Crush the Run on Your Next Military Physical Fitness Test

(Mo Farah and Galen Rupp go 1-2 in the 2012 Olympic 10k. Many years, thousands of miles, lots of heartache and self-doubt proceed Olympic victory. You don't need to do any of that to run your best 1.5 mile PT test.)

Two years ago I was overweight, out of shape and had developed permanent plantar fasciitis in both feet. This didn't happen overnight, over one month or one year. For ten years, my times had slipped little by little until I was running nearly three minutes slower. And I was caught in a vicious cycle. Unable to run much because of the pain in my feet I got heavier. The extra weight added more stress to my injured feet and made them even less able to sustain the impact of running; more pounds-->less running-->more pounds-->less running, etc.  

Thanks to some good orthotics I approached my most recent fitness test with some ability to run and a few months to train. From October 2014 until my fitness test in Jan 2015 I followed the program detailed below. Being fat and injured forced me to think about training in a different way. When I was 20 years old and a college cross-country runner I could have fixed my problem by running 60-80 miles a week with intervals, hills and strength training. That was untenable for lots of reasons. The program below worked for me and I think it could work for a lot of other military folks looking to do better on their 1.5-3.0 mile run (Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines). It's simple and efficient but it's not "easy". Running focused workouts that are typically less than 30 minutes a couple times a week will give you all the boost you need to crush your next physical fitness run.  

Best Reads of 2014

Confession: Last year's reading year was paltry. At first I struggled to recall what happened such that I could only get through 10-12 books. Then I remembered: we had a baby in the spring (Yea!!), the summer was mostly tied up with GRE studying (Boo!!), learning Portuguese (Yea!!!) and the autumn with a Game Theory MOOC on Coursera (Yea!!!) Sadly, I did not get to much of what I intended to read for 2014. In fact, looking back on what was read I found that I strayed widely from what I intended. The war maxim "No plan survives first contact" holds in life as well.
Again, these books weren't necessarily published in 2014 but I happened to read them for the first time. They were new to me...perhaps to you as well. Happy reading in 2015.

Urban Warfare

David Kilcullen's latest book makes a decently provocative claim about the future of warfare although he hedges quite a bit throughout. The basis of his projections are the facts that humans are clustering in cities to an extent never before seen. Along with urban migration, these mega-cities (Mumbai, Rio, Lagos) are also increasingly littoral. Kilcullen asks us to think of these cities as organisms or environmental systems with flows of people, energy, infrastructure, etc. Cities encounter problems when overpopulation strains the local government's ability to provide sewage, electricity, trash, security and other basic services. This can create criminal or insurgent groups which compete for control of a city sector or sub-population. He explains this in the third chapter of the book, "The Theory of Competitive Control". This section I found to be most interesting.

The claim that more warfare will take place in urban and littoral settings is not that far-reaching. Warfare is about humans. If humans accelerate their living patterns to these types of habitats then it seems logical, ceteris paribus, that more warfare will occur in these settings. However, Kilcullen's claim is stronger. Cities offer refuge and resources, an asymmetric advantage, to sub-state groups. Their comparative advantage vis a vis the US and the nation-state system is in the city. Warfare will be less Afghanistan and more Mogadishu. Fighting village-to-village on the mountainous border with Pakistan is an anomaly. We will fight these groups for competitive control but it will be in dense urban areas.  

The appendix promised some proscriptions about how to prepare a military to deal with the security challenges of urban littoral settings. This section under-delivered but to be fair it was not intended to be part of Kilcullen's main point.       

Aside from the third chapter, which I found insightful and provocative, the rest of the book felt like a long-form article that went to 200+ pages. It was all mostly useful but the length of the book (290pgs) didn't justify itself. That said, it wasn't as if the work was 500 pages. Still easily digestible in a few days. Recommend for strategists and those interested in warfare...YMMV otherwise.