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Back to fitness
I went swimming at a friend’s condo pool this morning, the first time I can remember swimming since I went to Seattle at the start of October. Predictably, it was hard; I managed six lengths of a 25 metre pool, twice coming to a grinding halt before I even completed a length. But after so […]
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Treats that aren’t television and other revelations
Our first flight, from Montreal to Tokyo, was blissfully relaxing; I got to doze and watch as many films as I liked. I realise now that I reached this beatific state by allowing the kids to also watch as much television as they liked. I.e. for the entire duration of the flight. When we arrived […]
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Bloc Shop
Today I took the morning off to go down to Bloc Shop, a bouldering gym in the south of Montreal. It’s inside an unprepossessing brown brick building, which I assume was a warehouse or an industrial unit before they put up a lot of overhanging walls with bolt-ons.
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Seven Bays and seventeen year olds
This morning I went to Seven Bays Bouldering, a climbing gym in Halifax on Gottingen Street, to climb with the teenage son of one of our friends from Dartmouth. Just like when I went to Dogpatch in San Francisco, the difficulty curve is super steep – there are a few almost derisorily easy routes, and […]
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Swimming Lesson #29
Today I spent about an hour in the pool. Half of that was freestyle, and when I was exhausted from that, we went onto backstroke, and then breaststroke. I still don’t have much stamina, but I can now do a length and a half (30 metres) of freestyle before I forget when to breathe and […]
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Swimming Lesson #27
It’s funny how I’m not seeing a synergy between the different workouts I’ve been doing. Both climbing and swimming require a combination of strength and flexibility, just as running and swimming both reward cardiovascular fitness. Yet here I am, unsure if my arms are sore from laps of breaststroke or from pulling myself up a […]
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10,000 steps the hard way
Today I walked Destroyer to school (about 2,000 steps, according to my fitness tracker) then took the bus to work, where I stood at my desk all day until it was time to go home. In that time, I managed another 5,000 steps or so. Now, achieving 10,000 steps in a day (whether tracked accurately […]
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Of pancakes and exercise
Screaming woke me. It punctured the shield of the hangover I had, eventually forcing me toeave my bed and see what the children were screaming about. They were, of course, just screaming. They don’t need any particular reason for that. When my wife was at boiling point (the kids had been winding her up for […]
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Swimming Lesson #25
I’ve been tired this week. I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve eaten badly, or if I’m eating badly because I’m not getting enough sleep, or I’m not getting enough sleep because I’m eating badly, or… Seriously, how many times around do we have to go? Anyway, after a day at work that started productively […]
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Improvements
I’ve been working with my personal trainer at the climbing wall for about three months now, so today we had a session where he assessed my fitness. This consisted mostly of painful things like hanging from a bar until I couldn’t hold on any more (around a minute, I think), or doing pull ups, or […]
