Tag Archives: excercise

Counting to 90

I’ve been doing stretches in the morning.

This post is about that and a new meditative technique. It’s uh, the title.

My trainer, the incredible Christina, saw there were some exercises where I was limited by mobility, not strength. For a pistol squat, at a certain point I couldn’t go lower without tumbling over.

So, at the end of October she challenged me to do a set of stretches every morning for 30 days. It’s based on these from the Strength Side guys.

  • 1:30 Seiza
  • 1:30 Squat
  • 1:00 Downward Dog
  • 1:00 Crab
  • :45/side Long Lunge
  • :45 Horse Stance

Not too much! Too much doesn’t get done.

I’ve been using this on most mornings as a way to be silent, mindful, meditative and fully inhabit my body instead of jumping into a million thoughts and todos.

After I get the coffee brewing, I do these stretches before cooking breakfast. I’m doing it this way to take advantage of something I learned from my book club inspired reading of Atomic Habits by James Clear. I am setting up a chain where the obvious thing to do while the coffee brews is to do these stretches. Not look at all the slack messages from India that have piled up in the night. Not check my calendar. Not check the news. Just do my stretches while the coffee brews. This is actually working for me as a way to create a good habit. It feels great.

Just one thing is irritating though.

My timer going off on my phone after 1:30 is jarring. Setting the timer again is disruptive and lets me look at notifications. Midway through a stretch I find myself tapping the phone to see how much time is left (as if it matters!).

So I switched to just counting and it’s going great. One one-thousand, two one thousand…

Turns out if you just count and concentrate on the counting, you can get all the way up to 90 just fine. Turns out that counting helps me focus and be single-minded – it’s a meditation technique.

When I’ve finished counting and stretching, I find myself loose and ready and centered. I can eat, clean and get kids ready easily. I can thumb through notifications and Slack messages and make sure I’m ready for the agenda for the day. But I’m doing it because I’m done with what I wanted to do first in the morning.

Week 2201

I zoomed with a crew of mostly ex PWP folks to catch up and drink a beer and remember our sweet trip to Stowe this winter, my last snow trip of the season. Also got lunch with Ian Sudderth, always a pleasure.

Fixed this website!

Back when letsencrypt was launching I was trying to get it to work here and broke my .well-known directory, which is also where you prove you own your website to keybase.io. Keybase told me it didn’t think I owned my website anymore. Trying to fix that ended up making the front page of this work, but no hyperlinks anywhere worked, because I suck at .htaccess, the magic format for manipulating apache webserver redirection rules. Eventually I just removed many “fixes” and hey it works and I won’t touch it again for a few years.

Released Pingplotter

I published it here, made a screencast, and posted it on reddit. I also wrote down my recipe for making the screencast in case I ever need to do that again or it could help some other nerd. (That will publish next week).

Got on Mastodon

I had a mastodon account back when it bloomed, but I lost it. I’m trying to get back into putting my energy into things I own or where I’m not the product and the Fediverse is the party to be at. It’s decentralized, hard to shut down and open source. I’m trying to blog more (maybe you noticed), toot more, tweet less. I’m randomly chose a mastodon server to join and now you can connect with me at https://hostux.social/@mattk

Come Join Mastodon! Right now I think the biggest problem is that I don’t know who I want to hear from or talk to, but I’m gonna take it easy and spend more time just getting to know people. This guy Jonathon posts really interesting stuff about Africa all the time!

Started selling our apartment

We probably need more room now. So we’re looking to sell our place in Brooklyn. I love that place but it’s hard to imagine moving back with 4 people to that two bedroom. I wanted to stay there a bit longer, but you gotta roll with the punches.

Sweaty stuff

I entered into the hyrox virtual championship and I am super outclassed there! Also got some wooden gymnast rings for pullups and put them up on the big tree out back.

No zombie runs in a while, want to get one of those tomorrow in the rain.

Buying a car

Sam is doing most of the work on this, but we’ve been renting a car for months now and there’s no clear end in sight. Our goal is to own a car of some sort before the next time we’d renew the rental car. If we move somewhere we don’t need a car, we can sell it. But it’s time to stop renting – this is gonna last a while.

My legs hurt

Group 3
I did a 5K last night in Central Park – which sounds like nothing, but I am not a runner.

The last time I ran was 15 years ago in the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge, with Chris Acton. It was terrible. I ran the 5K race in Rochester in a terrible 45 minutes. I was so slow and awful that my elf-lord boss ran backwards in bare feet encouraging me to keep going. It seems kind, but it also seems kind of like krumping to show someone that it isn’t hard to dance.

Anyway, this time was better! I don’t dig the 30 minutes of being corralled while we wait to start or the crowding, but once the run started I was able to get going and stay going. I’m still slow – finished in 32 minutes – but it’s better by a lot than last time!