Unleash the Monkey Army

If it's your first time here, welcome. The regular readers among you will know that I need little reason for introspection but recently, two different questions, in two different settings, have given me licence to roll my sleeves up and have a delve in my mind.  The first one was specifically about the indoor rowing and wasn't just directed at me: "What inspires you to row faster/longer/stronger/better?" Then, more recently "How do you do it? How do you do what you do, the way you do it and stay so in control?"  The second struck me as amusing. I was being asked by a prominent extrovert, how I stay so reserved and buttoned down, all the time. I've never thought of being reserved and hard work as something to aspire to. But then, that sums me up. And, not just me, we all take too lightly the things that come easily. The familiar.  But I owe the person who asked the opportunity for something more than the glib response I gave. I'...

I've had a couple of people talk to me offline about the burpee ladder and those conversations have started something along the lines of "I'm kind of interested in the ladder but I'm not sure about the full 100 days" I understand the question. My first instinct, of course, is to say "don't worry about it, back yourself anyway" but for some people it leaves something which is just to daunting. They're focused so much on the enormity of the latter stages that they'll miss out on the benefits of the challenge. I get that, fear has stopped me doing plenty of things over the years, and most of them I later come to regret (mind you, occasionally fear has kept me alert and safe, so it's not enough to say "fear is bad"). So, what to do? If the fear is creating a binary position for you i.e. you're either going to do take the challenge or you're not. And the not seems likely, why not try one of the reduced options that I p...

It's fast approaching that time of year again. Teachers and educators are joined in their wailing and gnashing of teeth by students of all ages. But much more importantly than that, September sees the return of the annual 100 day burpee ladder. This year will be 1st September to 9th December inclusive. Fancy joining in? Just an interested observer? Here's what you need to know: We'll be doing burpees every day for 100 days. It's ok, we'll start with 1 on 1st September. We will do 100 on the final day but we'll have built to it. They don't have to be done in one set. They don't have to be done in one session. There are lots of modifications to the humble burpee to make it easier or harder. Before we start, pick your minimum standard for the ladder. You can spice it up on days when you feel lively but you'll not go below this marker. Be realistic. The point of the exercise is consistency, not showing off. Just because you can do 50 or 100 on...

Being a little bit geeky I have a whiteboard and markers at home. I have used it to keep track of my numbers - which has been especially important as the year has gone on! (I am pretty certain that by the end of the year my dreams will be decorated with tally charts and punctuated by the beep of the timer.) I have tended to make some incidental notes on the whiteboards as the mental juices start to flow but these incidental notes have been wiped off almost daily, otherwise I have kept a running view of up to three weeks. Last Sunday (when I first journalled this piece), the day signalled the end of week 37 and coincided with the end of space on the whiteboard. As I wiped it off the thought occurred to me that maybe there ought to be a hint of sadness at the ease with which that much works is cleared away. But actually I found it quite satisfying, having done the work, to set up a clean sheet for the next phase. The sweeping away of a footprint doesn't remove the fact of the...

Ordinary people leading ordinary lives. We look for the extraordinary out there to give us a sense of something more than this. But quite often we end up putting our faith in the witless, the feckless, the pointless, believing them to be something more as a result of how we come to be aware of them. Glossy and distant it seems is better than gritty and close to hand. Familiarity breeds contempt? A prophet in his homeland? Or perhaps that people on our level make us think too much about our own part in all this... Even in the drab ordinariness of it all we plant and nurture the seeds of the very thing that could lead to our own accomplishment of something grand if we would but just point in that direction. Our ability to confront and endure a job; a relationship; a friendship; a life which by all accounts is manifestly unfair and beneath us should give us a sense of pride. OK, so it is not a fate borne with good grace but while not stoic, it is an endurance that most would not ...

The first flush of the new year is out of the way and many resolutions have already been cast aside, dismissed like a credit card bill pending a better set of circumstances in which to respond to the call. Now is probably a good time to visit the perennial January question - goals. Picture from Reuters.com Now, we "know" that the setting of goals is a good thing. I mean, those of us who have the double-edged blessing of working for pretty-much any sized organisation will have had it drummed into us that that it is vitally important. It also stands to reason that achievement is more likely when the objective is set. But what doesn't often get mentioned is that this is not merely a matter of temporal inevitability like night follows day; rather, it is a likely but no guaranteed sequence like Summer following Spring in the UK (you know it should happen but quite often it seems to go from Spring to Autumn/Winter with barely a pause for breath in between). Go...

The internet is a wonderful thing and it turns out that it is not just for porn! Every one of us can access research papers in medical sciences or strength and conditioning at the click of the mouse. We open our eyes and minds to more information than at any other time in histroy, Alexander's library contained less than a day's search history of the average primary school child. And yet, the cornucopia does not come with a user manual. We do not necessarily immediately have the requisite skill and training to separate the elixir from the snake oil. every trip to the ether puts us at risk from the next most vociferous programme. It could just be a feature of our societal ADHD. Whether time management or prioritisation in the office; or the student who spends all of her time researching and none actually writing; or the person in training who flits from one programme to the next at two-weekly intervals, we see the hallmarks everywhere. I think it may be a combination of lost pr...

