Despite that, I was determined to move forward with my workout routine. I had intended this entire month to be a solid training period, but I can see I have let the last few days get a little unbalanced, and going to bed early enough to recover (at least somewhat) from the day is an important part of keeping myself on a solid routine. When I don’t have enough rest I feel not just the normal tired, but training tired… which means what most people would call sluggish and sore — feelings that normally never affect me if I’m always working out and taking care of myself.

“Taking care of myself” has, until this month, also included eating a certain way. But gorging on McDonald’s for 30 days straight while keeping an otherwise normal routine is the whole point here so… whatev.

I went for my normal run and turned it in 20:48. Not bad, considering how pooped and slow I felt today. But that could have just been hitting green lights all the way.

One thing I noticed selecting shots for this blog entry, though, was how amazingly not-fatter I look after 27 days of McDonald’s. I mean, this is incredibly not like what happened on Super Size Me:

Did McDonald’s do this?!?

Granted, I’m not going to be posing for any man-pr0nz any time soon, but wow… I had come into this thinking that there would have been some downside to eating McDonald’s for a month straight. Who knows, maybe in the next two days I will explode in a giant ball of butter and cheese. But there’s just not much time left for me to become an unbearable fatass. There is also not much time left for my bloodwork to go haywire, considering how not really bad I feel, how strong I still am and how not fat I’ve gotten.

Anyway… blah blah blah. I did my run, wound up sleeping through my lifting time (yeah, that will make you feel like a complete dirtbag) and then went in to box.

Monkey see the knee…

Monkey do the knee… (but not as good)

My boxing workout wasn’t insane and I didn’t get carried away rolling with Leandro like I did yesterday. That was a good thing, every time I spend all night wrestling after boxing I overdo things and then feel like trash the next day. It’s almost like a hangover, but it is a hangover from kicking ass, so it’s justifiable.

I did mostly technical work today:

1R jumprope
2R knees
2R front kick
1R heavy bag
2R high knees (heavy bag)
2R heavy mitts (+ push ups)
2R speed/form work with paddles (+ push-ups)

Ell… thinking it would be funny to kick me… a lot.

The “+ push-ups” part was the result of me confessing to not having lifted today. Ell thought it was funny to have me do push-ups through the entire break between rounds for the last four. Har har har… That was only easy for the first round. I thought I was going to do myself in by the time the fourth round was over.

Push ups… making men feel like wimps since 1969 BC

Trying to make myself feel like running…
I had taken a day and a half off to rest after over-working myself to a pretty severe degree on Monday. My run time today was very strange: 21:14. That is exactly the same run time I turned in on Day 24, the day after I broke myself off. Of course, today felt entirely different. Whereas it was an effort just to finish two days ago, today it was an effort to restrain myself and not run too fast. I can still feel the effects of overtraining, but they are not as pronounced. My shin splints are also going away… so yay!

I didn’t feel comfortable going to lift weights today. I didn’t feel like avoiding the gym, I just did not feel as steady as I should to do the lifts I wanted to do. I needed to make up my missed weight workouts, after all, and that means (by my thinking) doing more large movements with heavy weight. The best thing I have found to do on make-up days are huge movements like dead-lifts, cleans, flat bench, etc. but all of those are a little scary to do alone on a day where I feel well-rested and energetic. I do not want to go in there feeling a little tired and have no spotter as I try some of those. So I just opted out. This is one of the primary reasons I hate working out alone… there is no one to back me up who I feel comfortable with and I am not confident pushing myself like I should without anyone else around.

When I went to the other gym today to train, I found a pleasant surprise: Leandro was there and ready to roll!

Nobody was around yet so I got him all to myself. He asked me if there was anything specific I wanted to go over, and of course having the opportunity to pick his brain on half guard sounded like great fun…

Running drills on a half-guard pass Leandro suggested to me

Then the new guys showed up and we had a class…

New guys have to discover their danger zones the hard way

After that I needed to change and do some boxing. Farrap was my trainer today and told me I needed to take things a little slower and focus on movement with him, not on knocking the crap out of a heavy bag and wearing myself out. I think Farrap underestimates himself and does not realize that doing movement and pad drills with him wears me out, maybe more than a heavy bag does.

Well deserved chicken nuggets…

By the end of things I had rolled for two hours, but most of it in a very light, fluid way with Leandro and boxed a decent 8-round workout (2 rounds shadow, 1 round heavy bag, 1 round movement, 2 rounds heavy mitts, 2 rounds focus mitts). I was extremely hungry, but felt otherwise very good and was highly satisfied with what I had accomplished today.

I woke up with some pretty awesome bed-head and wasn’t motivated to do much about that. I wasn’t motivated to do much of anything accept for eat more. I wasn’t ravenous like yesterday, but I still had a pretty good appetite.

My nappy face

Today was not a run day so the morning was nice and relaxing. I thought I could spend some time feeling myself out and at least get in for a light leg workout and boxing, but it just wasn’t going to happen today. I was too tired and my legs were already too strained feeling to be trying to kick anything. So… another rest day. I feel like I’m taking a lot of these, but comparing them with my output on the work days, things are coming out about right. A smoother pace feels better, though.

