Consistency and the cost of juggling

   I think that we have three core identities and only one of them is true. 

  Who you think I am.

  Who I think I am.

  Who I think you think I am. 

  For the longest time I wasn't really armed with those words, just a vague concept of identity. I believe that our identity isn't something that exists within us, but is (as Jimmy Carr put it) dispersed. I've long held this belief that every group or individual experiences different facets of who we are. Our identities live with them.  Ludalx gave me the three core identities concept in the beginning of that video, which it turns out is a quote by Charles Horton Cooley regarding the looking glass self, the concept that we view ourselves through the lenses of other's reactions to us in social situations. 

  At this point you may be saying "that's cool and all but what the hell does this have to do with consistency?" Well, I think we kind of unify those identities over time, given consistency and communication. Who we are doesn't just rest in what we say, but also what we do: to some people I'm still a photographer, to many of my family members I'm still a guitarist, to my partners I'm a hell of a cook, to my nephew I'm a gamer. There are people who see me consistently at the gym who know me as a gym guy, my coworkers know me as the networking guy. 

  Part of this feeds into the whole concept behind this blog: I am all of those guys, not at all times, each hobby takes different precedence in my life, but those are all a part of the whole. I still have the skills I've learned from each hobby. If a version of me stops showing up for a while, that doesn't mean it isn't latent inside of me, it just isn't active currently. We can only nurture so much day to day before we experience burnout. There's no one in my life in the city that sees me as the photography guy, and no one from the last few years in rural Oklahoma who sees me as the gym guy, neither of those things showed up to them. 

  The cost of consistency, ultimately, is shifting the perceptions other people have of you, and through them shifting your perception of yourself. The risk of that cost is burnout if you juggle too much; part of the reason I'm not the photography guy, or the miniature painter in my urban life is because I juggled every hobby I could, monetizing many of them, just to barely keep from drowning when things were hard. I burned all of my passion and interest in these things in a way that has been difficult to recover from. 

  There's also a different consistency in my life here: peace. It has been wonderful, but at the same time as taken a serious and unexpected toll. I lived for so long just barely making it that having this peace and quiet consistently has me feeling like something should be happening. I am learning to live with this new normal, leaning to accept that my identity is different to different people, how it changes and shifts as they see different facets of me. One of my partners said I'm different than the "I'm hot and I know it" Danny she met, but it was still false bravado I thought I needed to get through life, with the changes happening I was able to put that down and sit deeply in what I had going on. I'm having to relearn to love myself and be kind, because before this it was a front to keep the world from getting too far in when I had much too much going on. 

  I'm consolidating. I'm working to put together who I think I am, who you think I am, and who I think you think I am. It's slow progress, but it's a worthy pursuit.  

Turning self-improvement into a hobby

   Gamification doesn't work for me. I don't care about little numbers or achievements for doing my daily tasks or due diligence. I don't feel the need for reward for doing what needs to be done. I don't hold it against anyone who it does work for, it just bounces off of me. I get a small hit of instant gratification from doing the hard thing, not because I love challenging myself (I do,) or because the nature of it being hard, but because I know that I will be basking in the glory of a task completed soon enough. I get a lot of joy out of things I can turn into data and track; I'm not sure if it's because the human brain is designed around finding patterns or simply because those metrics give me a sense of progress in what I'm doing, but I really enjoy it. 

  With that in mind I've furthered my self-improvement by beginning to count calories. I don't mind eating the same (or similar) things day in and day out, so I worked out my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and Total Daily Energy Expidenture (TDEE). Using the Mifflin-St Jeor Equation we come up with a BMR of 2,654 calories per day for a 39 year old man who is 6'0" and 375lbs. This is my resting rate, not taking any activity into account, the amount I would burn just existing in bed all day. When you take into account my 6 weeks of elevated activity where I'm averaging 1,160 actively burned calories per day, I wind up with 3,814 calories to maintain my current bodyweight. At a deficit of 1000 a week, I will lose 2lbs (about .9kg) a week while consuming 2,800 calories.

The aforementioned 6 weeks of significantly increased activity. 

   So I set to putting together a meal plan I can act on that will meet the caloric and macronutrient needs of my body moving forward. I don't want to start burning muscle for energy as this process goes on, so I will need a significant amount of Protein, I need lubrication for my joints since I exist in a larger body, so I will need a heavy dose of fats, and I need glycogen to fuel my workouts and walks, so I will need to eat a lot of carbs. I can do all of those things in a way that is smart and healthy for my body, while managing my type 2 diabetes and hopefully getting me to a point where I am no longer considered diabetic and can stop taking this damn medicine. I did some digging around, found a few good bits of information, and settled on this: 

Here we are, healthy fats, protein, good carb sources, and fiber! 

