Bliss or Sarcopenia: Day Trips in the ACT

Autumn climbing in Australia always makes me think of stretching out the rock climbing season in Canada. One year, I was determined to climb right up until November first by which time there is snow on the ground, ice on the rock and temperatures well below zero. The only way I managed was by contacting every single climber I knew to try to find someone who was interested in getting some time on the rock late in the season. Just one reason why you can never have too many climbing, paddling, skiing (etc.) partners.

Average November Day Rock Climbing in Canada

Sometimes when it is raining down on the NSW south coast, the ACT is dry, and the last two days was one of those sometimes; it started raining as we drove down Clyde Mountain on the way home. Thursday was sunny with little wind and we had a pleasant day climbing rocks at White Rocks (aka Wickerslack Crag) above the Queanbeyan River. The poplars along the river had changed colour and, as I belayed Doug, I thought about how simple things, like a golden leaf floating off an autumnal tree and catching the light as it fell to the river below could be so beautiful.

On Friday, we drove south to Rob Roy Nature Reserve. Originally, we had planned a longer walk further south but were meeting a friend for lunch in Canberra so chose a location and walk closer to town and shorter. Canberra is surrounded by these nature reserves, frequently hills – which I like – and with networks of tracks throughout. Rob Roy Nature Reserve has the advantage of having one Percy. I’ve got mildly obsessed with Percies. If nothing else, they encourage you to go new places.

Doug does his pull up training on the Big Monk trig

Of course, we walked up Mount Rob Roy (1094 metres) and Big Monk (910 metres) and a couple of other little high points, strolling across grasslands and through pretty snow gum forests as the wind slowly decreased and the sun appeared. We had lunch, meat of course, before we walked back to the car expecting that we would find the café food singularly unappealing. Neither of us can actually eat café food as the seed oils used in food preparation make us both feel a bit ill. Which is a good form of aversive therapy.

My friend had a vegan (Bliss) bowl which had, a quick eyeball of the contents revealed, (being generous with calculations) perhaps 3 to 5 grams of protein (all incomplete plant protein). I support your right to be vegan or vegetarian or pescatarian or even fruitarian or breatharian but I also think no-one, least of all people who need to maximise (or even maintain) muscle, which is basically every human alive, should eat this way.

This is probably the pre-eminent reason why I am anti-censorship of speech. We live in an age where previously reasonable health information sources (such as Harvard Medical School) now push either vegan or vegetarian diets, which are necessarily high in carbohydrate (a non-essential macro-nutrient) and low in protein. At the same time, the entire population is either sarcopenic or at risk of sarcopenia. Sarcopenia, along with diabetes is the health risk of our times, and yet, we ignore sound scientific evidence in favour of the nutritional strategies that make Big Food and Big Pharma Big Money, but do nothing for you and I. Unfortunately, almost all of our governments and health advisory bodies are on-board with this nonsense. Eating meat is now counter-culture and promoting meat eating could (and has) get you banned from social media sites.

You might not think this is a big issue for you. Perhaps you are not diabetic (yet) but if you struggle to do the activities you did ten or even five years ago, I’d wager you are already part way down the sarcopenic road. It’s not actually hard to understand. If Doug and I line up against each other to lift a 50 kilogram weight off the floor and Doug is able to lift that 50 kilogram weight while only deploying 50% of his muscle fibres he will be able to lift 50 kilograms off the floor all day. However, if I have to fire 90% of my muscle fibres to lift 50 kilograms off the floor I’ve got maybe two or three repetitions in me. This applies to any activity not simply lifting weight off the floor. The stronger I am, the less of my ultimate capacity I have to use for any task from running, to walking, to paddling a kayak, to vacuuming the floor. There’s a reason Pavel Tsatsouline called his company “Strong First.”