Another week down

So my knee is almost fully recovered! I must say at this point last week I was pretty concerned, and I took Monday completely off (didn’t hurt that the workout consisted of back squats which was certainly not in the cards), and my co-workers made fun of my limp (gee, thanks guys..). On Tuesday I went to the gym figuring that if anything hurt I wouldn’t do it, and amazingly nothing hurt! I was a little annoyed with myself because I wasn’t in the right mental space to try and lift more than my previous 1 rep max on press. Not sure why. On Wednesday I learned that I could shuffle along from side to side doing a handstand “walk” against the wall (and that 75 burpees actually makes me a bit sore the next day). Friday was a good day because I did get a new PR on power clean and I think I actually could have gone a little higher but we ran out of time. Then we did a workout called “Grace” which is 30 clean & jerks. The prescribed weight is 40kgs for women but our coaches wanted us to use a weight where we could finish the workout in less than 5 minutes so we used I think 60% of our power clean, which in my case was 29kgs. That was far too easy as I finished in 2:31 and didn’t even feel any significant pain until the last 7 or 8 reps.

But back to the knee: other than some small amount of pain when I climb down stairs sometimes I usually forget that I injured it at all. I am actually truly, truly amazed by this considering that I literally couldn’t walk just over a week ago and the slightest twisting of the knee caused excruciating pain. Well, I don’t care: I’m just glad to be better!


The work week was also very packed, as usual. I feel like I didn’t really get much of a chance to breathe, which isn’t good because according to one of my gym friends I need to breathe more because my muscles below my ribs are all incredibly tight (that’s one of the root causes of that foot pain I had a few weeks back).

Week 2 of incubation went better than the first week. Things are starting to fall into place but we also still have a lot of work to do. On Thursday we had what was actually a really great meeting where we spent a few hours talking about a lot of this new business in detail and settled on some core elements of what we want to do and what we want to outsource (pending the results of market research, due diligence, and other digging: we need to make sure that how we want to do things actually is achievable).

This week also brought a new intern here from Denmark for 7 weeks, another meeting with a design firm (this time accompanied by a tour of operations including their full-size mockup room in the back: think movie studio but for life-size representations of design work … very, very cool!), lots of construction of shacks in the Hub, kickstarting Purple Heart market research, some great marketing and branding discussions, and, I think, more clarity on my side about what needs to happen for a couple of our businesses. I still struggle a bit with the human side but then again who doesn’t?

And, because I feel the need to document this lest I forget I did indeed hear these words out of the mouth of my boss: “You can work with Ellie on that. She’s more competent than I am.” When I asked him if he would write that down and sign it he just laughed: so I suppose he still has plausible deniability. But he and two other members of the senior management team are out next week on holiday which means there was a lot of last-minute things to do before they left.

It was also a pretty busy week activity-wise. On Tuesday night I went out to see a documentary about the recent outbreak of violence in Hout Bay. This made me a bit ill; I don’t actually think the documentary was very balanced but nonetheless there was quite clearly some unnecessary police brutality and that is extremely … discomforting? Bad? Worrying? Maybe all of it?

Wednesday evening started off with me arriving 30 minutes late to a local (even Woodstock-based!) startup for what was supposed to be telling of stories from the dotcom days but instead we wound up talking about Google, the syndrome of “not invented here” and “’n Boer maak ‘n plan” (a farmer makes a plan, which I guess is a way of saying necessity is the mother of invention combined with a certain level of self-reliance). But in social enterprise and I can generalize a little bit to any smart startup, especially here where resources are tight: there is no time and no money for any of this and you have to be extremely pragmatic. Oh yeah and I chose this opportunity to engage in one of my 8 drinking sessions: we eventually made it over to the 27 dinner just in time to grab some of the last few chairs. The highlight of the presentations was a demo of Microsoft’s Kinetic game system. We are so on the road to virtual reality: this tech is pretty cool, it’s like Wii minus the controller where you just use your body to do whatever, and it seemed pretty smart at picking people up and translating their movements into on-screen action. Following this, the party moved on to the Woodstock Lounge. Good times, until I realized just exactly how late it was….

Thursday evening one of our co-workers who is only here for another two weeks before going back to Europe invited us for a bring & braai at his place on Clifton’s fourth beach. This was a pretty spectacular setting for a fun work evening! I learned that apparently you don’t get between a South African man and his braai (one of the new European interns apparently suggested that the men move some of the coals around and apparently all three of their jaws hit the floor … and I thought American men were picky about their BBQs!). At least these men managed to braai the meat quite well, and not overcook it! On this evening I wasn’t drinking (wasn’t in any shape for it anyway!), which in the words of one of my co-workers is “why there was still beer left” at the end of the evening. Ha.

