January 24

As per usual, I set a number of goals and ambitions for myself this year. I’ll keep myself accountable by reporting back briefly at the end of each month. So: Four non-fiction books, one city trip (Ghent). Workouts and 10k walking every day. Finding the time and energy to practice each of my languages (and piano) on a daily basis proved more difficult, but I’m persevering. Saunas: check. Also (virtually) no sugar, except for a couple of occasions when it would have been impolite to decline. So overall a very successful month.

The books:

The Nutmeg’s Curse (Ghosh) – how colonialism begat global capitalism which begat the climate catastrophe. Some very interesting insights. (4.5/5)

The Atlas of Unusual Borders (Nikolič) – a light (-hearted) look at the more curious borders of the world. Informative. (3.5/5)

The Daily Stoic (Holiday) – Stoic wisdom through the ages, to be imbued daily. I couldn’t help but read it in one go. (4/5)

Deep Sea (Copley) – a collection of essays on the largest part of Earth: the sea. Brief, and to the point. Apparently it’s one in a series of similar books. (4/5)

2024 – the Next Iteration

S.m.a.r.t. goals:

10k of walking per day.

Sauna/pond dip minimum twice per week.

52 non-fiction books.

No sugar.

Weight training every day when at home.

One weekend trip per month.

Swim 20 minutes per day when temperature allows.

20 minutes of French, German, Dutch, and Danish per day.

Ditto piano.

Starting to think it will take a miracle to manage all these lofty goals. Well. So be it. It’s a year that sounds like it belongs in a Science Fiction novel, after all. Nothing is impossible in sci-fi. Engage warp speed (and discipline)!

Books of May

Well, it’s the first of June, and it feels like summer has been here for weeks already. I keep trying for four books per month in order to get one read every week, and I don’t quite manage every month, but this time I did. Hopefully long, light June evenings on the terrace will help me improve, but for now, here are the titles I read last month:

Poltava (Englund) – the first book I’ve read in Swedish for a while, and what magnificent Swedish! It describes the destruction of the Carolinian army in Ukraine in gory detail, but also provides a look at the psyche of people back in early 1700’s, and how foot soldiers can be made to make the ultimate sacrifice for little or no reason. Seemed topical. 4.5/5

Under the skin (Villarosa) – a harrowing, unflinching look at what it means to be Black/Brown in the US, specifically in regard to health care, and with special attention to the compounding effects of intersectionality. Not an easy read. I knew it was bad, but not that bad. 4/5

A Thousand Brains (Hawkins) – an interesting insight into the brain and how it functions, this also offers an exposé of what intelligence is, and what it can mean for our species. Fittingly, it’s thought-provoking. 4.5/5

Learning in the zone (Magana) – this book purports to describe habits of meta learning. It does not. This is the worst jumble of pseudo-scientific goobledigook I have ever had the bad luck of encountering. Awash with cryptically contorted nonsense-statements and with precious little on offer in terms of actual advice, this book serves one purpose only: providing a zero on the scale on which to measure good books. 0/5

Books of February

This month I haven’t managed to read as much as last, but this is partially a good thing, because the books I have read have required slow, thoughtful reading – the kind where some sentences cause you to look out into infinity for a long time.

I started on several books, and at least one of them will be devoured in the fullness of time, but I will hold myself to my self-imposed rule and only report on the two I have finished in February, both by the same author, Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and expert on mosses, and she combines her scientific knowledge with a native American’s approach to the natural world, which is deeply touching. The first book by her that I read is called Gathering Moss (4/5), and is a collection of essays on all things moss-related. It is very poetic at times, and makes you want to bring a magnifying glass to otherwise forgotten corners of the garden. I learnt a great deal from it and would recommend it to anyone interested in nature, but it is the second title that hit me like an iron rod.

At 85 pages this is a booklet rather than a full-sized book, and yet The Democracy of Species (5/5) is very, very powerful. It is one of those books that, like The Inner Life of Animals, I will carry with me for a long time, hopefully forever. The message is that Western culture, through the way in which our thinking and our language turns matter and animals into objects, has reduced nature to resources to be exploited, rather than intricate pieces in a vast, interconnected net of subjects, all bound together by our reciprocal gifts to one another. The concept of the Honorable Harvest, where you take only what is offered, and give something in return, is a practical reflection of what an alternative – and truly sustainable – approach looks like.

It is a title that I will buy over and over again, to gift to anyone and everyone, as it is the embodiment of perhaps the most important message of all. Read it.

Time of my life with Corona


It took 26 months of quarantines, lockdowns, social distancing, home schooling, no work, too much work in weird modes, toilet paper hoarding (remember that?), mask wearing, protests, antivaxxers, ever-changing rules and regulations, and three shots of vaccine, but I finally got Covid-19.

First off, I should say that I have been lucky. No fever, no difficulty breathing (which would be horrible), just cold-like symptoms paired with fatigue and occasional heart palpitations (scary, but apparently not lethal), so holding out to get Omicron rather than the earlier variants seems to have been well worth it. (And, to quote a friend, “if it hadn’t been mild after three shots I’d turn antivaxxer myself!”).

I’m also happy to report that the Belgian health system works, overall. I got symptoms Thursday evening, did a self test in the morning and had it confirmed at a local pharmacy within a couple of hours (in the backyard, so as to avoid contaminating other customers), then got an online notification in the afternoon. A quick call to my boss and my family GP, and suddenly I was on sick leave for eleven days.

And so began the time of my life with Corona, confined to my house and garden. The first couple of days I was too tired to do anything much apart from worrying that the disease might get worse. I went from my bed to the sofa and back, pretty much. Since I couldn’t go grocery shopping and didn’t have the energy to cook I subsisted on toast, musli and instant noodle soup – all thankfully available in abundance. Something else to be thankful for: I never lost my sense of smell or taste. Although I will say that eating the same instant noodle soup four days in a row can make you wish you had lost your tastebuds.

After the first few days I did get better, and was desperate to get out, having stared at the walls for too long. However, with the weather being what it is the garden wasn’t an option, as it resembled a rice paddy more than anything (Remember the first spring when life in the time of Corona meant the virus had us all lounging outdoors in glorious sunshine? No such luck.) It was so wet I thought I saw goldfish from the pond make little excursions, but I might have been mistaken. Equally desperate for some sort of physical interaction, I snuck out early mornings to visit the deer that live in an enclosure at the edge of my village. Turns out they enjoy old carrots and broccoli (which was all I had in my fridge by this stage) and I could even hand feed them.

It sounds silly, but those mini-walks made a difference. I can see why prison inmates feed birds – it’s not that the birds represent freedom, it’s the fact that you are doing something for another living being. Not being allowed to see anyone was much harder than I thought it would be. Thank goodness for WhatsApp, Skype, Facetime and Signal, but it’s just not the same. I’m a very tactile person, and not being able to hug my kids was the worst part of it all. As for online chats, the children had school, and in what little time that remained after class and homework they didn’t want to talk for long to their snotty, sleepy dad who wasn’t doing anything fun anyway.

In a way this was a scary premonition of what life in retirement might be like: limited energy, little social contacts, and no real goals or ambitions. That thought alone was enough to keep me working towards my new year’s resolutions as much as I could. I meditated, stretched, played the piano and chess, planned trips and investments, and read three books. But then of course on my second to last day of isolation Putin decided to invade Ukraine (again), so maybe war will break out and I won’t have to worry about retirement at all…

Catch -22

Most people are familiar with the concept of a Catch 22 – even those who haven’t read the novel by Heller know that it’s a somewhat absurdist law, literally catching you out, forcing you to do something you don’t want to and/or refrain from doing something that you do want, no matter what.

Life can be a little like that; who hasn’t felt trapped in a job or a relationship because you didn’t see a way out? Regular readers know that I like the idea of achieving, of experiencing, of expanding and improving. Or maybe it’s the opposite that scares me; stagnation, resignation, wasting what little time we have. Either way, I often feel that I don’t do enough, and I think that many might feel the same. There is a bit of Catch 22 in this, too; you don’t do anything to pursue your dreams, because pursuing them risks exposing them for what you fear they are: dreams.

But: big dreams stay dreams because you don’t divide them up into manageable chunks. You want to circumnavigate the world, but you don’t because it’s too difficult a thing to plan and execute. You want to get rich, but you have no idea how, so you don’t even try. You want to sing like Adele and write songs like Ed Sheeran, but since you probably can’t you don’t even sit down at the piano.

However, break it down into smaller pieces, and suddenly it’s feasible. I have a colleague who is traveling the world one country at a time, and he makes it look easy; he went to Machu Picchu over a long weekend, he did Australia (the civilized corner) in a week. Granted, it’s costly to travel like that, but what I take away from it is that you can see a lot more if you do many little trips than if you sit around dreaming about going on an extended world-cruising, continent-hopping holiday that somehow never materializes. I don’t think I want to go to South America for three days (I fear the jet lag alone would turn it into a mescaline trip), but the principle is sound.

The same goes for anything, really. Take finances: I never really had a plan for money beyond avoiding going into red, but I’m slowly starting to change that. And it’s the same thing there: you can’t turn into a finance wiz overnight, but you can read up on, and invest in, a LOT of things that over time will (hopefully) net you substantially more money than if you just leave whatever is left at the end of the month in a savings account.

As for healthy living, again, no one can expect instant fitness – it takes more than one gym session to get ripped, alas, and more than one healthy meal to live forever, cruel and unjust as that is – but if you set a weekly goal of not eating anything unhealthy except on Sundays, say, and working out a little (20 minutes, the length of a sitcom) every day, then it doesn’t seem quite so impossible to attain.

It IS important to be accountable to someone tho, as this increases the likelihood you’ll go through with your ambitions. So, here are my goals and how to reach them in -22:

– I will do a minimum of one trip per month to places I’ve never been – city weekends, short hiking hols, bonsai road trips, what have you,

– I will try to double my savings over one year. I have a figure in mind, but even if I don’t reach that I will actively try to improve my knowledge in this field,

– I will get fit – defined as 80kg body weight or less, and/or fat percentage of 18, and use the above mentioned template as my starting point,

– I will read at least 20 non-fiction books, or a little less than one every two weeks, on top of the Blinkist ones I’m already reading, and report them to my fellow jolly readers,

– I will learn a new piece of piano music every month, for a total of twelve.

I have other ambitions too, like more paragliding, bee keeping, sauna building, gardening, chicken keeping, et cetera, but these are easily visualised, and easy to quantify and report back on, thus keeping me (hopefully) on the straight and narrow.

Here’s to seizing the day, and making 2022 a good catch!

Ponderings

Last year during the lockdown, the garden was my refuge, my oasis, my paradise, and yet there was something missing. And so to mark my 50th circumnavigation of the nearest star (and what a strange thing that is to celebrate) I decided to get myself something that I have dreamt of for as long as I have lived here: a swimming pond.

What is a swimming pond, I hear you ask, obligingly. Well, it isn’t a pool, first of all. You aim to create something that mimics the functioning of a lake to the largest extent possible, so as to have a real, beneficial effect for the local wildlife, that can use it as a habitat (think frogs, newts, water fowl, koi, the kraken) or a drinking hole (everyone else, to feed the kraken). But of course the idea is to be able to enjoy it if you happen to be hooman, too, so how do you combine the two?

The idea is to have a natural, self-cleaning system instead of having to add chlorine or similar. Water is pumped through a combination of aquatic plants and porous lava rock, and so is kept filtered and aerated much the same way a lake or a brook is. The difference is that in order avoid having to swim through too much muck, the plants are kept in a separate compartment inside the pond basin. Excess rain water is stored in two underground cisterns, and on days when heat causes evaporation the system automatically uses that stored water to ensure a stable water level.

So, that was the plan. After a couple of failed attempts I found a company, Ecoworks, that specialises in these types of ponds, and who sounded professional. There were several planning meetings where loads of ideas were tossed about, and eventually out. Instead of islands, Japanese bridges à la Monet, or waterfalls, we decided on a simple oval shape with a round wooden terrace at one end.

(In a way, that is a rather nifty description of life at 50: the more outrageous notions might never have come to fruition, but hopefully what you are left with instead is a harmonious, graceful entity – and if there is an occasional wistful yearning for islands and waterfalls, well, that is life, right?)

And so, after some hiccups (the first measurements were wrong, and the guy who was subcontracted to do the digging bowed out as a result) the project got underway in August. I was mightily stressed out by the sheer volume of work that needed to be done, and frankly concerned about the impact heavy machinery would have on the rest of the garden, but I needn’t have worried – the builders were pros, and friendly to a fault.

As load after load of soil was carted out of the garden and the lawn turned to muck, the project began to take shape; the outsized cisterns were sunk in the ground and covered up, the enormous, made-to-measure rubber liner was somehow wrangled into place, the plant scheme decided upon and executed, and finally this enormous moat was filled with water from the garden hose over a period of four days, and it all worked smoothly, in spite (or because) of last minute adjustments here and there.

