I’m still steeping in the afterglow of our wedding. We returned home to Bostonas it slides into fall. Things feel entirely new and also comfortably the same.
What surprised me most about the wedding, I explained to my friend, B, was not the stress or bliss (although there were both), but the ineffable sense of transformation. Marching up and down the aisle felt like how Cheryl Strayed describes completing the PCT in the final pages of Wild: I understood “its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was.”
Each week, we live our way into the answer:
A life well lived is…
I. SATISFYING
WHAT I’M DELIGHTING IN THIS WEEK
This “September Sounds” playlist from Frama.
Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love: A Novel—on learning “that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.” Whether intentionally or not, the novel intriguingly explores many of the losing and winning relational strategies Terry Real describes in The New Rules for Marriage. I was also struck by the novel’s ability, as one review notes, “to pin our hopes, methods, and insecurities to the page.”
Inside Out 2 on the plane back from Edinburgh—which has many parallels with Internal Family Systems and parts work.
Esther Perel’s podcast Where Should We Begin—especially her How’s Work? series.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, again. And again, D wept.
II. ENGAGING
WHY & HOW I’M STARTING TO RUCK
On the surface, I’m an unlikely candidate for rucking. In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter defines “ruck” as both a noun and a verb: “It’s military-speak for the heavy backpack that carries all of the items a soldier needs to fight a war. And ‘to ruck’ or ‘rucking’ is the act of marching that ruck in war, or as a form of training for soldiers or civilians to get really, really fit.”
A potent combination of endurance and strength, GQ deemed rucking “The Workout of 2024.” But rucking is neither new nor complex. “Humans are, in fact, ‘born to carry.’ We evolved to walk great distances while carrying weight.” For Easter and his devotees (Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, etc.), simply “walking with weight is the missing link in human health and fitness.”
And it might be particularly advantageous for women, especially as we age. There’s evidence that rucking can help improve women’s bone density, muscle strength, cardiovascular capacity and endurance, and insulin sensitivity.
In addition to these health benefits, what attracts me to rucking is its practicality. This is not a new exercise to add to my longevity routine but an addition (of weight) to the Zone 2 cardio I’m already doing.
While the evidence is clear why women should ruck, determining how to do so is not. From what I could find pecking around the internet, here’s the beginner women’s training plan I’ve knitted together:
Weight: How much to carry will depend on your total body weight and fitness level, but generally, start with 12-15 pounds.
Duration: Start rucking for 30 minutes over even ground at a brisk pace, increasing your duration by 15 minutes every two weeks. (Once you hit 60 minutes, gradually increase your weight to 30 pounds maximum).
Consistency: Start rucking two to three days a week with ample time to recover in between (for me, Monday, Wednesday, Friday).
Gear: Another element of rucking unique to women is the gear. Will the bags designed for the (male) Special Forces also accommodate female frames? The brand, RUKR, suggests otherwise. (They know their audience well: I double-clicked on a promotional email titled “Why do men get the best gear?”). I purchased RUKR’s 12-pound Element Weighted Vest.
I’m curious: Do you have any interest in rucking? What are your reservations? If you’re already rucking, what are your recommendations for someone just starting out?
III. MEANINGFUL
HOW THE END OF A LOVE STORY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
Alain de Botton in The Course of Love on what love stories often miss:
The start [of a relationship] receives such disproportionate attention because it isn’t deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future—or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love…
The stories of relationships, maintained over decades, without obvious calamity or bliss, remain—fascinatingly and worryingly—the exceptions among the narratives we dare to tell ourselves about love’s progress.
“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”—Glennon Doyle