Friday night a co-worker had a housewarming party, mainly on his balcony which I think is one of the best views of city bowl that I’ve seen. There were a lot of really interesting people there; I think the funniest thing was when one of them heard me talking to one of our interns from Germany and immediately broke in with: “Whoa! You’re foreign!” Well, indeed. I guess you just never know who you’re going to wind up meeting at a party! I wound up staying later than I anticipated talking and then the next morning I was absolutely racked with indecision … did I want to go and get in a workout at CCF or go to the Biscuit Mill? Eventually I decided on CrossFit because I didn’t really need anything from the market and I knew I would be drinking later in the day so best to assuage the guilt … the workout was fun and I must say I don’t think 5 minutes have ever felt quite so fast as when you’re trying to beat 160m prowler push! We did, though, we got to 180. Go team!

Next, I changed and drove to pick up my co-worker and some others in Khayelitsha before heading to a wedding in Stellenbosch. My goodness what a beautiful setting, and although this was a Western wedding I must say that African weddings are more fun than Western weddings because Western guests don’t spontaneously burst into song and start dancing at various times! Shame I didn’t know any of the words but how cool!

I was deeply relieved that the bar had a TV in it where I could watch the rugby. Unfortunately, the game (Western Province vs the Sharks from Durban) turned out to be a bit of a Province spanking so that was quite depressing. But that’s what wine is for! Unfortunately I was so depressed by the game that I ate an entire cupcake. Now this is not a huge catastrophe but when I crashed from the sugar high I crashed hard: I was meant to drive down to Tokai for a Halloween party. By the time I finally woke up (!!) it was already 11pm so I suppose that made me fashionably late! But it was still super fun, and I did meet some more really fun people. I was happy that they were all reasonably sober, and so interesting to talk to (drunk people can be a bit boring don’t you know).

I am also compelled to admit for the record that this is the first sports bet I can recall losing. Shame. Well, now I owe my co-worker a six-pack of beer, so I suppose it could be worse!

Today was relatively chill although I had intended to get more work done than I actually did… but I started off at yoga and finally noticed the amazing contrast of the green geranium leaves against the green wall. It’s amazing how often we look at things without actually seeing them. A bit later on I had lunch in Claremont at the house of the parents of a friend, then to his place in Newlands for some brainstorming and also checking what is apparently the oldest ginko tree in the Western Cape. I will say that this whole thing was a bit embarrassing when I was getting asked all of these questions about American history and I had no idea! You would think I would know if the Declaration of Independence was signed before or after the Revolutionary War (according to Wikipedia, the answer is neither, actually: it happened about a year after the war started). Or when it was exactly that we introduced term limits for President; my knowledge of American history is actually kind of shockingly bad!

Looking forward to the week ahead I think I will be able to get a lot done. Well, I’d better: there is a lot that needs to get done before I go off on my own vacation in two weeks, and I’m out of the office on Friday because we are going to Joburg. Only bummer about that is that the flights are going to make me fashionably late to a Guy Fawkes Day party in Bakoven. Shame to miss sunset from there but hey, I’m sure there will be other opportunities!

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

I’m injured again. Ran the Impi Challenge yesterday which was a 12km obstacle course race with 17 obstacles and somewhere along the line I sprained my knee. As I guess it goes with these things I didn’t realize just how bad it was until I stopped at the end. Luckily there were doctors from Mediclinic there and so I got checked out immediately and learned that it wasn’t torn, there was no fluid under the skin (just a big bruise!), so it’s just a bad sprain. 7-10 days and I’ll be back to normal. Although I do heal quickly I have to say I am wondering just how realistic that timeframe is because this hurts. Badly.

The worst part is I am not even sure what happened! I think it was on the tower we had to climb where on the way back down we had to climb down some webbing and when other people got on at the top it caused the whole thing to swing pretty violently and I bet that’s when it happened. I should also note (yes, Mom, now I am bragging) that despite being injured I stuck to my guns about the fact that this was not an evening on which I planned to drink, and so I didn’t drink.

