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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (11th row) the day of the show at the box office, part of Seger’s first tour in more than a decade.
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.
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.
Could you lock your phone in a safe for 9 days and nights?
After reaching a goal of reading 
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The gym I have called home for countless, mostly pre-dawn workouts since 2004 will close its doors on Sunday, a product not of America’s increased demand for workout space but rather for glitzier, high-end training facilities.
Over the next decade I dropped 25 pounds, embraced triathlon, SUP and endurance sports, and chronicled these booming training niches, including yoga, functional movement, and obstacle races, transitioning from mostly a sportswriter to mostly a fitness writer. I marveled that group cycling or “spin” class, which since 2004 I’ve taken under the whip of physical therapist Alyssa Kay, has become an expensive New York phenomenon.
As newer gyms and fitness studios have opened, people have drifted away. I’ll run into former members at Chipotle or the yoga studio and they’ll recommend their shiny new facilities. I’ve always stayed put. Maybe I like the tough-it-out, Rocky Balboa mentality of the place. Maybe I like that it’s exactly 3.1 miles (5K) from my driveway.
As an author and journalist I often wonder if I read enough books. After all, the only way to stay informed and improve as a writer is by reading.
NOBODY READS BOOKS ANYMORE, AT LEAST NOT IN PUBLIC: I eat a lot at Chipotle, which means I stand in line a lot at Chipotle. This year I probably read the equivalent of one or two books while waiting to order a burrito bowl.
CARRYING A BOOK IS BADASS: As a reporter I’ve long believed that if you carry a clipboard or notebook and walk with purpose, people assume you’re supposed to be there. This has gotten me into places where I shouldn’t have been and, on occasion, thrown out of such places. In a world in which people shuffle along like zombies, hunched over phones, try walking with purpose and carrying a book. People will get the hell out of your way and treat you like someone important.
CHILD REARING: The modern era of helicopter parenting of micromanaged, overscheduled kids that spend most of their free time staring at screens frustrates the hell out of me. Fortunately, there are many authors to help, including Leonard Sax (Boys Adrift), Kay Hymowitz (Manning Up), Benjamin Sasse (The Vanishing American Adult), my pal Alan Schwarz (ADHD Nation), and the collective works of Jean Twenge (Generation Me, The Narcissism Epidemic, and iGen). I didn’t read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother until this year. Some view her as an extremist. I found her parenting style generally reasonable in a screen-addicted world.
SPORTS: I’m no longer a full-time sportswriter, but I still follow sports like the lifelong fan I am. I got on a baseball kick in July around the All-Star Game, reading Rushin’s books, along with Tom Verducci’s thorough breakdown of the 2016 Cubs (The Cubs Way), Jonah Keri’s book on the Tampa Bay Rays (The Extra 2 Percent), and my former USA Today colleague Tim Wendel’s look at our obsession with the fastball (High Heat). I read plenty of basketball, too, including Jack McCallum’s Golden Days, George Dohrmann’s look at AAU basketball (Play Their Hearts Out) and Keith O’Brien’s Outside Shot. I didn’t think I’d like Bill Simmons’s 700-page The Book of Basketball, my longest read of the year, but since he and I are the same age I found myself re-living much of my basketball fan experiences of the last 40 years.
The strangest déjà vu reading experience of the year was 
We didn’t evacuate for Hurricane Irma. But we had our bags packed and staged in one area of the house for either a last-minute departure or so we’d have a better chance of finding our most important belongings together amid the rubble.
Not long after we moved to Florida in the late ’90s, we had three hours to evacuate for a hurricane. This was before kids and digital media, so we dedicated much car space to photo albums and CD and DVD collections, which seems downright silly now.