covers your mindset and workout strategy: “get better, surround yourself with supportive people!” Let’s talk about your nutritional strategy!

Ruth: Eat real food, not too much of it, don’t eat too many carbs, and track everything. I use MyFitnessPal and track everything. I kind of find it weirdly freeing.

When my neighbor comes over with dinner, instead of trying to figure out whether or not I should eat that delicious rice dish, I pull up my tracker and I know exactly how much of it fits into my ‘budget.’

I’ve also tried to take a sensible approach on sweets – if there’s a dessert that I know is absolutely phenomenal and it’s a special occasion? I have it, and enjoy every single bite. I eat it mindfully, and savor it, and by doing that, I find that I don’t really want it very often.

Steve: “Eat Real food, and not too much of it” – amazingly simple philosophy. And I love that you don’t feel guilty about eating something that might not be super healthy. It’s a conscious decision to eat it, just like it’s a conscious decision to get right back on track after!

Are there any tricks you used to get yourself to a point where you could follow it regularly?

Ruth: In the beginning I got into the habit of batch cooking things for lunches and making sure I have 2-3 weeks worth of healthy, tasty, homemade frozen lunches, and had really good stuff in the house for breakfasts and dinners. It takes the cognitive load out of eating healthy – AND it actually makes getting breakfast or lunch from a fast food joint into the more difficult option, because I have to get in my car and drive somewhere to acquire the junk food as opposed to eating the healthy thing that’s in my desk at work.

Steve: Brilliant…working smarter, not harder. Make the healthy eating option EASIER, and the fast food even less convenient! Okay, you changed a LOT. What was the toughest change for you to make?

Ruth: I think it was mindset, really. I had to abandon my “all or nothing” mentality because it was sabotaging me! I had to be OK with slow and incremental progress. I had to become okay with taking tiny steps that continually went forward instead of doing everything all at once and flaming out which I had done in the past.

Steve: So, how did you get there? What was the biggest change that helped you succeed

Ruth: Making fitness and nutrition into habits. Habit gets me out of bed at 4:30AM to go for a walk when the motivation fairy has flown off. The motivation fairy is a flaky friend – she never hangs around for long. Habit and discipline get me through and help me chase the Sloth Demon away.

Steve: What about tracking your progress? Did you use a scale, measurements, or photos?

Ruth: I weigh in once a week or every other week, and I measure neck, biceps, bust, under bust, waist, hips, thighs, and calves once a month. I also see my doc as scheduled, and the biochemical measurements are also changing for the better.

Steve: “That which gets measured gets improved.” You’re proving that adage true! What would you tell others in your “start” situation who is ready to try again and succeed this time?

Know that you are worth it. You deserve to be healthy and fit, you deserve to carve that time out for yourself.

It is 100% OK to start with tiny baby steps. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk for 10 minutes, try 5. Then build on that.

Your big why has to be YOUR big why – not what you think society thinks it should be.

Steve: Now that you have conquered this phase of the journey, what’s next?

Ruth: Working on pull-up progressions and handstand progressions on the workout front, also on increasing number of pullups, etc. I just beat “Berserxes the Squat King” and advanced to Level 4 on the NF Academy workouts, so plenty of challenges there!

On the personal development front, I recently finished a foundation course offered by an international organization and found out I’ve been accepted to their content development course starting in January!

Steve: Okay, on to the important stuff: Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?

Ruth: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left shoulder – so definitely Lord of the Rings. I love both, though!

Steve: Favorite video game of all time?

Ruth: Mass Effect (all three of them, despite the ending of ME3, and I am SUPER STOKED for Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Steve: Quote to live by?

Ruth: ‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on,’ Jimmy Buffett.

How Ruth Did It. How You can too.

What made Ruth find success this time where she had failed tons of times in the past? It started with brutal honesty and ALSO self-love:

She accepted where she was starting from, and finally knew where she was going: She decided she was worthy of the life she wanted, and realized that it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing,” that just a little bit is better than nothing. And that a little bit consistently, step-by-step, can go a LONG way.

In her words, “When I think about where I was in January 2015 – if you’d told me then that I would be where I am today, I’d have laughed myself sick!” I love that.