Some of the obstacles were pretty cool, though. We had to crawl underground (there I used the bear crawl because it was easier than a normal crawl!), wade through a swamp, jump off a platform into water, climb under a series of posts (think crawling under a weight bench at the gym … not that the guys at CCF have ever made us do anything like that!), run across a series of palettes in water (if you went too slowly they would sink!), climb over a 3m wall and my personal favourite, climb over a series of posts (well, one post on either side with a cross-bar in between) that were taller than I was! This is the only one that was remotely challenging for me because it came just after a big long hill and you basically needed to sprint, jump up and grab on with your arms and then swing your legs up, over, and around on the other side. Oh, and did I mention they were also uphill?

So it was super fun although any ideas I had of running competitively were shot down when we had to queue for 20+ minutes at the first obstacle. Oops. They released us in groups of I think 50 and I was in a middle group so really the only way to run competitively is if you happened to be in Group A, or B, or maybe C. But, c’est la vie. Also after I realized I was hurt I took it easy and was mainly more interested in finishing without hurting myself worse!

But my life isn’t all about the Impi Challenge now is it? On one day last week I hit another set of double PRs on press (38kg for 3 reps, and 40 for 1), and had a pretty decent performance on my scaled version of Fran. And then on Thursday I was just exhausted and couldn’t do wall balls to save my life. Hmmm makes me a bit sad now to write this because it’s going to be quite a while before I’m back in the game, sigh…

The week was pretty busy at work. Incubation for our low-cost housing venture kicked off in earnest, we met with the V&A and another design firm, planned hamper market research and listed out different Cadbury touchpoints, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I can’t actually remember at the moment. All that I remember is that it’s busy. According to one of my co-workers I have been particularly busy the last three weeks, to which I think I said: “is that all?” When I first heard the phrase “time poor” I don’t think I fully comprehended it. I’d been busy before, but time poor is actually a different thing entirely, and it actually does speak completely to priorities. How we choose to allocate our time when there is more going on than we can possibly actually deal with; well, it’s challenging to get the balance right and not focus on things that are actually relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

So yesterday really made me pause and think (and this started before I injured myself thank you very much). So often we move forward so fast we kind of forget why, and even in social enterprise where we constantly try to pull ourselves back to our raison d’etre … so I was driving to the race and there was this news story about this woman and her child who had burned to death in a shack fire. Now this stuff happens all the time here, of course, and all I could think about was how couldn’t we work faster to get our enterprise up and running (because the technology is, among other things, highly fire resistant). Of course there is government red tape involved and I am sure that is going to bother me too, but that really brought it home.

Then yesterday evening a friend and I went over to a co-worker’s place (a shack, yes) in Khayelitsha for dinner and to hang out. So one of the women we met was telling us about how she used to be brilliant in school but she had to drop out to support her brothers and sisters. Now around here people say “shame” as shorthand for “that’s a shame” (not “you should be ashamed”) and to me this is the very definition of shame. That is just tragic! I am sitting around feeling pretty sorry for myself at the moment but of course, I have had every opportunity in life and yes, maybe I’ve made more out of them than some other people but really, really, this is shocking and sad and of course when you meet someone facts on the ground turn from statistics and stories into reality. It was also funny driving out of the township and the streets were dead. It is, of course, too dangerous for anyone to walk the streets at night in Khayelitsha. Shame.

I also had a bit of an epiphany on the drive home: the reason I like spending time with my boss so much (other than that he’s interesting, of course), is that I’m a natural leader but it’s tiring to lead all the time. When I’m with him is pretty much the only time at work when I consistently don’t need always to be the one who figures out what to do next, and where I am comfortable being led. I think that’s another thing I like about CrossFit: I don’t need to think at all (which isn’t to say I don’t have to concentrate: the two are different). Actually, thinking too much gets me into trouble sometimes (snatch, I'm talking to you...had a mental block on this lift for some time now, sadly).

My knee threw all my plans for today out of whack (well except my plan to go see a movie tonight). I slept in (you only heal when you sleep, after all!) then I went by work to have a check-in with a co-worker and to pick up an intern that we have for the next 7 weeks, bring her to Sandbar, and talk in more detail about the project that I think will be the best fit for her during her time here. And now, I have some work to do before dinner time! Dinner is going to be very similar to lunch, actually: a big salad with some red meat (in this case, free-range grass-fed kudu steak: cheap, healthy, and tasty!).

