Getting confused about muscle memory

I've been thinking how best to confuse my memory.

My muscle memory.

My brain memory can get confused enough, thank you very much.

It's seems over the years I've developed quite a bit of muscle memory without even knowing it. There are two kinds of muscle memory -- fine and gross.

The fine muscle memory I've developed include touch typing and the fingering required to play a guitar. Fine motor skills even play a role in such mundane activities as combing your hair and brushing your teeth.

Gross motor skills are those actions that require large body parts and large body movements such as those required in exercise.

Good golfers -- and I'm not one of them -- say the key to a consistently good golf shot is the muscle memory that comes from constantly repeating the elements of a good swing of a golf club.

But when it comes to workouts in order to control my weight and maintain muscle, flexibility and balance, apparently I don't want to remember too much of a good thing.

What my physical therapist daughter tells me -- along with my gym rat friends and endurance athletes --is that with regular exercise the body can become too accustomed to what you're doing, thus reducing the effectiveness of a workout.

It's a matter of getting over that plateau that our body has reached.

If I go for a 4-mile run twice a week, for example, and I trot along at a consistent 9-minute mile pace, I'm doing my body some good but I'm not maximizing how my body could benefit more from that same mileage.

The key is to diversify. Television infomercials and web sites promote all kinds of routines to mix-up and confuse muscle memory for the sake of a better workout.

For my run, on occasion I could find a track. Do some fast laps, then some slow laps, run intervals. Or maybe just do the same thing on the treadmill -- vary the speed, vary the incline.

If I go for a 1-mile swim and crawl through lap after lap after lap at about the same pace, I'm not getting as good a workout if I varied the pace and varied the strokes -- do four laps at a very fast crawl, then do two slower laps using the breast stroke, and continuing that kind of variety throughout the entire time in the pool.

But all this can be a challenge for someone like me who tries as hard as he can not to be confused and who finds comfort in repetition and routine.

But I know I've plateaued and the fact that I'm still fighting the battle of the bulge has nothing -- nothing, I say -- to do with having chips and salsa as my primary food group.

I need to concentrate on being confusing on purpose, just not confused.

Looking again for The Christmas Moment

I close myself off to Christmas at Halloween. I refuse to accept the season at a time of ghosts and goblins. I hate that retailers are forcing the season on the public ever earlier. Pretty soon, the first Christmas sales will start to accompany Back to School sales.

I don't start to open myself up to the notion of Christmas until the first of December. And then it's normally a gradual process of getting into the spirit.

Part of the process is what I've come to call my Christmas Moment.

It's when I know I'm in the zone and zen of Christmas. It has nothing to do with shopping, it has nothing to do with the frenzy, it has everything to do with the feeling about Christmas.

Normally it's associated with music, and usually it occurs late in the season, like at church on Christmas Eve.

Trouble is ... I might have already had my moment in the most unlikely of places, the gym.

I was in the middle of adjusting a Nautilaus weight machine when I heard Paul Potts come through the headphones of my iPod singing, "O, Holy Night."

Now, I have relatively few Christmas songs among the 1,500 or so I have stored on my iPod. And a Christmas song very rarely comes on when I have the iPod set to randomly play music when I work work out at the gym.

So the fact that I heard a Christmas song on my iPod was unusual. The fact that it would be "O, Holy Night" -- one of my Christmas favorites -- was also unusual.

And I did get that wash of reflective satisfaction come over me as I listened to Potts sing. Potts, you see, isn't very well known as a singer. He was a winner of the United Kingdom version of "American Idol" a couple of years back. He was a nobody selling cell phones, won the competition and started recording albums of classical music -- a great story of the everyman who finds a way to rise above his ordinariness.

At any rate, I figure the Moment has to count. How could it not? It met all the qualifications I impose upon it every year.

But I've judged that it was too easy.

So I'm on the search for Moment II. I'm looking for a Moment double dip.

And I think it'll be pretty easy to find because my very large, very boisterous family is supposed to coalesce at my mother's.

And that's a Moment, let me tell you, several in fact.

Following a trend, by accident

I don't consider myself as being trendy. In fact, in retirement, I am the antithesis of trendy.

Since I don't go to an office anymore to go to work, I don't concern myself too much with the latest trends in ties or other office wear. My home office wear tends to be my pajamas until about 9:30 in the morning.

I was once trendy. Back in the days of Nehru jackets I had one, and the trendiness that followed was mostly in the fashion of what I wore to the office -- pants, jackets, shirts, ties. It was corporate trendy.

I don't think of myself as being trendy at all any more.

So, how is it that I've become trendy by having a goatee? Totally by accident, it turns out.

That news of my new-found trendiness comes from The Daily Beast, the online product of trend maven Tina Brown, late of Vanity Fair.

The cool people in today's society apparently have goatees -- actor superstar Brad Pitt, basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, and television news superstar Chuck Todd just to name a few.

Said The Daily Beast post: "Now the goatee has become the Gap T-shirt of beards. The New New Goatee can be worn at home or at the office, by the hip and unhip alike, signifying, well, just about anything."

I happened upon my goatee for the simple reason that I decided I just didn't want to shave as much anymore when I after my retirement back in June of 2008. I just got lazy.

Every morning, as part of the get-ready-for-work ritual, I shaved.

I'd been shaving for a long, long time ... since about sixth grade, given the werewolf genes among the male members of my family.

I started with a blade, then went to an electric razor for a while, then went back to a blade, always anxious for Gillette to come out with its next best thing -- the double blade, the triple blade, the quadruple blade, complete with pulsing head.

But when I stepped away from the office, I also wanted to step away from the routine that had so defined me for more than 30 years.

I didn't want to worry about whether my shoes matched my belt, whether my socks matched my shoes (or each other), whether my tie was sufficiently in style, whether my button down shirts were ironed, and whether my face was shaved or not.

What I found through my laziness, is that there's a certain gravitas to the goatee.

My mother says it makes me look 10 years older.

It is black flecked with gray ... or gray flecked with black. But I like it because it makes me look wise, much wiser than I really am.

I've earned my elder statesman status, by accident or not.