   The real deal here is that I've taken all of this data and turned it into a self-improvement tracker, a hobby I can consistently improve at. I'm using HEVY (@apieceofenergy) to track all of my workouts and get some more metrics like these: 

A solid distribution chart, pretty cool.

Obviously I started lifting again a few weeks ago

Clearly reps per muscle group have increased

 

  All of this gives me a ton of data to work with. Coupling that with my intent to increase my general health, undo the damage I've done to my body (or at least whatever damage I can reverse,) I have even more reference points for my progress in this particular endeavor. By approaching it like a hobby and contextualizing progress through consistent data points I will not only have tracking information to compare myself to the only thing I should be comparing to (me yesterday!), but I will further increase my chances of success.

  I think when I was younger I lacked the understanding to set myself up for success, so even when I did this before I didn't maintain it for longer than a year, but now I have a deeper knowledge of self and find that motivation never even really plays a part in follow through. 

 

The Sorness Sets In: Being more active as I approach 40

   I've written before about taking better care of myself including a plan to walk 8000 steps a day. I know I also updated my progress two weeks in, but now I'm over a month into those goals and holding pretty steady to them. I'm not always completely on time with my updated bedtime (10:30-11:30) on the weekend, but I'm never off by more than 45 minutes or so, so I'll call that a success. 

  I'm now a month into my goal of moving more and I am most certainly doing that.  My average steps have increased drastically, as has my average activity level.

Six Months: Steps aren't the only metric of activity, but they're a pretty good start. 

 

One Month: Obviously the average has increased SIGNIFICANTLY.

  Hell, even my "low activity" day was close to my six month average, at 5,072 steps. I decided, as I started this project, that a 4 week spin-up time was good enough to decide if I was going to stick with it. If nothing else, the walks have been amazing for my dogs who are happier, healthier, and generally more ready to go to bed at the end of the day. That said, I told myself that if I stuck with it for four weeks I would start going back to the gym: I am paying for a YMCA membership, after all. 

  See, in 2013 I was around 400lbs, mostly fat, very unhappy, and extremely unhealthy. I decided in December of that year I would start counting calories. Initially it sounded like empty promises, since I decided that in mid-November, but it was really so I could not worry about it and have a big Thanksgiving meal with my family. I bought a food scale and started with the only focus being to get 2,000 calories a day. 

  By the end of December I had lost 31 pounds. I had decided when I started that I would eat clean for 30 days, have a single cheat day that coincided with my plans to spend New Years' Eve with my friends, and then go back to clean eating. After that I opted for 60 days of clean eating. In two months I lost 50 pounds and decided to get a gym membership and start lifting weights to try and restructure my body. What followed was me figuring out what worked best for me, learning how inflexible I am, and another 9 months of counting calories. By November 2024, a couple of weeks shy of a year of my decision to count calories, I was 262.3lbs, the lowest I had weighed since my addiction days, and the lowest healthy weight I had ever been in my life. 

  It's pretty safe to say that I have the discipline to override whether motivation exists or not. I don't enjoy working out, I hate every minute of it while I'm doing it but I feel better about myself after the fact, so it balances net positive I think.  

  It took 12 years of inactivity and increasing sloth for me to get close to my old weight, and even when I did I am smaller in size than the last time I weighed 370-380 pounds. I truly restructured my body and put on a lot of muscle during that year. The increased steps were a measure to combat feeling bad, I've been struggling with my body image for a while now and they were a start, but it's time to add more to the pile now that I know I can be consistent in my movement. 

  It seems to be working, remember that I've been going on around 2.2 mile walks every night for the last month when you see this: 

The bulk of the increase is "traditional strength training" and is determined by my effort rating.

  My walk effort has actually reduced by about 11% in the last week, but that's most likely because I went for a few walks during the day over the last month and I haven't in the last week what with it being blistering hot outside. That said, I intend to take the dogs out for morning walks in addition to our evening walks on the weekends from now on; they're just so damn happy about the time and who am I to deny them that or deny myself a longer-lived companion? 

  I started back in the gym, I had flirted with it a few months ago but fell off when I was more active in the garden. It's really easy to allow "some activity" to override "scheduled activity," when the additional activity should be just that, additional. Next thing I knew it had been two months and I hadn't been to the gym, so I'm back at it and the soreness has set in. 

  I divide my workouts into Push (Triceps, Chest, Shoulders), Pull (Back, Biceps), and Legs (...legs, what did you expect?). Right now I'm going three times a week but I've made the decision to follow my one month trial setup right on down that road. If I am consistent in three times a week for the next month, I'm going to move to a schedule that looks like Push, Pull, Legs, Rest, Push, Pull, Legs, Rest. It will give me a kind of cascading schedule since it doesn't line up with the days of the week but I don't think that will really present a problem. Even having increased from 3 sets per exercise to 5 sets, it's still less than an hour in the gym. It does skew a little more than that if I throw a swim in at the end, and gods know I need the cardio. 