The lesson here: if you have a dream project, the time for doing it is NOW. And if it doesn’t scare you, you ain’t dreaming big enough. Also – and this just might be universally applicable – chances are your dream project will look like a big muddy hole in the ground right up until it finally comes together.

And so we arrive at today. Mid October, mid life, a cold day and me with a cold to boot, but I wasn’t going to miss the premiere. If I can live the second half of my life in a way that reflects my pond – straddling the natural world and modern technology, adding beauty and doing good for the local flora and fauna (including my darling children) – then I shall be content. After all, if life is a beach, it is nice to be able to go for a swim, and sometimes you have to splash out on yourself…

Bookends II

Last year was a good year for reading (if nothing else). If you couldn’t work/travel/see people for real, at least you could encounter other worlds/perspectives/minds through the medium of the written word. And so I did. Here are some of the best ones I read, in no particular order:

Mindf*ck – Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America (Wylie): the very scary story of how Brits and Americans were manipulated into supporting Brexit and Trump. A must read.

The Popes (Norwich): A concise history of all the incumbents who ever had the job of CEO of the most powerful organisation the world has ever seen.

Being a beast (Foster): The author immerses himself in the world of various animals – foxes, deer, otters, badgers and swallows – and tries to live life as they do. Odd but mesmerizing.

The hidden life of trees (Wohlleben): Reading this man’s take on the inner life of animals made me a vegetarian. While not quite as good this is still an astonishing book.

Waterlog (Deakin): One man’s quest to swim the different waters of Britain, this is an ode to the element, and a cultural history of the land to boot.

The wild places (MacFarlane): In search of wilderness in the British isles. Similar in many ways to Deakin’s book, it comes as no surprise that the two authors were friends.

The history of England, part 1 (Harrison): covers the period from the ice age to 1600. Very well written. I read it in Swedish but I believe it’s been translated.

Creating a forest garden (Crawford): While I have some quibbles with the content (or lack thereof) there is no doubt this book influenced me more than anything else I read this year.

Animal, vegetable, miracle (Kingsolver): Horrible title and cover design, but the quest of one family to be locavores (eating locally produced food) for a year is as eye-opening as it is heart-warming.

Gardens of the world – two thousand years of garden design (Pigeat): garden porn at its finest. If you’re not inspired to design landscapes after reading this I don’t know that you ever will be.

Economix – how our economy works (and doesn’t work) (Goodwin): If someone had told me I’d find a comic book about economics interesting I would have laughed, but I did. And it made me laugh, too.

Baustilkunde – alle Epoken und Stile (Reid): If you can’t travel, this books still lets you see all the architectural styles in the world. It’s part cultural history, part house porn, plus the drawings are fantastic.

How to draw (Spicer): I picked this up in London in January – little did I expect that I would find myself with so much time to practice, but what an excellent teacher it would turn out to be.

So there you go. An eclectic mix, and hopefully something for everyone. Whichever one of these you pick up I guarantee they will enrich your lives – and that’s not something you can say of many things. Happy reading!

Me, a Sugar daddy?

(The one blog post I ever wrote that got thousands of hits was one that alluded to sex (but didn’t really have anything to do with it), so if you have been taken in by the title I apologize. The rest of you, read on:)

A cubist photo?

To say I have a bit of a sweet tooth is akin to saying African elephants are slightly buck-toothed. Not for me any other white substance; no Peruvian powder, no Bolivian blow, but good ole-fashioned simple sugar. Sucrose. I have a sugar habit that would make a hummingbird seem abstemious, and it is the one vice to which I unfailingly return.

I long since quit tobacco, I gave up coffee for over a year, I’ve been vegetarian for two years, and this year I resolved not to have any alcohol (luckily, as various Lockdowns and Quarantines certainly made booze look more attractive!), so I’m no stranger to overcoming vices, and yet Sugar Ray has me on the ropes, pummeling me relentlessly throughout every round. I’ve tried quitting before, but the longest I managed was a month or two.

In fairness, it is by far the easiest addiction to cater to – no restrictions apply, no eyebrows are raised in the supermarket when you load up with knock-off Snickers the way they would be if you were buying cheap plonk – and yet it is an addiction. Substance abuse. What else would you call it if you down a quarter of a kilo of chocolate in one sitting, or a quart of ice cream?

The effects of refined sugar on your body are devastating. It affects your heart, your sleeping patterns, your brain synapses… and that’s before we get to the horrible effect it has on your clothes – they all stop fitting! Suffice to say sweets are unequivocally bad news for you. If you know me a little you know I’m quite interested in living healthily, so this is anathema to me, and yet I haven’t managed to shake off the yoke of Candyland.

Cotton eye candy…

Of course, there are no Betty Ford-clinics for recovering sugar addicts. No posh hangouts with a safe, fructose-free environment for you to adjust to a life without sugar highs. Incidentally, the latter are the reason why refined sugar is so addictive; such grade-A product is incredibly rare in the natural world, so our bodies are pre-programmed to cram as much of it down our gullies as we can on those (originally) precious few occasions when an opportunity presents itself. The reward is a rush of endorphins akin to what you get when falling in love. And this makes sense when you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to steal honey combs and have to be double-quick gobbling it down before being stung to death by a black cloud of wild bees; it isn’t the least bit helpful when there’s an endless supply of it in your local supermarket (and no killer bees to prevent you from overindulging!).

In fact, resisting said temptation is an age old problem. All indigenous people go out of their way to get that sugar rush. Even the Original Sin was caused by sugar – Eve didn’t go for a starchy root vegetable or a protein-rich Egg of Knowledge in the garden of Eden, no, she and Hubby binged on fruit, which of course employ fructose to make themselves attractive to passers-by for propagation purposes (and information sharing, incidentally). My point is, the struggle is real.

So. I will sugar-coat things no more. Literally. My name is Chris. I’m a recovering sugar addict. It’s been ten hours since my last binge. From here on out I vow to live a life without refined sugar.

Life in the time of Corona

There’s this book called Love in the time of cholera. If you haven’t already read it, do. I won’t tell you what it’s about, but there is a hint in the title. As for me, I had already realized that life hasn’t changed all that much for me in this time of Corona, with the ongoing lockdown and isolation, but an Italian friend’s question got me thinking about why that is the case.

There are several reasons: having no family nearby apart from my children and few close friends – those who are close live far away, if you see what I mean? – has meant that I’m used to spending my time on my own, and/or interacting with people via WhatsApp.

Having worked part time ever since the children were born I have become accustomed to spending a lot of time at home, and I am in the habit of scheduling my time to make sure that I get things done, so even before the lockdown my day would consist of an hour of French, reading, piano, gardening, workout, drawing, etcetera. I have a treadmill in the garage and a basement gym, so I don’t have to leave home for my fitness, and the garden provides plenty of opportunity for outdoor activities and fresh air – if anything I’m grateful that I now have enough time to keep up with the weeds… All this means that my daily routine hasn’t changed – on the contrary, it has meant I was readily equipped with a roadmap for how to navigate lockdown.

As for shopping, I’m happy to do most of it online. Groceries are a bit of a hassle to buy without venturing to the store, but I tend to buy in bulk anyway, so nothing has really changed in that regard, apart from there being fewer people (and goods) in Delhaize. I bake my own bread, so the sudden Belgian interest in yeast and flour is the only real drawback of the hoarding that I have experienced so far.

I do tend to travel a great deal, and that has obviously been interrupted by recent developments, but part of me rejoices in the fact that mass tourism is presently interrupted, and besides, spring has sprung and it’s lovely to behold in the little paradise thatnis my backyard – birds are scoping out nesting sites, sleepy bumble bees have started to appear, and every branch is covered with the first coating of tender green that heralds sun, warmth and growth. There’s wonder and wisdom everywhere if you are willing to look for it.

It might sound depressing, as another Italian friend put it, but I honestly think my lifestyle is quite harmonious. If anything – and I don’t want to sound flippant here; people are dying from Covid-19, after all – I think the world would be a much better place if we practiced lockdown regularly. Let’s close Earth for business a couple of months per year. Let people concentrate on what is really important in life – happiness, relationships, tending to the earth (worshipping it, as the Danes would have it) and all living things instead of chasing wealth and power. It would be a better world for all.

20-20 hindsight

I always try to sum up the year that was. This time around, it’s both easier and more difficult than usual. Easier, because life has been reduced to the bare essentials in many respects, and more difficult because… well, you know.

Corona/covid came out of nowhere and walloped the world in the face, and the world responded by reeling around like a clown as it tried to come to terms with this new reality.

As the illness went from being an underreported event in a far-flung place to conquering the world, masks became ever more commonplace, as did questions about Sweden’s approach to Covid, which I felt supremely unqualified to answer. Social distancing was the catch phrase on everyone’s (hidden) lips, and then Lockdown was a reality. The inherent flaws of humanity (Loo Roll Riots) and its capacity for empathy (daily Healthcare Applause) were on full display.

In our case the kids and their mom went on holiday to northern Italy in February, just when things got started there, so they had to quarantine before most people. Throughout spring the kids struggled with isolation, an entirely new work interface, and teachers who seemingly had no notion of the burden they were placing on their wards. Luckily for us, there was little work for interpreters, because there was no infrastructure in place to hold large multilingual conferences via internet, so we could help the kids with their transition to distance schooling.

Summer holidays were different, shall we say. Having struggled to even get to Sweden, we isolated as best we could. Whether rafting with the kids and my sister and her family, or kayaking with my brother, I slept outdoors pretty much the whole time – either in a tent or in a hammock slung between a couple of trees. It was lovely, but very brief, as I didn’t get all the leave I asked for (in spite of there being absolutely zero work, my employer insisted on having people on standby…), meaning I had to return to Belgium, where I was forced to self-isolate, and so couldn’t work anyway, of course.

Instead, my mind turned to all the things I had been contemplating doing for a long time, and hadn’t got around to. August saw me take on a flurry of projects: getting solar panels installed, buying a hybrid car, getting bees, planning a swimming pond, constructing a duck house, volunteering at a wildlife rescue center, getting an e-bike, making jams and juice and canning fruit and sauces. It was good.

Then September came around, and a return to school and work, but not as we knew it. School was a strange hybrid, work even more so. Even after more than half a year, both organizations were clearly struggling to come to terms with the new parameters. There was still precious little work for me, so I planned on going to the French alps for a week of paragliding. It wasn’t to be. La rentree had the predictable effect of making cases surge again, and I had to stay home. This was a blessing in disguise, as our beloved cat Misty suddenly died; had I gone I wouldn’t have been there to bury her and grieve her passing with the kids – a poignant reminder of how many people lost loved ones without being able to be there! As it was we buried her in her favorite spot in the garden on the last day of summer. She left a painfully large void in all our lives.

And so we struggled on. Like everyone else we have tried to cope as best we can. In many ways we have been incredibly lucky, in that no one in our family has died from Covid. We still have our jobs. We haven’t been too affected by the many nasty (and under-reported) side effects of Lockdown and isolation, such as domestic violence, depression, substance abuse (ok, fine, sugar consumption levels have been too high). The garden has been an oasis and a constant source of joy.

It does sort of seem like a lost year in some ways, but at the same time I feel very strongly that the world needed this enforced pause to stop and take stock and reflect on where we go from here. I have certainly done so. And even though my ambitions for this year were largely knocked sideways, I have still managed to fulfill some of them: apart from the projects already mentioned I reconnected with old friends and made new ones – you know who you are! – and I did have some fantastic adventures in spite of the limits on travel. Forced to stay at home I did read a lot more than I otherwise would, and played a ton of piano – ninety-nine more years of solitude and I might even get good at it…

So there you go. A year like no other. Some good things, mixed in with a LOT of crap. But this, too, shall pass. Vaccines are coming, the Trump era is hopefully nearing its end (and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see him and his cronies go to prison!), and maybe, just maybe, we can build a better world on the ruins of this one*. If there is one thing that this year has instilled in me, it’s the need for everyone to pitch in and do what has to be done in order for all to prosper.

Here’s to making sure that things improve in 2021!

*Of course, we probably have not seen the last of it yet. Trump declaring martial law in 2021 seems unlikely but then so did Brexit in 2015, and now we have Russian oligarchs buying lordships in the House of Lords even as the country prepares to hurl itself into the abyss.

Bookends

As one of my resolutions for this year I set out to read more non-fiction, and I did – even though many of the books in the original pile didn’t get read for some reason. Amongst the books I did read, the following stand out (in the order my eyes happened to fall on them on the bookshelf):

Recovery (Brand): Russell lends his own mix of philosophy and humour to the AA brand of addiction overcoming.

Homo Deus (Harari): a mind-boggling exposé of the past, present and future of the human race.

Prisoners of geography (Marshall): How landscapes determine the political efforts of nations. An eye opener.

