Powerlifting is about getting heavy. There are few things more satisfying than loading up a barbell with as much weight as you can manage, putting it on your back and taking it for a ride.
When you decide to get heavy, you don’t fuck around. This is not the time to casually approach the bar, ease yourself into position and expect to manage maximal loads successfully. As strong as you may be, if you are not mentally prepared to own the barbell, well… the barbell will win every time.
After a week of watching people squat, bench and deadlift, the mental ritual of the Set Up was really driven home. Some people got violent, some got deeply calm; most, a combination of the two. You knew when someone’s head was in the game and when it wasn’t. As simple as this sport is, it takes all your guts to do it right.
Dudes seem to take naturally to the Set Up. Not always, mind you, but definitely more often than women. I suppose it has something to do with testosterone and the social acceptability of displaying aggression.
Blah, blah, blah.
Let’s get over that, shall we ladies? Let’s, instead, get in on the action.
When you approach a loaded bar, make the decision to be there. Develop your Set Up. It’s your ritual, your chance to forge mental and physical strength that is entirely your own. The thing isn’t gonna lift itself: you are. How cool is that?
Interior Room 715.
Me: (sits on edge of bed, opens laptops. Clicks Safari: computer idles. And idles. And idles.) Ach. (Picks up phone, dials 6 for reception)
Male Voice: (After several rings) Hello reception desk how may I help you?
Me: Yes, I’m trying to use the internet-
Male Voice: Yes Ma’am, please dial 0 and they will give you the pass code.
Me: Oh, ok, thank you. (hangs up, dials 0)
Male Voice (from desk across lobby): Yes Ma’am hello.
Me: Oh, yes, hi – I am trying to use the internet and it’s not working.
Male Voice: Yes Ma’am, you have exceeded our complimentary internet service. How many days will you be staying at the hotel?
Me: Um, until Sunday morning.
Male Voice: We can offer you a weekly rate of 8,000 rupees plus one day.
Me: I have to pay for internet? But I was just using it yesterday.
Male Voice: Yes Ma’am. We offer two hours complimentary use each day.
Me: Oh. Oh ok, well can I just do that then? The free two hours?
Male Voice: Yes, Ma’am. I will send someone to your room with the name and passcode.
Me: You can’t tell me on the phone?
Male Voice: If you hold for a moment, I will have our IT person come to your room with the name and passcode.
Me: But, why? Can’t you just tell me now?
Male Voice: Please hold Ma’am. (3 seconds pass) Ok Ma’am, here is your username: F for faculty, C for Charlie, A for Announcement, D for Delta, the number 3, the number 9, P for pickle, L for London, the number 7, the number 2, K for kentucky, T for turkey. Your password is the number 6, Y for yak, I for India, B for button, the number 1, R for radio.
This is the for the first hour of internet Ma’am. I will send our IT person to your room with the name and passcode for you second hour.
Me: But, but, but you can’t tell me now? On the phone?
Male Voice: Hold on Ma’am (3 seconds pass). Ok Ma’am, here is the second username and passcode: F for farther, C for cat, A for antidote, D for down, the number 3, the number 6, C for can, U for Utica, the number 4, the number 0, S for sugar, L for lipstick. Your password is the number 6, Y for yellow, I for instant, B for boy, the number 3, H for happy.
Me: Great. Thank you. (hangs up, attempts to go log onto hotel access site. Nothing.) Ach. (dials 0).
Male Voice: Yes, hello.
Me: Yeah, hi, I just tried to go on the inter-
Male Voice: Ma’am, please dial 6 for reception.
Me: Uh, oh, but, oh, but. Ok. (Hangs up. Dials 6)
Male Voice: (after 6 rings): Hello.
Me: Hi. I want to go online. My password and code aren’t working–
Male Voice: Hold on please, I will transfer you. (transfers call to desk across lobby)
Male Voice: Yes, Ma’am. You are calling from Room 715 Ma’am?
Me: Yes. You gave me a username and password. To go online. It’s not working.
Male Voice: Actually, Ma’am, you don’t need a name and password right now. You can just go online.
Me: (Hangs up. Clicks Safari. Success.)
(Repeat scene twice daily).
Meanwhile…
Nothing special.
14 hours. Sleep cut with Anthony Bourdain and chocolate: arrive India. After a pathetic attempt to hire a cab, decide to wait for the Germans at the airport. I listen to my podcast on cholesterol, duck the mosquitoes and try not to think about how much I have to pee. I’m here.
Andy, Patrick and Jens, my German team, arrive. We stumble into taxis – our drivers don’t really know where we’re going, but that doesn’t stop them from heading off into the smog. After a few stops to request directions from children selling stacks of eggs, we see the big, bright letters of our hotel across the dusty road. Hooray!
