Which could you live longer without: alcohol, caffeine, or meat?

Coming off a 10-day juice cleanse on January 21, 2022, I wanted to see which of the three I could avoid the longest. None of the three were necessary for survival, and giving up one or all of them could have health benefits.

I didn’t expect that I’d still be without one of them one year later. Definitely not caffeine. But here I am, caffeine-free, with no plans to resume using it.

A little background. I hate the taste and smell of coffee, having grown up in a home where my father woke early and began chain-smoking and pounding coffee. My first breath each morning was coffee and cigarettes. I’ve never tried either of them.

We did not have soda in our home, which was not uncommon in the 1970s and ‘80s. I picked up a severe Diet Coke habit in college that continued into my early thirties. But when our first child was born in 2002, I decided I did not want my children to see me drinking diet colas like water. Neither of our children drinks soda regularly.

The idea of a coffee and soda-free guy dropping caffeine might not seem like a big deal. Think again. For 25 years, I relied on drinks and powders that were virtually non-existent until the late ‘90s to fuel my workouts and serve as an everyday substitute for coffee and soda.

First came supplements and drinks laden with ephedrine and caffeine. I covered Major League Baseball as a sportswriter for USA Today in the 1990s and as a freelancer in the early 2000s. I figured if players could use these products to get through long seasons, it could help me with workouts and also the grind of being a baseball writer, which includes the same crazy hours and marathon travel as ballplayers without the compensation and first-class accommodations.

Sports leagues banned ephedrine after it was linked to the deaths of several athletes. I gave it up, too, but like players, I turned to energy drinks or “shots,” along with pre-workout powders that contained, among other things, high doses of caffeine. I train most mornings, but I’d mix a pre-workout drink even on days I did not since it provided mental clarity and alertness.

I was as addicted to these drinks and powders as people who consume coffee daily, which is at an all-time high of 66 percent of American adults. But I worried that these substances, like ephedrine, might have long-term side effects.

One night in November 2019, I had bad chest pains and drove to the hospital. Tests revealed nothing, but it was enough to scare me cold turkey from my daily energy shot (or two) habit. But I still had a daily pre-workout drink routine.

Now that’s gone, too. I don’t feel any less energized or sluggish. Like many bad habits, it’s more the addiction to the routine than the benefit it’s providing. I sleep better, drink more water, and consume more fruit.

It’s funny. I graduated college in 1991 when the workout supplement industry barely existed. Few young adults drank coffee. As hard as this might be for younger people to believe, I can’t recall seeing someone drink coffee during my college years, which I spent mainly in a student newspaper office where we routinely stayed up until 1 a.m. producing the next day’s edition.

There was Jolt Cola, introduced in 1985 with the slogan “all the sugar and twice the caffeine,” but it never was that popular.

What changed? My theory is that as people became less active and food became more processed, providing fewer nutrients, people turned to caffeine for the energy they weren’t getting from exercise and diet. Plus, the percentage of adults smoking cigarettes dropped from 25.5 percent in 1990 to 12.5 percent today. No doubt some of those ex-smokers and would-be smokers substituted caffeine for nicotine.

As recently as the 1980s, people viewed coffee as an old person’s drink. Television commercials of the time featured seniors drinking Maxwell House, Taster’s Choice, and Folgers. Then Starbucks blew up in the early 1990s, attracting a younger demographic. There also was the 1994 debut of the TV show “Friends,” featuring six twenty-somethings and set mostly in a New York coffee shop.

Coffee raises blood pressure and heart rate, making you more awake. Because it’s a stimulant, it’s also habit-forming, which helps explain why so many people say they can’t function until they’ve had their first cup of coffee in the morning.

Many Millennials and Generation Zers, unlike their Gen X counterparts, have grown up drinking coffee, thinking it’s normal. It’s been a drastic shift in 20 years. In 2003, I was in an early morning business meeting at an up-and-coming fitness company with 25 employees, all born in the late ’60s or ‘70s. A visitor asked if there was any coffee available. An awkward pause hung over the room as if the poor guy had requested permission to smoke. Someone ran out for coffee.

These days the company has 4,000 employees over multiple offices, and coffee available everywhere for its still-young staff, now born mostly after 1985.

I don’t miss caffeine, though it’s sneaky. Most chocolate has caffeine. A few months ago, I woke up from minor surgery and took a drink of soda a nurse had provided to settle my stomach. I jolted awake, thinking my non-caffeine streak was over.

Alas, it was just ginger ale.

 

 

 

 

 

Could you lose a ton of weight this year? Literally, one ton: 2,000 pounds.

This is not about body weight, of course, but belongings. This year, could you sell, donate, and discard 2,000 pounds of stuff?

Automobiles don’t count. Nor does a set of weights since a collection of dumbbells, barbells, and weight plates usually run 300 to 500 pounds. (Plus, there’s nothing easier to sell used online than weights.) Major appliances don’t count either since they’re usually replaced with a newer model.

But everything else goes toward the 2,000-pound mark. Furniture (both indoor and outdoor), tools,  small kitchen appliances, toys, sporting goods, knick-knacks, canned food, blankets, old media (CDs, DVDs, tapes), and clothing counts. So do books and magazines – that’s at least 200 pounds for most households – along with excess school/office supplies, and paper of all sorts that can be scanned (if necessary) and/or shredded.

Keep a running total with each trip to the donation center, recycling bin, or landfill. Use a scale for easy-to-weigh items like books but otherwise make realistic estimates of weight. Losing a ton means dropping 167 pounds of stuff a month or between 5 and 6 pounds a day.

Here’s the catch. You also must add the amount of weight brought into the home. Trips to the grocery store do not count. Nor do home repair/maintenance items. But everything else must be added. New clothes, household decor, additional TVs, books, and paper. Think back to Christmas. How many pounds of stuff came into the house?

Possessions weigh us down and it doesn’t occur overnight. It happens daily when we bring in 5 or 10 pounds of stuff but don’t get rid of anything. Much like making an effort to lose body weight, when we become mindful of everything placed in the body, it’s necessary to keep a log of the in-flow of stuff to lose a ton of weight and make significant changes.

How much weight can you lose? I’ve thought of this recently after cleaning out a one-bedroom condo after a family member died. He was not a pack rat or hoarder, just someone with all of the typical things a household needs. In such a situation, it’s hard to find a home for an iron and ironing board, toaster, microwave, coffee maker, dishes, flatware, brooms and mops, coolers, framed wall art, and furniture of all sorts. Most of it went to donation centers. For bigger items, I found people online to take them away.

Could he have dropped a ton of weight? Probably not, though he did have a few minor collections. Like some seniors, he did not have much of his life digitized, so there were a couple of hundred pounds of paper, files, magazines, and books.

This is not about making things easier for your loved ones when you pass, though that’s a noble byproduct of this exercise. Instead, think in terms of how much lighter you’ll feel after dropping a ton of weight. Much like losing 10 or 20 pounds of fat, eliminating 2,000 pounds of household excess will be a life-changing accomplishment.

The toughest part of decluttering or living lean for some people is unloading a collection. It’s both time consuming and emotionally challenging.

I’ve sold my sports memorabilia collection in stages and recently unloaded the last third of it, keeping just a handful of baseball cards and a few pieces of memorabilia I accumulated from the age of 6 until I stopped collecting about 25 years ago.