  I'm aging, my body had been hurting significantly, and I'm pretty damn mad that moving more was the only real answer I needed to alleviate that. I'm also pretty mad that something so simple is helping me improve my relationship with my body slowly, and helping me feel better mentally because what the fuck do you mean it's that easy? Why haven't I been doing this? Why did I let myself stop (the answer is a relationship that didn't like how much time I spent in the gym, but that's neither here nor there anymore.) 

Ugh, it's annoying. And good. I'm doing alright. 
 

Frustrations

   Sometimes it's really hard to progress. Sometimes I get auto-filled support and go back to play something I thought I knew only to get absolutely trucked and made a fool of. It's easy to feel frustrated and angry and lose my cool. It's a lot harder to hold onto the growth mindset, and feeling stagnant leads to frustrations. I've played many of the 15 games per champion, paring down to Sivir and Xayah, with low damage and low masteries on each. In a previous post I expounded on knowing when something isn't working for me. 

  Clearly, playing these champions isn't getting me the progression I'd like to see, so it may just be time to switch it up.  Now, I'm not abandoning Xayah and Sivir altogether, but instead looking at what I'm missing: lane presence, creep score, damage to enemy champions, and I'm expanding this project to give a shot to a few more champs, see what feels good and that I can learn from it: like I did with Miss Fortune though woefully I didn't enjoy her much. To that end I searched for champions that can be used in Solo Queue, where I do most of my play, to climb and found a Mobalytics Tier List. 

This is the Low Elo tier list for solo queue ADC. 

  Prior to writing this I hadn't put any time into Jinx, but I have messed around a little with Tristana before and I think with a little practice and understanding I could really enjoy her kit. I'm also going to give Jinx a go. This tier list is highlighted with ease of use, white, blue, orange, red from easiest to hardest. I think by giving myself an uncomplicated kit and some decent range I could further focus my fundamentals and positioning. Hopefully I can also focus my participation in team fights and better decision making overall. 

  I think it's really important to be able to adapt when frustrations rear their ugly little heads. To keep my own head and not take failure as a lack of moral or intellectual strength or sign of turpitude. I will not suddenly rocket up the ranks out of nowhere, but as I continue this path I should be willing to accept what is working and stick to it and pivot away from what isn't working. 

What caretaking taught me about skill-based hobbies

   When I was younger I fell victim to the "former gifted and talented kid" trap. I would start something up and if I wasn't instantly good at it, I'd quit. It was easy to buy into the hype of starting something new until it became work, putting it to the side with a "this just isn't for me." Then addiction happened, then sobriety, then caretaking. 

  I spent all of my early adulthood in varying states of mess and necessity. I was an addict, a criminal, a thief, and somehow I managed to avoid getting caught (I say somehow like the clearance rate for crimes isn't 44% for violent crimes and 18% for property crimes: the police are fucking useless.) Then my Nana called me and told me she needed my help, I quit cold turkey, moved to Oklahoma, and detoxed by myself. At 21 years of age I don't think I had found joy in anything I had done save playing guitar in a punk band. I started playing World of Warcraft again to give myself something to do with all of the free time I found, eventually got a job as a 911 Dispatcher, and spent my days taking care of my Nana and Poppa, then just my Nana for a long while. 

  Poppa lived for 3 years after I moved, I lost him in 2011. He was on dialysis, blind from Diabetic Retinopathy, and a tinkerer. Being stuck in the house drove him crazy; he continued running his used refrigeration business and messing with various things around the house, some of which I had to set to rights after he took them a bit too far. He frustrated my Nana to no end, but she loved him as infinitely as he annoyed her. Those three years set the foundations for the patience I have today, the follow-through I pride myself on, and the importance of taking care of the folks I care about. 

  After Poppa was gone I found myself doing a balancing act. Nana was obviously in a bad place emotionally, but I found that if I didn't leave a mess behind she would stay in bed for days on end. It took a while for me to realize this, but I started taking the ass-chewings gladly because they meant she'd get up and move around. The patience and follow-through truly became cemented in my character during these years. 

  I lost her in 2017 and found myself rudderless for a while, but these traits stayed strong and as I came out of that particular nasty depression I began climbing the ladder in competitive StarCraft II. The patience I learned and allowed to become a part of my character was indispensable in competitive gaming, I wasn't instantly good, hell I was terrible initially, but through will and work I got better. I kept that mentality over the years and it's been so useful in beginning to relearn league. I get frustrated with my lack of progress in game, then shake it off and remind myself that it will take time. 