She accepted it was tough work, but possible. We all have to start somewhere, and it can be depressing if we don’t see progress right away. If you can stick with it (THANK YOU SUPPORT GROUP!, you can build small habits. One day, you’ll get to a place (and maybe a LOT sooner than you think) where you’re looking back and saying WOW, I did that!

She started. This might be the most important step of all. Ruth spent 11 months reading Nerd Fitness articles before finally giving herself permission to try, fail, stumble, fall, and take baby steps. She could have overwhelmed herself with how far she had to go, so instead she just focused on what she could do TODAY:

She started walking for at least a half hour every day. (It’s how Tim lost 50 pounds)

She began making IMMEDIATE incremental changes to her diet. She started tracking her meals, ate a veggie with every meal, and eliminated all white bread.

These changes might seem small, but they added up and made a HUGE difference in a short amount of time. If they seem TOO big of a change to you, make a smaller one!

She gamified her life and fell in love with progress: By tracking her progress rigorously along the way (using the scale and measurements), she could make sure she was still on the right path and course correct when she wasn’t advancing physically (through measurements/photos/scale) or athletically (not making progress or leveling up on the workouts after a while).

Because she knew where she was going, she could make adjustments to her diet or workout strategy and stay on target!

She had a great support team: Life never works out exactly as planned. Shit happens. We get busy. Life gets in the way. If we don’t have a plan to support us during these times, we don’t have an avenue to succeed; it’s that simple!

When things were tough, Ruth had a whole network of people to lean on. The amazingly supportive NF Academy Women’s group and her real life neighbors provided words of encouragement and advice when training got tough or she fell off the wagon.

Follow in Ruth’s Footsteps

If you find yourself in “Before” Ruth’s shoes, here’s what you can do today to change:

Accept this is NOT all or nothing. Small changes and baby steps will win out in the long run.

Accept you ARE worthy of a life and body you’re proud of. 

Acknowledge the journey might be hard, but it is possible and you are capable of change.

Start. Today. Go for a walk. Eat a vegetable. Be deliberate, but start.

Track your progress. Photos, measurements, scale. Do so every 2 weeks.

Get hooked on getting better – you don’t HAVE to work out. You GET to work out.

Surround yourself with positive people, virtually or in real life, that will support you and keep you accountable.

Don’t wait for January 1st, beach season, or your next big event to start. Ruth needed 11 months to invest in herself before she decided “I might as well get started.”

I want TODAY to be the day you get started. Eat a veggie for lunch and go for a walk. Recruit a buddy on your walk during your lunch break.

And then down the road, I want you to email me YOUR NF success story so you can inspire a few hundred thousand people too.

-Steve

PS: We’re really freaking proud that Ruth applied our mindset, nutritional, and workout strategies from the Nerd Fitness Academy to change her life. I’d be honored if you checked it out and decide if it’s something that could help you on your journey. With over 25,000 students, and a 60-day guarantee, it might be the thing you need.

PPS: Seriously though, just go for a walk. That’s all you need to change your life.

[almajonesnjna]

How Ruth the Physician Lost 10 Sizes and Renewed Her Life

Meet Ruth O’Mahony.

She’s a 49 year old physician-turned health content manager who struggled for years with an unhealthy eating, yoyo-dieting, lack of movement, and a constant struggle to stick with anything for more than a few weeks before life got in the way.

This is something we can all relate to!

Although she found Nerd Fitness in early 2015, she spent months telling herself “I’m not ready yet, I’ll get started someday.” So she signed up for our email list, said “eventually!” and did nothing.

Sound familiar? 

After she could barely close the seatbelt on a flight to Disney (where just walking was a chore), her mentality started to change “maybe ‘someday’ will never happen…I need to change my strategy on this.”

Fast Forward 7 months…. and she now had a support group to learn from, a basic plan to follow, and excitedly started her push towards a better life.

So WHAT happened?  Why, after 11 months of reading Nerd Fitness did she FINALLY take action? How did she go from “I’ll level up someday” to “I level up every day”? How did she drop 70+ pounds, go down 10+ clothing sizes, and radically transform her life?

Keep reading!