Through a window (Goodall): chimps, and what they teach us about humanity.

Hjärnstark (Hansen): On the paramount importance of ensuring a healthy body to accommodate a healthy brain.

Bird by bird (Lamott): lessons in writing and life, drawn from a life of writing.

Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman): possibly the best book this year; how rational are we, really? Mind: boggled.

Underland (Macfarlane): this man has written several books I wish I had written. This is probably his best.

Touching cloudbase (Currer): not necessarily the best book I’ve read, but essential if you want to learn paragliding.

—-

So there. Something in there for everyone, I hope. For every one of these I have probably acquired two more, so I will keep this challenge for next year, too. Join me, maybe? #onenonfictionbookpermonth

Notox filler

You know that feeling when you arrive at the train station only to see the train you need to be on pull out? That was me this morning. Why? Well, I was slow, due to being dead tired from having been unable to sleep most of the night, and the reason for that was undoubtedly the two large whiskeys and enormous chunk of gingerbread dough that I had late last night.

As I stood there watching the train disappear in the distance it felt like I was watching an illustration of what was happening, as if life itself was showing me a metaphor; everything you put inside your body is either helping it or destroying it, and this was a clear picture of what I had been allowing myself to do more and more of lately. Eat and drink enough poison (sugar and alcohol) and you cannot act surprised when the metaphorical train of life leaves without you.

So. It was decision time. It’s not like I haven’t stopped before. I gave up both sweets and booze in the past, but those were just trials, test balloons if you will. Just like I knew it was time to give up on a carnivorous lifestyle over a year ago, so now the time has come for refined sugar and ethanol.

“Rewarding” ourselves by consuming chemicals that are harmful is hardly intelligent, nor particularly evolved. Humans are happy to munch on sugar as soon as opportunity presents itself, because it is scarce in nature, so evolutionarily speaking it is a good thing, but with the abundance now on offer that instinct works against us. On the other hand we need not be dogs who get treats when behaving correctly.

The same is true for alcohol – several species are known to enjoy a tipple; moose eat fermented fruit, dolphins get high on puffer fish, and so on, but these are rare treats (koalas spend most of their STD-infested lives high as kites on eucalyptus, but we won’t go into that now…) unlike the constant availability of wine, beer, spirits that humans face nowadays.

So no more. Detox is a load of mumbo-jumbo, but notox will be my watchword from now on. As of today I will live without all kinds of refined sugar (juices, marmalade, candy, confection, cakes, ice cream, you name it) and any and all Ju-Ju juice. Having put on four kilos in three months isn’t sustainable, and hopefully this change will bring about an improved situation in this regard as well. I will not bore you with the details, but I will publish updates here below of how my body changes (not to worry, no nudes forthcoming) and together we will see what happens. Only time (and my new, smart scales) will tell.

Update: So that was the starting point. Two weeks in (2/12), and the picture is looking brighter already; total weight down 700g, fat percentage down 0,4%, V-fat down 0,5kg. Less good: muscle loss 0,3kg, but then I haven’t met exercised at all.

On balance

January is at an end, and as always when things are ending there is a bit of apprehension: did I do everything I could? In my case, the first month of the year is always a bit of an indication of how I will fare over the rest of the year in my intentions and ambitions, so how did I do?

I’m still vegetarian, but my attempt to continue to stay off sugar floundered almost instantly in Italy with the discovery of the world’s greatest tiramisu, and it hasn’t improved since. Time to start afresh in February.

I am still plagued by injuries, but indoor biking has worked remarkably well, as has core exercises and stretching, which I hope will eventually see me back on my feet. In total I biked some 250 kilometres in January, which is a good start. I have to ease off on the weights for the time being, so having the bike is a bit of a life line, honestly. 

I learnt a new piece of music on the piano (Bohemian Rhapsody), and I read two non-fiction books (one guide to Stockholm’s culture and history, and another on the failed polar expedition of Andre – the former so-so, the latter spectacular -) but I didn’t study enough French. 

I was in Sweden twice and Italy once, and I kept my diary going, so all in all I’m doing well as far as my new year’s resolutions are concerned. Thus far, at any rate. How are you doing?

Taking bookings

One of my intentions for this year is to read more non-fiction. Fiction is a different matter – if one of my favourite authors publishes a new book I will read it, simple as that – but non-fiction I have to make a concerted effort to take on.

And yet I find reading non-fiction is the best way of educating yourself, so it tallies well with my ambition to improve intellectually. To quote a colleague who is something of a renaissance man: “I just want to make sense of the world”.

To this end I have a number of books that I’ve ordered (as seen above), on religion, personal efficiency, investment philosophy, human society and contemporary politics, plus a book on rhetorics (in the shape of famous speeches). That should see me through most of the year, but if you have any must-reads that you want to recommend, don’t be shy! I look forward to your suggestions, and will come back with reviews in due time.

2019 according to Socrates, Aristotle and… Hugh Grant.

We’re in for a new year again, and I feel I have found a model that works for me (no, not Claudia Schiffer): Keep your ambitions S.M.A.R.T. and make sure to make the most of time,.

So I’ll stick with the familiar format – develop as a human (intellectually and physically), travel, have new experiences, and set myself new challenges – one trip or challenge per month on average, for a total of twelve.

Trips: I have nothing planned (beyond the fact that I am in Rome celebrating New Year as I’m writing this), but hiking somewhere with my brother, taking the kids on several trips (the first one in February), and paragliding in either Spain or Switzerland (back allowing) are definitely happening.

Challenges: As last year was plagued with injuries, I don’t dare set any fitness goals at the moment. I do hope to improve my fitness, but in what way remains uncertain as of yet. The ideal is a workout per day, of some sort.

In the workplace things are equally up in the air, with my job as a roving reporter having come to an end, and nothing concrete to replace it. I want to keep writing and working with communication one way or another, tho, and I have a few ideas – let’s see what happens.

I already know I want to stay vegetarian for the coming year (having stuck with it for two months I see no reason to change back to a carnivorous diet), and I want to continue to stay off refined sugar, so that’s two. I really want to learn how to paraglide properly, which makes three. Also, limit time spent on social media (more difficult than it sounds?) – four. Keep a diary – five. Read (at least) one non-fictional book per month – six. Improve my piano and French skills, for a total of eight. And linked to all this: use my time more efficiently and wisely.

There is a funny passage from the book About a boy (later filmed with Hugh Grant in the lead) that has stuck with me:

His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

The protagonist of the book is a time waster, but the concept works: divide your day into time slots, and make sure to use them. That will be another challenge.

Why do this? Well, first of all, because, as the poet Herrick wrote in To Virgins, to make much of time:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying

and this same flower that smiles today

tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

the higher he is getting,

the sooner will his race be run,

and nearer he is to setting.

In other words: Our time is limited, and every breath takes us closer to death. That’s grim, as realizations go, but if that doesn’t light a fire under your ass to get things done, nothing will. Also, to quote Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Let’s make this a year of excellence.

2018 – S.M.A.R.T. or not?

At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.

Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Did I succeed? Yes and no.

Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)

Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.

Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…

French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.

Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.

Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.

Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.

Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.

Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.

So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.

Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…

Work, work, work, work, work!

On Monday I was supposed to receive a medal. It’s one of those traditions the purpose of which I don’t understand: you get one after twenty years as a civil servant. But it isn’t merit based – everyone gets one. All you have to do is stick with it two decades. That made me think.

I never really made a considered career choice. I got very lucky in that my coming of age corresponded with Sweden’s joining the EC, as it was then. My training made me a good candidate for the job of interpreter, and my knack for languages ensured that I made it through a training programme many failed.

After that a job was guaranteed, and so I took it, because it was interesting and well paid, and my then-girlfriend-later-to-become-mother-of-my-children-and-ex-wife was also offered one, we moved in together, and the rest is history.

Only…

Twenty years on, interpreting isn’t interesting any more, as there are no new challenges, only variations on well-known ones. Happily, I’ve been able to do other things for the last couple of years – working as a journalist, writing speeches and scripts for commercials – but now that’s coming to an end.

And so the question arises: do I really want to be nothing else but an interpreter for another twenty years? The answer is obviously no, but then the real question is, what do I want to do instead?

Write. Be creative. Travel. Experience. How best to combine these things? Well, being a blogger is one good way of doing it, obviously, but it doesn’t pay – for me, at least. They say to have three hobbies: one to keep you in the money, one to keep you fit, and one to keep you creative, but I’d like to combine the three, if possible. The Japanese concept of Ikigai is a better model: the point where what you love, what you’re good at, what you can make money doing and what the world needs intersect, that’s where you should strive to be, because that’s your ikigai, literally your reason for being.

So what’s my reason for being?

Gone Green

Notice anything different about me?

A month ago I set out on a journey. I was going somewhere very special. I was going to go vegetarian.

Like all ventures into the unknown it was preceded by trepidation, as I contemplated the prospect of future challenges as-yet vaguely comprehended. This journey didn’t involve me actually moving, but I felt like an intrepid explorer none-the-less – I needed to discover whether some long-held notions about myself really were true: Was I really going to be able to survive on vegetables alone? Would I not wilt just like the greenery I’d be eating? Would not my natural carnivorous instinct to devour meat take over, and have me clawing at the butcher’s door the very first evening, like an alcoholic sitting outside the liquor store all night?

One month on, I know the answer to all these questions is simply No. It’s telling however that the real hurdle to succeeding at this endeavour was the initial uncertainty, the step into unchartered territory. I am still not well versed in vegetarian cooking by any means, and it is a little cumbersome sometimes to find appetising food in some places when you go out, but these are minor hindrances – the real obstacle to going green was in my head.

So it can be done. Fine. I knew that. I’m stubborn and disciplined enough that if I set my mind to something I can do it for a month. But what about how I feel? What about the training regime?

Well, I’m happy to report that I feel just fine, as energetic as ever. I injured my back, and then had a week when I was ill, which meant I didn’t work out as much as I would have otherwise, but I’ve still racked up twelve training sessions in the last month, so the diet isn’t doing any harm to my energy levels.

I didn’t keep track of what I ate in the end, and I know I ate more sweets than I usually would, but I didn’t gain (or lose) any weight, so I assume it’s not been a bad diet in terms of nutrition. I’ve obviously eaten more greens than I normally do, too, and my body is still – erm – adjusting to the amount of lenses and beans I’m consuming, but all told I think I’m eating at least as healthily as before.

And of course no animals had to die for me to live this month, which is a really nice thought.

So will I continue? Yep. I don’t see that I can justify not doing it. I do miss some things, like salmon sushi when we have our family Friday sushi dinners, but not enough that I can’t do without, and as long as that is the case, I feel a moral obligation to try to do so. I might not stay vegetarian forever, but for now I’ve officially Gone Green.

Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore, part 3

Why are you staring at me? Is that a fork…?!

And so I passed into week three of my salad-munching new lifestyle. Actually, I lie: no salad was harmed in the making of this vegetarian*. At least not yet. You see, Monday eve saw the first delivery to my doorstep of a box full of veggie ingredients and (more importantly) easy-to-make recipes.

And so I started cooking vegetarian food with some confidence for the first time. Courtesy of Hello Fresh! (The French-speaking world has a love for English names that is only matched by their inability to come up with ones that make any sense…)

The recipes ranged from familiar with a twist (mac ‘n’ cheese with pumpkin and lasagna with eggplants and soy milk) to weird and wonderful (chachouka and dhaal). Those are actual words, by the way, not onomatopoeia describing how I sounded trying to eat these newfangled dishes. Newfangled to me, that is: the people of Mexico and India might have an ax to grind with me over that description.

The kids were not enamoured with it all, but then neither were they when I served meat dishes in the past, so I’m not that concerned. Funnily, my daughter (who was the one that wanted to become vegetarian) is less enthused than my son, to whom eating with bread is a brilliant improvement upon cutlery, and who now speaks of digging up the old sand pit and turning it into a vegetable plot. Go figure.

Mmmm… yummy!

Unfortunately I came down with strep throat and had a temperature for four days, so I wasn’t particularly hungry for most of the week, but what is surprising is that at no point during these three weeks have I had a yearning for anything animal to eat. I thought I’d be going through withdrawal symptoms akin to those I experienced when I gave up nicotine or caffeine, but… nothing. No cravings, no seeking out illicit bacon dealers on deserted street corners, nothing.

That bodes well for next week, after which the challenge is complete. I really don’t know what I will do after that. Watch this space.

——-

* Although the trees in the garden are starting to look very good to me. Coincidence?

Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore, part 2

A sea of greens, see?

The second week of my vegetative state was spent in the most vegetarian-friendly of states: Italy.

I was travelling with my son, who is of that age when nothing beats pasta and pizza, so we were both enjoying the food on offer (something that wasn’t the case during the first week…!). Here’s how it went:

Their breakfasts aren’t very healthy, but cornetto alla crema (pastries filled with vanilla) and cappuccino are both veggie-approved, so that’s what we had, more often than not. (Hey, I didn’t make the rules…!)