That represents two decades of collecting, both as a kid and a young adult. Plus, as a full-time baseball writer throughout the 1990s, I accumulated lots of items such as press passes, schedules, press pins, yearbooks, and other odds and ends.

The collection didn’t generate the money I’d hoped and I could have raised more if I broke it up and listed the items myself on eBay. But I didn’t want to take the time to deal with listing items, emailing, packing, and trips to the post office. The extra time would not be worth the additional money. Instead, I found a buyer online who specializes in selling sports memorabilia on eBay and sold everything to him. The collection consisted of several thousand cards, some going back to 1949 and many from the 1960s, plus dozens of autographs and oddball items.

I spread the collection over the dining room table and the buyer spent an hour looking at it. We haggled a bit and I got him to raise his offer about 10 percent, but that was as far as he’d go before I accepted.

Sure the collection was worth something – and I received a fair price, although again less than I’d hoped. In the end, though, it was just cardboard and paper that had been sitting in my closet for 18 years. That’s how long we’ve been in our current house; the collection took up space in the closets of previous homes. I dragged it from home to home and probably could have sold it for more years ago before the sports collectibles market softened in the early ‘90s.

It was just excess baggage. Over the years I’ve interviewed pro athletes at their homes for stories. What struck me most – aside from the size and elegance of these homes – is that most of these athletes didn’t have much of their own memorabilia on display. Some had collections of memorabilia for athletes they’d played with or against – or players they admired from a previous generation. But for the most part, they didn’t bother with their own memorabilia.

 I figured if athletes didn’t want their own stuff, why should I?

Thanks to the Internet and digital media, there’s no reason to stockpile books, magazines, music, movies, or memorabilia. As a kid without cable TV in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I turned to baseball cards as a primary way to follow baseball, a notion that seems preposterous in the digital era. After all, for more than two decades, the Internet has provided all the information a sports fan could want.

Collecting, whether sports memorabilia or anything else, has a downside. It produces a mindset that everything has value and that you should continue accumulating until you have the definitive collection. It takes lots of space, time, and money.

You spend a disproportionate share of your time on collecting stuff rather than experiencing things. Eventually you lose interest or no longer have space and must dispose of the stuff. That’s when you realize how much – or rather, how little – your prized collection is worth.

People don’t collect things like stamps, coins, and Hummel figurines like they did a generation ago and that’s good. No longer do they fill their homes with collectibles and knickknacks. Our society is more fast-paced, or at least screen obsessed, and people are less likely to spend an afternoon tinkering with Lionel trains or organizing baseball cards.

It’s important to appreciate the past, cherish and learn from it, but there’s no need to hold onto boxes of trinkets. Any of the thousands of cards and memorabilia pieces I sold can be found online. There was no need to even take pictures before the sale.

Before the buyer arrived, I looked over the collection spread across the dining room table. Some of the cards I’d obtained from childhood friends, two of whom are now deceased. I thought of the countless hours I’d spent accumulating the collection by attending card shows, buying packs at the supermarket, trading with friends, and following the market.

It wasn’t wasted time, of course. I loved following sports as a kid and that obsession, which included collecting sports cards and memorabilia, prepared me more for an early career as a sportswriter than any class I took in college.

To live mindfully and free of clutter, though, it’s necessary to let go of things that no longer make a contribution to your life and your future. Perhaps you have such a stockpile, whether it’s a collectible, hobby, or entertainment interest that stopped commanding your attention long ago. It’s time to say goodbye. Thanks to eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other avenues, it’s never been easier.

I thought I’d feel sad when I boxed up the collection and helped the buyer load it into his SUV. Instead, I felt like a burden had been lifted. Plus I had a few extra bucks.

The memories, of course, I’ll have forever.

It’s just I no longer need huge boxes in my closet to remind me.

 

 

When the decade began, few people were reading books on electronic devices. Smart phone penetration was minimal. It still was common to see people reading physical books rather than phones in public.

That’s no longer the case as the decade comes to an end, something I was reminded of again in 2019 as I reached my goal of reading 100 books – 101, actually – after reading 61 in 2017 and 79 last year. The key was to  follow the advice of Stephen King in his book On Writing, which I re-read in 2019, and carry a book wherever I went to take advantage of the many opportunities throughout the day to read when forced to wait.

Of course, we mostly turn to smart phones to fill this void. Failing that any waiting area – doctor’s office, auto shop, airline gate – has televisions blaring. Many people in my gym check email and social media in between sets. We now have selfies in church and Instagram posts from yoga class.

In 2019 I often was the only one in a waiting area reading, though it did not go unnoticed. Our sons’ orthodontist noted I always had a book and soon we were comparing reading lists.

My goal with reading 100 books in a year was to see if I could retain some semblance of 2008-like focus and concentration, eschewing 24/7 phone addiction. The result, I’ve found, is that my threshold for entertainment has risen. I saw only two movies in the theater in 2019 and my television viewing consists of little beyond college basketball, where my alma mater created some compelling content by winning a national title.

I gave up on books if they didn’t reel me in within 50 pages. After all, reading an average of two books a week leaves little time for mediocre content. As always, my rule was that I had to read two-thirds non-fiction and that fitness and travel books did not count toward the total.

My reading fell into five categories:

YOUNG ADULT: There’s perhaps no greater parenting challenge than keeping teenagers reading in the world of smart phones and video games. I began reading young adult dystopian fiction with our boys years ago to keep them reading and found I enjoy the genre. In 2019 our oldest re-read the five-book Percy Jackson series, which I read for the first time. We also re-read the last three books of the Gregor the Overlander series by Suzanne Collins, which we find better than her Hunger Games series. We’ll read anything by the great Michael Grant. His three sequels to the Gone series lived up to the originals. His Front Lines trilogy, based in a world where women fought in World War II, seemed like a reach but proved believable. World War II is a popular young adult setting and we enjoyed the works of Alan Gratz (Grenade) and Jennifer A. Nielsen (Resistance).

We allow our guys to read almost anything, especially the works of Florida writers Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey, who combined for just one book in 2019, though Dorsey’s No Sunscreen for the Dead was outstanding.

CHILD REARING: As the father of two teenage boys in the digital age, I’m frustrated by the stranglehold smart phones and video games have on kids. There’s no blueprint to draw from, no older parents to turn to for guidance since this is a largely a  phenomenon of the last decade. Sure we had video games during my childhood in the 1980s but those either required quarters or were nowhere as addictive as today’s games. Speaking of things that do not resemble the previous generation, the college admissions and financing process is nothing like it was a generation ago. With a high school junior, it’s required a crash course.

Fortunately there are plenty of authors cranking out advice on both of these fronts, including Diana Graber (Raising Humans in a Digital World) and The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell and John Gray. Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is one of my favorite authors and he covers both topics. His book Digital Minimalism is a must-read for anyone looking to break the chains of digital addiction. His book How to be a High School Superstar shows kids why they should avoid jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none college resume padding and become So Good They Can’t Ignore You, the title of Newport’s book about getting into any college.

Andy Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course Getting Kid into College followed his son’s one-year application process and Zac Bissonnette’s Debt-Free U explained how to get through college without debt. The scary thing is that though these two books are less than a decade, the costs have increased 50 percent. Anthony ONeal’s Debt-Free Degree, released this year, is an up-to-date take on the issue. Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission was published in 2006 but showed that the celebrity admissions shenanigans that came to light in 2019 is nothing new.