Ruth’s Story

Steve: Hi Ruth! Thanks for being here to share your whole story. I know after a YEAR of reading Nerd Fitness, you finally invested in yourself and joined the Nerd Fitness Academy. I’d love to hear about those first few workouts and diet changes. How did that go when you first started?

Ruth: When I first started the workouts, I couldn’t do all of the reps, so I did what I could. I also had to modify almost all of the exercises. I did pushups from a bookshelf that was high enough that it was effectively the wall. I did box squats and assisted split squats and leaned super heavily on the counter. I took a mindset of ‘can I do a little more?’ with every workout – can I lean on the counter less, can I get a little lower to the floor, can I do one more rep? Trying to do just a little more each time has really led to giant progress.

At this point I was still having “meh” days. I occasionally had a day where part of my brain says: ‘Why is this so HARD?’ but the NF Academy Women’s FB group was awesome when those days hit. I used it as a place to check in, for accountability, for feeling like part of a community on similar journeys. I realized how important that was the first time I posted an ‘I need encouragement, ladies’ thing and IMMEDIATELY got tons of encouragement.

Steve: I love that, because know how important a community can be that will support and help you (and keep you accountable!). Now I hear, you fell in love with the idea of the Academy Boss Battles. What was it about them?:

Ruth: I remember when I defeated General DOMS [our level 1 boss] and moved on to Level 2 workouts. What was surprising to me is that I shortly after that went on vacation in July and I didn’t get derailed! I walked and WALKED on vacation, and put together a plan to get back into the workouts, which I stuck to. By that time, I’d defeated The Widowmaker, so I went on to level 3…and even tried the GYM!

And since then I eventually scraped up the courage (20 seconds of courage for the win!) to go to the gym I was actually paying for, and I couldn’t even lift my feet to do a proper bar hang at first. Now I can! Now I can do 25 lb farmer’s carries, 6 pushups with decent form, and I use less and less assistance on the pullup machine each day.

Steve: YES! Nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody (male or female) kicking ass in the weight section of the gym. After all, you have just as much of a right to be there as anybody else. High five! 

I want to know, have you tried and failed to get healthy before in the past? What made this time different?

Ruth: I have. I was pretty fit at one point in my late 20s thanks to the US Air Force, but I hated the fact that it was mandated and stopped almost everything when I got out. I tried a few different things in the interim (Tae-Bo, yoga, a treadmill, even a couple of Xbox Kinect games). It was all-or-nothing, boom-or-bust, and nothing to show for it.

Steve: Now, judging by these recent photos you’ve lost a TON of weight. What else has changed about you? 

Ruth: Yeah, I’ve gone from a Size 28 to a Size 18, and I’m doing it SUSTAINABLY!

I can fasten a seatbelt on an airplane without difficulty. I ran around Disney without having to stop and catch my breath – and I walked all over London (so many stairs!) without thinking about ‘I’m going to get tired, how will I get back to the hotel.

I can pick up my neighbor’s three and a half year old who is the size of a five year old and swing him around, much to his delight. I lift big boxes into the house rather than waiting for my husband. I have enough energy to car dance – you know, when that awesome song comes on the radio and you dance in your seat?

Steve: Dancing and singing is the #1 reason for having a car. 

Okay so it took Ruth 11 months to get her mindset right, and now she’s a badass! What did she do?

How Ruth Became a Badass

Steve: You adapted a mindset of leveling up and progression that’s helped you get excited to work out. How did those workouts develop?

Ruth: I’m working my through the different levels of Academy workouts, and I’ve ‘levelled up’ almost all of the exercises in that level which keeps me excited about what I can do.

On other days, I’m either walking or doing what I’ll call ‘running training’ every day – three days a week, I’m out in the morning and doing run/walk intervals. I started with CouchTo5K but couldn’t ramp up that quickly. Old me probably would have thrown in the towel. New me bought an interval timer app and constructed custom intervals that ramp me up a little more slowly, but at a pace that works for me.

On the days that I’m not doing that, I’m still walking.

I had a bad week a few weeks ago, and the old me would have given up. New me reached out to the ladies in the NF Academy Facebook group, got reassurance that ‘eh, bad runs happen sometimes, and if it gets to be a pattern, talk to your doc about it,’ and got back out there the next time I was scheduled to do it.

