BEN HERST

Why Tennis is the Best Sport.

Not to mention also probably the most difficult to master.

Why?

When played at a high level, no other sport comes close to demanding the same maximum combination of aerobic and anaerobic fitness, acceleration, anticipation, agility, flexibility, endurance, speed, power, variety of movements and shots, balance, total body and hand-eye coordination, all-skill expertise, physical and mental strength, discipline, strategy, execution, precision, geometry, physics, history, emotion, respect for the opponent, honesty, and sportsmanship. The fact that tennis usually involves only a single individual with no coaching allowed during competition only amplifies the complexity. In the case of doubles, teamwork and communication are two additional necessary qualities. If you happen to be competing at the highest level, your season is essentially year-round and your opponents come from all over the world. Not to mention you are often playing in a different country each week.

This is what I mean:

 

Why Egg Yolks Are Not Bad For You

    Yesterday, The Atlantic came out with an article, titled Study: Eggs Are Nearly as Bad for Your Arteries as Cigarettes, that reviewed a recent study comparing eggs to cigarettes. The article concluded that "Egg yolks are almost as bad for your carotid arteries as smoking." Not only is this article misinformed, but I fundamentally believe its logic (and that of the study itself) is flawed.

    Here's my take on this. For one, it says the average age of the participants in the study was 62. Do I have the same body as a 62-year-old? No. Therefore, how generalizable are these results to me? It's hard to say..

Ok, yes, egg yolks are high in "cholesterol" as the article posits. But do they realize that there are three different kinds of cholesterol, and not all cholesterol is bad?

    Even without breaking down the nutrients in egg yolks, it is still counterintuitive to believe that the whole egg would somehow be unhealthy for you. Why would the yolk exist in a chicken's egg if it was not absolutely essential to a baby chicken's incubation into a chick? Do baby chicks grow by only consuming the egg white? No. The white is where most of the protein from an egg is stored, but not most of the nutrients.

    Regardless, it is ludicrous to not eat the egg yolks when eating eggs (just as it is ludicrous to think that, because of what the yolk contains, you should not eat eggs whatsoever). By eating only egg whites, you are neglecting the most nutrient-dense, antioxidant-rich, vitamin-rich, and mineral-rich part of the egg. The yolk contains tons of crucial nutrients, including vitamin A, choline, lutein, B-vitamins, folate, and other trace minerals. These help make eggs one of the healthiest foods in the world.

    As you should know, egg whites are great sources of protein. But this protein is not as effective without the yolk to balance out the amino acid profile, making the protein more bio-available. In an egg, the yolk contains all of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K in the egg, as well as all of its essential fatty acids. The yolk also holds more than 90% of the calcium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, thiamin, B6, folate, B12, and panthothenic acid of an egg. If the eggs are from free-range chickens, they'll also be full of super healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

    The argument that eating the yolk will boost your cholesterol to unhealthy levels is flawed. First of all, when you consume something with high dietary cholesterol, such as eggs, your body down-regulates its internal production of cholesterol to balance out (Conversely, if you don't get enough dietary cholesterol in your diet, your body just produces more, as cholesterol has several vital functions in your body). Second, studies have shown that eating whole eggs raises your HDL "good" cholesterol to a higher degree than LDL "bad" cholesterol, which improves your overall nutrient ratio. Finally, it is important to note that high cholesterol is not even a disease. Heart disease is a disease, to be sure, but not high cholesterol. Cholesterol is a vital substance in your body with several important functions.

   

    I could tell you more about cholesterol and heart disease, but I think my point is clear...time for me to go cook some eggs!

 

The Old Man and the Sea

I just read The Old Man and the Sea. Incredible book.

Lightning Strikes Lake Michigan

Winning the IF Cookoff

This past weekend, I got to do some grilling with some of my friends from school.

Watching the Sun Rise

When was the last time you actually watched the sun come up over the horizon?  For me, it had been far too long, so this morning I opted to break from my usual 7am workout to go out to The Point and put myself through an equally important mental workout.  Sitting alone in below-freezing temperatures and biting winds coming off the lake is probably not the most fun I've ever had, but watching the sun rise is an experience that I value deeply, as it can be genuinely peaceful, mind clearing, and energizing.