FINANCIAL/MINIMALISM: This is a blog about lean living, after all, and I enjoyed the books of two minimalist bloggers I follow: Joshua Becker (The Minimalist Home) and Courtney Carver (Soulful Simplicity). James Wallman’s Stuffocation: Living More with Less shows how consumerism is destroying our health and our planet. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson explains why we should follow the lead of the Swedes and deal with our crap now to reduce the burden on our loved ones later. Tanja Hester’s Work Optional is another compelling look at the retire early movement. Chris Hogan’s Everyday Millionaires is a modern look at The Millionaire Next Door.

BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Tom Hanks might win an Oscar for his portrayal of Fred Rogers but Maxwell King deserves an award for his thorough 2018 biography The Good Neighbor. I figured I knew everything about Tina Turner but she held nothing back in her 2018 autobiography My Love Story. When famous people cooperate with a talented writer’s biography, the result is usually awesome. That’s the case with Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk.

Leah Remini’s Troublemaker is the latest thorough takedown of Scientology. I’m a sucker for autobiographies of wacky folks and was rewarded with Manhood (Terry Crews) and Full Disclosure (Stormy Daniels). Mike Reilly has yelled “You are an Ironman!” at thousands of race finishers and his Finding My Voice is a great read about the triathlon subculture.

SPORTS: Though I’m no longer a full-time sportswriter, I still follow sports avidly and knew I’d need to read a lot of compelling sports books to reach the century mark.

I’ve now read most every noteworthy basketball book. My 2019 list included several that belong in the discussion for best-ever, including Alejandro Danois’ The Boys of Dunbar about the early 1980s high school team that included four future NBA players, including Muggsy Bogues; and The Miracle of St. Anthony, where future ESPN insider Adrian Wojnarowski spent a year (2004) with high school coaching legend Bob Hurley. I also re-read Loose Balls, Terry Pluto’s rollicking oral history of the ABA. I can’t believe it took me until 2019 to discover the historical sports narratives of Gary M. Pomerantz. I tackled his The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics and Wilt: 1962, the Night of 100 Points. (I also read what might be his best book, Their Life’s Work, about the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers.)

Other great hoops reads included The Last Great Game (Duke vs. Kentucky) by Gene Wojciechowski, Chris Ballard’s The Art of a Beautiful Game, Filip Bondy’s Tip-Off: How the 1984 Draft Changed Basketball Forever, Ian Thomsen’s The Soul of Basketball and Jackie Macmullan’s Basketball: A Love Story. I’ll read anything by the sports investigative tandem of Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict and got around in 2019 to Keteyian’s Money Players – Days and Nights in the New NBA and Benedict’s Out of Bounds – Inside NBA Culture of Rape, Violence, Crime. Sam Anderson’s Boom Town is a fascinating history of Oklahoma City and the acquisition of an NBA franchise. If you wonder how the NBA transformed in the last decade into a data-driven, three-point obsessed game, Kirk Goldsberry explains it well in Sprawlball – A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA.

Marcus Thompson has covered the Golden State Warriors for years and produced compelling biographies of Steph Curry (Golden) and Kevin Durant (K.D.) ESPN’s Brian Windhorst has built a career around covering LeBron James and his LeBron, Inc. is a fascinating look at how the player and his close-knit handlers manage his career. Jock autobiographies are notoriously sanitized but Lamar Odom was surprisingly candid about college recruiting, sex, and the Kardashians in Darkness to Light.

Other sports books I enjoyed included Darren Rovell’s Gatorade history First in Thirst and Inside the Empire, Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff look at the New York Yankees of recent years. I read two autobiographies by sports figures who cut their careers short over concussion concerns: Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s Racing to the Finish and Mind and Matter, written by MIT mathematician and former NFL lineman John Urschel.

Rob Neyer’s Power Ball, the baseball version of Sprawlball, explains how data and the obsession over home runs and strikeouts have transformed baseball. Albert Chen’s Billion-Dollar Fantasy, an insider account of FanDuel, Draft Kings and the emergence of daily fantasy, is an impressive piece of reporting. Before 2019 I had never read any of Tony Dungy’s books, figuring that living here in Tampa Bay for 20 years I knew all of his stories, but there’s a reason Quiet Strength and Uncommon are best sellers. Also inspirational is Tom Friend’s telling of the story of baseball coach Rich Donnelly’s The Chicken Runs at Midnight and The Road Back, a book I re-read by Michael Vitez about a University of Virginia swimmer who miraculously survived a bike crash and became an Ironman triathlete (and later a physician).

My favorite book of the year was K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches. Tyler Kepner rounded up most every living pitcher of note, including several who notoriously shun the media, and crafted a compelling look at not only the art of pitching but the history of the game.

I re-read nine books in 2019, including Fun is Good, the business motivational book I had the honor of writing with baseball marketer Mike Veeck in 2004. Mike’s daughter Rebecca suffered from retinitis pigmentosa and Batten disease and was featured in the book. Rebecca passed away in September at age 27. Though she was blind at a young age, she read hundreds of books via books-on-CD. Reading 100 books with perfect vision, or at least middle-age vision and reading glasses, is a more modest accomplishment.

Here’s the list of 101 books read, in order completed. Not sure if I’ll reach 100 in 2020, but if you’ve read this far and have suggestions, please let me know.

*Fiction

*Gregor the Overlander/Curse of the Warmbloods – Suzanne Collins (Jan.1)

*Gregor the Overlander/Marks of Secret – Suzanne Collins (Jan. 2)

*Gregor the OverlanderCode of Claw – Suzanne Collins (Jan. 3)

The Good Neighbor (Fred Rogers) – Maxwell King (Jan. 7)

*No Sunscreen for the Dead – Tim Dorsey (Jan. 23)

*Percy Jackson/The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan (Jan. 24)

*Percy Jackson/The Sea of Monsters – Rick Riordan (Jan. 26)

*Percy Jackson/The Titan’s Curse – Rick Riordan  (Jan. 31)

Best American Sports Writing 2018  – Jeff Pearlman, editor – (Feb. 10)

Troublemaker – Leah Remini (Feb. 15)

*A Time to Kill – John Grisham (Feb. 20)

*Sycamore Row – John Grisham (Feb. 24)

Racing to the Finish: My Story – Dale Earnhardt Jr. (Feb. 26)

Digital Minimalism – Cal Newport (March 1)

Everyday Millionaires – Chris Hogan  (March 1)

The Minimalist Home – Joshua Becker (March 3)

Full Disclosure – Stormy Daniels (March 4)

Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry – Marcus Thompson  (March 7)

*Grenade – Alan Gratz (March 10)

Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too – Clay Travis (March 16)

Duped – Abby Ellin (March 19)

The Chicken Runs at Midnight – Tom Friend (March 23)

The Price of Admission – Daniel Golden (March 30)

On Writing – Stephen King – (April 1)

*Elevation – Stephen King – (April 3)

*Code of Honor – Alan Gratz – (April 6)

Inside the Empire – Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff (April 12)

Soulful Simplicity – Courtney Carver (April 16)

Work Optional – Tanja Hester (April 17)

Running Outside the Comfort Zone – Susan Lacke (April 19)

Anger Kills – Redford Williams & Virginia Williams (April 21)

Quiet Strength – Tony Dungy (April 24)

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck – Mark Manson (April 26)

*The Brooklyn Nine – Alan Gratz (April 27)

Uncommon – Tony Dungy (April 28)

