About a month ago, it was announced that Ignite would be coming to Chirp.

I decided to submit an abstract for a talk, but on what? My wife told me that I should probably make it something Twitter-related but I decided to go in a different direction, given what I saw here.

If you haven't deduced from this post's title, I guess I should listen to her more often in the future.

Anyway, I found myself gravitating towards two particular topics from which I could draw a great deal of personal experience: fitness and nutrition (geeks' favorite topics, right?)

I thought about how to frame a talk for the 5 min/20 slides format. As part of the exercise, I captured a few of the most meaningful moments in my life so far regarding my physical fitness. Based on those events, I focused on distilling the lessons I've learned over the last two decades into 15 second chunks.

Perhaps I'll get to sharing those lessons in the future at a different Ignite session but as my talk wasn't accepted for this round, I thought I would at least blog about each of the moments as they've had an impact on me. I'll save the details for another day, but here are each of the events in a nutshell, reverse-chronological order:

1. Bootcamp with Maurice Rodriguez
2. Masters' swimming with Markus Lombardini
3. Kieser Fitness
4. Body for Life
5. Kursalon Fitness/John Harris/Club Danube
6. Health Dynamics with John Patnott
7. The Strength Shoe
8. High School Football & Basketball Coach
9. HFCS

Over the coming months, I'll look to flesh out each as vignettes as time allows.

(BTW, the speakers who were selected for the evening were great. You can check them out here.)

"Britons are entering the downturn unable to cut household costs because they don't know how to cook cheap meals, turning instead to fast food"

I'm finishing up my second round of Bootcamp at work and have no hesitation recommending it (disclaimer: I get nothing for my endorsement.)

It's a great mix of cardio and strength training. It actually reminds me of PE class from school, but in a good way. Now I'm old enough to understand the benefits.

It's been a while since my last post. A lot has been going on in the last month. For one, I've been doing a fitness class in the morning by the name of "Bootcamp."

Our instructor is much more fun than a Drill Sergent but that doesn't mean he doesn't work us hard. Just this morning we went for a mile run. I did it in 6:20. I don't know if I ran that fast in high school. Considering that I ran it in 8:14 four weeks ago, I'd say that my cardio conditioning is definitely improving. These last few months have been so crazy that I haven't been as physically active as I normally am but with that kind of mile-time, I'd say I'm back in the saddle again.

During recovery from my pyeloplasty, I've been making use of a technique recommended by my swim coach. He told me about the Carpenter effect (a.k.a. the Ideomotor effect.) If you check out the Wikipedia entry on the topic, you'll find an explanation of the phenomena but not exactly as my coach described it. He explained that - while not yet scientifically proven - people who mentally train while physically incapacitated lose less muscle mass during their convalescence. I've been giving this a try. In my mind, I go through three sets of twelve reps for all the major muscle groups and imagine that I'm training to failure at the end of the third set. I haven't had any muscle soreness the day after but if nothing else, I'm super relaxed after my "session" is done.

My swimming coach summarized something this morning that resonated so well.  He was describing why he works out.  Paraphrased from German, he said that it wasn't because he wants to change his body, but rather, to be able to enjoy eating things and not worry about the consequences.  It's more of a proactive than a reactive approach to weight management. I like that.