Quicksand

Ever feel like you’re running as fast as you can just to keep in the same place? I suppose that isn’t entirely fair because things are definitely happening and a lot is going well but something feels somewhat off. Maybe it’s the lack of alcohol. More likely, I didn’t sit down on the weekend and really plan, and I am now feeling the results of that.

OR not having internet for the fourth day now at work is taking its toll …. I am running out of bandwidth quickly on my personal internet which is not a good thing. I think much of the city of Cape Town is having problems; lots of people are complaining and the wireless network is quite slow. It’s not really clear. Well, welcome to Africa I suppose; I was talking to some of the guys in the office yesterday who were commenting that when I go back to the States it’s going to seem like paradise to have uncapped, high speed internet. Probably true! I am also looking forward to a good pumpkin beer. Driving on the right though, now that’s going to be weird!

I think heart is a little bit like CrossFit: never the same day twice! Today ranged from scheduling the incubation of our latest social enterprise (aka my latest baby) to photographing some social entrepreneurs to weekly status meetings to a Purple Heart branding and marketing discussion. Oh, and then I sat down to my emails.

Similar story yesterday: spent a lot of the day planning for our big Hub launch event at the end of the month, and doing some Purple Heart planning with our newest hire. I then had to run out of the office to go to the marvel of American-style consumerism that is Canal Walk (it’s a shopping mall. A really big shopping mall that aside from the brands being different could literally be in Los Gatos) to register for the Impi Challenge race that I’m doing on Saturday, assuming that I am healed. The line was absurd! I think I had to wait about 25 minutes, which was a bit annoying but it’s life I suppose.

Speaking of healing, I had a session of muscle activation/trigger point therapy last night with one of the women at my gym. That ranged between extremely painful and being really ticklish, which she remarked was funny because what she was doing was applying some hard pressure and not tickling. Considering how darn sore I am today, I would say she is right. My goodness.

That’s probably (hopefully) why I felt so weak this morning at the gym; I even had to reduce my weight for the workout because I felt tender in one of my muscles and figured discretion was the better part of valor and risking injury was not very smart. Yesterday, all things considered, was a better day: some genius decided that 3x row 500m would be a fun workout for a Monday. Well, I did row my first sub-1:50 time at 1:49.2.

In the spirit of recovery, time to get to bed!

Currie Cup, and Recovery

Well, the recovery is continuing apace. I woke up Saturday in a lot less pain than usual, looked at the workout on the web site and thought I might not be able to do some of the exercises in it. However, once I warmed up the pain went away almost entirely and I was able to do everything although not quite with the “invincibility” I am used to. I’m only human, apparently. After the workout one of our coaches showed me how to use a kettlebell to work on the tightness in my stomach. Ahhh, pain!! It’s just amazing how tightness in my stomach can cause excruciating pain in my foot! The body is a funny thing.

One of my friends came over and we went together over to the Old Biscuit Mill. I am not going to be able to go for a couple of weeks, so I really needed to stock up on meat. Just as I was telling her that it was pretty well impossible to go to this market without running into someone you know, we saw one of the guys from the gym. No comment there!

Speaking of meat, I’ve gotten really into chicken livers recently. So when we saw duck liver for sale at the Neighborhood Butcher I was very excited. Now I have some in my refrigerator, I just have to figure out what to do with it!

Then in the afternoon a group of four of us made our way over to Newlands to watch the Currie Cup semifinal game. Just before that we watched the second half of the Sharks-Blue Bulls game (these teams are from Durban and Pretoria, respectively) from a bar. I think this may be my first time going into a bar and watching a game and not having a drink. Apparently the game was running late and the stands were quite empty because there was an attack of bees (lest you think I’m making this up you can find the article here). The Province fans were a bit scandalized – something about “real men” playing through an attack of bees. Ha. Anyway in what was a surprise to most people, I think, the Sharks won that game.

So Western Province was playing the Free State Cheetahs. I am compelled to comment that Province has probably the ugliest uniform I can think of off the top of my head. I also wonder why this team doesn’t have a name like Blue Bulls or Sharks or Cheetahs … just … Province. Strange. Anyway, whatever, so this was my first game not in the standing section. It was a bit more subdued. Next time either mid-field seats or standing section again, with the real fans! The game was pretty terrible, actually, as a sporting contest. At one point Province was up 31-0 before getting a little sloppy and the Cheetahs scored a try. But, I guess it’s ok to attend a lousy game as long as your team is the one winning! I have to say though in comparison to, say, a Patriots playoff game the atmosphere was disappointing. Then again, when the Patriots just run up the score even in a playoff game it’s just not that interesting either.

