// posted December 01, 2008 by Lou Schuler

One of my favorite events each year is the annual JP Fitness Summit.

Information about the 2009 Summit has just been posted, and it looks like a great lineup of speakers: Alan Aragon, who was a big hit at last year's event; Leigh Peele, an Internet friend I've looked forward to meeting; Jamie Hale, an up-and-coming strength coach; and some bald-headed guy, who's usually good for a few laughs.

This year's Summit is May 15-17. The big news is that it's moving to Kansas City after six years in Little Rock. I've been to five of the events in Little Rock, and always enjoyed myself, but I confess I'm looking forward to the change. I have family in K.C., so this trip is a combo platter for me -- fun with my Internet friends, and fun with my mom, siblings, and nieces and nephews.

I couldn't ask for anything better. (And if I did, why would anyone listen?)
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Tags: personal , jp fitness summit

// posted November 23, 2008 by Lou Schuler

Let me say up front that I've never coached a team at any level before, and don't pretend to have any particular skills or knowledge in that area. All I know is that my daughter's recreational league needed someone to coach, I volunteered, and managed to get the team through the season almost undefeated.

In fact, we were undefeated until yesterday. But nobody expected our team to win that last game, so in that sense I still consider the season a remarkable success.

Readers of my original Male Pattern Fitness blog may remember this entry, about one of my daughter's soccer games two years ago.

Here's a quick recap of the part that's relevant to this post:

My daughter [Meredith] is probably the youngest player in the league (her birthday was just on the wrong side of the cutoff), which means the median player is a year older and some are nearly two years older. She's also short for her age, which is exacerbated by the age gap. But she doesn't care. She plays hard, particularly on defense.

So, in the third quarter, [Meredith] was playing defense on the same side of the field as the [gigantic daughter of the other team's coach, who had been scoring at will and running up the score on my daughter's team]. And, as is her custom, she was going right after the big girl, stopping her cold every time she put a foot on the ball. The other team ran the offense through their giant, so when Meredith tied her up, she in effect stopped their entire team.


After a few minutes of this, Meredith fell to the ground, holding her face. Play stopped, and I sprinted out onto the field. Meredith was sobbing, holding her nose. It wasn't bleeding, but I'm sure everyone reading this knows what it feels like to get whacked right on the bridge, which is apparently what happened.



My daughter doesn't normally take things that happen on the field personally. But in this case she was livid. Madame Maxime, she said, had elbowed her, and she'd done it on purpose.

After I wrote that post, and after my daughter's team went up against that team again in the spring season, I realize Meredith was telling the truth. The other coach's daughter is not only the biggest player in the league, she's also the dirtiest. I don't use that term lightly when I'm talking about an 11- or 12-year-old girl. I mean she shoves, kicks, and elbows opponents to gain an advantage.

So that brings me back to yesterday's game, the last of the season, against the monster team.

Our girls hadn't played for three weeks because of rain and a bye week, and we hadn't practiced all month because of the time change (it gets dark too early to hold practices).

It sounds like I'm making excuses, but I'm really not. Despite three weeks without soccer, our girls outplayed the monsters for the first half. We really had them rattled -- one girl on their team was scream-grunting like Maria Sharapova, and the coach's Ivan Drago-like daughter was shoving and leg-whipping our girls all over the field.

(Some of the fouls were so blatant that the teenaged referee, who looked like she hadn't gotten much sleep in recent nights, shook herself out of her lethargy long enough to call some of the most flagrant penalties.)

Unfortunately, we ran out of gas after halftime. I should add that it was about 33 degrees at game time, with a really sharp and relentless wind. Our girls couldn’t keep up the intensity, and were seriously outplayed in the second half.

But for all that, the final score was 2-1, and the girls who were on the field for the game-untying goal said the ball was in our goalie's hands when a girl on the other team kicked it in. That's against the rules, but since the other coach doesn't care about rules, it doesn't really matter. If the ref had overruled that goal, his players would've gotten nastier, and one or more of my players might've gotten hurt. (Earlier in the game one of them had kicked our goalie in the thigh, the kind of play you don’t really see in girls' rec-league soccer.)