*Ban this Book – Alan Gratz (April 30)

Manhood – Terry Crews (May 3)

*Percy Jackson/The Battle of the Labyrinth – Rick Riordan (May 9)

LeBron, Inc. – Brian Windhorst (May 10)

*Percy Jackson/The Last Olympian – Rick Riordan (May 13)

Money Players – Days and Nights in the New NBA – Armen Keteyian (May 18)

Out of Bounds – Inside NBA Culture of Rape, Violence, Crime – Jeff Benedict (May 18)

All the Way – My Life in Four Quarters – Joe Namath (May 19)

Basketball: A Love Story – Jackie MacMullan (May 26)

Finding My Voice – Mike Reilly (June 1)

*Beach House – James Patterson (June 5)

KD: Kevin Durant’s Relentless Pursuit to be the Greatest – Marcus Thompson (June 17)

My Love Story – Tina Turner (June 21)

Sprawlball – A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA – Kirk Goldsberry (June 25)

Raising Humans in a Digital World – Diana Graber (June 29)

Boom Town (Oklahoma City)– Sam Anderson (July 10)

The Soul of Basketball – Ian Thomsen (July 14)

*The Fifth Assassin – Brad Meltzer (July 17)

First in Thirst (Gatorade) – Darren Rovell (July 19)

Boys among Men: How Prep-to-Pro Gen Redefined NBA – Jonathan Abrams (July 23)

*The Reckoning – John Grisham (July 25)

Profitable Podcasting – Stephen Woessner (July 25)

Elon Musk – Ashlee Vance (July 28)

Forever Green – Chuck Leavell (July 28)

*Foul Shot – Doug Hornig (July 29)

Killing the SS – Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard (August 3)

Darkness to Light – Lamar Odom (August 6)

How to be a High School Superstar – Cal Newport (August 9)

So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport (August 14)

Loose Balls – Terry Pluto (August 17)

*Awakened – James S. Murray/Darren Wearmouth (August 19)

*The Brink – James S. Murray/Darren Wearmouth (August 20)

Mind and Matter – John Urschel (August 24)

K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches – Tyler Kepner (August 28)

Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course Getting Kid into College – Andy Ferguson (Sept.1)

*Resistance – Jennifer A. Nielsen (Sept. 2)

The Boys of Dunbar – Alejandro Danois (Sept. 7)

*Words on Fire – Jennifer A. Nielsen (Sept. 8)

The Miracle of St. Anthony – Adrian Wojnarowski (Sept. 15)

*The Whistler – John Grisham (Sept. 17)

The Art of a Beautiful Game – Chris Ballard (Sept. 27)

Tip-Off: How the 1984 Draft Changed Basketball Forever – Filip Bondy (Sept. 29)

One Million Followers – Brendan Kane (Oct. 2)

*Swimsuit – James Patterson (Oct. 7)

The Last Great Game (Duke vs. Kentucky) – Gene Wojciechowski (Oct. 11)

The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics – Gary M. Pomerantz (Oct. 16)

*Black Book – James Patterson (Oct. 17)

*Mistress – James Patterson (Oct. 20)

Their Life’s Work (1970s Pittsburgh Steelers) – Gary M. Pomerantz (Oct. 26)

*Front Lines – Michael Grant (Oct. 27)

Power Ball – Rob Neyer (Nov. 5)

Billion-Dollar Fantasy – Albert Chen (Nov. 10)

*Silver Stars –  Michael Grant (Nov. 14)

Wilt: 1962, the Night of 100 Points – Gary M. Pomerantz (Nov. 15)

*Purple Hearts – Michael Grant (Nov. 17)

Debt-Free U – Zac Bissonnette (Nov. 21)

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning – Margareta Magnusson (Nov. 28)

*Hero – Michael Grant (Dec. 1)

The Road Back – Michael Vitez (Dec. 5)

*Plague Land: No Escape – Alex Scarrow (Dec. 7)

Fun is Good – Mike Veeck and Pete Williams (Dec. 13)

Stuffocation: Living More with Less – James Wallman (Dec. 14)

*Calico Joe – John Grisham (Dec. 15)

David and Goliath – Malcolm Gladwell (Dec. 19)

Debt-Free Degree – Anthony ONeal (Dec. 22)

The Boy Crisis – Warren Farrell & John Gray (Dec. 27)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a flashback in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” showing how Andy Dufresne tunneled his way out of a prison cell with a tiny rock hammer at night, covering the growing hole with a poster of Rita Hayworth and later Raquel Welch.

After each digging session, Andy collected the pieces of dirt and concrete and filled his pockets, concealing the evidence of his planned escape. The flashback shows him discretely emptying his pockets in the prison yard each day.

It took the fictitious Andy Dufresne, played by a young Tim Robbins, 19 years to tunnel his way out of prison by removing the barrier little by little.

I’ve found Andy’s process an apt metaphor for minimalism, especially my own life as I prepare to downsize from 20 years in the same home. It’s a prison of sorts, a home that’s been too big for too long for our family of four. I shudder to think how much more time and money we’d have now and over the last two decades by living smaller and investing more.

If the cost of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it, then my wife and I traded much of our thirties and forties paying for and maintaining a large home. There are perhaps three reasons for having a big home – huge family, many houseguests, lots of entertaining – and we can’t justify it on any of those grounds.

It’s not just the initial cost of the home in 1999, which was significant, but also the ongoing expense in terms of taxes and insurance, to say nothing of the time maintaining the home and a huge yard. In recent years, it seems we’ve welcomed more contractors and repairmen into the home than guests and family members.

As we prepare for the move to a smaller home in the next six to 12 months, I take an Andy Dufresne approach to each day, doing the equivalent of dumping my pockets each time I leave the house. If I’m going to make daily progress, stuff must go every day. Here are four areas where I do just that:

FREEBIES: It’s understandably difficult to unload things we paid dearly for, either emotionally because of the cost or practically in terms of finding a buyer. But why do we build our clutter prisons with freebie t-shirts and promotional items? I’ve stopped the inflow by turning down giveaways but still am amazed at how many freebies I continue to discover cluttering my home and my life. If it was free, it’s not for me.

FURNITURE: The less stuff we own, the less need for furniture. Why own massive bookshelves, entertainment centers and armoires? My next home, whether owned or (more likely) rented, will include built-in clothes drawers in closets. I no longer want or need to own a dresser. There is perhaps no other consumer category that costs so much, takes up so much space, and is so hard to sell at any price than furniture.

If sitting is the new smoking, as some suggest, why own so many chairs and couches? Prisoner Andy Dufresne couldn’t wait to get his hour of time outside each day. So why with all of our freedom are we so content to spend most of our time inside sitting?

PAPER: The two most important minimalist tools are a quality shredder and scanner (or scanning service). There are few documents that must be kept in physical form. One of the biggest challenges is “sentimental paper” such as love letters, photos from the pre-digital era, children’s artwork, report cards, and perhaps your work product – all of which can be scanned. I’ve spent much of my career writing for magazines and recently had more than 1,500 pages of articles scanned, eliminating the need for five thick binders of articles in plastic sleeves (The scanning service kept the articles and I donated the sleeves and binders to a back-to-school drive.)

ENTERTAINMENT: Like many people, I’ve stopped purchasing books, CDs, and DVDs because of digital accessibility. I prefer reading physical books, but read only what’s accessible through the library, which is most everything if you’re willing to wait, at most, a few weeks. Each trip to the library I bring a bag of books I no longer need to donate toward the library’s monthly book sale.

