Plastic Rocks and Other Oddities

Indoor rock climbing is a very odd activity in many ways, especially for people like me who generally prefer to shun physical activity.

The object is to climb a wall into which irregularly-shaped splodges of coloured plastic have been bolted and then . . . come down again.

And that's it.

A session of indoor rock climbing involves doing just that over and over again until your fingers lose their grip and your arms begin to tremble with the strain.

It really shouldn't be as much fun as it is. But it is.

This evening I went climbing with Gayle (who, despite the appearance of her blog, has actually been back in Australia for about two months) and I very quickly realised just how long it had been since I last climbed.

First I had to get the instructor to show me how to fit the harness (my own harness!) and then a wall rated just 15 (on a scale of 1 to 30) almost broke me.

It had been a long time. The last time I went climbing was in a place that burned down in 2004. And when it burned down, it was quite a while since I'd been.

So the plan is to go again next Monday, and possibly on a regular basis after that. We'll see how that pans out.

Adventures in Osteopathy

My work has, very generously, been stumping up for monthly visits from a personal trainer, to take us through some stretching and strengthening techniques that go some way towards offsetting the damage inflicted by sitting in front of a computer all day.

I've had problems with my back for a long time, mainly the result of a mild inherited scoliosis and a sciatic injury from time spent working in a supermarket as a teenager. And sedentary office work really doesn't help.

Various osteopaths over the years have had a crack. Some have been able to help, and some not.

Anyway, at about the time this personal training business started, I changed to a new osteopath.

In the first visit he had diagnosed that my problem was not my back, but my hip. Apparently I naturally twist to my left, putting most of my weight onto my left hip, and shrinking my left leg to the point where the resulting imbalance puts a heap of strain (but only muscular strain) on my back.

Not bad for the first 45 minute session.

Armed with some new stretches and exercises, I went away with the notion that it might actually be possible to fix this.

Fast forward to 4 weeks later (now) and the improvement is noticeable. The pain radiating down my left leg (which I've had for years and I thought was the sciatica) has all but disappeared, and my centre of balance has shifted. To the centre.

The stretching from the trainer has helped immensely too. It's nothing too drastic in the way of activity, but it's making me feel better than I have in years.

Aches and Pains

I'm starting to appreciate that I'm not as young as once I was.

Yesterday, we had another visit from the personal trainer we'd seen at our work offsite a few weeks ago.

Like these things usually pan out, I'd been all keen after that first session, and actually did some of the exercises at home for the first couple of days.

Then it kind of dropped off to every second day, then every third, until I was occasionally doing only, you know, the stretches that were easy and felt good pretty much immediately. None of the hard ones.

So yesterday we went through the whole box and dice again, just as a refresher. And I was reminded of how much it hurt the first time.

I cursed myself silently (at least, I hope it was silent . . . I was in a roomful of people) for not having been more conscientious as my recalcitrant muscles refused to move where they were told.

So now I am in the same position again. I'm all keen to continue and do the exercises every day and half-believing that it might really happen.

I even got up early this morning to run through the whole sequence before I went to work.

And as a result I've had aches and pains all day.

This better be good for me.

Course / Work

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I know my readers (both of them) have been waiting with bated breath for the next post.

(Sidebar: I had to look up the spelling of 'bated breath' just now, as I wasn't entirely sure it shouldn't be 'baited breath'. It's definitely 'bated', although I found an amusingly correct use of 'baited' here.)

I've been off the blog and off work for the last couple of days, attending a management . . . sorry, Leadership . . . training course.

Companies like mine often send their middle management off on this sort of thing. It's a chance to get them out of the office, get them fired up, and more importantly, show them they're not indispensable.

This course was pretty good, and one of the slightly more entertaining I've been to.

The location was certainly better than most.

It was held at the Life Saving Club in Port Melbourne, in a room with sweeping views of the beachfront, the bay, the kids playing cricket on the sand and at one point, a couple snogging for a full half-hour in waist-deep water.

So there were more than a few distractions when the content of the course ran a bit dry.

Day one and the first half of day two had us looking at our management 'styles', particularly how we rated in a questionnaire filled out by our reports. Or my 'minions' as I like to call them.

My results were (in a nutshell) that I'm good at planning for the future and setting team direction, but I'm a bit too nice.

They obviously don't know I call them my minions.

All in all I'm quite happy with that. Although if a situation comes up that calls for a micro-managing asshole, apparently I'm screwed.

The second half of day two was a complete change of direction. A personal trainer took us through some stretching and gravity-based core strengthening techniques (see how I can speak the speak?) which covered the gamut from embarrassingly painful to sadistically torturous.

The floor work was intercut with a PowerPoint presentation, telling us more than we could possibly take in on glutes, medials, various acronyms I've forgotten and some other stuff I don't remember.

At the time I remember thinking it was awesome. Then like a fine weed, it all seemed a bit unreal after the comedown.

But we got a foam exercise roller and massage ball to take home. So that was nice.

I went back to work today to an Inbox packed with emails and aches in my glutes and medials.

On the upside, the aches made grunting dismissively at my minions slightly easier, so maybe there's hope for my asshole side yet.