Self Improvement - cushtie.com

Category: Self Improvement

  • (Almost) 28 Days With An Upright Go

    (Almost) 28 Days With An Upright Go

    Talk about making a rod for your own back … almost a year ago I signed up to the Kickstarter for Upright Go, and didn’t realise that (for various reasons too dull to go into here) Kickstarter was sending all notifications to a defunct email address. So I forgot all about my pledge, and then […]

  • Last Working Day Of The Year

    It was pretty quiet in the office today, which suited me as it didn’t distract from writing reviews and planning for next year. I had a class at the climbing gym, which turned out to be an hour of hell, principally in the form of squats and duckwalking. Before today I’d never encountered duckwalking; you […]

  • Finding out about yourself while climbing

    Because I had a call at ten this evening, I felt no guilt sloping off at five to go to the climbing wall for an assessment. The purpose of that was to see how fit I am, and then recommend what I do next. So most of it wasn’t around seeing if I could clamber […]

  • Back to Palo Alto

    The flight to San Francisco only took 14 hours (I guess prevailing winds are a wonderful thing) and I was through Customs and picking up my bag before 9am. It was touch and go for a bit; they have automated machines at SFO to collect your information before you hand your passport to a person […]

  • Swimming Lesson #2

    I went back to Swish for my second lesson. After the first one, my neck had been sore from pulling my head out of the water to breathe, and I was utterly exhausted. Similar today.

  • Quick Strength For Runners

    At the library this weekend, I borrowed Quick Strength For Runners, which promises a better runner’s body in 8 weeks. It’s a nice big square book with lots of colour photos, and less than 200 pages, and it doesn’t muck about.

  • Swimming Lesson #1

    I learned to swim ten or fifteen times during my childhood – and forgot how to swim that many times as well. Looking back, I realise that trying to persuade a delicate child that it was enjoyable to bob around in an overchlorinated, chilly pool of preadolescent piss was quite obviously a non-starter. A bit […]

  • Cocoon Yoga

    After eating an incredibly dense stack of pancakes at a cafe near our flat, I went to Cocoon Yoga for a class. I had walked past their front door a couple of weeks ago, looking for ice cream, and saw they had a back class. Since I have always had dreadful posture, and since working […]

  • Three personal failures

    All this week’s meditation and contemplating has yet to make me a good person, as evidenced by three things today.

  • Some firsts in Nova Scotia

    On my last day in Nova Scotia, I had a few firsts. First, we went out on our friend’s boat, Fiddler’s Green IV, and I caught three mackerel. Or herrings. Or some sort of fish.