My new, other past-time: Assembling McDonald’s toys.

I noticed something interesting today. I looked visibly thinner in the mirror this morning than I did a week ago. The fat around my tummy is going away at an almost alarming rate, making me wonder if this diet, despite seeming so heavy, is actually a lot lighter than what I normally eat. I have done this level of work before, it is not so unusual for me… but I usually gain weight, not lose it. Body fat usually does go away, but as things stand right now I think I am actually lose weight overall and fat in particular.

That just makes me wonder what my normal diet calorie count actually is. One good thing about McDonald’s is that it is very easy to check how much you are eating of what if you compare your receipts with the table they publish. When I cook at home I usually make things from scratch so I have no clue how much of what is in which thing. Interesting consequence.

This is my tired face

I ran my regular route in 21:14, which was about a minute slower than yesterday, but I just didn’t have anything else in me. 20+ minute 2.5 mile runs are not fast by any standard, but even 21:14 was difficult today. It was more of a survival run than a training experience. I tried everything: running slow, running fast, big steps, small steps, smooth, choppy, anything I could think of… and it all just sucked. I was simply too tired. I could feel when I got back home that I hadn’t accomplished anything other than confirming that I had overdone things last night.

My legs hurt, my chest felt hollow and things just weren’t working right. After the run I spent a nice, long cool-down period and stretched out a lot and got ready to go eat.

I decided that the wisest thing to do was to cancel the rest of my training for the day because it just wouldn’t do to crush myself under a barbell or damage my legs or shoulders boxing. With only one week remaining in the experiment an injury would risk the remainder and that just doesn’t make sense.  Regardless what I do today, my body will have to put its full energy into rebuilding and restoring itself and that will require food, all of which will come from McDonald’s, so this should still give me a clear picture of whether or not my body is adapting to this diet or not.

Recovery food?

Of course, at this point I don’t really feel any different than I did when I started and my blood work was great at the mid-point test, so I don’t think there’s much to worry about. The big change was that last night I met a BJJ guy who was better than me and a ton of fun to roll with and I wasted myself doing boxing and that all at once.

And on the point of diet… I was starving… all day. I could get to feeling full, but I always felt hungry again right afterwards. It was sort of a miserable feeling because I’m tired of eating the same food every day and going all the way to McDonald’s every time I get hungry is beginning to be a pain in the ass.

Bleh! Overtraining sucks and feeling worn out to this degree is not a very fun thing. I need to curb my enthusiasm a little if I plan on double-work at the gym. It changes a three-a-day schedule into a four-a-day schedule to roll and box on the same day. Without pacing the entire day a certain way and putting a lot more technique work into the routine (as opposed to going full-force on pads and on thr ground so often) there is no way I could keep up with a schedule like yesterdays with any regularity.

But why would AIDS research money be in any area other than vaccines these days? Just a few years ago several now-forgotten subsidiaries of the most respected pharmaceutical companies were hard at work trying to develop a vaccine for AIDS. This was natural as every human in the world was a potential (and almost certain) customer, so even a very cheap vaccine would see at least 6 billion units sold as quickly as they could be produced. This is not even counting the market position one would have for the duration of the patent’s life, as the vaccine would almost certainly be a worldwide child vaccination requirement.

The fact that the vaccines never made it to market (and most never even to trials) and the striking reality that nearly all of these companies or subsidiaries no longer sponsor AIDS vaccine research or in some cases even exist is a testament both to the difficulty of this sort of research and the negative effects of intellectual property threats from a huge number of sources.

The basic problem with medical research is that it simply is not free. A common misconception in the pharmaceutically un-invested public is that pharmaceuticals are produced by companies which are dark, evil and seek to control life, death and the money involved with those two. People further assume that somehow the sort of extremely difficult and exhaustive research required to develop truly innovative and life-saving drugs and techniques is not worth the enormous effort (represented by money) required for such research and that companies have no right to recoup the billions they spend annually on such research by charging market prices for drugs.

The drug research industry has seen a huge contraction in recent years, particularly in areas such as AIDS prevention research and drugs simply because they are afraid of investing the time and money required to produce a stable product only to have their intellectual rights trampled and product stolen.

“But that’s ridiculous!” was the first response I got to this. It is not. Consider that every populist government on the planet and nearly every left-leaning political party or private organization has plainly stated that any technical knowledge which has the potential to reduce or eradicate AIDS will and must be appropriated in the public interest. No compensation is mentioned here and none is intended. The image of drug companies being only after money (as if that were somehow a crime and against the public interest) and therefore evil greatly assists this assertion and has, indeed, protected such policies and the men who promote them from any backlash. They have, in fact, usurped the moral high-ground and made their intended theft appear moral — and amazingly made working hard and spending money to eradicate AIDS with the expectation of being compensated for this effort appear evil. Amazing, isn’t it?