I’ve donated CDs after uploading the ones I want to digital files and DVDs as well. There’s no longer a need to own entertainment. Heck, Andy Dufresne entertained himself for years at Shawshank with only books from the library and a rock hammer to carve a chess set out of rocks. He made beautiful chess pieces and the project proved a good cover story for his real need for a rock hammer.

I’ve purged all physical entertainment, but kept my Shawshank Redemption DVD. There might soon come a time when a DVD player is obsolete; I already can find the film on-demand. But rather than keep it concealed in the (since discarded) entertainment armoire, I display it on my mostly empty bookshelf, a visual reminder to keep tunneling to freedom every day.

 

 

What makes a gym?

Is it the size of the facility and the amenities offered? Is it the group fitness instructors and the demographics of the members?

It is simply the price point and location?

In February of 2018, my longtime gym closed. It had been an LA Fitness for six years and a Lifestyle Family Fitness for a decade before that. The closing was long rumored. Supposedly a Cheesecake Factory, of all things, was assuming the lease. Or perhaps it would be the car dealership that was using our sprawling parking lot for overflow inventory.

Many of my fellow members, figuring the building’s days as a gym were over, scattered to other facilities, including a new LA Fitness 10 minutes away.

That was too far for me. So for the next six months I worked out at home. I did more standup paddleboarding and took yoga classes.

Then, much to everyone’s surprise, Crunch Fitness put up “coming soon” signs. The gym was gutted and remodeled and Crunch reopened in October offering memberships for as little as $10 a month.

So like a drunk that returns to the same bar through name and ownership changes, I came back to the gym, which had a totally different vibe. It had the usual assortment of weights and machines, many placed in the same spots as the LA Fitness configuration. Gone was the group cycling classroom where I had taken classes for more than a decade, the walls blown out to open up the room. The same was true of the “kid’s club” area where my sons, now teenagers, once spent many hours as toddlers.

Another part of the gym, clearly inspired by CrossFit, features weighted sleds and tires for flipping. There are heavy bags and MMA training tools. A lower level workout space was enclosed for tanning beds.

Though I’m told the women’s locker room received a major overhaul, the men’s room only received a new floor. The lockers missing doors from the LA Fitness era still were missing doors.

The biggest change was in the demographics. It seemed like I’d aged 15 years in just 9 months, going from slightly older than the median age at LA Fitness to one of the oldest in the room. Credit that to the Crunch vibe or the lower price point.

I’m not bothered by being the old man, though it seems there are more people walking around staring at their phones. They get in the way at times.

A handful of my LA Fitness brethren have returned. They live close to the building, too. Maybe we’re just creatures of habit.

Or maybe it’s all about real estate: location, location, location.

 

 

Bob Seger plays in Tampa for the last time tonight as the 73-year-old rocker is on his final tour, having delayed it for more than a year following emergency spinal surgery.

Seger is my all-time favorite performer. Somehow the howling lyrics of a 35-year-old with the long haired, bearded Jesus look in the summer of 1980 captured the attention of a 10-year-old kid in Richmond, Virginia just discovering the FM dial.

Seger still has good hair, though it’s shorter and grayer. He was never one of these rockers trying to look 45 forever. Nor was he a guy who lived on the road, essentially staying home for his fifties because he became a first-time father later in life.

As a result, I haven’t seen him nearly as much as I would have liked. Tonight will be just my 10^th concert since my first in 1986. Three of those came during a four-month stretch in 1996 and three during a five-week span in 2007, his first tour in more than a decade.

Seger might be the most underrated songwriter in rock history. In 2015, on the occasion of his 70^th birthday, I ranked my top 70 Seger songs of all time. I’ll get to hear about 25 of them with my wife tonight from about the 23^rd row.

Seger’s ticket prices always have been reasonable compared to other comparable performers, many of which tour more often. Sadly, there’s no longer such thing as ticket stubs, which is why I don’t have a stub from the last time I saw Seger in 2015. Here’s a look at those 10 concerts, the ticket prices, and the legacy of an enduring performer.

Friday, August 1, 1986, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland

Pavillion, row QQ – $16.00, ($36.88 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 41

I drove for more than an hour through tough DC area traffic at 16 to see my first Seger show, part of his American Storm tour that lasted more than a year. The second song on the album, Like a Rock, became part of a Chevy campaign that lasted more than a decade. Name another song used in a commercial for a decade. Heck, name another ad campaign that lasted a decade. This was Seger’s first tour since Tom Cruise lip synched Old Time Rock & Roll in Risky Business three years earlier and the first since Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop in 1984, which produced Seger’s only No.1 hit – Shakedown.

 

Sunday, October 5, 1986, Capital Centre (demolished 2002), Landover, Md.

225, row BB – $17.00, ($39.19 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 41

I watched a lot of great NBA basketball (by visiting teams) as part of sparse 1980s NBA crowds in the dark pit of a building that was the Capital Centre. Usually my friends and I would buy upper level tickets for $5 – $3 with a high school student ID – and move down lower. I should have realized when I bought uppers for my second Seger show in three months that the lower bowl would be full. Still a great show.

 

Monday, February 5, 1996, USF SunDome, Tampa, Florida

Section H3, Row 31, $25.00, ($40.81 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 50

This would be Bob’s last tour for a decade since he recently had become a first-time dad. This being before classic rockers kept performing into their 60s or 70s, there was some thought that this would be his last tour, especially coming on the heels of one of his lesser albums, It’s a Mystery. I was a full-time baseball writer for USA Today, though not sure what I was doing in Tampa two weeks before spring training opened. I’d relocate to Tampa Bay permanently less than two years later.

 

Tuesday, February 13, 1996, Philadelphia Spectrum (demolished 2011)

R-B-6, side lower level, $30.00, ($48.98 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 50

Just eight days later, I drove from my Northern Virginia home to catch Seger at the Spectrum in South Philadelphia, where I was introduced to a talented opening act, John Hiatt, who I’ve now seen at least 10 times, including a month later at a bar in Phoenix during spring training. It’s hard to believe lower level tickets still cost just $30 at this point. Concert ticket prices took a big jump after the Eagles 1994 “Hell Freezes Over” reunion tour. Thankfully Seger never followed the lead of his good friends Don Henley and Glenn Frey and kept ticket prices reasonable.

 

Tuesday, June 11, 1996, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland

MM-134-Center, $35.00, ($56.48 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 51

My first visit back to Merriweather for a Seger concert in a decade, which of course also was his first performance there. It’s also the first Seger show I took my now wife. We used a song from the It’s a Mystery album (The Real Love) on our wedding video. We did not include We’ve Got Tonight, a song about a one-night stand that Seger says couples frequently tell him they’ve danced to at their weddings.

 

Saturday, January 6, 2007, Amway Arena (demolished 2012), Orlando, Fla.

F4, K10 (floor), $64 ($79.96 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 61

With young kids, we didn’t want to spring for a sitter. So I made the two-hour drive alone to see Seger in Orlando, where I learned what at the time was a valuable concert hack, finding a single ticket on the floor (11^th row) the day of the show at the box office, part of Seger’s first tour in more than a decade.

 

Saturday, January 13, 2007, St. Pete Times Forum, Tampa, Fla.