  This year I started gardening and sadly, despite the prodigious plant size, I only managed to get one zucchini out of my yield. Some kind of bug ate through the root just above the dirt level on three of my four plants. This wasn't seen as a personal failure, rather an opportunity for learning. My bed was too dense and gave ample cover from natural predators like birds, I need to thin it out a bit and let nature take its course as I grow the kind of things that will encourage pollinators, birds, and other creatures to spend time on my little plot. It was an abject lesson into how I can do better in the next season.

  I originally started this blog as an exploration of the world through my hobbies, and that's the goal here, writing about myself through the framework of the hobby as well as finding my writing voice, but it's very much also become about character and mental health, emotional honesty and security. I have no idea who will ever set eyes on this, but I think it's a good journal for me over time. I also honestly think if this gardening setback had happened to me in my early 20s I may have seen it as a lack of virtue and just quit gardening altogether. Hell, I know that's probably the case because I experienced my first frustrations with League of Legends way back in 2010, and I only occasionally have touched it through the years as a result of leaning on that experience and thinking "I'm not very good at this," but Jake the dog had the right of it:

Gotta fail to learn. 

Accepting when I'm wrong in a hobby

   Man, I love cooking. I've loved cooking for most of my adult life. My primary love language is absolutely acts of service, and my primary expression of that comes out in feeding people. I've fallen into a bit of lull about that since moving to the city and having disposable income/proximity to good food, but I'm trying to get back into it. 

   I also have long held the opinion that French cooking is for assholes.  I guess that's not entirely true, when I say "French Cooking," what I mean is "haute cuisine" since it has its roots firmly planted in "what the poor can't have," while including "elevated" dishes poor people were already eating. It's pretty safe to say that I'm not a big fan of fine dining as an experience or art form. Something about a thing being created for an only really available to the wealthy makes me want to burn it to the ground.

  Maybe I'm the asshole, but I'm pretty convinced it's them. 

   That said, there are some french dishes that really strike me as worth the time to create. Things like French Onion Soup, Cassoulet, Quiche Lorraine, and the dish I'm giving a go to this weekend: Vichyssoise. It's a thick, creamy, blended leek and potato soup served cold and a food that Anthony Bourdain said it was the first food he'd really noticed and the first food he remembers enjoying.

  That has to mean something, right?  

  There's not much to say here about it until I've cooked, cooled, and tried it, but I think it goes a really long way to acknowledge when we're wrong about something. Just a little growth every day can go a long way, and I think when we stop trying to grow that's when we really fall apart.  

An update on taking care of myself

   I'm starting to write this a few days early, and will complete it as we actually hit the two week mark, but as of right now I've been successful at both of my goals every day save one. Last Saturday I went to my partner's house for a board games social night, it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the time, but when I got home at nearly 9:45 I still needed to walk the dogs and, oh boy, it was fuckin hot outside. 

  After finishing our walk it was about 10:40 and I was pouring sweat. In that moment I made an executive decision to push my "in bed" time back up to an hour so I could cool off, relax, and get recentered after being around a lot of folks for a few hours. It turns out this is supported by sleep research, which suggests "earlier sleep timing and regularity in sleep patterns with consistent bedtimes and wake-up times are favourably associated with health." So I pushed my bedtime back to midnight last Saturday. Short of that I've hit 8000+ steps and bed by 11:00 every day!

  You see, I'm an extrovert at heart: I recharge by spending time around people, but on the same side of that time around people gets me wired and I need to relax a while before I rest. Spending 16 years mostly isolated in rural Oklahoma has settled me into a low-energy high-energy exchange mode where I basically function day to day in a restful way and have bursts when I spend time around people. It's been an excellent survival mechanism but it can be taxing on my nervous system if I shift between the two too rapidly, so a nice lull state comedown is necessary. 

  It's now been a few days since I began writing this and I've come back to it to happily report success for the last two weeks. My dogs seem healthier from the walks we're taking, I feel better generally, and most importantly I feel like I sleep better. My sleep score on my health app is consistently higher with less variation than before. Previously I'd scored as high as 91 and as low as 43, but now I'm pretty solidly 85-89. I wake up feeling rested and have adjusted my bedtime to be "in bed between 10:30 and 11:30," allowing me to skew a bit later on the weekend and make sure I get plenty of sleep during the week. 

  I'll definitely be continuing this trend as I slowly work in more habits for an overall healthier lifestyle. I'm getting older and I've spent decades punishing myself for the things I did when I was younger, I really do need to admit to myself that it's time to show myself some grace. This is another place where my "embrace the suck" mentality does more harm than good and I owe it to myself and the people I love to show me a little kindness. 