Afterwards, over to an intimate little braai for a couple of hours before heading home to get a good night’s sleep! It was fun, though: at one point we were talking about certain types of dreams. Turns out almost all of us have dreams about falling, two of us have dreams we can fly, three of the people had some weird dream about teeth falling out and trying to shove them back in (!!). Anyway, good stuff.

Today was a very chill day. Woke up pretty early, went to yoga then lunch at the Wellness Warehouse, followed by some work, then a massage that was half Thai massage and half sports massage. It is a bit annoying to have to spend so much time working my body to get it back to normal but it’s quite necessary. Spent some time after talking to the guy who runs the place. Poor thing works in a dark cave all day. On a day like today (a bit warm for me at around 32 degrees, I am probably going to die in the summer!) working in a cave sounds pretty attractive.

Overall, a nice lazy Sunday: just what I need to prepare for the week ahead!

Jozi!

Today (today being Friday) my boss and I went to Johannesburg on a day trip to visit a corporate that is providing grant funding to us to get one of our social enterprises off the ground. The day didn’t start off so well as we were informed upon check-in that our flight was delayed for 100 minutes (wound up being more like 2 hours). So we went to a coffee shop on the second floor and worked through our plan in more detail.

In any event I was excited to see the little of this city that I had heard so much about. I was there last year for a bit after safari (for details you can consult this blog post). Haha, I still don’t know how cricket works! But I got to see a bit more of it today, and all I could think was that it reminded me of LA. So Cape Town reminds me a lot of San Francisco, and Sandton at least is a lot like LA. Very flat, spread out, with a lot of generic-looking houses, office parks, and shops. There is more of a fast-paced culture there than in Cape Town so from that perspective I suppose the comparisons to New York may be apt. I don’t really know: I spent a grand total of about 6 hours there.

We took the much-heralded Gautrain (so-called because it is in Gauteng province, get it?) between the airport and Sandton. This was not nearly as exciting as I had imagined: I was thinking more like bullet train. But apparently it beats driving on the surface roads, and it was certainly efficient enough as these things go.

The meeting went well; it was mainly a relationship-building meeting but we came out of it with a clear understanding of what we need to do over the next several weeks. But our hosts couldn’t have been more welcoming and pleasant to work with. They even provided us with some lunch which was great since we arrived at 1pm and didn’t have time to get any food. I even managed to stick to my strict diet (for the most part, I did eat the deli meat which is not an ideal protein source by any stretch of the imagination but it was the only protein available … as I was busy I had packed nuts and fruit but didn’t have any biltong available).

After the meeting we had some time before our return flight (more time than we anticipated even as this flight was delayed too, by about an hour), so we went to Sandton City. This is apparently the biggest tourist attraction in Sandton, and consists of Nelson Mandela Square and a very large shopping mall. Boy am I glad I don’t live in Joburg. We were amused to see all the people taking photos in front of the Nelson Mandela monument. I was much more excited to catch a glimpse of Patrice Motsepe and his bodyguards (he is one of South Africa’s richest men, and possibly the richest black man, I am not sure).

Oh! But I was very excited to see my first jacaranda trees. The color didn’t really come out but I put up a photo of one of them up above. Beautiful! Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time on this trip to make it up to Pretoria where the jacarandas are apparently everywhere, sort of like the cherry trees in Washington D.C. or Tokyo. Apparently there are some jacarandas around Stellenbosch so I should go back out there at some point to check them out.

The airport was just chaos! They kept moving us from gate to gate, which was very confusing because we were so busy concentrating on our laptops that we kept almost missing what was going on. That is actually the challenge of travelling with someone else: you don’t take as much personal responsibility for paying attention to your surroundings!

We had carpooled to the airport and on my way to take my boss back to his house we encountered a sobriety checkpoint! This was very exciting because I had never been stopped at a sobriety checkpoint before, in any country. And on this occasion I hadn’t had a drop to drink all day (I had sparkling water at Sandton City thank you very much!), which all in all is definitely the best time to get pulled over by the police! Following this I went home to do about 45 minutes of trigger point massage/ball rolling. My foot injury is healing well, which is comforting.

All in all, a good day though. It was nice to have the luxury of time to talk through a lot of things. It’s actually a great situation that we have where the people I work with closely are people that I can learn from, and they can learn from me, and we happen to be similar enough and yet different enough that we complement each other well.