| Happy Sunday, everyone. Right around the first weeks of the year my thoughts turn to the cold. I miss it. I love the sun, the beach, the warm weather, but I do miss the cold. Can't deny it. It's in my blood. Go back thousands of years and my ancestors dealt with cold weather on a regular basis. Trudging through Scandinavian snowbanks, chopping wood and stoking the fire just to make life bearable. Later, crossing the channel during the Norman invasion, wind in the hair, salt spray chilling the skin. Go back to my childhood and you'll find a young Mark Sisson roaming the backwoods of Maine in wintertime, playing on the freezing beach. Now? I'd have to drive for half a day to even reach a place where I needed to bundle up, but I still know cold weather. If you have access to cold, go get outside. Think about what kind of climate environments your ancestors endured. Of course, your ancestors would have loved to have access to central heating and heated seats, just like they would have loved drive-thru food. You put them in a modern context and they'd suffer just like so many people today suffer. But that's not the point. The point is that your genes "expect": inclement weather. My genes expect cold weather from time to time. I can get by without it but I feel a whole lot better and my body is a whole lot happier with it, and it's probably true for many of you. (If it doesn't apply to you and your ancestors, just swap in the temperature extremes to which your ancestry is acclimated.) There is a physical limit to the amount of cold you can endure, a point after which your body succumbs. I'm not arguing against the existence of the limit. But the majority of people never get near it. Man, people from the Midwest or Mountain West would (and should) laugh, but it was always funny seeing the entire city of Los Angeles bust out the winter gear when the temp dropped below 60 degrees. Don't let it get to that point. Go outside. Do you like the cold? Even if you don't "like" it, don't you feel better having experienced it? Tell me how you feel about the cold (or other weather extremes) in last week's Weekly Link Love comment section. | 