F3, row 18, (floor), $74.16 ($92.65 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 61

Having scored in Orlando, I found two last-minute floor tickets a week later in Tampa when some were released online late. Seger’s Face the Promise album was pretty forgettable, though Bob isn’t one of these classic rockers who makes his fans sit through much of his new material. Fellow Michigan native Kid Rock sang a duet with Seger on that album (Real Mean Bottle) and appeared on tour at several tour stops, though sadly not in Tampa.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007, Pepsi Center, Denver, Colorado

146, row 6, seat 1, $66.50 ($82.64 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 61

The good news was that I was in Denver on business working with several big Seger fans. The bad news was the concert was on Valentine’s Day and they all had plans. No problem, I employed my now-familiar, last minute single-ticket strategy and again ended up close. Seger rarely plays his song Get Out of Denver, covered by Tina Turner and others, but he told the crowd he knew he had to play it in the Mile High city.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015, Germain Arena, Estero, Fla. (7,186-seat)

15^th row, center, $111 ($119.59 in 2019 dollars)

Bob Seger age: 69

With Seger three months from his 70^th birthday, I thought this would be his last tour, especially with no new album. So instead of buying tickets for the 20,000-seat venue in Tampa a week later, I drove two hours to a smaller venue used for minor league hockey near Fort Myers. (Apparently Bob has a condo nearby). Bob sounded great and never said it was his last tour.

Friday, March 15, 2019, Amalie Arena, Tampa, Fla.

FL6, row 5, $150 ($121 plus Ticketmaster fees)

Bob Seger age: 73

These technically were $121 tickets, more than reasonable for 23^rd row on a final tour. But Ticketmaster has taken its fleecing to new levels, adding $29 per ticket. Maybe it’s a good thing Bob is coming off the road. Even when he keeps his appearance fees reasonable, others involved get in the way. No longer are paper tickets issued, meaning I’ll have to keep a printout as a souvenir of my last witnessing of a remarkable career.

 

 

 

Could you lock your phone in a safe for 9 days and nights?

That’s what I did earlier this month when I boarded a cruise ship for the first time in nearly 10 years, leaving it in the cabin safe for the duration of the cruise.

During our last cruise in 2009, I did not have a smart phone. Social media barely existed. Nor did many of the apps now part of everyday life.

My then-phone did not include an international coverage option. My wife and I phoned home just once that week, using a calling card (remember them?) and then only by navigating an ancient pay phone in Cozumel, Mexico.

These days, wireless companies are happy to sell you a cruise ship package. The cruise lines provide an expensive WI-FI option or a slightly cheaper “social” WI-FI package that provides access to social media sites only. Or for $5, a cruise ship app that enables the user to check activity schedules, make dinner reservations and create a list of friends on board to instant message.

I wanted no part of any of this. Nothing against friends that post hourly updates from their vacations, including cruises, but I want less digital media in my life, especially on vacation. So I turned the phone off for the duration, even in Cozumel, which my wireless provider now includes for data and voice.

I’ve written about my frustrations with cell phones, from the people who text and scroll through social media feeds in church, yoga class, and the gym to the ones idling at stop lights in front of me long after the signal turns green. As a parent of teenagers, I worry about how screen-addicted kids will function in a world where success often depends on extended focus, deep work, and mindfulness.

So I wasn’t about to spend my nine-night cruise, including four days at sea, staring at a screen to communicate with friends and family not on the cruise and keep up with politics, sports and everything else back home.

As a result, I read three books, worked out twice a day, attended classes on meditation and juggling, watched four comedy shows, twice sung karaoke (badly), competed in two costume contests, attended a class where I made props for those costumes, interviewed five people, and learned the following four things from ditching the phone.

TIME SLOWS DOWN: Sure I was on vacation and on a cruise ship where the phone would have been useless had I not paid for WI-FI anyway. (Those who bought it found it unreliable.) But I’ve been on vacation in the USA where I’ve been guilty of checking email, sports scores, and social media. Those vacations, in many respects, seemed just as hurried and frazzled as non-vacation time.

Without a phone, I had an abundance of time since I didn’t fill all of the gaps with the phone or the Internet. I’ve succeeded at this in recent years by carrying a book everywhere I go, boosting the number of books read. Not having a phone gave me a sense of mindfulness and purpose. I improved my juggling and meditation skills, finished second in a costume contest, created a new workout, and at times found myself staring out at the ocean for 10 to 15 minute intervals.

CAMERAS WORK GREAT: Phones have replaced cameras, but this was no excuse to use a phone on the cruise either. I brought along my 9-year-old DSL camera, finally using non-automatic features consistently, perhaps because I had plenty of time to practice them. We spent plenty of time in and on the water during shore excursions, so a Go Pro camera was more than adequate and actually better than a phone camera.

Did I take fewer photos? Probably. But when you’re not looking at every moment as a recordable, sharable event, you live in the moment and enjoy it more.

WORK WON’T MISS YOU: None of us are irreplaceable at work. They can get along without you. If you have a full-time employer, there’s no reason to go without a phone on a cruise; they know you’re gone. I’m self-employed and occasionally get rush gigs that need to be done within 48 hours. I was afraid I’d miss out on a couple of those.

In reality, I missed nothing. I told my main clients I’d be gone and nothing was waiting via email or text that I could not deal with on the day I returned.

NO INFORMATION DIETS TASTE GREAT: Cruise ship cabin televisions have news channels, though we kept ours tuned to that screen that tracks the ship’s position. The sports bar on our boat featured four ESPN channels, though they were tweaked with more international programming. I did pop in a couple of times to check college basketball scores, but otherwise I missed everything that transpired during that nine-day stretch.

Actually, I didn’t miss anything.

 

 

 

 

 

After reaching a goal of reading 52 books in 2017 (finishing with 61) I set out to read 100 in 2018. The idea was not just to read more, but to remain mindful and focused in a culture that seems hell bent on having every second occupied by noise and distraction.

It’s not easy. We live in a world where people bring smart phones to church, yoga class, and the gym, three places where presumably they’re trying to engage in mindfulness. It’s impossible to wait anywhere – medical office, airport, auto shop – without being surrounded by blaring televisions. Sports event operators have determined that loud sound effects must continue at all times, even during play. Every store and restaurant plays music – loudly – without interruption.

Even the public library has thrown in the towel. My local branch has a room set aside for kids to play video games. This has become so popular that they have added computer monitors in the newspaper and magazine reading area since, apparently, there are so few readers of those items that they won’t mind hearing kids shouting at screens as they play video games.

So the library, a place once meant for quiet reading, is now a Fortnite gathering place.

Reading 100 books in 2018 would prove challenging. My rules were the same as 2017. No skimming. Fitness books, cookbooks, and non-narrative travel books would not count toward the total. The vast majority should be non-fiction.

I fell shy of the century mark, finishing with 79 (55 non-fiction, 24 fiction). Unlike the 61 books of 2017, I read more fiction and included some shorter books. (My 79 books ranked only second in my house as my school librarian wife, as usual, read more than 100).

Here’s what I learned from those 79 books and the process of reading them:

EVEN FEWER PEOPLE READ BOOKS IN PUBLIC – I made it a point in 2018 to look for people reading books in public. I eat a lot at Chipotle, a place where you’re likely to wait in line. Not once did I see someone reading a book, though one young cashier would comment on what I was reading, as if to say how cute it was that this guy her father’s age still read books.