Then there’s the fact that every unassuming restaurant consistently serves really good food; everywhere we went, plates were filled with gourmet-level cooking. And thanks to the abundance of locally grown quality veg this was equally true for us salad-munchers: every tomato sauce is nectar of the gods, every mozzarella di buffala ambrosia, every antipasta and primo is a deceptively simple dish made to perfection.

So simple, so perfect.

They really have no excuse with their markets looking like they do, I know, but still, other countries have those, too, and they don’t manage to pull this off. In short: if I had to pick anywhere in the world where I could live happily as a herbivore, this would be It.

It-aly may have its drawbacks and weak points (such as rarely holding on to a government for longer than a few months and collapsing infrastructure), but you can’t beat the boot in culinary matters. India might have more to offer due to its sheer size, but since all Indian food could also double as rocket fuel I’m going to give Italy pride of place in this man’s vegetarian food pantheon.

If you are a reasonably well-travelled veggie you may already know all this, of course – a case of “bean there, done that”, as it were – but if not: what are you waiting for?! Avanti!

Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore, part I

So I decided to try life as a vegetarian. It didn’t get off to an auspicious start.

Like an addict, I spent the last couple of days gorging myself on my chosen poison before finally taking the plunge, testing if there really isn’t such a thing as too much bacon (there is – a family pack for breakfast for one) and if three cheese burgers in one sitting isn’t better than two (It isn’t!).

My last evening before this experiment begun I dined on goose liver. It was divine. Next morning I played it safe – a known luxury brunch place in town would see me through most of the day (cakes are vegetarian, after all), and the next evening I had arranged delivery of a whole box of meals (well, recipes and ingredients) to my doorstep, which would carry me through most of the week.

It didn’t go according to plan. The brunch place had crispy bacon on everything (or so it seemed), but that I could manage. Worse was the realisation that the food box company wasn’t going to be delivering anything for another week.

Back to the drawing board: Sunday afternoon I prepped as much roasted veg as I could. My vegetarian acquaintances weren’t very forthcoming; all their dishes seemed to require hours of work. A friend tipped me off about lentils with butter for breakfast, which sounds like a cruel joke to me; another veggie friend chimed in with his own top tip: don’t eat anything that has a face. Possibly useful as a guideline, but not helpful when I was staring forlornly into the fridge, wondering what to do.

In the end I survived my first week without any real difficulties, in fact. Sure, pasta and various sweets featured more prominently on the menu than I would have liked, but I didn’t actually crave meat at all, and I certainly didn’t go hungry – if anything I ate more than usual, in an attempt to get enough protein. And I got six workouts in in the gym, so clearly my energy reserves weren’t completely depleted.

So far, so good. Next week I’ll be in Italy for the most part, and if a feller can’t be a vegetarian there, I think India is probably the only place you’ll survive. Watch this space.

Going green

Hot on the heels* of the UN report on the catastrophic consequences of climate change, I have decided to act.

I stated at the beginning of the year that I wanted to try to go vegetarian, and since skipping meat and dairy is apparently among the top things a person can do to combat global warming, it seems only self-preserving to do so.

Of course, the notion of devouring other living beings is only normal because our culture tells us it is**. I will have to challenge my own inherent belief system.

Besides, having read the great book The Inner Life of Animals I can’t morally defend taking the lives of other sentient, feeling beings for my (unnecessary) pleasure any more, if I can learn to do without. The real question is, can I?

It will be a big change, that’s for sure, and an even greater mental leap – merely thinking about forsaking meat makes me have visions of entrecôte, bacon, smoked salmon… carnal thoughts indeed.

This personal carnival will also entail quite a steep learning curve, as none of my go-to recipes are the least bit vegetarian. I have identified as a cis-carnivore all my life, after all. I’ve not been as much as a little bivorous – I didn’t even experiment with veg during my college years. Salads were for bunnies when I grew up, and that was the end of it.

Luckily I have two good veggie restaurants near my work place, so I can eat out, but cooking is a different matter. Simply put: I will have to re-learn how to fend for myself in the kitchen. I have asked vegetarian friends to provide me with recipes for their favourite, easy-to-make dishes, but still, I anticipate that the transition will not be entirely smooth, and certainly not easy.

Since I’m continuing with weight-lifting for fitness, getting enough protein is another concern, but I won’t be going vegan, so eggs and cheese and other dairy are still on the table***, at least. I’ll track what I’m eating via the MyFitnessPal app to be sure I get what I need.

Will it work? Time will tell, I guess. I will publish weekly updates, so if you want, you will be able to follow my progress (or lack thereof) here in Diary of a Hesitant Herbivore. Any and all efforts to help will be greatly appreciated!

—–

*Literally…

** And yet we curiously delineate between this and that species – no one I know thinks eating cats or dogs is normal, and yet they happily munch on piglets and lambs.

*** See *.

2018 and the art of being S.M.A.R.T.

I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across some good advice that really resonated with me. If I have failed to reach my goals in the past, it’s nearly always been because I haven’t made sure they were S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. So that shall be my credo for 2018: be smart about what tasks I set myself.

The fundamentals haven’t changed: I want to develop as a person, intellectually and physically, by testing my limits, working diligently and hard towards certain goals, and I want to travel to see the world and broaden my horizons, ensuring that by the end of the year I can look back and see progress and time well spent.

So: smart intellectual challenges – the ones I’ve worked on for a couple of years now still remain the same: I want to read more non-fiction, get better at piano, French, and chess. That’s not very specific, tho, so measuring progress will be key; I need targets I can quantify. One book per month. One new piece of music learnt every two months. One hundred French words per month. And as for chess… well, getting a rating of 1400 before the end of the year would be an easily measurable goal, if not necessarily that easily attainable. (I’m hovering around the 1300-mark as I’m writing this…). Plus I will note down every half hour spent on each activity, thus keeping a tally for accountability purposes.

So I’ve got all of those down to an A.R.T. Physical challenges are a little different, mainly because of the uncertainty I’m living with at the moment, so for 2018, I have decided to change tack a little. For my first challenge in January I will do a runstreak. Running every day will hopefully allow me to rebuild what was damaged in the accident in November. If that goes to plan, Paris marathon in April will be another milestone on the road to recovery, and if that goes well I’ll sign up for either another ultra marathon, or a full length Ironman. Or both.

Alas, there are too many unknowns at this stage for me to know if I will be able to run such distances again, but if I can, then a total of 1500k each of running and biking seem attainable goals overall. At least I know I can bike, so if running is out then I’m doubling that number for biking (and only watching Netflix while on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone – limiting my Netflix binging AND encouraging more time in the saddle!).

Weights have never been anything but a complement to my other workouts – now more so than ever as I try to strengthen my weak leg – but again, if I find I don’t recover my running capacity, I will focus more on getting strong/building muscle. Having always been skinny it would be interesting to see if I could actually muscle up.

As for swimming, I want to learn how to crawl properly! At present I can hardly do one length in the pool, and even though I managed the Ironman 70.3 anyway it would be nice to shave off five or ten minutes from that time, so learning how to crawl at least a kilometre is another challenge.

I will be working more in 2018 than I have for a decade, which will hopefully have the dual effect of giving me the opportunity to take on more interesting work on the job, and allowing me a bigger travel budget, as, happily, my children have said they want to travel more with me, so that will affect what trips I take this year.

2018 promises an Arab spring once more, as I’m going back to Morocco in January and have another trip to Egypt in February (with the kids). I have a week of holidays in March that I don’t know what to do with yet – downhill skiing would be nice, but again it’s dependent on me making a complete recovery. I want to go back to Spain and get a fully-fledged paragliding pilot’s licence. Hiking in Iceland would be lovely, the last part of Bergslagsleden still beckons, and I want to do at least one journey further afield – maybe watching the great sardine run in South Africa? Or taking the kids to the US? There’s no shortage of possibilities.

Other challenges: I wouldn’t mind doing more for the environment. This could involve installing geothermal heating in the house, keeping hens for eggs, joining a wind power collective or other changes. One thing I do know I want to try is becoming a vegetarian. At least for a month.

Not eating any sugar in any shape or form may be another challenge, and limiting my social media intake to half an hour per day wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

And of course I want to continue building my blog, writing about my experiences for the joy of writing, but also as a living testament to what I do with my life when I don’t have my kids. Hopefully my readership will continue to grow, but that is less important. If I can inspire only two people, that is more than enough for me.

Here’s to a S.M.A.R.T.er future!

P.S. All this goes out the window if I were to get my dream job, of course… 😄

Swedish Yuletide

I’m headed back to Ultima Thule to celebrate the holidays. Of course, Christmas in Sweden has very little to do with celebrating mass, or Christ. Sweden is to all intents and purposes as heathen as it was before it was christened, and Yule (the Swedish word for the holiday is Jul) was always about appeasing the gods and assorted spirits and sprites that influence life in the cold darkness of winter – something which still goes on, regardless of what the church dictates.

The examples are legion: So for instance the tomte, a gnome that embodied the spirit of the homestead, had to be fed and given gifts, to ensure that the animals lived and stores weren’t depleted. Later on, of course, the tomte was mixed up with St Nicklaus, and Coca-cola added its own taint to the figure, thus ensuring Santa was born, but Swedish kids still leave out porridge or cakes and milk for the tomte the night before Christmas, in what is essentially a last ditch attempt at bribery.

He knows if you've been bad...

We have also, famously, incorporated St Lucia in our traditional celebrations. Why an Italian saint who was burned alive would become part of heathen feasts might seem less than obvious, but when you consider that we have been sacrificing people and animals around the time of the winter solstice to bring back the light since before the Viking era, and lighting fires and singing to scare away the darkness, it’s perhaps easier to see the allure of this sacrificial lamb and her demise. Traditions tend to get lost in the mist of time, however, so the gruesome fact that children dress up in white shrouds and have lit candles in their hands and hair as a token funeral pyre is utterly lost on most modern Swedes in any event.

Speaking of lambs: the aforementioned tomte wasn’t traditionally the one who brought gifts (beyond the gift of not getting pissed off and ruining the farmstead) – that was the role of the Yule billy goat. To what extent this benevolent critter has common ancestry with Krampus, the black horned satyr/devil spawn that probably begat the Belgian Black Pete, who is the antithesis of St Nicklaus, I wouldn’t like to say, but in Sweden at least the goat was always warmly welcomed – probably because trolls were the ones in charge of abducting little children.

One Krampus, two Krampiss...

The word Yule itself is of unknown origins, but if I were to engage in guesswork, it’s probably no coincidence that the old Norse “jul” is very similar to the Swedish word “hjul”, wheel. The wheel of time always turns, and at no time is that more keenly felt, than in the midst of Nordic winter, when the longing for a new cycle of life is most desperate.

So as you can see, celebrating Yule may have a thin veneer of Christianity to it, but when we heap portion after portion of the sacrificed pig unto our plates – always mindful of it being lagom (literally “enough for everyone”) – and drink each others’ health by crying “Skål!” – a word that derives from “skull”, as the craniums of slain enemies were used as drinking vessels – we honour a heritage that goes back much, much further than any Christmas.

Good Yule, everyone!

Shedding a tear

Well, it’s hard to believe it, but 2017 is almost over. I said I’d take on a challenge or go on a trip per month this year, and I had some ideas about what I’d do for December, but alas, events have overtaken me.

As some of you may know, I have an old injury in my left leg, which leaves me with a structural imbalance. It’s always been a fear that this would someday get even worse, and, well, one forceful step was all it took: As I was running down a hill in Spain last month I heard something tear in my groin, while a flash of intense pain shot up through my buttock.

I was hardly able to stand afterwards, let alone walk or run. I managed to do the rest of the paragliding course, literally limping across the finishing line, but the damage was done, so now I have to undo it as best I can. This will have to be my challenge for December then: Operation Shed A Tear.

I signed up with a physiotherapist, which is a misnomer. She gets very physical, that much is true. Therapeutic? If you’re a masochist, perhaps.

Now, it would be wrong to say she gets Medieval on my ass. More Chilean – under Pinochet. There’s horse liniment, a plunger(!), electrodes hooked up to a car battery, duct tape, needles. All these things go onto or into my ass. And groin. Then there’s exercises. Core exercises, balance, stretching – all those things you should do all the time, but never do (at least I don’t). Plus biking, as much as I can take. And drinking lots of water to keep the cells nice and supple.

I haven’t run for two weeks (the scales know this already!) but I seem to be working out as hard as ever. Hopefully I’ll be back on track (again quite literally) before the end of the month. That’s the goal. It’s already taken blood and sweat. If it can alleviate the tears? We’ll see. Paris marathon in April is still on, as far as I’m concerned.