Steve: I love that you’ve got ‘hooked’ on getting better. It’s definitely a mindset shift from “I have to work out” to “I GET to work out…what can I do today?” So talk to me about support. It sounds like you have both one in real life and the online support group too here at NF.

Ruth: Yea, the NF Women’s FB group is an amazing and special group of women – they have been massively supportive.

In my regular day-to-day, I also have two neighbors who have said that if I pick a 5K race, they’ll come run it with me – and they mean really run it with me, every step by my side. The across the street neighbor runs marathons and has said that she HATES running shorter distances, but she wants to support me, so she’ll run a 5K with me!

Steve: Perfect. So that covers your mindset and workout strategy: “get better, surround yourself with supportive people!” Let’s talk about your nutritional strategy!

Ruth: Eat real food, not too much of it, don’t eat too many carbs, and track everything. I use MyFitnessPal and track everything. I kind of find it weirdly freeing.

When my neighbor comes over with dinner, instead of trying to figure out whether or not I should eat that delicious rice dish, I pull up my tracker and I know exactly how much of it fits into my ‘budget.’

I’ve also tried to take a sensible approach on sweets – if there’s a dessert that I know is absolutely phenomenal and it’s a special occasion? I have it, and enjoy every single bite. I eat it mindfully, and savor it, and by doing that, I find that I don’t really want it very often.

Steve: “Eat Real food, and not too much of it” – amazingly simple philosophy. And I love that you don’t feel guilty about eating something that might not be super healthy. It’s a conscious decision to eat it, just like it’s a conscious decision to get right back on track after!

Are there any tricks you used to get yourself to a point where you could follow it regularly?

Ruth: In the beginning I got into the habit of batch cooking things for lunches and making sure I have 2-3 weeks worth of healthy, tasty, homemade frozen lunches, and had really good stuff in the house for breakfasts and dinners. It takes the cognitive load out of eating healthy – AND it actually makes getting breakfast or lunch from a fast food joint into the more difficult option, because I have to get in my car and drive somewhere to acquire the junk food as opposed to eating the healthy thing that’s in my desk at work.

Steve: Brilliant…working smarter, not harder. Make the healthy eating option EASIER, and the fast food even less convenient! Okay, you changed a LOT. What was the toughest change for you to make?

Ruth: I think it was mindset, really. I had to abandon my “all or nothing” mentality because it was sabotaging me! I had to be OK with slow and incremental progress. I had to become okay with taking tiny steps that continually went forward instead of doing everything all at once and flaming out which I had done in the past.

Steve: So, how did you get there? What was the biggest change that helped you succeed

Ruth: Making fitness and nutrition into habits. Habit gets me out of bed at 4:30AM to go for a walk when the motivation fairy has flown off. The motivation fairy is a flaky friend – she never hangs around for long. Habit and discipline get me through and help me chase the Sloth Demon away.

Steve: What about tracking your progress? Did you use a scale, measurements, or photos?

Ruth: I weigh in once a week or every other week, and I measure neck, biceps, bust, under bust, waist, hips, thighs, and calves once a month. I also see my doc as scheduled, and the biochemical measurements are also changing for the better.

Steve: “That which gets measured gets improved.” You’re proving that adage true! What would you tell others in your “start” situation who is ready to try again and succeed this time?

Know that you are worth it. You deserve to be healthy and fit, you deserve to carve that time out for yourself.

It is 100% OK to start with tiny baby steps. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk for 10 minutes, try 5. Then build on that.

Your big why has to be YOUR big why – not what you think society thinks it should be.

Steve: Now that you have conquered this phase of the journey, what’s next?

Ruth: Working on pull-up progressions and handstand progressions on the workout front, also on increasing number of pullups, etc. I just beat “Berserxes the Squat King” and advanced to Level 4 on the NF Academy workouts, so plenty of challenges there!

On the personal development front, I recently finished a foundation course offered by an international organization and found out I’ve been accepted to their content development course starting in January!

Steve: Okay, on to the important stuff: Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?

Ruth: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left shoulder – so definitely Lord of the Rings. I love both, though!

Steve: Favorite video game of all time?

Ruth: Mass Effect (all three of them, despite the ending of ME3, and I am SUPER STOKED for Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Steve: Quote to live by?

