Boom! This is Books & Biceps #353!

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BOOKS

The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map by Alex Hutchinson

Alex Hutchinson is one of my favorite authors and dudes. He not only does super deep dives on topics that I find endlessly fascinating, from human performance to exploration to endurance and beyond, but he also goes on cool adventures with his family and he even has his own garage gym dubbed Flex Factory North.

I interviewed Alex for his last book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, here in Books & Biceps and it was one of our best received interviews because we got useful information and takeaways you can use right now.

Endure became a runaway NY Times bestseller (as it should have) and now Hutchinson’s new book is out, which is the perfect complement to his previous work:

The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors and the Blank Spots on the Map

The upcoming interview is thorough and awesome because I loved this book and had some specific, research-type questions. And since you’re a sophisticated meathead reading this, you’ll enjoy the hell out of this conversation. 

Read the full 5 Question Q&A below and then immediately buy the book. I promise there will be ten takeaways that will change how you think about what you want to do and how you want to explore for the rest of your life.

ONE

FINKEL: You casually start the book with an impressive family trek through the wilderness with your wife and kids along the Long Range Traverse in Newfoundland. And you drop this line in there: “There was no source of water nearby, so I had to bushwack down the slope for ten minutes until I found a little rivulet that was clear and deep enough to fill our bottles.”

You mentioned bushwhacking a few times in this section. Are you talking about smashing through brush with a machete? Scaling thorny bushes? Paint us a picture of your legendary dad prowess haha.

HUTCHINSON: I’m not very good at painting pictures, but I can definitely paste a photo in here:

This stuff is called “tuckamore” in Newfoundland, which is basically the stunted, gnarled trees that grow on windy sub-alpine coasts and form an almost impenetrable barrier. I didn’t have a machete, and it probably wouldn’t have helped (mostly because I would have cut off my toe or something). You just have to push through and get scratched.

As for dad prowess, please note the extra backpack strapped to my own backpack in that pic. I eventually realized that it was too much to expect my younger daughter to push through this stuff while also wearing a pack. This is visual proof that I’m not a complete bastard.

TWO

Nils Van Der Poel is my new favorite trailblazing athlete. He’s an Olympic speed skating champion you profile who flipped training on its head, by spending most of his time building overall strength and endurance off the ice (5 hour bike rides in hills, three hour runs)…before dialing in for the big races close to events. I’ve been thinking heavily about this for swimming.

Particularly the 50 fly. Strength and speed work instead of hundreds of laps at a time. What is your takeaway on this kind of unconventional training? Does it crossover most of the time?

If we took a poll of Olympic champions, I guess it would be one vote for the van der Poel method and 10,000 votes for “just do the thing you’re training to do over and over.” Still, there’s no doubt that van der Poel’s cross-training approach has had a big impact on how athletes from a bunch of different sports—running, cycling, skiing—think about their training. And there’s some solid logic behind it.

The one caveat I’d add is that van der Poel already knew how to skate. He was a two-time world junior champion and Olympian before he started this experiment, so he already had thousands of hours getting the reps in on his speed skating technique. I don’t think this approach would work for someone trying to learn how to skate. For you, you’ve got the butterfly muscle memory, but you do need to spend enough time in the pool to make sure your form is on point. With the van der Poel method, you can do that form work at race pace, which might be more effective than doing a bunch of slow laps.

THREE

Robert Wilson’s Horizon Task Data is fascinating. Is this something that we can alter by simply being aware of it happening? Like can we consciously reverse the trend? Can you give a quick summary of what it is and why we should all be aware of it as we age?

Wilson uses gambling games to study how and when we decide to explore riskier options versus sticking with safe bets. In his Horizon Task study, he found that we explore more when we have lots of turns left and get gradually less exploratory as we approach the end of the game. This makes good intuitive (and mathematical) sense: it’s more useful to explore when you have more time left to benefit from whatever you discover. It’s also a metaphor for life: kids explore a ton, old people stick with what they know.

The hard question is whether we can—or should—try to fight this trend of decreasing exploration. We can’t just snap our fingers and become young and naïve again. For better or worse, I already know that I don’t like eggplant, suck at ballroom dancing, and fare very poorly after drinking a pint of gin. I don’t need (or want!) to re-explore these questions. But there are plenty of tastes and activities and experiences that I still want to explore, and I do think being aware of the tendency to explore less can help us fight it: as G.I. Joe used to say, knowing is half the battle.

