Unleash the Monkey Army

Somebody close to me suggested to me that my last blog post was a little sad. Sorry about that! That was not the intention but it probably fell victim to two different quirks of being one of my piece's of work: While I do tend to overthink stuff, as a proportion of the time spent thinking, the thinking prior to doing anything or writing anything is miniscule! On the bright side, this means I can crack on with things pretty quickly and without too much baggage to weigh me down (at least, at the beginning, like a tourist, my bags fill up along the way as I collect duty free and tacky souvenirs!).The downside is that I only ever have the loosest sense of what the end point will look like. Which might be why I can attend to triumph and disaster with about the same level of attachment. I don't re-read this stuff before I post it. That's the joy of the internet! Aside from porn and religion, the internet gives us a facility to belch out our every cognitive air biscuit with o...

"And worse I may be yet: the worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst'" William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4 scene i We're in to week 26 now, and have racked up over 16,500 burpees in the year to date (since 1st April). When I say it out loud it seems, by equal turn, a trifle and a ludicrous thing. I tend to do my burpees in one session and, depending on what the day throws at me, there are days when I feel pretty flat before I start. Calvin and Hobbes by the outstanding Bill Watterson It is close to unbelievable to think that I have come this far. It is not that I ever thought that I wouldn't, but that is down to a lack of imagination rather than a devastating self-confidence. I'm still firmly of the belief that the single biggest danger to this endeavour is my almost limitless capacity to be distracted by something shiny and have a pop at another challenge along the way.  A case in point. No need, just no need! ...

The burpee year is beguiling. It is a simple enough idea – although you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn how many questions people can generate before starting. (For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, it start  on April 1 st  with one burpee, and escalates by one burpee per day until we perform 365  on 31 st  March  next year). The first 20 to 30 days are easy. Suspiciously easy. Disappointingly easy. Almost too easy for a lot of people. Definitely within reach for the vast majority. Even the detrained and out of shape can manage this, albeit they need to pick their burpee variant carefully and they may find it to be as much a physical challenge as a mental one.   But this “too simple” thing is intriguing. It shouldn’t come as a surprise but when I hear people say it, it does catch me out really often, in every walk of life!   In a lot of group settings (or on your own if you listen to the negative voice you carry around with you) t...

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...

A strange story came to mind today for some reason. When I was seventeen, the coach of an American Football team tried to recruit me after seeing me play rugby. He told me that I'd get to hurt people. But he missed the mark then and that hasn't changed over the years. Yes, I've hurt people and been hurt by people but that's a by-product of what I have done, not been the objective in its own right. Then I played rugby for the simple of joy of it, for the immersion and freedom from my own head space. There was a challenge element to it, to see if I could, not about beating others but not being defeated myself. You win, you lose, but those are just marks on a tally board. You're never beaten until you quit. Other people can take everything from you but your spirit. That you give away of your own accord. Other people live that thought more than I have; have expressed it far more eloquently than I ever will, and have tested it in far harsher conditions than hopefully I...

I was asked recently about carbohydrate loading and my first reaction was "don't" but I reined that in and asked the sensible questions: what sport, what level of activity/duration, what standard of event/competition? The response was amateur rugby, so I reverted to my first answer! However, this answer seems a little trite and unhelpful. So I got to thinking (not unusual) and what started life as a short answer rapidly escalated into a lengthier one. I'll explain not only my reasoning but go some way to tightening up the definition of the term itself. That last act in itself may go some way to leading to your own conclusion as it the term is frequently abused which I feel leads to much of the misapplication. I have skipped some of the physiology in the interests of not extending the answer any more than I already have. I have tried to be faithful to the science but by skimping have probably done it a massive disservice. If more information/clarity would be useful fee...

Last night I saw an old woman in her heavy cotton pyjamas and her belt of authorita giving a demonstration. She proved, beyond all expectations, that her self-defence art only works if the attacker obligingly holds himself in the right position. It reminded me of my childhood and the various martial arts renaissances – most particularly karate. There seemed to be an army of black belts sprouting, like dragon’s teeth, all claiming that they were invincible. Most went on to point out that you were not attacking them in the right way when they were unable to fell you with a “deft monkey” or something like that. All of this brought me on the handful of finishers’ medals that I have for various silliness. I put those in a similar league to the non-competitive sports-days and electoral reform…I know my mind is as cluttered (and as filthy) as a teenager’s bedroom! The medals slice up two ways. Yes, they are a symbol of the achievement of finishing, and that separates those of who received ...

While we have all been there, it is still desperately sad to see somebody wallowing in the pit of despair.  (from "The Princess Bride" a must-watch film, the book is different but well worth a read too) I get that it is difficult for you. I know that you want me or somebody to say or do something that will make it easy. Something that will make it all ok, that will make it go away. I can't. In truth, the admission still hurts me but it is the truth.  What you want is a bottle labelled "drink me" that will take you to a different world. But all you seem to get is the world saying "eat me". I hate to be the one to stamp on your playset but the Star Trek transporter system doesn't yet actually exist. If you look up for a minute you will see that there is an open door for you. I know, there are stairs on the other side of the door and they will be harder and who knows, you may even run the risk of having to put in some effort. But what's your ...

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...

In amongst all the pissing and whinging, it's occasionally easy to lose sight of the fact that I'm actually very lucky. Life is full of petty frustrations. Frustrations? Bullshit to be more exact. Petty? Pretty much! I pay what seems like a lot of tax and get to listen to news that I'm expected to pay more and earn less. But that means that I have a job, and that fact alone can be easy to underappreciate. Every day, similar or different, presents another opportunity to wrestle with yourself and your interaction with the world. I'm getting older, but everybody does. I'm old enough to know that I know very little but still young enough in mind to be excited by that prospect! I've seen a bit (a bit more than I would have liked at times) but I know there's more to see. Thanks to living in a modern, post-industrialised country with access to the resources that provides, I am better placed to find out about and discover those things than any previous generatio...

This is an odd one for a blog post but I think that we've lost the ability to be comfortable with our thoughts. I'm not sure that we need companionship or a sense of belonging any more than previous generations but I do think we seek these things out with a completely different outlook to our forebears. there is a constant, never-ending supply of, and demand for, information and entertainment - Television; radio; magazines; newspapers; computers; mobile devices; gaming platforms; the blogosphere. They all enter our lives, shoehorn themselves into our existence and lure us in with promises of engagement. And we enter willingly, we get hooked and we demand more. In exchange for the tacit surrender of our ability to critique, to analyse, to determine logical value we receive a succession, a torrent, a flood of padding to swell our time. Suppliers quest for more to sustain it lest we begin to recover, to think about what we're seeing and hearing. So we're brought in furthe...