One friend had the best quote a few months back: “If the
mind is not healthy, the body certainly will not be.”
My stupid ass went back to training before I was fully
healed. Everything is connected, so when my side and stomach felt ok but my
left back was tight I ignored it. Maybe I didn’t want my coaches to see how
badly hurt I really was (stupid of course because they also have eyes), maybe I
just missed CrossFit, or the people I see there. I don’t know. What I do know
is that it was pretty stupid: if I can’t squat without pain, what on earth makes
me think I should be squat cleaning 47kgs for three reps and if one pullup hurts,
why should I be trying to do 40 of them?
Yeah, well. Sometimes you go on autopilot, and this is part
of my life, my routine, my social life, what keeps me balanced and sane. At
least my focus was good if my performances were, in a word, inconsistent.
Monday was quite exciting because I had a chance to do a
workout that I always seemed to miss due to travel or scheduled rest days or,
ahem, injury. Diane: one of my favourite benchmark workouts because it involves
one of my favourite things: handstand pushups! It’s 21 deadlifts @60kgs, 21
handstand pushups, 15 deadlifts, 15 handstand pushups, then 9, and 9. Now until
you get really good handstand pushups at this volume is more about pacing than
anything. My current max is 15 (Lynda, knowing that, decided to set a new gym
record this week of 16 … so I’ll clearly need to go for 20 next time around!),
but if you go to max in the first set you will literally not be able to perform
the movement with the proper range of motion by the end of the second set. So
you do 5, come down, shake it out, etc.
Anyway from this perspective it’s interesting because how
much rest is enough vs too much is a fine line. So it was fun to play around
with it. I was ecstatic about my time (7:41) because it smashed my (admittedly
1 year old!) PR of 15:38. And I even had 5 no reps (two where my head didn’t
touch the bottom, and three where I couldn’t press out). So, room for
improvement!
Tuesday I don’t remember but WEDNESDAY was horrific because
everything hurt and I couldn’t do wall balls to save my life (one I threw and it
went STRAIGHT up into the air instead of where it was supposed to be going). My
performance was inconsistent, to say the least, and the same last week.
Not sure when I had the ‘aha’ moment, possibly while lying
on the table at acupuncture with a new record 42 needles in my body (mostly in
the back this time, yeesh!) but obviously I’m going through a lot at the
moment. Physically recovering from injury and also a couple of different types
of work to unwind old movement patterns. Emotionally, dealing with some quite
painful things. If your mind isn’t healthy, your body won’t be. Combine the two
and it’s no surprise that my performance has been, in a word, inconsistent. But
instead of thinking it through, I just got frustrated that I was feeling out of
shape. Actually, I’m probably not. I have had a couple of SUPER workouts in
these past few weeks, so the fact that I’m feeling out of cardio shape probably
has more to do with my throwing too much at my body than that I’m actually out
of shape.
Or that’s what I tell myself but actually it doesn’t matter
because this time I am going to rest until I’m actually better. Good news is
after a good session with Emma Thursday evening my back released a lot.
Exciting week at work: working on designing social
enterprise diagnostics with Oriel, seeing some of the fruits of Lilian’s
research, a two-hour meeting on the Heart website redesign, introducing Oriel
to FoodTents, a BBBEE presentation by one of the senior consultants at the top
BEE consulting firm in South Africa. This was interesting not only for the
direct applicability of it but also for the examples: the speaker used to work
at Anglo American and I remember reading in The Economist back in the day about
the programs Anglo did to, for example, test their workers for AIDS and, if
necessary, give them ARVs. Made sense even outside of the mandates of BEE: if
your trained workers get sick and die, that’s bad for the bottom line.
The BEE legislation is under review now, which is interesting
because it was originally promised not to be touched for 10 years (we are now 4
years in). Some things have worked well (the emergence of a black middle
class). Some things have not (the famous ‘black diamonds’ and the difficulties applying
in practice the theory of what was intended around such things as preferential
procurement).
More importantly this week, Parliament voted in favour of a government
secrecy bill. See the Zapiro cartoon and brief write-up here. Now I haven’t actually read this bill (hell I haven’t
even gotten a shower curtain rod after almost a month) but the gist of it is
that the government wants to make a lot of government actions and information
classified and lock up any journalists who write about it. A lot of people are
upset. Or, were on Tuesday, at least. Time marches on. We will see what happens
next: advocacy groups are gearing up for a legal battle, and the discourse onthe subject
is quite interesting; it may in fact be that the popular media has misconstrued
the main threat of the bill. I’m not going to repeat the discourse here. If you’re
interested, read it. It was quite interesting to hear all the people quoting
Benjamin Franklin this week.