Ruth: ‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on,’ Jimmy Buffett.

How Ruth Did It. How You can too.

What made Ruth find success this time where she had failed tons of times in the past? It started with brutal honesty and ALSO self-love:

She accepted where she was starting from, and finally knew where she was going: She decided she was worthy of the life she wanted, and realized that it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing,” that just a little bit is better than nothing. And that a little bit consistently, step-by-step, can go a LONG way.

In her words, “When I think about where I was in January 2015 – if you’d told me then that I would be where I am today, I’d have laughed myself sick!” I love that.

She accepted it was tough work, but possible. We all have to start somewhere, and it can be depressing if we don’t see progress right away. If you can stick with it (THANK YOU SUPPORT GROUP!, you can build small habits. One day, you’ll get to a place (and maybe a LOT sooner than you think) where you’re looking back and saying WOW, I did that!

She started. This might be the most important step of all. Ruth spent 11 months reading Nerd Fitness articles before finally giving herself permission to try, fail, stumble, fall, and take baby steps. She could have overwhelmed herself with how far she had to go, so instead she just focused on what she could do TODAY:

She started walking for at least a half hour every day. (It’s how Tim lost 50 pounds)

She began making IMMEDIATE incremental changes to her diet. She started tracking her meals, ate a veggie with every meal, and eliminated all white bread.

These changes might seem small, but they added up and made a HUGE difference in a short amount of time. If they seem TOO big of a change to you, make a smaller one!

She gamified her life and fell in love with progress: By tracking her progress rigorously along the way (using the scale and measurements), she could make sure she was still on the right path and course correct when she wasn’t advancing physically (through measurements/photos/scale) or athletically (not making progress or leveling up on the workouts after a while).

Because she knew where she was going, she could make adjustments to her diet or workout strategy and stay on target!

She had a great support team: Life never works out exactly as planned. Shit happens. We get busy. Life gets in the way. If we don’t have a plan to support us during these times, we don’t have an avenue to succeed; it’s that simple!

When things were tough, Ruth had a whole network of people to lean on. The amazingly supportive NF Academy Women’s group and her real life neighbors provided words of encouragement and advice when training got tough or she fell off the wagon.

Follow in Ruth’s Footsteps

If you find yourself in “Before” Ruth’s shoes, here’s what you can do today to change:

Accept this is NOT all or nothing. Small changes and baby steps will win out in the long run.

Accept you ARE worthy of a life and body you’re proud of. 

Acknowledge the journey might be hard, but it is possible and you are capable of change.

Start. Today. Go for a walk. Eat a vegetable. Be deliberate, but start.

Track your progress. Photos, measurements, scale. Do so every 2 weeks.

Get hooked on getting better – you don’t HAVE to work out. You GET to work out.

Surround yourself with positive people, virtually or in real life, that will support you and keep you accountable.

Don’t wait for January 1st, beach season, or your next big event to start. Ruth needed 11 months to invest in herself before she decided “I might as well get started.”

I want TODAY to be the day you get started. Eat a veggie for lunch and go for a walk. Recruit a buddy on your walk during your lunch break.

And then down the road, I want you to email me YOUR NF success story so you can inspire a few hundred thousand people too.

-Steve

PS: We’re really freaking proud that Ruth applied our mindset, nutritional, and workout strategies from the Nerd Fitness Academy to change her life. I’d be honored if you checked it out and decide if it’s something that could help you on your journey. With over 25,000 students, and a 60-day guarantee, it might be the thing you need.

PPS: Seriously though, just go for a walk. That’s all you need to change your life.

[johnclapperne]

How Ruth the Physician Lost 10 Sizes and Renewed Her Life

Meet Ruth O’Mahony.

She’s a 49 year old physician-turned health content manager who struggled for years with an unhealthy eating, yoyo-dieting, lack of movement, and a constant struggle to stick with anything for more than a few weeks before life got in the way.

This is something we can all relate to!

Although she found Nerd Fitness in early 2015, she spent months telling herself “I’m not ready yet, I’ll get started someday.” So she signed up for our email list, said “eventually!” and did nothing.

Sound familiar? 

After she could barely close the seatbelt on a flight to Disney (where just walking was a chore), her mentality started to change “maybe ‘someday’ will never happen…I need to change my strategy on this.”