As the man said, let the Wookiee win.

So that ended our undefeated season, but I don't think any of the kids or parents really cared. Everyone had fun, everyone improved their soccer skills, and no one got hurt. And despite having a first-time coach, we didn't really have any close games before this one. (One game ended in a 1-1 tie, but it was called after one quarter because of a monsoon-like rainstorm. We'd beaten that team by several goals earlier in the season.) One of my proudest achievements as a coach is that we never rolled up the score on weaker teams, and we never hurt any opposing players.

After the game, after the obligatory handshakes, the other team got off the field as fast as they could pack their packs. Our team stayed around, cheering for each other as I handed out trophies I'd bought for the girls.

I'm not one to claim moral victories, but I'm pretty sure we were the happiest team on the field that day. And that's something I hope the players never forget. I'm pretty sure I won't.


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Tags: soccer , family , sports , coaching

// posted November 19, 2008 by Lou Schuler

Sometimes it sucks to be me. Don't get me wrong: the career is great, the family is terrific, and my health is fine. But when it comes to issues related to technology, it’s unbelievably frustrating to be middle-aged and uninitiated to the mysteries of HTML code.

Which is ironic, given the fact that I live online. I work for a website, I do 99 percent of my job via email, and I get most of my news from the Internet on any given day. I don’t even subscribe to a daily newspaper anymore.

And yet, when it comes to a fairly simple thing like keeping my personal website up and running, I'm lost.

The original louschuler.com was a pretty nice-looking site – kudos to the designer – but it was always dysfunctional. It just didn’t work particularly well.

When the designer gave up trying to fix it, I went to an IT company recommended by a friend. They helped me with it for a couple of years, but then when I went to them with a plan for a redesign, the owner floored me with a flat-out rejection. He fired me as a client. His tech guy hated working on my site, and they just didn't want my business anymore.

That’s when I made the mistake of trying to fix some things myself. I looked under the hood, made a few tweaks, and left my site dead in the water. It was frozen in time in September 2007. Readers who happened by could still read my older posts and get information about my books, but I couldn't add or update anything to what was already there.

At first it didn't seem like a huge problem. I had a new blog, Male Pattern Fitness, which kept me busy and connected to readers.

Weeks with a frozen site turned into months before I finally got around to hiring a new IT team to give the site an overhaul. The owner of the server that hosted my site offered to do the job for a suspiciously low price. I had no reason to suspect them of being up to no good – I'd been on their server for four years at that point, and the few times we had a breakdown they took care of it. My emails and phone calls were always returned promptly, usually by the company's owner.

But something changed in the spring of 2008. After I'd paid them for the work, I got one email updating me on their progress, and then . . . nothing.

To this day, nothing.

The site was always up in all its frozen splendor. My email usually worked. But I never heard from the owner or anyone connected with her company. Either they were dead to me, or I was dead to them, or we were mutually dead to each other. Maybe somebody died in the literal sense. I don't know, because nobody will tell me.

This fall, my colleague Nate Green recommended his friend, Jason Lengstorf of Ennui Design, for the long-overdue redesign and relaunch of my personal site.

If you're reading this, you know he actually got the site up and running again, and for good measure moved it to a server run by verifiably sentient beings.

It's taken a long time and cost me some money – not a fortune, but there are commas involved – but I finally have a working site again. For that, I want to thank Jason, Nate, and anybody who wanders by to read this.

Now let's see how long it takes before technology brings me down again.


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// posted September 24, 2007 by Lou Schuler

My friend Joe Stankowski gave me a nice write-up over at his blog, Morning Cup of Joe.

And just because this is my lucky month, I'm quoted in this story from the October issue of Women's Health, which is on newsstands now.
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Tags: personal

// posted July 14, 2007 by Lou Schuler

Leigh Peele just posted a detailed and very flattering interview with me on her blog. It's the first time I've gone into this kind of detail about the content of New Rules of Lifting for Women, and I get into the book's backstory as well.

I'll be referring to this one often in the months leading up to the book's release on December 27.
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Tags: personal