French and Canadian health consortia have both stated that they will strike the intellectual property rights of whatever company first successfully develops an AIDS vaccine within their jurisdictions. Under their proposed programs government-subsidized generic drug makers are the ones who will provide the “public service” of producing at-cost generic AIDS vaccinations for everyone. This sentiment sounds great to anyone not actually involved in trying to find an AIDS vaccine… or to anyone who lacks an understanding of how all the medical miracles we take for granted today have come into being (not to mention the mountain of other miracle gadgets that make modern life what it is… from elevators to airplanes).

I personally was heavily invested in more than one company trying to develop an AIDS vaccine back in the days when that was a popular and forward thinking thing to do. I invested money not simply because I want to see AIDS done away with (I enjoy philandering enough to have a personal interest in seeing this disease wiped out, after all) but most importantly because I want to see a decent return on my investment capital.

In the end, I have the intellectual and operational capacity as an individual to avoid contracting AIDS under nearly all circumstances, so I am much less worried about contracting AIDS personally than I am getting a decent return on my money. I am not unique in this regard. Saving the world simply doesn’t make you any money. I tried it for years, risking my own life in the process, and you just walk away with divorces under your belt, kids who don’t know you and a home country that “respects” you from afar but doesn’t understand or care to know you as a person anymore. However, investing money in things that are inherently useful (and therefore worth money) is something that is easy to believe in, no matter how cynical the world has made you, and the pinnacle of functionality for humans is something that has the potential to save their very lives from something like AIDS.

But the problem with such a thing is that everybody who doesn’t have anything to do with the effort wants it, and not just wants it bad enough to pay for it (which is your whole angle as an investor) but wants it bad enough to steal it. Enough of them want to steal it that they will vote together to make the process of stealing it legal. So in the end you can invest billions in an AIDS vaccine and the only thing that will ever come of it is for people to not thank you and repay you, but to steal the product of your long labor in a flurry of moral self-certainty and self-righteously call you an “evil pharmaceutical profiteer”. Some way to thank the group who worked so long an hard to save the world from AIDS.

Where is the fun in that? Lose my investment while the bleeding hearts pat themselves on the back for what amounts to intellectual property theft leaving all those who worked hard on the project to wonder what happened and why they are suddenly unable to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labor instead of looking for jobs or investment opportunities in another sector. After all, once research is proven to be unprofitable, does anyone imagine smart money would continue to fund smart researchers only to repeat the painful experience of being legally robbed? Research is a business and it takes huge sums of money to pay huge teams of talented researchers who can demand appropriately huge salaries for committing years of their lives to this extremely difficult and deep research. Researchers are easy to come by, but motivated, insightful, good researchers of the caliber a private concern are willing to pay top money for are frighteningly rare.

So… to bring a rambling article to its focus: What happened to all those very promising trial vaccines and the companies that were producing them? They all shut down. Funding was withdrawn, people were let go, the information collected across thousands of man-years of research was recorded, sealed and secured probably forever, never to see the light of day. The research is simply too controversial. It appears that nobody is ever going to let an investor or company make a dime off of an AIDS vaccine, at least not while it is still a political topic instead of an actual disease that actually infects Real People(TM) in the minds of billions of people around the world. That means all the money will move into other, less controversial areas of research or different sectors of industry entirely and AIDS vaccines will continue to be a largely neglected area of research.

But what about government grants? Those exist, sure, but they provide a mere fraction of what is necessary for research at this level with any speed. There is not a war against AIDS and AIDS is not threatening the national security of a country such as the US which actually has the means to do something about it. So it will fall to the side in favor of more pressing issues such as people who kill citizens by the thousands with airplanes or other political hot button topics such as making sure that Planet English only produces literature using feminine or gender-neutral pronouns (even when it doesn’t make sense) or global warming (which are far less controversial on the surface, despite being based on far shakier science than AIDS research).

As discussed above researchers are easy to come by — the dirtbag, non-productive type, I mean. The sort of researcher who is content to subsist on government grants which require no real way of quantifying, qualifying or substantiating their research for funding justification (which is what the government grant game is all about) are not the same sort of top-notch engineers and researchers hired by companies who have the private investment capital to pay bigger salaries for bigger brains. Research, just like making drugs, is a business after all, and nobody goes to MIT or interns at the Mayo Clinic to end their life poor, merely happy with the “difference” they made on a crap government salary.

The South African trial in most likely will fail, but the failure being based on an extremely limited group (most trials based on prevention, not treatment, utilize a pool of thousands, not tens, for very good reasons) will be easy enough to publicly misinterpret long enough to attract some unwise investors into impulsively tossing their money away at this company in time for the company to close its doors and stop operating at a realized profit — and yes, halting operations after absorbing free bags of stupid money (as opposed to smart money mentioned above) is a business model, though it’s a swindle, not a productive interprise.

This certainly appears to be a stunt that the media is trumpeting out of sheer hope, not based on concrete and promising data. I hope that AIDS gets eradicated; further, I hope that I can profit from that eradication. I’m happy either way, but something nobody is going to stand by (at least not me) for is to see AIDS get eradicated and the people responsible for the work behind it to get nothing but a smirk, a smile, or robbed in return.