Unleash the Monkey Army

I'm about a week out from competition and that means that my mind is starting to dwell a little. This gives me chances to rationalize and start to shape and control those mental processes.  2017 has been an interesting experience for me so far but we'll keep to my age and the training perspective for now. 2016 closed off with a focus on burpees (the annual 100 day ladder carrying through from September to December) and the indoor rowing Crazy Bear Challenge (30 Half-marathons in 44 days). I came through both ok, setting a personal best with my final 21km. But it meant that I hadn't done any kind of strength work since October. That's ok. Activities have a "season" as you shift focus.  So in January I joined the resolutioners crowd in the gym and started back at it. It was not long before my bicep tendon and brachioradialis were giving me grief and only a month of self-treatment/avoiding certain aspects of training before I sought treatment. Through thi...

Welcome back! We're nearly two weeks into 2014. that means that the 12 burpees of Christmas, thankfully, over. The festive period is naught but memory, a shadow, fading but somewhat jaded by the arrival of the bank statements and credit card bills! But, her in the monkey army we're more upbeat than that, so today we'll revisit the tail-end of the Christmas period and cast an eye to the future. 12 Burpees of Christmas (Again, taking "Sets of" as read by the number) Day 8 - 8 gecko burpees.  These were surprisingly difficult. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was! with one leg in the air, the arms, shoulders and chest take more weight and, for somebody as stiff as me, the hip opening proves to be a little uncomfortable. Day 9 - 9 180° degree burpees. As the name suggests, a burpee with a 180° twist in mid-air on the jump. Actually, I quite enjoy these. As fatigue kicks in, stabilizing the jump/landing can be fun but otherwise...

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 Lance Armstrong "affair" continues to swirl around, resurfacing in between other news stories as people hit another juicy section of the 202 page USADA report. Never being short of an opinion, I felt the need to share mine. I do need to be careful here, so let me say, for the record that, as a result of my borderline coffee addiction I may have come dangerously close to the IOC limits for caffeine, I have never knowingly taken any banned substance, nor have I condoned it in people I have trained or trained with. In fact, one of my many limitations in sport and life has been not being nasty enough and being too willing to play within the rules. And when all the hand-wringing, moralising and soap-box grandstanding is done, whatever else we may think, anabolics, peptide hormones, growth factors, Beta-2 agonists, diuretics, blood doping inter alia are categories of banned substances or methods. And, for example, if you compete in a regulated sport and enjoy a Camberwell carr...