On Keeping My Mental

   I took a day off of work yesterday. I wasn't necessarily doing bad, but I just didn't feel good, you know? 

  It seems a little silly to burn my PTO like that, but I largely self-isolated, walked the dogs, played video games, watched a TV show for a bit. I kind of only really responded to text messages and just really spent some time alone, it was refreshing. I really enjoy the peace I've cultivated in my life, especially since I moved to the City. 

  Part of that was continuing my journey in League of Legends. I played a handful of games on Miss Fortune and I'm not entirely sure I'm going to make it to 15 ranked games with her. I may just drop her off of my roster, because while I have felt like I've done decent on her...

My awful winrate speaks for itself

   I feel like no matter how I improve on her, it's just not worth playing. ADCs are inherently squishy, I know, but nothing I do feels like I'm making progress. I'm not sure how to respond when I'm getting bullied out of lane constantly and everyone is going for kills kills kills. I don't feel like I can wield any pressure in lane, but I also feel like (despite my ATROCIOUS showing of KDA) playing MF really prepared me to better deal with her and I was more readily able to counter her poke in my last Xayah game. 

  I also feel like I had a better understanding of what to do on other ADCs, so maybe it isn't all wrong or a waste, but when you factor in my other games on MF, it goes from a 1-in-5 winrate to a 1-in-8, and part of the process of keeping my head level is to understand when something I'm doing isn't serving me. 

  I definitely improved at my CS, going from under 5.0 average in games before Miss Fortune to over 5.0 a minute. It certainly still needs to improve, but there are some mechanical fundamentals that really got pushed home by my time playing this champ. 

  I caught myself tilting during one of the games and had to recenter myself, being honest about feeling like I'm not actually progressing. Sometimes I feel like ADC isn't worth playing due to all of the early aggro compositions I'm coming up against, and according to hearsay smurfing is rampant though I'm not willing to blame the issues I'm dealing with on anything other than myself. Sometimes a lack of trackable progress can feel incredibly frustrating, there's so much to learn and do. I'm not sure where to position myself in teamfights when I can just be deleted by a Diana looking sideways at me and not being able to rely consistently on the person who signs up to play support definitely has me looking at something more survivable, but I committed to this learning path and I'm going to hold to it. 

  That said, the plan may need to be altered bit by bit if I find myself feeling like I'm not progressing at all or, even worse, find myself not having fun. I had a quickplay game where I went 14/3/4 and while that was a great result, I realized partway through the game that I just wasn't enjoying playing MF. It's time to hang up the spurs and admit when something isn't working instead of toughing it out, this is about learning and I'm not going to do it when I'm frustrated as all hell. 

  One of the biggest flaws I have is a mentality I developed both to protect myself and to win back in spite against the world is embrace the suck. When I was lifting weights and living by the mantra "suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret" (its own special form of socially acceptable self-harm, by the way) I refined "embrace the suck" to "when I have nothing else I will be defined by my capacity to endure." This is an extremely useful mindset in a lot of places:enduring growing pains, living in survival mode, and dealing with hardship, but it also leads to me attempting to put my nose to the grind stone and push through something I don't enjoy in a place where that isn't necessary. 

  I'm playing this game to get better at is, yes, but I'm also playing it in my leisure time to enjoy it. There are going to be times where my joy is less, like when I'm losing particularly hard, but I shouldn't be feeling like I dread playing the champion I'm playing. It makes no sense in this context to embrace the suck, but makes perfect sense to pivot to the champions I know I enjoy like Yunara, Xayah, and Sivir. 

  One of my biggest focuses early on is my mental, and that means in and out of game. If my fun is dampened by circumstance that's one thing, but if I'm not enjoying myself at all in my leisure time I need to learn to remove myself from the situation. I'm already at war with myself on so many other fronts, this doesn't need to be one of them!

   

Learning a Language as an Adult

   I have next to no background in any language other than English. I have a pretty solid command of kitchen Spanish from my time as a line cook a lifetime ago, but nothing conversational or even pretending to approach fluency. 

  I also have a major life event going on currently that will take the next four years to resolve. That's really all the detail you need, as it isn't anyone on the internet's business, but I plan on celebrating the end of this particular phase in life with my first really legitimate trip out of the country. Much like a pitbull, I'm extremely food motivated and my favorite food is Korean, so I've decided South Korea is a solid goal. I also discussed my love for esports and South Korea is a global powerhouse when it comes to that particular arena. 

  I'm not a historian, but what I do know is that in the 90s the South Korean government started a long-term strategy for becoming a center of Information and Communication Technology, then there was a financial crisis and they closed the community centers they were using to promote broadband access. A lot of out of work folks started PC Bangs (cafes), as the country continued heavily improving the broadband technology. It was a resounding success and lead to a boom in esports as competitive and online gaming was in its infant stages. Stephen C. Rea wrote about it in detail, if you're interested. 