Wednesday evening I went to a networking event that featured
a couple of speakers, the one I really went to the event to hear was discussing
cognitive biases and how to avoid them in product design (focused on web
usability, as that is his area of expertise). I didn’t learn much I didn’t already
know, but I did talk to him for a good long time afterwards. It’s always great
to meet likeminded people, and the direct application of cognitive biases is an
interesting twist. It’s also good, I suppose, to exercise the brain in a way I
used to exercise it … redesigning the web site and writing copy for it has made
me dig up some of my old usability skills. If there are two things in business
I’m passionate about, it’s customer value propositions and good product design.
While I’m on the subject I’ll share a tidbit I picked up
from a TED talk clip recently. Most companies talk about what they do, then
maybe how they do it, and if you’re really lucky, why they do it. But as a
customer you don’t actually care what the products and services are. You have a
problem you want solved and you want to know can this organisation help me,
how, and how much will it cost? Lower barriers to sale, in other words. Rather
you should talk about why you do what you do (remember, you’re in business to
solve a customer’s problem not to entertain yourself), then how and what.
I am presently trying to figure out how the bloody hell to
get my cats from Boston to here, which I really should have done on one of my
last visits but you need to apply for the import permit 6-8 weeks in advance,
which I never wound up doing far enough in advance of my travel. Having said
that, the paperwork and veterinary certificates are the easy part. The hard
part, actually, is figuring out how to get them here. There are so many factors
involved. If you take them as baggage when you fly, that’s probably the
cheapest option (although I’m not sure of this), and you need to make sure you
are flying a pet-friendly airline. Some airlines apparently do not climate control
the cargo hold which would literally cause my cats to die on the flight between
Boston and Europe. Not ideal, obviously.
But I’m not planning on going to the States until next July-August
and in the meantime fostering the cats is a massive inconvenience for the
people who have stepped up to the plate to help. If you think I hate asking for
help normally, imagine how I feel NEEDING help. But if you are not flying with
your pets, the airlines do not seem, for the most part, to have services that
offer shipping the animals. You have to go through a cargo company, of which
there are about 50 listed in Boston. Of these, I need to know the ones that a)
either are pet-friendly or work with pet-friendly airlines and b) do in fact
ship from Boston to Cape Town. Add to this the difficulty of not being able to
call U.S. numbers (gonna try Skype on the weekend).
My point being: these web sites, which is where I have
started my search, are anything but customer-centric. And here I feel like I’m
lecturing people all week: WHAT is your desired social impact? WHY before what and how. My prefrontal cortex is tired.
This manifested the other day when I was driving somewhere,
I was late, and there was massive amounts of unexpected traffic. And I’m
sitting there, absolutely fuming, even though I know fully well that all I’m
hurting is myself. Ironic, isn’t it? If you can’t eat your own dog food, how do
you expect anyone else to? And it’s when your prefrontal cortex is tired that
you eat the chocolate cake. Or the three chocolate slabs. Luckily I’ve avoided
that. Not that I haven’t been tempted, mind you. Awareness is the first step; it's the mindless actions that always get us.
On a final note, consider the following two aphorisms:
- If better is possible, then good is not enough.
- Perfection is the enemy of good.
Which is most applicable to a given situation? Classic MBA
answer: it depends. In sport, maybe the first one (and even that is situational,
competition vs training). In business, maybe the second one (lots of talk of
minimum viable product and iteration this week!).
- “He seemed fairly interested. So I was happy to listen to his rubbish.” – Jon
- “That’s a nice improvement, hey?” – Chris
- “But the thing is – the person who wrote that book should have met [name removed].” – Peter
- “Just …. Don’t shoot the messenger, man.” – Ellie
- “I don’t have enough ice cream in my life these days.” – Hollie
- “It’s just when you’re feeling better that you should rest just a little bit more.” – Hon
- “I could but then I’d also have to be obsessed.” – Adrian
- “Note to self: don’t drink beer at work then come to CrossFit.” – Adrian
- “Where there’s smoke there’s fire hey.” – Adrian
- “Welcome to Africa. We don’t buy softwares.” – George
- “That’s hard!!” – Phil (that’s what she said … actually I’d just explained what I do for a living)
- “THIS is the sort of place I hang out, and THESE are the sort of people I hang out with.” – Phil
- “So you like getting stuck with needles?” “ F*ck! No!!” – Jacques & Ellie (this was funny mainly for the vehemence of my response)
- “We had a budget. We were allowed to kill 5 people a year before anyone asked any questions.” – John
- “Most of us don't breathe properly.” – Emma
- “Their opinions are simply their opinions. Nothing else.” – Dale
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