Unleash the Monkey Army

Charlie Higson as Swiss Toni PT is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman - at first you throw yourself in with everything you've got (and if you've been out of the game for a while, this won't be for long). But, before long, if you're just thrashing around and not working with your head as well as heart and soul, it will either chew you up and spit you out or you'll get bored and be looking for the door. [Before I continue, an explanatory note for my younger or non-UK based readers - Swiss Toni was a used car dealer in the sketch show "The Fast Show" who compared everything to making love to a beautiful woman.  Feel free to swap the word "woman" for man/goat/whatever to suit your tastes, the effect would be the same.] Interlude reducing my political incorrectness a notch out of the way, we can return to our tale.  It's the end of the first week of January and a significant percentage of new gym members will alread...

For the first time in I don't know how long, I turned off the shuffle on my ipod this morning and enjoyed the simple pleasures of listening to a whole album. It's not all that noteworthy in so much as I will put an album on at home in the background when I'm creating some paleo monstrosity in the kitchen but it did spark a thought. There are some parallels with life and training. We have more means of accessing variety than ever before. So much of our experience is like a butterfly. It probably does lead to a tornado in Azerbaijan but I was thinking more of the constant flitting. The briefest of touch-downs on and then off to something else. As a species I think we like choice and variety and there's plenty of it out there. But, like many other things, toxicity is dose specific. We start a task and then something shiny "demands" our attention and we're off. In training we are appealed to by the latest gimmick or the new packaging on an old idea and we a...