  With that goal in mind, I've picked up a new little hobby of sorts: Learning Korean. As of the beginning of this entry on July 20, 2026, I've picked back up in learning Hangul with Unit 0 from How to Study Korean. A few years back, in 2023 or so, I started learning Korean via Duolingo. I didn't know it wasn't the greatest resource and wouldn't ultimately do anything but teach me some words, but I remember the Hangul lessons being pretty solid. This year I took to it with the spirit of this blog and searched for people who had learned Korean, the goal was to find what path they took and what they'd recommend. 

  The path I've decided on, for now at least, is to start learning Hangul from a handful of sources, like the link above, then move into Courses from Talk to Me in Korean, supplemented with the Korean Grammar In Use books for levels I-IV. If I decide to go beyond functional understanding to full fluency I could always aim for TOPIK Certification but that isn't really necessary for what I'm trying to do. 

  I want to be able to navigate the country and have a functional understanding of what's going on around me. I'd like to be able to order my food and have a decent conversation with people I meet. I know that kids supposedly have an easier time with languages and developing a natural accent, but I can apply similar principles to this that I do to other goals and learn faster. 

  Much like my journey with League of Legends I can follow a pretty simple process to improve. 
    1. Set an achievable goal
    2. Stay in a growth mindset, each step of failure is a step toward improvement.
    3. Practice the repetitions, initially Hangul, the vocabulary, then grammar. 
    4. Review with a coach, whether a hired teacher or native speaker. 

  I've already started doing the work to learn Hangul, as well as the phonetic pronunciations of all of the characters. I keep repeating sounds over and over and drilling it the best I can, especially if I can use some dictation training to try and write what I hear. I think the natural progression for me will be to do that, listen and write, then go back and get a transcript of what was said and confirm. It feels like this is doable, it will just require me to roll up my sleeves and do the work. 

   

Learning the Rift: Competitive Gaming in Late-Adulthood

   So, I started playing League of Legends again recently. 

  I know, I know... 

  It's been a hell of a learning experience, the game has changed massively over the years and it shows. I started my account around December 2009-January 2010, when my World of Warcraft raiding guild had 25 man Icecrown Citadel pretty well on farm. My GM, who was a co-worker of mine, told me that he, Swabo, and a couple of other guildies were playing this new game, League of Legends, between raid nights and they needed someone to play a support character. I downloaded the game, read a little about it on different gaming websites, and created my account. 

  Through the years I've played off and on, sometimes more seriously than others, I've long had a deep and abiding love for esports of all kinds especially League of Legends and super especially Starcraft II. Even when I was playing League more competitively I was consistently hammering away at the ranks in Starcraft II, reaching my peak of Master 3 in 2019 before I deleted my Battle.net account entirely thanks to the Blitzchung controversy.   

  Sometimes I miss when I was idealistic enough to believe a single person voting with their wallet would make a lick of difference. 

   Anyway, what sparked this all off was actually Hasbro sucking, and now I'm writing about learning a new role in a game that doesn't seem related to this at all. That is until you discover Riftbound, which is Riot's own TCG I decided to give a try to. The cards have a great feel, like they're actually made of cardboard and not just two pieces of paper poorly glued together, the foils don't pringle as soon as they're aware of moisture's existence within three miles, and it isn't just a coin-flip of "who can have the most deliberately sweaty, game breaking combo and go infinite on turn 5?"

I'm beginning to wonder if I actually like Magic: the Gathering anymore.

  Regardless of that little tangent, I decided to give Riftbound a shot when I saw the Proving Grounds box in my friendly local game store. I picked up the Proving Grounds, grabbed one of my partners, and sat down to learn and it was so fun. The central conceit is battleground control, you amass points by conquering and controlling battlegrounds with your units (vs hitting people in the face in MtG.)  I couldn't stop thinking about playing it again, found the Riftbound Gaming Network, and started thinking about going to an event. It didn't need to be any kind of qualifier, just a normal organized play event.

  This, of course, had me thinking about Runeterra and its lore, the characters, and my abiding love for esports which lead back to installing the Riot Client. I started playing with my partner, swapped from a support main to ADC main, immersed myself in the game bit by bit, including the frustrating process of realizing I'm really bad at it and wanting to improve at least a little. Following this desire I found a few great resources: Coach Rogue and Broken By Concept being chief among them. 

  In a bit of kismet I stumble across Broken By Concept's Four Stages of Improving at League of Legends podcast episode, which leads me to their YouTube channel, a day after it was posted. It happens at a time where I'm working on my mental in many aspects of my life, so why not competition? I've always known I'm capable of change, but I think I somehow wound up in a rigid, fixed mindset where I couldn't do it. I'm too old, or I'm too tired, or any number of excuses.