I took my older son to get his drivers license – the one place guaranteed to require a wait – and saw nobody among the 100-plus people in the DMV waiting area reading a book.

The one place people still read books? That would be airplanes. Maybe it’s because we don’t yet have 100 percent Wi-Fi saturation. Perhaps it’s because using electronic devices is not yet allowed for entire flights. Maybe it’s because people know to bring reading material for the inevitable delays. I still was usually among the only ones reading a book in a terminal, where Wi-Fi is now universal.

READING IN PUBLIC CAN BE DANGEROUS: My sons swim and play basketball. Which means I spend a lot of time at practices and games/meets, which have a lot of down time. Swim parents understand the grind of spending five hours at a morning swim meet session to see a child swim for perhaps 7 minutes, less if they compete in sprint events.

This year, however, being a sports parent became dangerous. On two occasions at AAU basketball tournaments, I somehow managed to focus on my book intently enough to miss the escalating arguments around me. Thankfully I looked up in time to move, avoiding getting caught between opposing team parents coming to blows.

BOOKS ARE CHEAPER ALL THE TIME: This is because with fewer people competing for books at the public library, it’s easier to reserve and quickly receive new releases. As an author, I’m not proud to say that I checked out 74 of the 79 books I read from the library. But this is a blog about lean living, after all, so it makes sense to save money and avoid accumulating. Plus I left Amazon reviews for many books and those are more valuable to authors.

READING KEEPS KIDS READING: We had two teenage boys in our home for the first time in 2018 and keeping males of that age reading books is a challenge. As much as I’d like to think they follow my example, I’ve realized the key is to read quality young adult fiction together. Our older son even dusted off and re-read his five Gregor the Overlander books, perhaps the best of the many young adult series we’ve read over the years and arguably the best work of Suzanne Collins, better known for The Hunger Games.

We also read the final five of Alex Scarrow’s nine-book Time Riders series, which accounted for four of the five books we could not find in the library and thus purchased. We also enjoyed the first two books in Scarrow’s Plague Land series, Michael Grant’s two prequels to his terrific Gone saga, and the addictive historical fiction of Alan Gratz (Refugee, Prisoner B-3087, and Projekt 1065).

I always let our guys read anything by Florida writers Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen, who unfortunately combined for just one new book in 2018. Dorsey’s Pope of Palm Beach was outstanding.

Mira Grant’s zombie apocalypse trilogy (Feed, Deadline, Blackout), which features as heroes a group of ass-kicking teenage bloggers who master the new media world and the world in general, was the dark horse hit of the year in our house.

As for my solo reading, it fell mostly into three categories:

CHILD REARING: As the parent of teenagers in a screen-addicted, micromanaged, helicopter-parent world in which little from my own childhood seems applicable, I’m always on the prowl for good advice. I found plenty this year in Ron Lieber’s The Opposite of Spoiled, Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology, The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre, and The Self-Driven Child by Ned Johnson and William Stixrud.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales should be mandatory reading for every parent with minor kids and ranked among the more disturbing books I read all year. Sara Zaske’s Achtung Baby about life as an American raising kids in Germany was a fascinating look at how Germans raise kids in a hands-off, free-range manner most U.S. Gen X parents will recognize from their own childhoods. And Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids details how we no longer let our kids do anything without adult supervision.

After reading Dave Grossman’s Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing, which analyzes the link between videogames and violence, especially school shootings, I plan to read the rest of his work in 2019.

FINANCIAL/MINIMALISM: This is a blog about lean living, after all. So I read Scott Trench’s Set for Life: Dominate Life, Money, and the American Dream, Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff, Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life, and Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money. I read Charles Long’s How to Survive without a Salary, figuring most of us must at some point.

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants is an exhaustive chronicle of how marketers, entertainment producers and Silicon Valley types have stolen our attention over the last 200 years. It might have been my most thought-provoking book of the year. If we think in terms of what we give our attention to – how we pay attention – it changes how we use our most precious asset: time.

There were a barrage of books and articles in 2018 on how to focus in a screen-addicted world. Cal Newport’s Deep Work is a good start.

William McRaven’s Make Your Bed and Carl Hiassen’s Team Rodent were the shortest books I read all year. McRaven’s was little more than a print version of his compelling keynote speech, but a powerful message. I read Hiassen’s epic takedown of Disney when it came out in 1998 and this year it served as a  reminder of why I’ve never taken my kids to one of its theme parks.

SPORTS: Though I’m no longer a full-time sports writer, I still follow sports and in 2018 wanted to read some books that have long been on my list.

I understand now why some rank David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game as the greatest sports book ever. If you read that book on the late 1970s NBA and Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps book about Michael Jordan and his era (as I did in 2018), you’d have an in-depth understanding of the history of the NBA.

What a shame that the exhaustive reporting that Joan Ryan did for her 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about the abusive and insular USA Gymnastics culture did not bring about change. Perhaps the horrors of Larry Nassar could have been avoided.

I’m a sucker for any sort of season-inside sports book where a talented writer follows a high school team. Amy Bass’s One Goal, which chronicles a team of mostly Somali refugees playing for a Maine high school soccer team, rightly ranks among the best sports books of the year. Hope: A School, a Team, a Dream by Bill Reynolds, published in 2017, shows that the hoop dream dramas chronicled in 1994 by Darcy Frey in The Last Shot, which I finally read, have not changed.

Other sports books I enjoyed included Chris Nashawaty’s Caddyshack: Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, Jeff Pearlman’s Football for a Buck account of the USFL, Ben Reiter’s look at the success of the Houston Astros (AstroBall) and Baseball Cop by Eddie Dominguez. I didn’t think there was anything more I needed to know about Tiger Woods, but when you put the investigative team of Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian together (for a book called simply Tiger Woods), you get a lot of new material and a fresh perspective.

Michael Sokolove has an underrated career of quality sports investigative work. His latest, The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino, is an awkward title but a thorough expose on how corrupt and sleazy college basketball has become. Gilbert Gaul’s Billion Dollar Ball provides a similar look at college football.

My new favorite author is Mark Leibovich, whose Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times exposed NFL owners and the media who cover them as possessing similar egos. Leibovich mostly covers politics and his earlier book This Town, about the 2012 Presidential campaign, was just as entertaining. Who knew there were so many similarities between David Gregory and Adam Schefter?

As the parent of a competitive swimmer, I’m always looking for great swimming reads. Not sure we’ve had any iconic books yet in this field, though I read some solid ones in 2018 in Michael Silver’s Golden Girl (about Natalie Coughlin and the Cal swim team) and Anthony Ervin’s Chasing Water. Missy Franklin’s 2016 book Relentless Spirit left me thinking she would retire soon and two weeks after I finished she did just that.

Some books don’t fit into any of those three categories. Here’s the list of 79, in order read and date finished. My goal for 2019 is to (finally) read 100. If you’ve read this far and have suggestions, please let me know.