Autumn in Paris

I seem to have reached an age where my friends are turning fifty. This is why I found myself in Paris this weekend, to celebrate this momentous occasion in the life of my very good friend L

There’s no denying it is a milepost. A person is no longer young at fifty, the potential of the younger self has been squandered or put to good use, and the resulting life has evolved accordingly. One must face mortality, and consider how best to spend the remainder of this all-too-brief existence before all is irrevocably lost to death and decay. 

Perhaps fittingly then, we spend the first day in Paris visiting the dead. First the untold millions of mortal remains of millennia of Parisians bundled together in the catacombs: 

The medevial municipal graveyards were literally overflowing at the end of the 18th century. At the same time the limestone quarries that had once been well outside of city boundaries were being subjected to urbanisation, which resulted in several spectacular collapses; houses and entire streets were swallowed up by sinkholes as the poorly shored-up, long-forgotten mine shafts caved in under the weight of the expanding city. Such an exciting time to be a Parisian – your house might spontaneously drop thirty metres into the ground, or your basement might get flooded with partly decomposed bodies! 

Ingeniously, the authorities decided to solve both problems in one go: the mines were mapped and their walls reinforced, part of the many miles of underground corridors were consecrated, the churchyards dug up and their dead deposited in the mine shafts-turned-catacombs, instead. Anything between two and six million skeletons were transferred to the catacombs, and today they make for a gruesome reminder of our brief toil on this mortal coil: the narrow corridors are filled floor to ceiling with row upon row of skulls – nothing for the faint of heart. 

The Pantheon is a different proposition altogether: a Greek-Roman temple constructed “to house the great men of the Fatherland” (feminists might have a thing or two to say about that), it is the final resting place for the bodies of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Marie Curie – maybe she was granted a dispensation? – and others worthy of veneration. 

The building is famous for housing Foucault’s pendulum, which proves that the Earth moves – and I think we can agree THAT’s a relief to know! – but more importantly it moves the human spirit, because it is one of the most impressive buildings you will ever see, and the views from the roof of its dome is nothing short of spectacular.

Sticking with the theme of mortality, there is an adage that says that a person should plant a tree, sire an heir and write a book. All that speaks of a desire to leave behind something more lasting, and so the second day was devoted to visiting monuments:

The Louvre, the world’s greatest museum, filled to the brim with painting and sculptures, all wishing to immortalise their subjects and/or the artists behind them. It’s interesting to see, but also sobering to realise how little we know of even the most famous ones: Mona Lisa’s identity is uncertain, there is no proof Venus from Milo depicts Venus (or more accurately Aphrodite), and no one knows what Victory from Samotrace looked like. 

Another good example of the phallacy of immortality is the Arc du Triomph: ordered by Napoleon as a lasting monument over his soldiers’ bravery (and, one suspects, his own greatness), it wasn’t completed until long after the Emperor had been forced to abdicate and end his days on a forsaken island far, far away. It still makes for a good outlook point, however.

A better, living monument, still thriving in the age of e-publishing, situated right across from Notre Dame, is the wonderful bookshop Shakespeare & C:o. Today’s proprietor is the daughter of the founder, who ran it for fifty years, and it’s a wonderful shop, just the way bookstores should be but rarely are: books spill out of every nook and cranny (of which there are legion), and cover every available surface from floor to ceiling, so that you think you have alighted upon an Escher painting made up of books. If books have the ability to transport you through time and space, this bookstore is a wormhole of black star proportions, and I hope it will outlast all other monuments in Paris. 

So, death being inevitable and immortality (even by monumental works) being near impossible, what remains? Eating, drinking and making merry. And so we stroll the streets of Paris, taking in its many wonders – the galettes and cider from Normandy, the macaroons at Ladurée on Champs Elysée (where a Saudi prince and his wife are subjected to the worst service of their lives), the opulent pleasures of brasserie Chez Julien (where Edit Piaf would still feel at home), cheese platters straight from the fromagerie, gateaux from thriving patisseries and incredible breakfasts courtesy of Jozseph and Frédéric, who run the best bed and breakfast in the world. The champagne and absinthe flow, there is laughter and silliness, but a moment of poignant silence marks the end of the weekend, as we happen upon a mass in the monastery church of St Pierre, literally in the shadow of Sacrecoeur on Montmartre.

 There, before a congregation of believers, and in a moment of divine light, the Lord’s Prayer is read, and for the first time it strikes me: underneath the religion and ceremony lies a very simple message. Accept that you can’t control anything much, accept the finite nature of things, be accepting of others’ struggles and treat them kindly regardless, and be grateful for the little things. It’s not a bad credo. 

  

Bogged down by Belgium 

Home from the hills. Après les alps, le deluge. Or so it feels. Coming-home blues is a real thing, as hard a come-down as anything ever sung of in the Mississippi river delta. 

To alleviate my ills, I turn to friend Florian, a man so well-travelled he makes Magellan look like a kid playing with his toy boat in a tub. His journeys are so many and far-reaching it’s as if Marco Polo popped out for a quart of milk at the corner shop by comparison. He suggests the Haute Fagne, or High Moor, as a best place in Belgium for a day trip, and who am to disagree?

Located in the easternmost part of Belgium, straddling the border to Germany, it’s a peculiar highland, more akin to the Scottish peat bogs than anything else. A big bog to take my mind off things? Well, I’ll give it a try. Maybe seeking out the antithesis to what you miss is the way to go? And so off I, well, go. I don’t pack hiking gear, figuring I can run the 30k trail F suggests. Famous last words…

When I get there, looking out across the moor, the landscape looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: nothing but a few stunted shrubs and dead trees. The nuclear heat of the day does nothing to detract from this illusion. Once out there, running along the duckboards, it’s a different matter. The marshland is home to hundreds of plants, mainly grasses and flowers, and it’s quite pretty in a low key way. 

There isn’t much time to look out across the landscape, however. The duckboards prove to be quite difficult to run on, in spite of being perfectly dry. The bog swallows everything eventually, but since it isn’t happening equally fast everywhere, this means one part may be perfectly stable, and the next one might tip to the side as you step on it, bounce, or simply break. It makes for a rollercoaster run. 

 This feature of the bog landscape is of course the main reason it has been a borderland for as long as can be remembered. The oldest border markers found here date back to the 7th century, and several imposing stone markers still show where the borderline between Prussia and Belgium once ran. Much like marshlands elsewhere, they were simply too difficult to traverse, and of too little economic interest for countries to fight for. 

Unfortunately, Belgian budgetary authorities share this view. Many paths through the moors are being abandoned, and only a few kept open – the others are allowed to sink into the boggy ground and disappear. I run along the main route towards Germany, and after only four kilometres I am suddenly off the beaten path. No longer able to run, I walk along a brook. It’s hard going, but very pretty, reminiscent of Swedish forests, with ferns and firs growing high, and not a living soul around. Pieces of abandoned duckboards appear intermittently, but it’s clear that not many people come here any more. 

Like a Zorn painting. Only one thing missing…


I have long since left Florian’s suggested route behind, and decide to turn around before I walk back into Germany, and there, suddenly, I’m no longer alone. A photographer and his two nude models are hard at work under a tree! 

It’s difficult to know what to do in certain situations. Do you say “hi”? Stop and admire an artist’s work? I briefly consider asking if they need another model, but I figure this blog has seen enough of me in a state of undress recently, and besides, the couple are twenty years and twenty kilos each past attractive. I get back to running instead.

I run back through ferns and grasses and dead trees, the ground muddy and slippery and mostly hidden by the undergrowth. It’s a hard slog, the ground either sucking at my shoes or sliding away and a couple of times I come close to wiping out. After a painful misstep and a near face plant, I slow down to a walk again, but once back on the duckboards I force myself to run once more – mainly to get out of the sun. 

After two hours I’m back where I started, at the one inn on the one road leading across the moors. The Baraque Michel (or the Obama Inn, as I like to think of it) has been a beacon to weary wanderers for well over two hundred years, and it’s easy to see why the family-run establishment is doing brisk business: my feet are wet and hurt, my shins and calves will require at least two showers to just be dirty again, my clothes are soaked through with sweat – I can’t bring myself to leave. 

I’ve done about half the suggested route, but I’m quite done. Properly bogged down by Belgium. 

Half a lap around the sun…

…and it’s time to summarise what’s happened this far 2017. As has been the case these last couple of years, I set myself certain tasks in January, to be completed over the next twelve months, and at the halfway mark it makes sense to take stock, to see what has gone according to plan, and what hasn’t. 

Have I managed to go on an adventure/set myself a new challenge/have a new experience every month? Happily, yes. January I ran a marathon with a difference, February I went to see Alhambra, Grenada (the text about which seems to have been deleted, sadly!), March I dived the incredible reefs of Pemba, April saw me join a monastery of sorts in Mallorca, then came hiking in Madeira and in the troll-infested forests of Sweden (whilst also trying out the benefits of a paleo diet), before finally taking on my first triathlon last month. 

Looking back, it’s quite a lot crammed into six months, so I’m pleased with that. 

I’ve managed to work out quite a lot (unsurprisingly, what with the races) but not as much as I had set out to do in total – weeks of hiking and skiing and diving have prevented me from reaching the goal of a marathon run and biked every week, and I haven’t done much yoga either. But then there’s still six months left to remedy that. 

Have I developed my French, my piano and chess playing, and done more non-fiction reading? I certainly got off to a good start, doing thirty minutes per day of each, but a good friend giving me a Netflix password threw a big spanner in that particular structure. I haven’t completely derailed, but there have been leafs on the tracks, shall we say.

As for taking on new tasks at work, I have, happily. And not least because of this very blog, in fact. Turns out people at work read it and thought I might do good in Internal Communications, so from now on I will spend one day per week as a roving reporter, highlighting goings-on in my work place. Very happy about that. 

So what’s next? I will try to make up for lost time in those areas where I haven’t quite managed to reach my targets, obviously. 

I’ve still got the mountain ultra X-trail coming up in the beginning of August, and ten days of hiking the Bavarian alps hot on the heels of that. After those ten days I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the year. An acquaintance has invited me to Bilbao, and another to Nepal, so those things might happen. Or not. Readers should feel free to make suggestions. 

I still want to try and beat my marathon record before the end of the year – I’ve improved significantly on my personal best for shorter distances, but whether that will translate into a new marathon PB remains to be seen. Time to start looking for a fast race, in any event. 

At work I have made a promise to attempt to add Danish to my official language combination, so that should keep me busy for quite some time (maybe there are Danish movies on Netflix?!), and the new job will hopefully continue to present new challenges, as well. 

All in all I feel quietly confident that the second half of this journey will be as filled to the brim as the first half was. Come fly with me!

Diary of a cave man (2/2)

Howling at the moon…

The second half of my month of eating paleo looked like it might be considerably harder than the first. Eating nothing but what our most distant ancestors might have eaten works fine when not exerting oneself utterly, but as my triathlon draws closer that’s not an option. Plus I would be going hiking for five days with my brother, and goodness knows how my body would react to that, paleo or no. This is what happened:

Day 16: 10k bike / 2k swim brick-session (i.e. one follows immediately upon the other). No problem.

Day 17: 18k bike, 8k run, 6k run, all with hour-long pauses in between, and 28C temperatures. By the end of the day I’m exhausted, but somehow I don’t think the diet is to blame. I cheat a little afterwards, drinking half a litre of pure apple juice – it tastes like the nectar of gods!

Day 19: I discover that smoked trout and boiled eggs make a good breakfast, but leaves your mouth smelling like fart. Learn something new every day. 

Day 20: New PB on 5k. Wonky reading on the Garmin tho, so won’t count it, but still: clearly paleo isn’t hurting more explosive efforts either. 

Day 21: Prepared massive batch of protein cakes to bring on next week’s hike. Tweaked the recipe to include maple syrup and chocolate. All caveman kosher. Biggest problem will be not eating them before actually on the trail…!

Day 23: Hiking all day. 18k in hard terrain in Tiveden. Protein cakes yummy. Freeze-dried food better than expected. Energy levels stable and high.

Day 24: Hiked 20k. Ate big plate of macaroni and cheese in the evening and literally passed out for half an hour afterwards. Just laid down on the ground and fell asleep. Felt hung over on carbs the rest of the evening. Disgusted.

Day 25: Hiked 23k. In the evening an old friend met up with us, and served us cold beers and Brie sandwiches. Couldn’t say no out of politeness. Didn’t want to, either. Paleo regime officially toppled, then. Will mount a counterattack. Tomorrow.

Day 26: Got up at 0400. Hiked 32k over ten hours. Gratefully accepted a beer in the evening from kind strangers, but otherwise toed the line.

Day 27: Last day of hiking. Family reunion. Lots and lots of food. Decided to forgo paleo for the evening.

Day 28: Back in Belgium. Rest day.

Day 29: Rest day.