And then the entrance:
It’s real. I was not, in fact, lured to India by some German to be sold into the sex trade. We are covering the International Powerlifting Federation World Championship 2009 in Gurgaon, India.
We have no rooms; we will have to stay somewhere else. We mill in the lobby. Someone tries to find us a place to sleep. When was the last time I ate? Apparently it’s after midnight, but I never saw noon. What day does that make it?
Snoozing on the couch when I’m told that it’s all been resolved, we have rooms. Sleep is near. But first a fantastic bowl of tomato soup, and a cold shower (which way does the knob turn for hot?). It’s 3am.
Up at 9:30am. My first view in daylight. Attractive.
And then some tasty breakfast.
We check out the space for the meet. It’s under construction and quite small, according to Andy. Soon there will be muscle-bound lifters pulling metal off these platforms, but right now Indians in flip flops are gluing carpet and hammering it down with scissors.
I meet the President of the IPF, Detlev. Or wait, maybe he’s just the President of the German IPF team? Too much German.Well, it looks like today’s events mean set up can’t start until late afternoon and anyway I’m not needed for that. Off to explore Gurgaon, India’s answer to Silicon Valley and home of the mall!
I need a pedicure.
I always thought they were gross. My mother would soft boil one every morning: the sight of that oozy yolk ruining her perfectly good piece of toast made me shudder. How could someone eat something that smells like fart, anyway? Traumatic for a 15 year old to witness at 6:30am.
I wish I could tell you the first time I ate a plate of eggs, but I’ve no recollection. I’m sure I was in my twenties, and I’m sure it was in omelet form or else scrambled dry as a bone. It was definitely not poached or even hard-boiled – that would have been too much egginess for me to handle. Similar to my coffee progression (from milk and sugar with a splash of coffee, to Starbucks mochas, to espresso), my love of eggs came on tentatively, with caveats and in disguise.
Now I’m not afraid to admit that I am an egg enthusiast: fluffy, creamy, whipped, hard and, yes even runny and smelly, I devote Time to the egg. I hunt down the tastiest, and stay up late researching the best methods of preparation; I suppose you could say I’m obsessive. Turns out it’s a healthy obsession. Literally.
What’s in an egg?
Inside that small, fragile shell you’ll find a shocking source of protein, vitamins and minerals. In fact, the ratio of amino acids (protein) in eggs is so close to ideal for human nutrition, they’re used as the model for rating quality of protein in all foods (pretty much stole that sentence right out of Nina Planck’s Real Food). Just one egg will provide you with 10%-30% your daily needs of no less than 11 of the 18 amino acids.
Before I dive into the whole soufflé, let me address the white elephant, the yang, the other side of the coin, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘egg’: cholesterol. Eggs can’t be healthy cause they have lots of cholesterol, right? Well, so does breast milk, but that didn’t keep us from happily slurping from mom’s teat, did it?
Cholesterol is ok. It’s actually essential. Without it, we can’t build cell membranes; no new membranes, no life. It also puts us in a good mood. Studies have shown that people with low cholesterol (totals under 160 in men) tend to be pissed off and depressed. Apparently, cholesterol blocks re-uptake of that happy neurotransmitter serotonin. Just like prozac! So maybe if we chowed on cholesterol-laden foods we wouldn’t be popping so many pills.
But, I digress. (I’ll save cholesterol for another time. I don’t want to take away from the real topic here.)
Ok, so eggs have a stellar amino acid profile. I’m a CrossFitter, we like protein, this is good.
Eggs also have loads of minerals that are good for your brain, like lecithin. Lecithin, found in the yolk, helps digest fat and is the source for choline. Choline is a key component of fat-containing structures in cell membranes, and a damned high percentage of our brain’s total mass comes from fat molecules. Guess what? Eggs contain the highest source of choline.
Lutein, a fabulous carotenoid found in the yolk, helps prevent macular degeneration. You can find lutein in other foods, like spinach, but it’s easier to absorb from eggs.
You’ll also find a bunch of antioxidants like riboflavin, B12, biotin, and glutathione, all of which help to mitigate the cellular damage of life. Since we like to beat up our bodies with heavy cleans and 100-day burpee challenges, we’ve got a bit more cellular damage going on than your average Suzy. It’s important for us to pay attention to that stuff, so we can be warriors like Jacinto.
A quick note on that whole cholesterol thing: I do want to add that oxidized cholesterol is bad. It’s damaged and produces inflammation in the body. How you prepare your egg determines whether you’ve allowed the cholesterol to oxidize. Generally, you want to eat unbroken yolks – hard/soft boiled, poached or fried are superior to scrambled and omelets. Doesn’t mean you can’t have the latter, just eat them less frequently.