*Fiction

*Refugee – Alan Gratz (Jan. 1)

The Opposite of Spoiled – Ron Lieber (Jan. 3)

*Prisoner B-3087 – Alan Gratz (Jan. 4)

*The Party – Robyn Harding (Jan. 4)

Set for Life: Dominate Life, Money, and the American Dream – Scott Trench (Jan. 6)

*Projekt 1065 – Alan Gratz (Jan. 12)

Crash Proof 2.0 – Peter Schiff (Jan. 22)

*TimeRiders: Gates of Rome – Alex Scarrow (Feb. 2)

*TimeRiders: City of Shadows – Alex Scarrow (Feb. 5)

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell (Feb. 10)

*The Pope of Palm Beach – Tim Dorsey (Feb. 14)

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology – Adam Alter (Feb. 22)

*Time Riders: The Pirate Kings – Alex Scarrow (Feb. 24)

Your Money or Your Life – Vicki Robin (Feb. 28)

The Trouble with Boys – Peg Tyre (March 4)

One Goal – Amy Bass (March 11)

How to Survive without a Salary – Charles Long (March 14)

The Self-Driven Child – Ned Johnson and William Stixrud (March 20)

*Time Riders: The Mayan Prophecy – Alex Scarrow (March 23)

*Time Riders: The Infinity Cage – Alex Scarrow (March 30)

Getting to Us – Seth Davis (April 5)

The Attention Merchants – Tim Wu (April 10)

*Diary of a Wimpy Kid/The Getaway – Jeff Kinney (April 11)

*The Finisher – David Baldacci (April 15)

Make Your Bed – Willam McRaven (April 17)

Seal Team Six – Howard Wasdin (April 21)

Team Rodent – Carl Hiaasen (April 27)

Natural Born Heroes – Christopher McDougall (May 1)

Lou – Lou Piniella (May 12)

*The Keeper – David Baldacci (May 17)

Superfans – George Dohrmann (May 20)

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers – Nancy Jo Sales (May 22)

I’m Keith Hernandez – Keith Hernandez (May 24)

Tiger Woods – Jeff Benedict-Armen Keteyian (May 28)

The Day My Butt Went Psycho – Andy Griffiths (June 12)

*Plague Land – Alex Scarrow (June 24)

Hope: A School, a Team, a Dream – Bill Reynolds (June 30)

How to Raise Kind Kids – Thomas Lickona (July 1)

*Feed – Mira Grant (July 5)

Boundaries – Henry Cloud (July 8)

*Deadline – Mira Grant (July 19)

The Breaks of the Game – David Halberstam (July 22)

Caddyshack: Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story – Chris Nashawaty (July 26)

*Blackout – Mira Grant (July 28)

Media Madness – Howard Kurtz (Aug. 2)

Glow Kids – Nicholas Kardaras (Aug. 5)

Deep Work – Cal Newport (August 9)

Playing for Keeps (Michael Jordan) – David Halberstam (Aug. 12)

Achtung Baby – Sara Zaske (Aug. 18)

The Last Shot – Darcy Frey (Aug. 21)

Free-Range Kids – Lenore Skenazy (Aug. 25)

Winning Bigly – Scott Adams (Aug. 28)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – Michelle McNamara (Aug. 31)

*Monster – Michael Grant (Sept. 4)

Astroball – Ben Reiter (Sept. 6)

Baseball Cop – Eddie Dominguez (Sept. 10)

Freakonomics – Steven Levitt & Steven Dubner (Sept. 13)

If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late – James Sexton (Sept. 16)

The Greatest Salesman in the World – Og Mandino (Sept. 19)

Until it Hurts – Mark Hyman (Oct. 3)

*Her Pretty Face – Robyn Harding (Oct. 10)

Football for a Buck – Jeff Pearlman (Oct. 13)

The Man I Never Met – Adam Schefter (Oct. 14)

The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino – Michael Sokolove (Oct. 18)

Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times – Mark Leibovich (Oct. 28)

*Plague Land Reborn – Alex Scarrow – (Oct. 31)

The Soul of Money – Lynne Twist – (Nov. 6)

Billion Dollar Ball – Gilbert Gaul – (Nov. 12)

This Town – Mark Leibovich – (Nov. 26)

*Villain – Michael Grant – (Nov. 29)

Don’t Worry, Make Money – Richard Carlson (Dec. 4)

Golden Girl – Michael Silver & Natalie Coughlin (Dec. 8)

Relentless Spirit – Missy Franklin (Dec. 10)

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes – Joan Ryan (Dec. 13)

*The Darkest Minds – Alexandra Bracken (Dec. 26)

Assassination Generation – Dave Grossman (Dec. 29)

*Gregor the Overlander – Suzanne Collins (Dec. 29)

Chasing Water – Elegy of an Olympian – Anthony Ervin (Dec. 30)

*Gregor the Overlander: The Prophecy of Bane – Suzanne Collins (Dec. 31)

 

It’s been said that an athlete dies two deaths. The second is the inevitable. The first is the end of a competitive playing career.

I sold my triathlon bike recently and had mixed emotions as this gently used Cervelo P2 drove away on the back of someone’s Jeep Wrangler.

On one hand, I had barely ridden the Cervelo in four years and recouped nearly 50 percent of what I paid for it, a score by Craigslist standards. On the other hand, I was parting with it because of neck injuries sustained in a 2014 automobile accident (in a car) that make it tough to ride in the aero position, to say nothing of keep pounding the ground running.

It just took four years to accept that.

We see this in professional sports when “old” players calls it quits because they no longer can compete at the highest level because of injury or age. Ideally, they go out on top as Peyton Manning did winning the Super Bowl at the age of 39.

It can be more challenging, however, to accept a body that no longer performs the way it once did. That’s because with modern medicine it’s possible to extend an athletic career whether you’re a pro or weekend warrior.

Got a bad knee or hip? That’s nothing an artificial replacement can’t fix.

Have a herniated disc in your neck or back? A fusion or disc replacement can get you back in the game. If not, there’s cortisone, stem cells, dry needling, epidurals, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic care or bariatric oxygen.

Too often, though, people continue to pound their bodies past the breaking point. I was a basketball and baseball player through high school. And while I could play those sports today, my joints would take a pounding on the basketball court. My reflexes aren’t what they once were for baseball – and they weren’t great as a teenager.

I competed in running, obstacle racing and triathlon events through my early forties. I could continue to slog it out there too, even with a bad neck, but the stress from running would be too much. When it comes to running, we only have so many miles on the odometer.

Thankfully, there are always alternatives. There’s perhaps no better sport or exercise regimen than swimming, which is easy on the joints. Open-water swim events have soared in popularity in recent years, in part because former runners are looking for a more low-impact activity.

Ex-runners also turn to biking since that also is easier on the joints. “Biking” is thought of differently from “cycling,” where you clip into the pedals, wear tight spandex, and risk life and limb on the roads, where smart phone-wielding drivers often are not paying attention. But a more leisurely bike ride still can provide a workout. Some runners turn to hiking or race walking.

I miss the competition and camaraderie of triathlon, but I might have given it up anyway because I never liked cycling. I started group rides in 2006, the year the iPhone was released and things got progressively more dangerous. I shudder to think of what might have occurred had the distracted woman who ran through a stop sign and struck my mini-van had, instead, plowed into a peloton.

I don’t mourn the loss of triathlon. It helps that I had my third athletic act lined up before the car accident, shifting more toward stand-up paddleboarding, hiking, swimming, strength training and yoga. I’m in or on the water most every day.

Like life itself, it’s never too late to reinvent yourself as an athlete. I once swam with a group of mostly senior women as part of a masters swim program. One particularly fit woman told me she once did triathlons but had given that up and focused on swimming and weight training. I thought she was in her early fifties, but she was 66.

Several women from that group still compete, setting national age group swim records in their nineties, again proving that while you might have to accept that your body has fewer options to compete and train as you age, there’s always something available.