  I'm not though. I really am not, I've proven that I'm capable of it before both with an unregulated schedule when I quit drugs, and a tightly regulated one when I got stronger and lost a bunch of weight. Settling into an inelastic mindset not only does a disservice to me, but it does a disservice (and frankly, a disrespect) to everyone I love. I owe myself chiefly, but also them, much better. 

  Back to the point at hand, I discovered their Four Stages, and this is the diagram:

credit to Broken by Concept at https://www.weteachleague.com

  And while I think they probably should invert the numbers, it's spectacular. The very foundation of this pyramid, without which it couldn't stand, is out of game issues. It's "get your mental right," it's "take care of your body and your mind. I highly recommend listening to it, even if you're not trying to improve in league, because it could help in nearly any competitive game out there. 

  The most important part to me is when they reference John Wooden's "Pyramid of Success," which I had never heard of until this episode. You see, I'm not a big sports person, I don't follow coaches or players, I enjoy watching the occasional Baseball or Lacrosse game, but couldn't name a stat to save my life. John Wooden is widely considered one of the greatest coaches of all time, he did foundational work at UCLA that lead to a staggering 80% win rate across 27 years, but the mention of the "Pyramid of Success," interested me, so I looked it up.

John Wooden's Pyramid of Success

   I find it incredibly interesting that the foundation of this pyramid focuses on your relationships with yourself and with others, your attitude, and your work ethic. It's not until tier 3 that skill at the game (or in your endeavors) is considered. There's a huge focus on your mental and physical condition and control, paying attention and taking initiative, being loyal and cooperative, enjoying what you do. By all accounts Coach Wooden really embodied this and it feels like there's a correlation between his success and his belief in this. 

  I'm not much for gods or masters, but faith in myself and others is important to me, I think it's telling that ambition and self-control are neighbors, without one the other seems useless. Again, this all comes about in a time in my life where I'm working on my mental, but I really resound with the condition square here, Mental-Moral-Physical, eliminate dissipation or energy waste in all of those aspects, REST, and take care of yourself. At the very top is competitive greatness "Be at your best when your best is needed. Enjoyment of a difficult challenge." 

  Difficulty is an opportunity to grow, not necessarily the difficulty of going through trauma, but from personal experience getting through it definitely is an opportunity for growth. In context for competitive gaming at nearly 40, difficulty of playing against much better players, much younger opponents, should be relished, not dreaded. 

  I could keep blaming the mage meta for my difficulties, or I could be disciplined and honest with myself. I learned a lot from my time in the salt mine of Starcraft II, including how to be critical of myself while not tearing myself apart. I know I have that skill, so why am I not using it? 

  Outside of the game it is place for me to focus on improving in my day to day life. This benefits me and the people around me directly, and I believe in the value of hard work so maybe I should embody that. This pyramid informed the game-focused pyramid put together by Broken By Concept, which prioritizes your mental state even before your skill with the champions you choose. 

  I've been playing some ranked lately, and not performing terribly as far as win-loss ratio, hell I'm sitting at a solid 66.67% winrate, but I see where I need work in engagements and CS, or creep score (killing minions with last hits while in lane.)  

Well, my winrate isn't bad, but my other stats are atrocious

   You can see that I'm swapping champions quite a bit for those three games, just adjusting to being outplayed and performing poorly. I was honestly surprised to see my win rate because I was so hard on myself about the losses I was absolutely SURE it was sub 50%. I remember beating the hell out of myself about those Xayah and Yunara games, which I have a fabulous winrate in! If we're winning the games as a team, and I'm going positive as far as KDA, why have I been such an asshole to myself?

   Well it turns out I need to work on my mental. If we refer back to BBC's 4 stages, you'll see in the foundational stage, the first thing they mention is tilt. This sounds an awful lot like I'm tilting, I also am definitely comparing myself to others, especially the enemy ADC or Mage that's bot lane with me. I clearly also have mechanical issues with last hitting, and if you look at the KDA, teamfighting and decision making. 

  I don't have all day to just hard grind in League of Legends, so I have to adapt my goals to my lifestyle. Since my time is limited by work and relationships (both romantic and platonic), wanting to improve and shifting to a growth mindset is not enough to see real, traceable progress. I also need to be efficient in how I grow, and frameworks like this are absolutely what I need to do that. Finding my own voice and writing posts about these hobbies has been a multi-day endeavor so far, which seems to be working to my advantage here. You see, I started writing this post the day before I found Broken By Concept and their four stages which is, wildly enough, the day the four stages were posted.  