I'm not sure if it's an unreasonable man or an enduring optimist who maintains his original heading in the teeth of a gale. Actually, while I'm on the topic of admitting to ignorance, I'm not entirely sure that there is any difference between the two. We need to be responsive to feedback, we need to be open to it, to adjust it or disregard it as appropriate . It's the "as appropriate" qualifier which should be making you think. Please think! Rugby players, fighters, police and military, in response to performance or potential situations think (rightly IMO) "I need to be stronger". Thanks to the work of the Gubernator, Joe Weider and the nutroceutical industry, big muscles are perceived as being the hallmark of strength. Bodybuilders have big muscles, therefore I need to train like them... Cut to game time and some hulk running out of gas early doors. What does this tell us? "As private parts to the gods are we! They play with us for their...

I can't hear what you're saying because your actions are deafening. As a player, captain and coach I've always struggled to get my head around players telling me that they wanted to progress and then not turning up to training. Or turning up but going walkabout, if you follow me. Struggled because, well, frankly, I did not really care whether they wanted it or not. If told that they did not then I could either manage my expectations or selection accordingly. The ambivalent, who blow hot and cold can be managed. Those who blow one temperature for the most part can also be handled. But those who sell the desire dummy are a pain in the brown eye. The concern for their progress, potential and the team is the slippery slope. It's easy to not train because it's cold, or because it's raining, or because it's your dog's birthday or because it will be bloody hard work or it might expose a weakness. Most of us have been there at some point. And if not in the...

I was asked to comment on the suggestion that running can be the fool's gold of fitness. It was a fairly easy request in some respects as I have on several running related ventures gone on the record as saying "running is for stupid people". No I blame that on discomfort as a product of distance but in my training practice I certainly adhere to the less offensive approach of not commenting on intellect and just reducing the amount of running I ask of others. But why? This is one of those occasions when I can think about what I do and talk to others about it. Just the other day, somebody came up to me at my dayjob while we both doing something else and started a conversation which ran something like this: "You alright mate?" "Not bad ta, you?" "Not bad. Look, I need to start running again, what sort of distance should I aim for to begin with?" "What? Erm, sorry, what are you shooting for?" "To go running but I'm not sure w...

There is a degree of trending in life - in so much as heightened awareness and confirmation bias mean that we pick up on strands in our existence. I think that's probably born of an evolutionary survival mechanism but that's not the point of today's thought. In both spheres of my "working" life I find myself presented with discussion and implementation of opportunity and fairness. As a coach my passion is to help people realise their potential, as best I can. As a coach my job is to present the best possible opportunity for my charges to develop. The bigger the group, the less tailored to the needs of the individual my interventions can be. That's just an economic approach - getting the most for the most from the dwindling resource. That said, I can scale workouts and exercises to open the door for as many as possible. And here's the thing, I am holding a door open for people. I encourage and occasionally cajole but the step over the threshold is the c...

Resolution season is but a glow in the dieing embers of the new year's festivities. By this point many will have given up on theirs. Many more will be on the threshold of pulling the plug on theirs, ready to go back to "normal" life.  Awaiting them is the security of the usual. The comfort, or at least the familiar discomfort of the day-to-day. We are able to re-programme ourselves to live and to learn but to do so we need to embrace failure and the stultifying fear of it. Without discomfort we have little of substance to respond to, to learn from, to prompt re-wiring in the loft spaces of our minds. But like everything in life it doesn't come cheap and as it is worthwhile it will seldom come easy. And that's where the process loses the majority. "Can you write me a new diet?" "Sure, but that will absolutely have to go." "Oh, I couldn't do that" It's nonsense of course. You can. You just do not want to. And that is fi...

There is no such thing as an entirely level playing field and to pretend otherwise is naive and delusional. My issue with hankering after one is that it puts you, the individual, anywhere other than at the centre of finding a solution (how we like to externalise blame!). "If we could just catch a break we could turn this on its head"; "If the referee would just stop penalising us we could get back in this"; "if they'd just advertised that job in the one idiosyncratic publication I happen to read I could have applied". What are you doing about it? If you're sitting back waiting for a leg-up or investing your energy in complaining about the situation you are missing the point. For reasons of endocrinology or physiology or psychology - hormones or rest or genetics or fuelling or mental acuity or physical positioning - in every field of human endeavour we will find ourselves different to the people we are with and against. Even if that wasn...

As we roll into Christmas it's about half-time in the season and that lends itself to a mid-term review- a view from Fester's dungeon. I've been known to get too serious about stuff and one of the myriad things I did wrong as skipper was to take it all too seriously and to try to get everybody to feel the same way, to the same degree. I still take things seriously but I try to remember to keep some humour in it and confine myself to my sphere. I no longer struggle to teach the pig to sing. I can't speak for my porcine friends but it was irritating the heck out of me! As a firmly amateur club, it has been interesting to see an emphasis on fitness coaching. I would say "strength and conditioning" as that's my background, but frankly we're a long way from that. Even so, for some time now the club has had a dedicated provision of fitness coaching in its corner (yes I know necessity is the mother of invention but why fight it!) . I'm told it ...