Fast Forward 7 months…. and she now had a support group to learn from, a basic plan to follow, and excitedly started her push towards a better life.

So WHAT happened?  Why, after 11 months of reading Nerd Fitness did she FINALLY take action? How did she go from “I’ll level up someday” to “I level up every day”? How did she drop 70+ pounds, go down 10+ clothing sizes, and radically transform her life?

Keep reading!

Ruth’s Story

Steve: Hi Ruth! Thanks for being here to share your whole story. I know after a YEAR of reading Nerd Fitness, you finally invested in yourself and joined the Nerd Fitness Academy. I’d love to hear about those first few workouts and diet changes. How did that go when you first started?

Ruth: When I first started the workouts, I couldn’t do all of the reps, so I did what I could. I also had to modify almost all of the exercises. I did pushups from a bookshelf that was high enough that it was effectively the wall. I did box squats and assisted split squats and leaned super heavily on the counter. I took a mindset of ‘can I do a little more?’ with every workout – can I lean on the counter less, can I get a little lower to the floor, can I do one more rep? Trying to do just a little more each time has really led to giant progress.

At this point I was still having “meh” days. I occasionally had a day where part of my brain says: ‘Why is this so HARD?’ but the NF Academy Women’s FB group was awesome when those days hit. I used it as a place to check in, for accountability, for feeling like part of a community on similar journeys. I realized how important that was the first time I posted an ‘I need encouragement, ladies’ thing and IMMEDIATELY got tons of encouragement.

Steve: I love that, because know how important a community can be that will support and help you (and keep you accountable!). Now I hear, you fell in love with the idea of the Academy Boss Battles. What was it about them?:

Ruth: I remember when I defeated General DOMS [our level 1 boss] and moved on to Level 2 workouts. What was surprising to me is that I shortly after that went on vacation in July and I didn’t get derailed! I walked and WALKED on vacation, and put together a plan to get back into the workouts, which I stuck to. By that time, I’d defeated The Widowmaker, so I went on to level 3…and even tried the GYM!

And since then I eventually scraped up the courage (20 seconds of courage for the win!) to go to the gym I was actually paying for, and I couldn’t even lift my feet to do a proper bar hang at first. Now I can! Now I can do 25 lb farmer’s carries, 6 pushups with decent form, and I use less and less assistance on the pullup machine each day.

Steve: YES! Nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody (male or female) kicking ass in the weight section of the gym. After all, you have just as much of a right to be there as anybody else. High five! 

I want to know, have you tried and failed to get healthy before in the past? What made this time different?

Ruth: I have. I was pretty fit at one point in my late 20s thanks to the US Air Force, but I hated the fact that it was mandated and stopped almost everything when I got out. I tried a few different things in the interim (Tae-Bo, yoga, a treadmill, even a couple of Xbox Kinect games). It was all-or-nothing, boom-or-bust, and nothing to show for it.

Steve: Now, judging by these recent photos you’ve lost a TON of weight. What else has changed about you? 

Ruth: Yeah, I’ve gone from a Size 28 to a Size 18, and I’m doing it SUSTAINABLY!

I can fasten a seatbelt on an airplane without difficulty. I ran around Disney without having to stop and catch my breath – and I walked all over London (so many stairs!) without thinking about ‘I’m going to get tired, how will I get back to the hotel.

I can pick up my neighbor’s three and a half year old who is the size of a five year old and swing him around, much to his delight. I lift big boxes into the house rather than waiting for my husband. I have enough energy to car dance – you know, when that awesome song comes on the radio and you dance in your seat?

Steve: Dancing and singing is the #1 reason for having a car. 

Okay so it took Ruth 11 months to get her mindset right, and now she’s a badass! What did she do?

How Ruth Became a Badass

Steve: You adapted a mindset of leveling up and progression that’s helped you get excited to work out. How did those workouts develop?

Ruth: I’m working my through the different levels of Academy workouts, and I’ve ‘levelled up’ almost all of the exercises in that level which keeps me excited about what I can do.

