Just last week I wrote how we had left Thursdays free from work until 4PM so that we could go on ‘workday adventures’ - but that we hadn’t done one yet.
This past Thursday we did, and we had a great time.

One thing I’ve been considering lately is whether I should increase my work hours or not. The concept of work-life balance is popular among employees, but it’s quite a different thing when you are self-employed and have to choose how much and what kind of work to take - as it’s easy to do too much and then end up burnt-out.

Another thing we saw on ‘A new life in the sun - Where are they now’ is how some of the more entrepreneurial people were able to expand their businesses by taking on more projects as their initial idea succeeded - for example, a couple invested the money they earned with their restaurant by buying a condo to renovate it and rent it.

We watched a few episodes of ‘A new place in the sun - Where are they now’ while in the UK, resting on the couch after a day of walking on the Dales Way. I like this show as we too have a dream of having a place of our own at some point, somewhere more rural than where we live and have grown up in - and to have some sort of passive (as well as active) income from it.

It’s a strange feeling - for the last few days our routine has been to wake up, walk and find spots to take a break and eat something while going to the next step of the journey, which we found to be rather freeing: the task was clear, the reward immediate, the end in sight - not something that happens very often in regular life.

I once heard in a podcast by the Jack Mountain Bushcraft school the above quote - ‘crafting is cumulative’ - meaning that the more you do it, the better you become at it.

I believe there are seasons and phases in one’s training, and one should not deny this and fixate on just one modality when its timing is over [at least for the moment]. I used to be very much into strength training, and built a DIY wooden power rack to train heavy squats, bench presses and rack pulls - but now that phase is over

I’ve had a 40kg kettlebell for almost 10 years now, which I bought for swings and to use for weighted chin ups and dips. At the gym I mainly have students use it for deadlifts, as I find KB deadlifts are very handy for group classes. So, around this time last year I took advantage of a sudden discount and bought 3 other big kettlebells - a 48, a 56 and a 68 - to increase the progressive overload potential

I wanted to do one last trail running adventure before the summer travels, but we couldn't find a suitable race - they were either too long or too short - so we picked a track with the characteristics we wanted from a book I stumbled upon at the library.

I was thinking yesterday how weird it is that most ads I see in relation to physical training or nutrition are about promising fast results…

I had just finished teaching a private session when my student told me this sentence..

About a month ago I was reading about training for adventure racing, and I saw someone mention that it’s much easier if you have an ‘adventure lifestyle’…

I read this quote in Jonathan Goodsman’s newsletter and I really like it, as it sums up nicely the way I’m thinking about my social media accounts and this website

The daily commute to one’s workplace can be a dreaded moment - but it does not need to be. Now that the weather is getting better, I am enjoying going by bike to the physio clinic I teach at twice a week …

If you’ve never heard of Alastair Humphreys, check him out. He’s an adventurer that came up with / popularized a number of interesting concepts, and one of my favourite goes by the name of ‘the doorstep mile’ …

As I mentioned a few posts ago, we bought two new bikes..

At the end of 2023, while housesitting in the Dordogne, we set out some goals for 2024, as part of our usual brainstorming on New Year’s Resolutions. One of these was to run 3 trail running races - though, in a way, I didn’t really think I’d actually do them, as I have been thinking about getting back into running for years and never really followed up on it

A subset of hikes I really enjoy is the ‘dinner with a view’ kind. Grab a bunch of friends, some tasty food and head to a peak in time to eat dinner while the sun is setting, to then come back when it’s dark..

The first word of this blog is ‘explore’ because it is an activity I have always loved - mainly in the virtual world of videogames when I was a child, and now in the real world as an adult.

After a few years without easy access to a bike, we’re enjoying spending time on the saddle. This renewed enjoyment of cycling that we are experiencing also reminded me of a discipline I heard of a few years ago, that seemed interesting at the time but a bit too difficult to access - adventure racing...

It’s been said by many thinkers of this era that our western society’s lack of proper rites of passage is a great detriment to our personal development, that we need to be challenged in physical ways, to ‘reintroduce the metaphorical tigers’ in our lives - and I very much agree with this

A home gym is a luxury that everyone into physical training came to appreciate during lockdowns. Mine was born 10 years ago, when I started going down the rabbit hole of training articles and realized I could train at home rather than going to the gym…

‘Mat intuition’ is a term I’ve seen used to describe that quality of instinctively knowing how to move one’s body in scrambles, how to transition from technique to technique in a fast paced situation, how to improvise and appropriately adapt to the continually changing conditions of a roll.