Day 30: Went running for the first time in over a week; shaved another sec off my PB on 5k. Celebrated daughter’s birthday with huge, distinctly non-paleo cake. 

Day 31: 10k bike (PB), 8k run, 7k run. Weighed in: 77.2kg. 

So, strictly speaking I stuck with the diet 100% for three weeks. After that circumstances conspired to make things more difficult, as I had predicted. That’s never an excuse tho; I chose to give it up for the sake of convenience. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that I was able to work out as hard as I ever have in my life during those three weeks, and it felt great. I lost five kilos during May, without losing any muscle, so it seems the theory holds water – your body will switch to burning body fat if carb intake is significantly reduced, and do so without lowering your performance levels, over either short or long distances. 

It will be interesting to see what happens at the Ironman triathlon in three weeks – that will be the real litmus test. I will be writing about that experience too, of course. One thing’s for sure: I’ll be continuing on this prehistoric path. 

Diary of a cave man (1/2)

The usual suspects. I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess.So for the month of May I challenged myself to go on a paleo diet, in order to see how this might affect my well-being and physical performance. Here are some of the highlights of what happened:

Day -1: Panic. I’m supposed to not have any sugar for a month!?  

The healthy thing to do would have been to research recipes and prepare. What do I do? I run out to the local night shop and get an overpriced bucket of Haagen-Daez ice cream and down it all in one sitting, then – predictably – feel horrible about it. At least I didn’t have a beer as well.

Day 1: Breakfast is made up of bullet-proof coffee (black coffee with a dollop of coconut oil in it) and left-over oven-baked chicken with mozzarella; how’s that for high fat, low carb? It feels a little weird, eating chicken first thing in the morning, but hey, embrace change, right? Only I have the same thing for lunch AND dinner, and now I do feel a real need for change.

In terms of training I don’t do anything more strenuous than a short run, which a post-workout banana covers just fine. It remains to be seen how longer bouts of exercise affect me…

Day 2: Reading up more on paleo, I discover  all legumes are banned. No beans. I literally had cans and cans lined up on the kitchen counter to make a big batch of chili con carne! No sweat, old bean.

Also, no dairy is allowed, so my buffala mozzarella yesterday wasn’t caveman kosher either, in spite of the fact that trying to milk a buffalo is a pretty Neanderthal thing to do. Crud. Two days in and I’m failing. There’s a learning curve to this, clearly. 

I buy a spiralizer to make zucchini “pasta” for dinner and find it surprisingly edible. The kids threaten to go on hunger strike, then devour almost an entire cheesecake with raspberry coulis for dessert while I watch. 

Day 3: Weight-lifting after an English breakfast goes well. A banana, a date and some walnuts plus lemon water with a shot of flax seed oil replaces my usual (milk-based) protein shake. So far so good. 

In the afternoon the kids have an hour each of breakdance (L) and hiphop (R) with an hour in between, so the plan is to run while they dance. First hour is no problem, the second one I struggle, but more because I’m tired from this morning than anything else. And three workouts in a day is a fair amount, caveman or no. 

Day 4: Brought carrots, strawberries, dates and walnuts to work to tidy me over until lunch. Worked well. 

Dinner I’m invited to an Italian friend whom I’ve completely forgotten to inform about my new habits. Shit! In my mind’s eye I see a mountain of Parmesan-powdered pasta looming, followed by troughs of tiramisu, but my gracious host is very understanding, and beyond the guilty pleasure of a smallish plate of spaghetti vongole I don’t stray from the path. 

Day 7: I want to test myself (and the diet), to see if no carbs for a week will mean bonking when keeping up a sustained effort. So I do an hour of swimming (2k) followed by a three hour walk (13k), stop for lunch, then go biking one hour and a bit (25k). Admittedly this isn’t anywhere near as much as a marathon or triathlon, but I do it all without getting particularly tired or feeling any need for carbs. Yay!

Day 9: 16k run. No problem. 

Day 10: Becoming accustomed to eating “nuts and roots”, as my sister put it. Breakfast is dates and cashew nuts, carrots and hummus, plus a couple of eggs. Apart from the coffee, it feels like something the first guy to climb down from the trees might have eaten. He probably didn’t read his New York Times daily briefing while doing so, but so what?

Day 12 I run equal parts nuts (pecan, walnuts and cashew) and medjoul dates in a blender to create the simplest and best “cake” ever (1 cup of each; calories: approximately 1 gazillion). Who said troglodytes didn’t know how to party?

Ate it all in one sitting, and a good thing too, because Day 13 I swim 3,000m for the first time since I was 18. And then do an hour of weights.   

Day 14: Brunch with a friend. Half of what they serve is bread, or sugar, or both. I try a teaspoon of tiramisu (which I normally adore) and it’s so sweet I can hardly bring myself to swollow. Luckily the other half is made up of yummy veggie dishes, so emerge quite sated.

In the afternoon I run a half marathon on nothing but water. 1:52:50. Good time, given previous day’s workouts. Still don’t feel the need to refuel during the run. Scales show I’ve lost three kilos in two weeks.  Not a bad first half! 

—–

(A friend objected that people get paleo wrong, in that they eat meat a lot more often than our palaeolithic forefathers and -mothers did; this is an objection I would say is probably correct. Even so, I’m buying a lot more veg than usual, and I feel good: slimmer, lighter, never quite as ravenous nor as zonked out before or after meals as I normally get.)

Great, gravity-defying tits 

I’m so sorry. You came here hoping for mammaries, didn’t you? 

No can do, I’m afraid. But despair not. Today was a day of wonders greater than surgically enhanced bosoms. Today was the day when the hatchlings from the nest of great tits in my hedge took the great leap into the void, and I was there to watch it. 

Think about it for a second. Your whole life you’ve been confined to a cosy bed, your parents bringing you yummy, wormy treats all day long, and then suddenly this urge strikes you: I must throw myself into the air and soar. It’s a crazy notion, but it might just work, right?

Wrong. There’s a steep learning curve to flying even if you’re born to do it, it seems. The three chicks are emphatically not good at it. They crash into things, miscalculate distances and generally make, well, tits of themselves in the process. It’s painful to watch, really. 

They call to one another and their parents, but there’s nothing the elder generation can do but watch as their offspring fail Aviation 101. One particularly unlucky fellow smacks into the trunk of the crab apple tree where the rest have managed to congregate, and gets irrevocably trapped in the undergrowth. 

I watch it struggle for a long time, reluctant to intervene, but in the end there’s nothing I can do but pick it up. It’s the tiniest little thing, short wings and scruffy head, but it’s plucky and perky, and stays on my hand without a worry in the world, seemingly sunning itself and calling to the rest of the family as if to say “Check ME out!” (Tits do that).

I have to nudge it to finally convince it to hop onto a branch of the tree, but once reunited – and having received a restorative maggot from mom or dad – it seems content to continue its aviary adventures. 

Me, I spend the rest of the morning at a respectful distance, listening to their calls from afar, a big, big smile on my face, thankful that my garden gives me such moments of unadulterated pleasure. If you can’t fly yourself, then surely the next best thing is to watch the next generation do it?

Three great tits. Not a caption you’d normally want to see.

May, me eat meat.

Urgh. Gruff. What is this M&M’s of which you speak?


Remember the bit in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus Wallace promised to get medieval on someone’s ass? Always sounded like a good threat to me. (I imagine it would involve building cathedrals and trading in relics…) 

However, the whole world seems to be hellbent on going much further back in time, with Trump wanting to bomb everyone into primordial soup (presumably to level with his intellectual discours). So in keeping with that spirit, I figured the month of May might be a good time to challenge myself in a new way: by getting Stone Age on my own ass. 

It’s not as mad as it seems. I’m not proposing to go live naked in a cave and hunt mastodons for breakfast (although that would be fun, too), no, what I will do is go on a Paleo diet for a month, to see what happens. Paleo is essentially about eating the way our earliest ancestors did, in an attempt to get away from starch, sugar and carbs – something which those early hunter-gatherers didn’t find much of on their menu.*

It will require quite the change to my eating habits: no more oatmeal and milk for breakfast, no pasta, beer or pizza post long runs, no sushi on Fridays, and certainly no sneaky Haegen-Daaz ice cream orgies late at night. 

I’m getting hungry just writing about these guilty pleasures, and chances are you are, too, which is due to the fact that our bodies are hard-wired to like this kind of food. The problem is it used to be a very rare treat back in the palaeolithic, whereas now there’s sugar everywhere, and our bodies cannot deal with such quantities of the stuff – hence diabetes, obesity, cardio-vascular diseases; the list goes on and on.

The physical effects of switching to paleo are interesting for another reason too, because after a while – anything from a few days to a few weeks – the body goes into a state where it stops craving carbs and starts using fat as its  prime source of fuel. This will supposedly make you much more efficient in long distance races, as the body’s supply of fat is vastly bigger than its stores of sugar (the difference between your muffin top and the muffin you just ate, if you will). 

Now, I experimented with this prior to running Ultravasan, but chickened out during the race. But my triathlon is coming up, and if I can do that without craving sugar then this diet must be the real McCoy. 

As always, there will be an update afterwards to account for how I did during the challenge – the practical aspects of it as well as any changes to my physique/performance. Now, what’s the best way to cook mastodon for breakfast?
————-

*This sounds like an excellent idea to me, particularly since some studies show dementia to be caused by an accumulated inability to break down sugar, similar to diabetes, and I really don’t want to go down that path. 

Having the time of my life


“People’s life do flash before their eyes right before they die. The process is know as ‘living’.”  – Terry Pratchett

I don’t want to come to the end of my life feeling I haven’t accomplished and experienced as much as I might have. In a way, that realisation is the main reason for this blog; by charting my adventures and self-imposed challenges I can look back and see how well I’m doing in this regard. 

This year, I set out to achieve measurable progress in a number of specific areas, and I determined I would go about it differently from what I have done previously.

Whereas in the past I set lofty goals for how many books I should read, how many irregular verbs or piano pieces I should learn – and then not doing it – I now avoid such targets and focus instead on ensuring there are slots in my day for the activities in question. 

This means I plan as much of my time as I can in advance to ensure I get everything I want done, writing a schedule for the day; one half hour is devoted to reading non-fiction, the next to studying French, the one after that to playing the piano, et cetera. 

In fact, it’s the same principle I’ve been applying to travelling; by planning trips in advance – giving them an allotted time – I ensure they get done. I just never thought of using the same principle in my day-to-day life before. 

Now, three months isn’t a long time, but I’m really pleased to report the method of structuring my time is bearing fruit already. I’m not a machine, so the actual time I spend on these activities often doesn’t correspond exactly to the schedule, but even so the results are better than I dared hope for: in the last three months I have logged over 50 hours each of reading, piano playing and French studies, plus 150 hours of workouts. This works. 

In fact it works so well that I have decided to add another activity to the list: chess. I hadn’t played for a long time when a colleague challenged me to a match in February. This rekindled my love of the game, and I haven’t looked back since. In Pemba, I even played a Danish national champion and won 2-0 (he was a national kite-surfing champion, but never mind…).

If you want to play me, I’m on chess.com – improving my game for half an hour every day, as per schedule.

300: a race report

King Leonidas, of chocolate fame.


One of my goals for this year is to run the equivalent of a marathon per week, so why not get an actual marathon in early on, I thought, as I sat on my cozy couch, slightly woozy from the heat of the fireplace and the inner fire lit by a fine single malt. Why not indeed?

One month later and I’m in a pine forest on the outskirts of Genk, in the Belgian rump region of Limburg. It’s cold and has just stopped raining. Looks like it could start again any moment, too. 

There are three hundred of us (the maximum number of participants allowed in the Louis Persoon Memorial Marathon), lined up like lambs for the slaughter, or a band of brothers (and a few sisters), and maybe that’s why, or maybe it’s just the mood I’m in these days, the first of the dystopian nightmare that is the Trump regime, but my thoughts go to Thermopylae. 

The tradition of running marathons comes from the first Persian invasion of Greece, when Pheidippides was sent to tell the citizens of Athens about the victory at Marathon. This wasn’t the Persians’ only attempt, however. They came back for more, and when they did, they came via the Hot Gates (i.e. Thermopylae), a narrow pass through the mountains. 

There, three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas made a stand, and held off an infinitely superior Persian force long enough that democracy could live and flourish. They knew they would perish in the process, but they did it anyway. 

It’s a little like that today. The three hundred of us fight through a seemingly endless onslaught of kilometres, battling it out up and down long inclines, pushing against the waves of oncoming Persian pines, lap after lap. 

The seven laps of the race are essentially made up of three kilometres uphill, then another three back down, both taking their toll. A month isn’t enough to prepare for a new record, and after the (still fairly good) first half, I realise that it won’t happen. I can’t help but feel a little defeated. What’s the point? 