On other days, I’m either walking or doing what I’ll call ‘running training’ every day – three days a week, I’m out in the morning and doing run/walk intervals. I started with CouchTo5K but couldn’t ramp up that quickly. Old me probably would have thrown in the towel. New me bought an interval timer app and constructed custom intervals that ramp me up a little more slowly, but at a pace that works for me.

On the days that I’m not doing that, I’m still walking.

I had a bad week a few weeks ago, and the old me would have given up. New me reached out to the ladies in the NF Academy Facebook group, got reassurance that ‘eh, bad runs happen sometimes, and if it gets to be a pattern, talk to your doc about it,’ and got back out there the next time I was scheduled to do it.

Steve: I love that you’ve got ‘hooked’ on getting better. It’s definitely a mindset shift from “I have to work out” to “I GET to work out…what can I do today?” So talk to me about support. It sounds like you have both one in real life and the online support group too here at NF.

Ruth: Yea, the NF Women’s FB group is an amazing and special group of women – they have been massively supportive.

In my regular day-to-day, I also have two neighbors who have said that if I pick a 5K race, they’ll come run it with me – and they mean really run it with me, every step by my side. The across the street neighbor runs marathons and has said that she HATES running shorter distances, but she wants to support me, so she’ll run a 5K with me!

Steve: Perfect. So that covers your mindset and workout strategy: “get better, surround yourself with supportive people!” Let’s talk about your nutritional strategy!

Ruth: Eat real food, not too much of it, don’t eat too many carbs, and track everything. I use MyFitnessPal and track everything. I kind of find it weirdly freeing.

When my neighbor comes over with dinner, instead of trying to figure out whether or not I should eat that delicious rice dish, I pull up my tracker and I know exactly how much of it fits into my ‘budget.’

I’ve also tried to take a sensible approach on sweets – if there’s a dessert that I know is absolutely phenomenal and it’s a special occasion? I have it, and enjoy every single bite. I eat it mindfully, and savor it, and by doing that, I find that I don’t really want it very often.

Steve: “Eat Real food, and not too much of it” – amazingly simple philosophy. And I love that you don’t feel guilty about eating something that might not be super healthy. It’s a conscious decision to eat it, just like it’s a conscious decision to get right back on track after!

Are there any tricks you used to get yourself to a point where you could follow it regularly?

Ruth: In the beginning I got into the habit of batch cooking things for lunches and making sure I have 2-3 weeks worth of healthy, tasty, homemade frozen lunches, and had really good stuff in the house for breakfasts and dinners. It takes the cognitive load out of eating healthy – AND it actually makes getting breakfast or lunch from a fast food joint into the more difficult option, because I have to get in my car and drive somewhere to acquire the junk food as opposed to eating the healthy thing that’s in my desk at work.

Steve: Brilliant…working smarter, not harder. Make the healthy eating option EASIER, and the fast food even less convenient! Okay, you changed a LOT. What was the toughest change for you to make?

Ruth: I think it was mindset, really. I had to abandon my “all or nothing” mentality because it was sabotaging me! I had to be OK with slow and incremental progress. I had to become okay with taking tiny steps that continually went forward instead of doing everything all at once and flaming out which I had done in the past.

Steve: So, how did you get there? What was the biggest change that helped you succeed

Ruth: Making fitness and nutrition into habits. Habit gets me out of bed at 4:30AM to go for a walk when the motivation fairy has flown off. The motivation fairy is a flaky friend – she never hangs around for long. Habit and discipline get me through and help me chase the Sloth Demon away.

Steve: What about tracking your progress? Did you use a scale, measurements, or photos?

Ruth: I weigh in once a week or every other week, and I measure neck, biceps, bust, under bust, waist, hips, thighs, and calves once a month. I also see my doc as scheduled, and the biochemical measurements are also changing for the better.

Steve: “That which gets measured gets improved.” You’re proving that adage true! What would you tell others in your “start” situation who is ready to try again and succeed this time?

Know that you are worth it. You deserve to be healthy and fit, you deserve to carve that time out for yourself.

It is 100% OK to start with tiny baby steps. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk for 10 minutes, try 5. Then build on that.

Your big why has to be YOUR big why – not what you think society thinks it should be.

Steve: Now that you have conquered this phase of the journey, what’s next?