  Originally I was going to try to come up with some viable framework of my own to break down the stages of play and give myself viable metrics of improvement; after all, this is a post about competitive gaming in late adulthood. As it turns out I won't need to do that because there are a lot of people who are much more cerebral than me that have come up with something I can readily apply to my own gameplay, it even fits the whole theme of this blog, learning from other peoples endeavors and mistakes. 

  To that end I've set a couple of goals for myself:

1. To counter bouncing between champions due to being outplayed (whether by mage picks in lane or other ADC doing a better job than me) I will stick to the three ADC I'm showing in ranked with an optional throw in fourth of Sivir until I have 15 ranked games on each. 

2. To counter issues stemming from my mental I will play in no more than 3 game blocks, dismiss responsibility of any factor but myself (e.g. not blame solely the picks, not blame support play) and resist the urge to try and save my teammate since that almost always leads to an enemy double kill.

3. To counter issues I have mechanically with CS I will utilize the practice tool with the goal of functionally understanding where the last hits live for each of the three or four champions I am currently working on. At 10 minutes perfect lane CS is 101, with the 19th wave reaching the middle of the lane after the 10:00 mark. A pro player benchmark is 80-90 CS in a real game, 100 in the practice tool, so I will aim for last hits on 90 in a solo practice tool game, 60 @ 10:00 in a real game. 

  There are other game knowledge issues that exist, but instead of trying to overtax myself and effectively loading my mental stack with everything I'm supposed to do right, I will work on listening to team pings, working on my CS, and I will introduce other concepts line freezing or manipulating minion waves after I am comfortable with my creep score and basic lane mechanics. 

This is a current screenshot of my op.gg stats as of July 15, 2026. 

  

And this is a current screenshot of my mobalytics.gg stats as of the same day

 

  Ideally, I'd like to see more wins of course, but the traceable metrics we're going for here are a higher CS/M score, a higher damage share (which should correlate to higher KDA in the A column at least,) and possibly a higher P/Kill %, which is kill participation. The P/Kill will show an improvement in reading my teams pings and arriving for teamfights on time, which is another small mechanical problem. 

  I've said before that these posts are multi-day affairs for me, and in some cases (like this one) there will be follow ups.  A big part of competition, especially competitive gaming as I get older is going to be on the efficiency of how I use my time in the competitive environment, reframing my relationship with the game and with myself is going to be a bigger turning point to my performance than any other thing, I think. 

Trying to be reasonable while being hard on myself

   I am my own harshest critic... in everything. Nothing anyone else says or does can touch me, but when I make mistakes I have a bad habit of internally chastising myself. I've spent years believing everything that happens to me is fair punishment for the lifestyle I escaped, but this weekend I had a terrifying thought. 

  You see, I haven't been taking my meds like I'm supposed to. It's just a prediabetic med, but I've not been diligent about it or about my health. That is exactly how my Poppa's diabetes got worse, and exactly how he wound up dying. He just didn't take care of himself and his body started failing. Maybe the lesson I'm learning here is from myself, or maybe it's from his failures. I think it might be both.

   I know I'm capable of great change, I quit addictive drugs cold turkey, I changed my life from being an addict to being someone who lives a good life, and I spend every day spiting my baser nature by attempting to be as good of a person as I can. Hell, in 2014 I lost 130lbs by counting calories and lifting heavy ass weights, I know I don't lack discipline or focus, but being here and comfortable has given me excuse after excuse: I'm no longer in survival mode so there are things I just haven't dealt with, I'm tired from a long work day, I don't want to do those things I'm still young. 

  Except I'm not. I'm almost middle aged and if I don't start now nothing will change. That said, I also know that progress and goals are incremental and I need to start with achievable things, so I set two goals I'm trying to reach this week.

1. Be in bed by 11PM every night, not necessarily asleep, but in bed winding down to sleep.
2. Walk 8000 steps a day. 

  They're simple enough, and I've managed it so far but it's only day one. As of writing this I'm about to go to bed and I crushed 10,000 steps due to work today. Tomorrow is another day and another chance to succeed, but if work doesn't have me running all over the property I'll have to walk after work. That's really when we'll see if I can tap into even the smallest discipline.

  I'm trying to start reasonable, after succeeding for a week I'll just do my level best to log what I eat into an app, not necessarily exact measurements yet, but just rebuild the habit of logging meals, I already have been working out a bit though the last few weeks I've been lax, so I'll work a routine back in there too. This is all doable, I just need to be reasonable and be kind to myself a bit. There are people who love me for what I am now, and I gotta accept that maybe I'm just worth that these days. Maybe what I say about myself when no one else can hear is just wrong. 

  I don't like being wrong, but I like the shit I'm talking on myself even less.