Eat the whole egg
You might have noticed that the couple of nutrients I mentioned above are found in the yolk. In fact, most of the good shit is in the yolk. Sure, the white gives you some protein, minerals and is a killer binding agent in cooking, but one of its main purposes is to protect that gorgeous yolk. We’ve ditched the yolk in recent years cause we’re scared of cholesterol, but that’s clearly not a legit argument. We’re also anti-yolk cause it’s got fat. Well most of those essential vitamins and minerals in eggs are fat soluble, meaning your body can’t use them unless there’s fat involved. That’s why, for example, lutein is more easily absorbed from yolks rather than spinach.
Which came first…?
I must interrupt myself for a minute to tell you something extremely important. Not all eggs are created equal. The goodness of your egg depends on the life of the chicken that laid it. See, most industrial laying chickens are crammed into dirty, smelly cages inside dirty, smelly warehouses. In fact, they’ve so little room to exist, they usually have their beaks trimmed so that they don’t peck each other in the ass. They’re fed a diet of supplements with maybe some ground up meat, pig and, yes, chicken thrown in there.
People have gotten wise to the industrial egg business and have started buying eggs labeled organic, vegetarian feed and pastured. This is good, but let me break those labels down for you, cause they’re not the same and some are better than others.
- Organic means the chickens are not pumped not full of antibiotics and other wacky, unnatural shit. Generally the way they’re raised is a bit more humane too.
- Vegetarian feed means the chickens didn’t get forced into cannibalism. It also means they probably did not get out in the sun very much.
- Pastured means the chickens were raised hanging out on the land; fencing is probably minimal and their food is mostly grass, grubs, worms with some supplementation of chicken scratch (i.e. human-made food).
Which do you think sounds best? You’re all pretty smart, so I’m guessing you went with pastured. Ding ding ding.
Why, exactly, is pastured better? Well all those nutrients found in eggs are MUCH higher in eggs from pastured chickens. See, chickens are omnivores. They’re meant to eat insects and grasses, which contain all those vitamins and minerals, not to mention omega-3 fatty acid. The ratio of omega-3 fatty acid (good) to omega-6 fatty acid (bad in large quantities) is pretty much ideal in pastured eggs; it can be up to 20 times out of balance in industrial eggs. Check out this fascinating comparison of the nutrient profile for pastured eggs vs. industrial eggs: http://www.motherearthnews.com/uploadedFiles/Eggs%20chart.pdf
Here’s a test:
Which egg is industrial, organic and pastured?
Yep, that one with the gorgeous dark yellow yolk is pastured. You can literally see its nutritional value. All those carotenoids ready to fight for your health. And the one in the middle? That’s the industry standard. Finally, we’ve got organic on the right.
Taste is everything
Health is good, but food is just as much about experiencing deliciousness. There is nothing quite like a perfectly prepared, pastured egg. It’s not smelly, the texture is silky and creamy, the taste is rich and deep.
Final thoughts and tips
This is by no means an exhaustive post on the wonderfulness of eggs. There’s plenty more to know, but you’ve probably already had to scroll down so much that it’d just irritate you if I wrote more. So let me just finish with these quick notes: eggs keep a long time, maybe a month, especially if you get them fresh from the farm. Older eggs are easier to peel and older egg whites are easier to whip into meringue.
Go to the farmers market for your eggs. Ask the farmer how they raise their chickens. More than likely the farmers who sell eggs on the side are raising them best, as opposed to farmers in the egg business; larger volume generally affects quality.
My favorite way to boil an egg
- Place one or two eggs in a fairly small saucepan. Cover them with cold water and add a pinch of salt. The salt helps keep the egg white from leaking out in case you’ve got a little crack in your egg.
- Place your pan on the burner and turn the heat up high. Bring water to boil.
- Once the water has boiled, turn off the heat and cover your pot. Set your timer for 9 minutes* and check your email.
- When your timer goes off, grab a spoon, lift your eggs out of the hot water and slip them into cold water for 2 or 3 minutes.
Once they’ve cooled to warm or room temp, crack the egg on the round end and peel the shell. You should have a firm, not hard, egg white containing a fluffy, creamy, dry egg yolk. Get fancy by sprinkling on a little paprika or dill, be simple with salt and pepper, or chop into a salad.
*9 minutes is a general guide. With pastured eggs, you’ll have some little, titchy eggs and some so big you feel pain for the chicken that laid it. Adjust your time up or down accordingly.
Where I learned about this stuff:
Protein Power Lifeplan by Michael Eades
Real Food by Nina Planck
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2007-10-01/Tests-Reveal-Healthier-Eggs.aspx
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=92