Ruth: Working on pull-up progressions and handstand progressions on the workout front, also on increasing number of pullups, etc. I just beat “Berserxes the Squat King” and advanced to Level 4 on the NF Academy workouts, so plenty of challenges there!

On the personal development front, I recently finished a foundation course offered by an international organization and found out I’ve been accepted to their content development course starting in January!

Steve: Okay, on to the important stuff: Star Wars or Lord of the Rings?

Ruth: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left shoulder – so definitely Lord of the Rings. I love both, though!

Steve: Favorite video game of all time?

Ruth: Mass Effect (all three of them, despite the ending of ME3, and I am SUPER STOKED for Mass Effect: Andromeda)

Steve: Quote to live by?

Ruth: ‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on,’ Jimmy Buffett.

How Ruth Did It. How You can too.

What made Ruth find success this time where she had failed tons of times in the past? It started with brutal honesty and ALSO self-love:

She accepted where she was starting from, and finally knew where she was going: She decided she was worthy of the life she wanted, and realized that it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing,” that just a little bit is better than nothing. And that a little bit consistently, step-by-step, can go a LONG way.

In her words, “When I think about where I was in January 2015 – if you’d told me then that I would be where I am today, I’d have laughed myself sick!” I love that.

She accepted it was tough work, but possible. We all have to start somewhere, and it can be depressing if we don’t see progress right away. If you can stick with it (THANK YOU SUPPORT GROUP!, you can build small habits. One day, you’ll get to a place (and maybe a LOT sooner than you think) where you’re looking back and saying WOW, I did that!

She started. This might be the most important step of all. Ruth spent 11 months reading Nerd Fitness articles before finally giving herself permission to try, fail, stumble, fall, and take baby steps. She could have overwhelmed herself with how far she had to go, so instead she just focused on what she could do TODAY:

She started walking for at least a half hour every day. (It’s how Tim lost 50 pounds)

She began making IMMEDIATE incremental changes to her diet. She started tracking her meals, ate a veggie with every meal, and eliminated all white bread.

These changes might seem small, but they added up and made a HUGE difference in a short amount of time. If they seem TOO big of a change to you, make a smaller one!

She gamified her life and fell in love with progress: By tracking her progress rigorously along the way (using the scale and measurements), she could make sure she was still on the right path and course correct when she wasn’t advancing physically (through measurements/photos/scale) or athletically (not making progress or leveling up on the workouts after a while).

Because she knew where she was going, she could make adjustments to her diet or workout strategy and stay on target!

She had a great support team: Life never works out exactly as planned. Shit happens. We get busy. Life gets in the way. If we don’t have a plan to support us during these times, we don’t have an avenue to succeed; it’s that simple!

When things were tough, Ruth had a whole network of people to lean on. The amazingly supportive NF Academy Women’s group and her real life neighbors provided words of encouragement and advice when training got tough or she fell off the wagon.

Follow in Ruth’s Footsteps

If you find yourself in “Before” Ruth’s shoes, here’s what you can do today to change:

Accept this is NOT all or nothing. Small changes and baby steps will win out in the long run.

Accept you ARE worthy of a life and body you’re proud of. 

Acknowledge the journey might be hard, but it is possible and you are capable of change.

Start. Today. Go for a walk. Eat a vegetable. Be deliberate, but start.

Track your progress. Photos, measurements, scale. Do so every 2 weeks.

Get hooked on getting better – you don’t HAVE to work out. You GET to work out.

Surround yourself with positive people, virtually or in real life, that will support you and keep you accountable.

Don’t wait for January 1st, beach season, or your next big event to start. Ruth needed 11 months to invest in herself before she decided “I might as well get started.”

I want TODAY to be the day you get started. Eat a veggie for lunch and go for a walk. Recruit a buddy on your walk during your lunch break.

And then down the road, I want you to email me YOUR NF success story so you can inspire a few hundred thousand people too.

-Steve

PS: We’re really freaking proud that Ruth applied our mindset, nutritional, and workout strategies from the Nerd Fitness Academy to change her life. I’d be honored if you checked it out and decide if it’s something that could help you on your journey. With over 25,000 students, and a 60-day guarantee, it might be the thing you need.

PPS: Seriously though, just go for a walk. That’s all you need to change your life.