In fact, I believe that it is necessary to constantly put your life in perspective, relative to the rest of the world.  This helps protect against the human egotism that is far too powerful in today's society.  Watching the sun rise is a perfect way to remind yourself that the planet is incomprehensibly bigger than just you (staring out of an airplane window is also helpful for this).  If we allow ourselves to succumb to the urges of personal power and material wants, we lose our capacity to allow mental peace and find our lives cluttered with futile restraints.

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Loss Aversion in Sports

I am currently reading Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim's Scorecasting, a fantastic statistical and behavioral economics book examining the hidden influences behind major sports.  Along with several University of Chicago references, the authors focus time and time again on the principle of loss aversion, the idea that we change our behavior - sometimes irrationally - paying too much attention to purchase price and avoiding short-term loss at the expense of long-term gain.  In short, we tend to prefer avoiding losses at the expense of acquiring gains.  This is why the pain of losing $1 is far more powerful than the pleasure of winning $1.

This phenomenon can be observed in sports in many different ways.  Take the concepts of offense and defense in basketball, for instance (though the situation can be applied to many sports besides basketball, including soccer, football, hockey, rugby, ultimate frisbee, etc).  Offense is undeniably more glamorous than defense (if you want to learn whether or not the ubiquitous adage "defense wins championships" is statistically true, read the book).  That being said, on offense, athletes seek a gain.  They're looking to score, to increase a lead or reduce a deficit, to change the numbers on the scoreboard.  On defense, athletes are trying to prevent points, to preserve the score and keep it from changing.  But if sports were structured differently, might defense be perceived differently?  Imagine if every game started not at 0-0 but at, say, 50-50, and teams could only have points deducted from that total.  It seems plausible that the principles of loss aversion would take effect, resulting in better defense.

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Wisdom from Marcus Aurelius

I am currently reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which is fascinating prose.  It is particularly powerful once you realize that these words are simply transcriptions of his thoughts and were intended for solely his own eyes.  This passage is especially meaningful to me and really puts life in perspective:

Words that everyone once used are now obsolete, and so are the men whose names were once on everyone's lips: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried in oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon as a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are 'out of sight, out of mind.' In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself. (IV. 33, trans. Scot and David Hicks)

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Chicago River on Thanksgiving Morning

First Steps of Life Redesign

As I have dedicated myself to cutting the unnecessary things out of my life (there was a lot, and there remains much, much more...), I have changed a few things that have really freed my mind and time on a day to day basis.  I won't analyze my email behavior just yet, since it is taking some time to train myself, and I haven't quite nailed it just yet.  That being said, I have dramatically scaled down my social media presence, deleting my Facebook and cutting my Twitter follows in half.  I do have a theory that even once people cut mostly-meaningless things from their lives, most tend to fill the time that they have "saved" with other, similarly-meaningless things (maybe this has been proven to some extent already, but it probably isn't universal and depends primarily on the person).  I like to think that I have avoided this syndrome thus far.  I have also dramatically reduced the time I spend reading the news online.  By sparingly reading only the headlines, I can gather the majority of what is going on in the world on any given day.  Obviously, if I am genuinely interested in educating myself on a particular subject, I will take the time to read into and compare the information available.  These are just the basics of the subtraction side of my life redesign.  You'll find that once you eliminate time-consuming things, however big or small, that you thought to be necessary, entertaining, and/or useful, much else will follow.

While I have deleted plenty from my life, I have added a few things to my daily hobbies.  I have ignited a new passion for cooking things that I had previously been hesitant to try and cook.  I have found it both exciting and challenging to teach myself new ways of preparing food.  Even though most of these new culinary experiences are probably second nature to a moderately-experienced chef, as a sophomore college student living in an apartment for the first time, most things in the kitchen are uncharted territory for me.  There is something fascinating about learning how different foods respond to different types and amounts of heat.

On a different note, I have also made it a point to really challenge myself in my exercise.  What I mean by this is not necessarily going harder or going bigger, but adding new forms of physical activity to my daily workouts.  I have resolved to learn how to do a handstand (almost there!), improve my technique on Olympic lifts, and get more serious about yoga and stretching.  But I'll save all of that for a later post!

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