New workout this morning, a variation on Craig Ballantyne’s Crazy 8s method:

• Warm up: Rower (4-5 mins at a good pace; you want to feel as if you’ve been working, but not completely cream-crackered)
• Star Jumps x 50
• Push-ups x 16
• Kettlebell swings (16kg) x 20
• Foam roller crunches x 12
• Kinesis reverse fly x 12
• Kettlebell squats (16kg) x 12
• Kinesis squat & pull down x 12
• Plank x 1 minute

Rest 2 min then go again.

Rest 2-3 mins then go again, or at least ‘go again for as much as you can, but you might want to scale it back a bit, depending on the pain’.  I was down to 30 Star Jumps, 12 push-ups, 16 KB swings, 10 squats etc etc. by the 3rd round.

Then have a bit of a lie down.

The important thing is to Keep Going, and not take too much of a break. So don’t do the Star Jumps then wander off, have a drink, stare vacantly at the clock, then eventually get on with the push-ups — it’s got to be bang-bang-bang. Then have a little rest between rounds.  The other good things about this is that it is over quickly.

Try it — or your own variation. It’s surprisingly challenging.

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In at work by 0715, and away home at 1730 meant I was able to skip out to B__ Square with Number One Daughter and play frisbee and 40/40 Home.

Lots of sprinting, push-ups and laughing. Then cycling round and round the tree before heading home.

Great fun and a good way to round off a day spent behind a desk.

Oh, and my new Salomon trail runners score top marks for grip on grass. “I didn’t know you could run so fast, Daddy!”

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From the Harvard Business Review, of all places, comes this really rather good article by Clayton Christensen on the importance of assessing what you really want in life. This basically boils down to ‘Things’ or ‘People’:

…the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

There’s some good stuff here, and it ties in nicely with my current re-reading of Montaigne and the eternal problems of How to Live.

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Now have Powerbar, so this, combined with the Jungle Gym, should lead to Mr. Apollo-like results.

The Jungle Gym is great fun and actually brings some child-like play into the keep fit regimen. Kids love it, too. I took it to the Philippines and Japan, but never got the occasion to use it.

There are loads of videos showing how you can use it, and this shows the progression to chin-ups. Note: it looks easier than it is — You’ve been warned!

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An interesting perspective from Mark Bernstein on how to improve searches on Google.

In a piece headed Internet Failure hew says:

“My recent strategy has been to fool Google by combining the information I want with the name of a serious cook – Ruhlman or Keller or Bourdain – and then to look for results that are not written by that cook. This often gets you results from food blogs and other serious writers, not retreads from 1990’s supermarket magazines.”

Must try this in other variants, too.

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Il Pappalardo is an excellent local trattoria-style Italian restaurant in Kyoto. You really should go there if you are in Kyoto and want a good Italian pick-me-up.

Located towards the southeast of town, on the east bank of the river, it’s about 3 minutes walk from Sanjusangendo (one of my favourite temples) and perhaps 15 minutes walk from Kyomizudera:

Il Pappalardo
451-1 Maegawacho Myouhouin
Higashiyamaku
Kyoto 605–932
tel: +81 75 533 3330
kenji@pappalardo.com
www.ilpappalardo.com

Kenji Kitamura runs the place and, in particular, the pizza oven. The food is genuine, authentic Italian with a good choice of primi piatti, secondi and an impressive wine list. We have been there for the last two nights and my children both said they wanted to come for the third night in succession — it’s that good!

Tonight, I had a mixed salad, with fresh leaves, cherry tomatoes and very juicy mozzarella, then a superb wagyu beef steak. The kids had very good pasta and pizza, and La Belle Femme shared the salad and then dug into a tasty spaghetti all’amatriciana.

With authentic coffee and even limoncello or grappa to wash it all down, Il Pappalardo is a trattoria that I’d be happy to go to in Venice or Spoleto, let alone London. The staff are attractive and helpful, the ambience good (especially with the roaring pizza oven) and the setting pleasant.

Go eat now. Vai mangiare!

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Watching Blue Juice again the other night, I noticed that Edwin Starr took the part of Ossie Sands whose “Price of Pain” had been sampled—and mangled—by Josh Tambini.

At the end of the film, Starr sings (as the credits roll) a cover of “Movin’ on up” by Primal Scream. While I quite like the original, Starr’s version, or at least the truncated piece allowed by the distributors, knocks the socks off it.

I zipped over to the iTunes store to buy it. Not there.

I try Amazon. Nothing.

I google “Blue Juice soundtrack” and find that it’s never been made available commercially.

So you cannot get the excellent piece of music anywhere. That really is a shame, as it’s a real belter.

Interestingly, Starr moved to England in 1973 and became a hit on the Northern Soul circuit. Indeed, shortly before his death in 2003 he topped the Northern Soul Poll as “All-Time Favourite Artist”.

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And you thought you knew about snow.

More great pictures of snow, ice and archaeologically buried cars here.

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Courchevel 1850 was our destination this year for a 3-day trip with friends. I’d only skied 2 days last year so was pretty rusty, even after a couple of hours on the indoor slope at Hemel with Rob from InsideOut Skiing.

However, a four hour lesson (non-stop!) with Marco Tommasello at New Generation really sorted me out. My main faults were two-fold: first, I was not going up and down anything like enough and, second, I was skiing with my feet too far apart in a futile, if unconscious effort to be more balanced, though in fact it has the opposite effect and makes everything else difficult if not impossible. But after some gentle practice around Verdons, we headed up to 1650 just as the snow really started to come down and then hit some reds, starting with Rochers. Keeping tight on Marco’s heels meant I could semi-forget the technicalities and just let myself try to do what he was doing (again, without thinking about it too much, a curse of mine). Then we shot back to 1850 all the way down to the Croisette and beyond, to the Brigues red down to La Tania and back up via the Foret bubble, down the bottom section of Dou de Midi then back to the Croisette. I went straight to bed at 1.30pm and slept for 2 hours!!

The following day I was skiing reasonably happily with the others and, albeit far from elegantly, going down all the reds in the deep powder. Lunch was at the Soucoupe where Winchie (aka. SpiderMonkey) had memorably questionable herrings and Mikey later got lost just off this section:

I fell over about 10 times in the three days but felt that this was due to pushing myself rather than being utter crap. And I won “Most Improved Skier of the Tour” award, admittedly against not much competition.

The Hotel Le Paddock was OK. Well, for Euros 115 per night including breakfast and only a stone’s throw from the Croisette, it was always going to be slightly spartan. But spartan is good, and the bar downstairs was fine. I was lucky enough to have one of the rooms on the not quite as noisy side of the hotel — if you stay there, do NOT have a room on the same side as the main entrance as you will be woken at an ungodly hour by drunken renditions of your favourite tunes from all the revelling skiers.

I had a great time, and was really getting into the skiing by the time we had to leave. Which is a pity.

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Warfare should be viewed like hunting, according to the old Byzantine text on the art of warfare, the the Strategikon has some useful and timely advice on how really to conduct war:

Warfare is like hunting. Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait, by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by sheer force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy be many or few. To try simply to overpower the enemy in the open, hand in hand and face to face, even though you may appear to win, is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory.

via the LRB (subscription required). Pretty sensible, really, and there are echoes of Geronimo here, too.

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