BICEPS

My son and I have been watching all of the Mission Impossible movies the last few weeks to get ready for the final installment this weekend.

Tom Cruise, of course, does a lot of running. In fact, the running joke about Cruise running in movies is so funny because when you watch a bunch of his movies in close succession, in this case about a half-dozen in two weeks, you watch him racing full tilt in cities and exotic locations around the world. Rooftops. Airports. Deserts. Glaciers. Buildings. Crowded streets. The man runs everywhere. I don’t think more than twenty minutes of screen time ever happens where he’s not racing off somehow.

Interestingly, in the millions of interviews he’s done, I’ve never actually heard him talk about running or why he loves it so much… until today.

This Australian TV Show host got Cruise himself to comment on her own running and then he launched into a monologue about why he’s loved running since he was a kid and the thing is… I don’t care how many billions of dollars Cruise has or how famous he is… This is the most relatable explanation for why sprinting is awesome that you’ll hear from anyone:

And if you’re looking for a Tom Cruise-Inspired Sprinting Workout, here’s one:

Find a distance you can sprint. Could be on a track, on a field or between mailboxes or driveways on your street.

Do 20 sprints with 30 seconds rest between each one.

Do this at least once a week. Twice if you’re feeling like Ethan Hunt.

Guaranteed to improve you overall health, cardio, fitness and speed!

QUICK FLEXES

Macho Man died 14 years ago this week. Writing his biography was a bucket list career experience for me and I appreciate each and every one of you who bought the book and wrote me. I hadn’t watched it in a while, but man, this book trailer still hits so hard! SOUND UP:

I spent last weekend in Atlantic Beach near Jacksonville for a Midlife Male adventure. It was awesome and if you’re a dude 40+, you need to subscribe ASAP. Also, I woke up to catch the sunrise on the first day and grabbed a near-perfect photo:

STRONG LINKS

In honor of our 350th issue I made a LIMITED EDITION POWDER BLUE Books & Biceps Official Tee! The response has been tremendous...

I was originally only going to print 25, but since so many of you liked it, I’ll extend ordering until June 1st. Which means you’ve only got 1 WEEK LEFT TO ORDER!

Look at this beauty! Full Carolina blue with that glorious logo on the left lapel AKA the left pec for us sophisticated meatheads! Grab it before it’s gone!

PS: If you’ve bought one and received it, hit me with a pic and I’ll share it here!

1) This is the single most relatable newsletter about start-ups you’ll ever read. And it’s by the guy who founded Beehiiv, the platform host of this newsletter. His name’s Tyler. His newsletter’s Big Desk Energy. You’ll love it:

2) And if you love Underdog Stories in Sports, you’ll love this. One of my favorite new reads:

Generation Griffey is still the #1 Sports & Pop Culture book for dudes who grew up in the 80s and 90s… Get your copy!

If you still wear your hat backward like Griffey, think all the Prime flavors are dumb because Gatorade Citrus Cooler is the greatest sports drink ever, miss Blockbuster and Tower Records, destroyed your friends in Street Fighter, GoldenEye, and NBA Jam, can quote Tommy Boy and Billy Madison, and never missed Stu Scott on SportsCenter —this book, Generation Griffey, is for you.

I ranked 90 of the '90s things that made your dude childhood legendary. A rankfest, if you will. Ninety columns. By me. For you. For US.

Why Generation Griffey?

First, it’s a great name. We’ve got alliteration, “generation,” and the quintessential athlete of that era: Ken Griffey Jr.

Junior perfectly defines the era for late '80s and '90s kids because the apex of his career matches our childhood. From the day he joined the Mariners’ lineup in 1989 through the next decade, nobody embodied '90s style (the backward hat), swagger (the swing, the smile, the commercials), and coolness (the kicks, the cameos, the crossover stardom) quite like Griffey.
His reign atop the sports/celebrity pyramid (alongside Jordan) from his rookie year in Seattle to his move to the Reds in 2000 serves as the perfect bookend for all of us who grew up in the last decade of the last century.

See? Generation Griffey is a spectacular name for this book.

What are we ranking?

Everything. Well, noteverything, but the 90 most nostalgic things that make us dudes smile all these years later: the movies we quoted, the athletes we loved, the cards we collected, the foods we devoured, the shows we watched, and more. All of it. Got it? Good. Let’s go.