My feet hurt so much from the repeated impact of poor soles against the asphalt that I’m forced to walk even if I could have run otherwise. Dehydration proves another obstacle. I simply hadn’t taken into account how much more you sweat wearing multiple layers, so my muscles start cramping, and when I pee it’s the colour of Earl Grey. Nutrition becomes a problem, too, as I get heartburn, which turns every breath into Greek fire, but thankfully a Pepsid allows me to keep that more or less under control. 

The rain holds off, but the overcast skies stay with us all day. When told the Persian archers were so numerous that their volleys of arrows would darken the sky and block out the sun, the Spartans’ only comment was “then at least we will be fighting in the shade”. I try to channel that super-cool attitude in the face of hardship, but my heart isn’t in it.

But then THAT’s not the way to take on a challenge like this. As the Spartan queen told Leonidas, “Come home with your shield, or on it”; quitting simply is not an option. With that in mind I make it a point to go into these races with three goals, where the first one is – always – to finish, the second one is a reasonably good time, and the third a personal best. 

I’m nowhere near a PB, but that’s ok. I came fairly close to the second, which was sub-four hours, and I reached the most important one. I persevered. Maybe sometimes that’s all one can hope for. We need to fight seemingly insurmountable odds, knowing that something is impossible and doing it anyway, sacrificing for the greater good. 

And whatever doesn’t kill you…

Before and after. No way of telling how bad it was in between…

 
P.S. At Thermopylae there is an inscription in a rock that’s been there ever since the battle. It says, simply, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

Words to live and die by. I recovered from the race by eating a whole box of chocolates. Leonidas, of course.

20-20 hindsight 


2016 is coming to an end. It seems not long ago that I sat down to set out the goals I had for the year, and now the time has come to summarise what I have accomplished, and what targets I failed to reach. 

I wanted to challenge myself, have new experiences, travel, go on adventures and develop as a person. Overall, I think it’s fair to say I have. 

I overcame my fear of diving, and went not only to Nemo33, but also on two marvellous diving trips, to Thailand and Malta. On top of that I travelled to Mallorca, Luxembourg, Barcelona, London, Leeds, Edinburgh, Sweden, Rome, Switzerland, and Sardinia, so I certainly fulfilled my ambition to go on adventures. 

I challenged myself in other ways than diving: bungee jumping and canyoning demanded overcoming myself mentally; and taking on not one, but two new roles at work has certainly brought new intellectual challenges and opportunities into my life, for which I’m very grateful. 

I tried abstaining from caffeine and alcohol for a month, and lived to tell the tale; I tasked myself with reading more non fiction as a way of contributing to the fight against the dumbing-down of our society; I try to be more mindful of what I eat.

The main challenge of 2016 however was gearing up for the immense task of running an ultra marathon. It took two marathons to prepare for that adventure, along with untold hours of physical exercise, but I did it, and couldn’t be happier with the result. 

Not everything went according to plan, however: my grand design to develop as a piano player looked set to succeed until too much travel meant having to give up on regular lessons, which in turn left me disinclined to practice. 

The same is true for my ambitions to improve my French – I started out well, but a lack of structure meant I let it slip by the wayside, almost without noticing, and I didn’t read as many books as I planned, either.

I didn’t bike as much as I had planned – the lofty goal of 2000 kilometres turned out to be more than twice the distance I actually covered, and I didn’t participate in any kind of Ironman. I did run the 1500 kilometres I had set out to do, however. 

Oh, and I did write about it all here – no mean feat in itself, either.

So, what to learn from all this? First of all the importance of setting goals. I set out to do something every month, and on average I did, even though some months by necessity were more intensive than others. 

Secondly, the need to have clear-cut, measurable targets if you want to achieve something; having UltraVasan as a goal allowed me to plan what I needed to do to reach that level of fitness, week for week. 

Third, to push beyond your comfort zone. If I don’t, I tend to not get anything useful done, but by forcing myself to face up to my fears I have had a much more rewarding year than would otherwise been the case. 

What I take with me most of all going into 2017, then, is that excellence is a habit. No goal is achieved in one great leap, or overnight, but by chipping away at it, you can do wonders. 

Here’s to making next year a Year of Wonders!

Food for thought

It was 9/11 yesterday. The real 9/11. Trump was elected president. Yet another example of a populist playing on people’s fears and base instincts, but this one now with the power to change the course of history at a pivotal time, crucial for our species’ survival. A denier of climate change. An ingoramous, flaunting human rights and lacking in fundamental decency. The prospect is a grim one. 

The only thing I can see that would have made a difference is education. Learning more about the world around you gives you new perspectives, new insights. It’s the responsibility of each and every human to learn as much as they possibly can, and in doing so, exercise critical thinking, the better to withstand the base appeal of trumped-up alpha baboons offering simplistic solutions (or even just sound bites) to complex problems. 

I can’t shape education policies anywhere much – beyond the local school – but I can at least try to lead by example. As a birthday present to myself I bought ten books that were recommended by TED lecturers; I figured it was as good a way as any to discover titles that I would otherwise never read. Add to that five books that were gifted to me, and you have fifteen (mostly) non-fictional works that I will attempt to read before the end of the year. 50 days, 15 books, equals one book every 3,33 days. 

Tall order? Yes, but I’m going to try even so. Imagine a world in which every single adult read a new work of non-fiction every three days – how much of a chance do you think the Donalds, Le Pens and Borises of the world would have then? Imagine the quantum leap in human understanding, the as-yet untapped potential that might be unleashed for the greater good of humanity. 

Food for thought, that.

—–

The books on my reading list are:

Map Stories (Matteoli)

The old ways (Macfairlaine)

The Art of Being Human (Woodruff)

Eat and Run (Jurek)

A Time of Gifts (Leigh)

Exodus (Collier)

The Singing Neanderthals (Mithen)

Just Mercy (Stevenson)

My bondage and freedom (Douglass)

Lives in Ruins (Johnson)

Easy Company Soldier (Malarkey)

Jimmy Bluefeather (Heacox)

Ankara Witch (Okorafor)

Silence (Endo)

Bit Rot (Coupland)

Which ones are on yours?

Sober October

So I decided to quit coffee and alcohol for October. From a habit of five to ten espressos per day and the equivalent of a bottle of wine per week, I would go cold turkey on both. The results? Well…

First of all, actually doing it was surprisingly easy. I taped my Nespresso maker shut just in case I would need an extra second to reconsider in moments of weakness, but those moments never really materialised. People around me were generally supportive, even though they often couldn’t – wouldn’t? – understand why I was doing it. I was worried about becoming a social pariah, but I spent pleasant evenings out in wine bars and cocktail bars without feeling awqward or any need to sample their wares (the Latvian creationist/lesbian porn star/children’s book author I encountered may have been a figment of delirium-induced imagination, I guess, but I doubt it.). I will admit visiting Rome and not having neither cappuccino nor limoncello was difficult, but apart from that I was fine. 

And how did it feel? I had light headaches for a week, and wasn’t able to concentrate too well during those first days – something which my chess partner took good advantage of. But apart from that I was unaffected, really. And I experienced less heart burn, muscle soreness and pain in the liver (although I might have imagined that last one in the first place), plus felt better rested and energetic overall, so that was a big bonus. 

Add to that the pecuniary aspect of easily saving 10€ per week on coffee and twice that on alcohol, and you’re looking at savings to the tune of 1500€ per year, or three roundtrips to the US annually. Not bad as exchange rates go. 

So what now? Should I continue my abstemious lifestyle? I honestly don’t know. I still yearn for that first shot of espresso in the morning, and a glass of Rioja with my entrecôte, and a cold lager after a good, long run in the sun… My problem is I don’t do things half-heartedly, so there’s a risk that one coffee doesn’t remain one coffee very long, and the same goes for drink. So for now, like a good goalie, I think I will just keep the zero for as long as possible. 

Tempus fuggit*

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” G. Marx

This is probably my favourite quote of all time. It contains three undeniable truths, all of them vitally important, yet oft overlooked: 1) your time on this Earth is brief, 2) some things just are, and you can’t do anything about them, and 3) while 1) and 2) irrefutably suck, you might as well try to have a laugh.

So, on this day, the 45th anniversary of my having been born into this world, I would wish for all my loved ones, friends and family alike, to take a moment to consider this.

Done? No. Take another. It’s quite heavy to digest. 

Now. Embrace it. Within the framework just given to you, time’s a-wastin’. So. You are going to die, you can’t change some stuff but you can use as much of your time as possible to do things that make you happy. Do something today that makes you happy. Then do it again tomorrow. And again after that.

 Take a long, hard look at your life and decide what’s worth doing, cause you ain’t immortal, and you’re a long time dead. 

Dare to say fuggit*. Nothing would make you (or me) happier.

Giving Death the Kiss of Life. (photo L. Woodruff)


*Tempus fugit means time flies. Fuggit is a feeble pun. Works best if pronounced like an Italian-American gangster would do it. Fahgeddabahtit. Fuggit.

Power to the people

I might have mentioned that I run a bit from time to time. And like most, when I go out for longer runs or bike rides, I need a dependable source of energy. I’ve got a Camelbak that is just the right size to see me through just about any outing, and there are various energy drink powders you can mix in your water, so fluids isn’t a problem, but I have never really found a solid source of energy that I like. 

There are gels and tablets and goo and bars available to buy, but they all have their drawbacks – they’re too sticky/icky/wasteful or difficult to digest, so I’ve decided to forgo them. Enter Miss Adventure, who apart from being a keen diver/yogini/hiker/biker also is a dab hand in the kitchen. She has been making her own power bars for ages, and kindly let me have her recipe, which I promptly adapted for my own purposes. 

So, without further ado, let me present what I humbly claim is the world’s greatest power bars, easily reproduced in the comfort of your kitchen:

350 ml almond butter

350ml rice syrup

Heat in a large pot on the stow, bringing it to a low boil. To this, add a mixture of:

300g oats

100g each of crystallised ginger, cashew nuts, walnuts, pecan nuts, chia seeds, goji berries, cranberries, coconut flakes, chopped dates, and 1-2 tsk of raw cocoa powder. (For protein powder bars, add vanilla protein powder to the mixture)

Stir it all together until a good consistency, then press into a pan greased with coconut fat, and leave it in the fridge to cool for a few hours, before cutting it into 5×5 cm squares, each containing a whopping 330 kcal, 15g fat, 10g protein each (more of the latter if powder was added, obvs.). Wrap individual squares in clingfilm or wax paper, stuff them in your flipbelt (don’t repeat my ultra marathon mistake!) and you’re good to go for as many miles as you like. 

Oh, and you never tasted anything near as good. It’s got to the point where I now have to work out to compensate for all the power bars I’m eating…! ?

Halfway, 2016

imageRemember New Year’s Eve? And the resolutions you made way back then? It’s hard to believe, but the year is more than halfway over already, so it’s high time to have a look at how you’re fairing in regard to these promises – most likely they have fallen by the wayside already, long forgotten – but since I made a commitment to myself (and you) to report back occasionally on how I’m fairing, I will do so, even though – or perhaps precisely because – the results are less than fantastic.

I set out to improve intellectually and physically, and to go on adventures and challenge myself. To ensure that I did so I set myself clear, measurable targets, so how am I doing in relation to those?

In a word: poorly. At least on the intellectual side of things. I haven’t read more than very few books, my attempts at taking piano lessons were foiled by too much travelling, my efforts learning French came to a halt after two months (during which I did learn rather more words and phrases than I had thought possible, but still).

Improving my general fitness level is an area where I have been a lot more successful. Even though I have cycled nothing like as much as I thought I would do, and swum less, I have managed to work out a lot (as evidenced by a nice lady doctor asking spontaneously if I was an athlete of some sort only yesterday(!)). I’ve logged 160 workouts in the first six months of the year, or slightly below one workout per day nine days out of ten. I’ve run two marathons, both well below four hours, and I’m hopeful I will manage Ultravasan and its 90 kilometres come August. Who knows? I might even be reduced to swimming and biking afterwards instead of running, as a result…

On the other hand, my diet hasn’t been anywhere near as strict as I had planned – perhaps precisely because I had no concrete target in mind there. If anything I have been too indulgent, especially in allowing myself too much alcohol, so that’s something to improve upon in the second half of the year, as well.

So far, so-so impressive. Travels, adventures and challenges, then? Well, I did go for a refresher dive at Nemo33 in January, then went skiing in Sweden in February, and to Thailand to dive in March. April I got a new job part time, which wasn’t planned but must count as a new adventure, and May saw me hike Mallorca with my brother, which was quite the challenge – not because of him, I hasten to add! Then in June I explored Luxembourg, and this month I’ve taken the kids kayaking in the Ardennes, and gone to Edinburgh for a quick visit, so overall my track record isn’t too bad, even though I feel it lacks in challenges.

So what to make of all this? Reinforced efforts in terms of reading, playing the piano and learning French; more diverse workout schedule; better food and drink habits; more adventurous adventures and challenging challenges (and trippy trips? No.).

Lined up next: London with the kids, then two weeks without them (good time to improve diet and spend time playing piano/reading/studying, putting good habits in place) before going to Sweden and making final preparations for Ultravasan. After that I’ve got nothing planned apart from a few days in Lugano, as a post-race (re)treat, and then school starts and the rat race recommences. If experience shows anything, it’s that it’s time to start planning autumn now. Maybe that Ironman? Or a climbing course? Or something else entirely…?

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Bokashi – the Way of the Eco Warrior

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You don’t even have to chop stuff into pieces. Unless you want to.

You may have heard of Bushidō – the Way of the Warrior in feudal Japan. It was literally the code of moral principles that the Samurai should live their lives by.

I have a great fascination for that epoch, but today I won’t talk about the Samurai – instead I want to introduce you to an equally venerable tradition from Nippon, namely Bokashi. It, too, encompasses a moral code, namely the most basic principle of ethics we have to live by: give back as much as you can of what you take from the Earth. In a word – recycle. The Way of the Eco Warrior, if you will. Or the Eco Worrier, perhaps.

Bokashi is a composting system that enables users to completely avoid wasting food. I had been looking to find an indoor-compatible compost for several years when I came across it. Having discarded the idea of having a worm compost as being too fiddly (and also likely to leave me abandoned by my family), this seemed to good to be true when I read about it – no smell, no creepy crawlies, and an end product that could go directly into the flower beds without attracting rodents and the like, even if I put fish or meat in it? Where do I sign up?

The volumes of food and leftovers that are thrown away annually in the western world are stunning, and I’m no better at this than anyone else – quite the contrary! – but this type of compost – an improvement upon a centuries old technique consisting of burying scraps deep underground makes me feel almost virtuous about chucking out stuff that’s past its sell-by date, and has made me less prone to harass the kids in an effort to get them to eat up their Brussels sprouts – both decidedly good things.

So how does it work? When you buy a bokashi kit you get two plastic containers (thoughtfully designed to fit under your average kitchen sink) and a bag of Bokashi brans – essentially saw dust enriched with particularly beneficial microorganisms that kickstart the composting – that you scatter a handful of on top your scraps every time you add something to the container. Why two containers? Because once one is full it should ideally be placed somewhere cool and dark to ferment before the process has run its course and the end product can be placed in your garden compost/borders/potted plant. There’s even a handy tap that grants you easy access to the juices that collect at the bottom of the vessel, which can be used to revive any dying plants. Sure, it seems expensive, but given what potting soil costs per sack, you will soon break even.

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Ya should’ve seen the other guy!

Now I have never in my life gone on record endorsing a product. Normally I don’t even endorse product endorsement, but this thing is too good not to tell people about. So what are you waiting for? Buy yourself a kit, buy one for your dear old mum, or give your loved one a present they will never expect – and if they complain, tell them it will all come up roses in the end.

Reality check

Most people’s resolutions for the New Year flounder by February. Actually, most resolutions probably find themselves stillborn on January 1st, but even for those people who do honestly try to effectuate change in their lives, habits die hard, and so I figure it is high time I conducted a health check on my ambitions for 2016 and see what happened to them.

If you recall (and even if you don’t, never fear – all is revealed just one click from here), I set out to improve myself in terms of physique and skills and experiences and whatnot. My idea was to have specific targets for each of these areas, the better to be able to track my progress. So how have I fared thus far?

In terms of improving mentally and intellectually, I have been playing more piano than before, and I have been taking lessons, even though these were temporarily disrupted by my teacher moving to Vienna. I’m not sure I can claim to have played 30 minutes per day, though. I listened to the theme from The Piano and didn’t take to it, so am looking for alternative pieces to learn – Claire de Lune is the current front runner, but suggestions are welcome.

On the other hand I have been diligently studying French, and have accumulated a total of 506 words and phrases thus far, which is a lot more than I would have thought. Have I learnt them all? Not yet, but using CardsOnGo on my iPhone has proven to be a really good method, as I can pick it up whenever I have a moment of downtime and go through my lists. To be recommended.

I’ve only read two non-fiction books thus far this year. I experimented with audiobooks, but found the medium not much to my liking – possibly due to having to wear headsets all day at work – so have gone back to analogue books now, and am ploughing through Bill Bryson’s latest even now (I’m writing this in between chapters).

Staying healthy and getting fitter made up the second chapter in my to do-list. I can’t say I have been wholly successful in staying away from alcohol, as it seems intrinsically linked with going out – something I’ve been doing more of this year, too – but I have stayed away from carbs and sugar for the most part, at least.

Working out is an area that’s been, well, working out well for me so far this year. Even with a week of no physical activity whatsoever due to a persistent cold, I have managed to notch up 69 workouts over 70 days, which is a LOT. It’s been mainly running and strength training, as I had the marathon in Barcelona looming last weekend, but I’m hopeful that biking and swimming will enter more prominently into the equation as the weather improves.

Finally, my ambition was to go on adventures and/or experience something new every month. January saw me go diving down to 30 metres in Nemo33, but in February I didn’t find anything new to do. I did take the children skiing in Sweden, which turned out to be more adventurous than we would have wanted, as one of their cousins fell and broke her leg, but it wasn’t a new experience as such*. All the more reason to look forward to Thailand next weekend!

In conclusion then, I don’t think I’ve been doing too bad so far. Some things haven’t materialised quite as I imagined them, but I’m on track, at least. After all, a map can never fully predict a path, merely point out its direction and features more or less accurately. I will be back with more updates later on.

———

*Having said that, I doubt even Scott (of ill-fated polar expedition fame) had to coax and cajole his companions into pushing on as much as I and my brother-in-law did when stuck on a wind-whipped slope far from the cottage as the sun started to set on day one. Then again, if his fellow explorers had been ages seven to ten and he had promised them unlimited access to iThings once home, I dare say they would have overcome any obstacle.

Seven Tips For A Painful Marathon

imageYesterday I ran the Barcelona Marathon. The goal was to improve my personal best by over half an hour, from 4h33 to anything sub-four hours. A tall order at best, as preparations didn’t exactly go according to plan.

It occurred to me that with three marathons and one ultra marathon under my belt – all of them marred by difficulties, injuries and insufficient planning and experience – I could probably write something on the topic of how NOT to go about training for them and running them in the best manner possible. After all, every runners’ magazine, web page and blog is already filled with that stuff. Instead, I figured I could provide you with

Seven Tips For A Painful Marathon

1. Overtrain
The importance of this cannot be overstated. There’s nothing quite like showing up at the starting line with a wonky knee, a smarting hip or a stiff back to ensure a painful experience. Acquired through Zealous Adherence to a Plan no matter what (you can follow in my footsteps and go running in primordial goop for two hours on a given day because the Plan decreed it should be so – causing an inflammation to the hip three weeks before D-day) or simply by training too much – nothing like preparing for a marathon by running one, right? – they all but guarantee a torturous outing.

2. Don’t sleep/eat enough before the race
During my last marathon I burnt 3,600 calories, or the equivalent of almost one and a half days worth of calories, so carb loading is essential. Overdoing this might have adverse effects on your sleep, however: having duly inhaled a couple of pounds of pasta and some jolly good Spanish cervezas the night before, I found myself tossing and turning between two and five in the morning, as the sheer quantities of food left me feeling like a beached whale; again something that begets a less than enjoyable run.

Another essential part of preparations if you want things to run smoothly – quite literally in this case – is the application of

3. Vaseline and/or Glide
Imagine you were to suggest to someone that they take a piece of cloth, soak it in briny water and rub it back and forth over their nipple, oh, say, 50,000 times without stopping. All but the most ardent masochists would surely balk at the suggestion, as no other method is more fool-proof in terms of dropping you into the seventh circle of runners’ Hell. To avoid this, apply Vaseline or Glide to all your intimate areas – nipples, crothes and ass (every crack, fold and crevasse), you name it, a liberal dollop of the gooey stuff is the only thing – again, quite literally – between you and utter, agonising, blistery chafing pain.

I’ve been told that those of a female persuasion would do well to look after the seems of their sports bras the same way, but regardless of gender, a top tip is coating your eyebrows with it (preferably before you go to work on other, more delicate areas), as this prevents sweat from reaching your eyes and stinging them like acid rain. Or not, you know, depending on your preferences.

4. Footwear and headgear
In a good story, the beginning and the end are the most important bits. Get these right and the stuff in between will fall into place. And so it is with the body during a race; make sure your feet and head are doing ok, and the rest will follow (it has no choice, really, does it?).

Feet need proper, well-fitting shoes, but since feet swell during a race, and shoes generally do not, you must either run with shoes that are initially too big or wear compression socks that help fight the swelling. Having ignored this in the past (with consequences that are outlawed in the Geneva convention if inflicted upon others), I opted for the latter solution yesterday, and it seemed to work. Having said that, as I’m writing this one of my toes has a pustule that is to normal blisters what Krakatoa is to a pimple, so it’s clearly not a perfect method.

As for the head, wear a baseball cap. It’s going to protect you come rain or sun. Pour water on it if you get too hot, but keep it on. If you do not, you will get sunburn/rivulets of sweat/rain in your eyes/headaches from squinting in the sun, all of which is dispiriting and painful.

5. Don’t study the map beforehand
Almost all serious organisers provide runners with a good map of the race course, and – even more importantly – a topographic outline of it. Ignore this at your peril. In Berlin and Barcelona you can get away with it as the courses are quite flat, but nothing brings your spirits down quite like suddenly facing a seemingly never-ending ascent that you didn’t even know was coming. Also, studying the map will help you avoid social embarrassment, like when I managed to run right past La Sagrada Familia yesterday without noticing, an involuntary faut-pas my proud and architecturally-minded hosts were understandably quite upset about.

6. Run with your heart, not your head
And so you’re finally ready to step up to the starting line. You’ve done your homework and are well prepared, physically and mentally, and know what pace you want to be going at, but once the speakers start blasting music (“Barcelona” with Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballé yesterday) and the crowd cries out, you charge ahead, blood boiling, adrenaline flowing, and you find yourself running fast, too fast. Much too fast.

I did exactly that yesterday. I had set my Garmin to alert me if I ran too fast or too slow, the better to ensure that I kept the speed I had decided on beforehand, which would take me to the goal in just under four hours. Due to my inadequate programming skills, however, it only beeped when I ran too slowly. Before I had noticed this I was five kilometres into the race and going almost a minute faster per k than foreseen – a recipe for disaster. I tried to slow down but couldn’t. By ten kilometres I was panicking, by the halfway mark I was becoming fatalistic – it was do or die.

Another thing to avoid is straying from the path; the bigger marathons nearly always draw a line on the ground that demarcates the official length of the race, so professional athletes actually run the distance. Stay on this, and you will, too. The problem is that you are crowded by people, some of whom you will overtake, so walking the line (or more accurately running it) becomes impossible, and inevitably you run longer as you zig-zag through the throng. By the end of the race I had done a kilometre and a half more than 42,195 metres, which is quite frustrating but seemingly inevitable. You can counter this at least in part by running in as straight a line as possible and under no circumstances interact with the audience, but where would be the fun in that?

In fact, I counsel you to do the latter as much as possible, and if you pay for it in sweat and additional steps then what you get in return is certainly worth the price; having whole swathes of the crowd clasp your hand and shout your name as you go past merely because you were the only one of all the runners who gave back something by smiling and thanking them for their support is priceless, and I promise that the pain you felt a moment ago will melt away under the adulation of las zorras.

7. Don’t take pride in your results
What’s a marathon, after all? Anyone could do it, right? Well, maybe they could, but they sure as heck don’t. Less than 1% of all people do. It’s going to hurt, it’s never going to be not painful, and you will walk like a stop-motion John Wayne puppet afterwards, whatever all those articles tell you, but if you embrace it (and maybe heed a piece of advice or two along the way) and enjoy it, there is every reason in the world to be proud and rejoice; after all, you just ran an effing marathon!

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P.S. Did I make it in the end? Did I beat my personal best? Did I do a sub-four hour marathon? You betcha. I improved my PB by over three quarters of an hour and it wasn’t even (that) painful. Which only goes to show, I guess, but what, I’m not sure about.

On refugees

June 2015

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My son woke me up this morning by telling me that he loved me. I was in my own bed, in my own house, and I counted my blessings.

Imagine having all that torn away by powers utterly beyond your control, having to abandon your home for fear of being raped, tortured, killed, having to flee for your life, seeing friends and family die on the way into the unknown and still have to carry on, since it’s the lesser of evils.

Imagine finally making it to a place where prosperity and peace reigns, only to be met by racism and xenophobia, by people wanting to send you back to the utter hell you’ve escaped (a hell created by a lack of action from those same countries that you now have to flee to).

Now imagine that’s you. How would YOU like to be treated?