It’s been one year with crossfit, and I can honestly say I wish I had listened to my brother back in the CCIT days when he first told me about this stuff. This would have saved my twenties. For now, though, I’ll settle for it saving my thirties, fourties and fifties.

My come-to-crossfit moment came on a five round couplet of thrusters and a 400m run. It took me about twenty minutes. It felt like an eternity. In the lifetime I spent gutting it out those last rounds, I realized all the training I had been doing was obviously not working.

Something else about all that other training: it was breaking me down. I had knee problems and back problems and shoulder problems. Issues were stacking up so quickly that I could rarely put together three consecutive weeks of workouts before something flared up and I had to give it a rest for a week or two. The doctors had no answers for me. I started wearing knee braces and gave up on ever running more than three miles ever again.

Fast forward a year and all of my problems have evaporated. I’ve since run Ragnar, gotten a couple 10Ks under my belt and have dropped to sub-7 minute splits on four-milers. I’m faster than I’ve been since high school and stronger than in any other point in my life. More importantly, I’m actually functional now. I used to spend hours at the gym running and lifting, but when it came to something as simple as holding a door open, I’d get bowled over. That’s not the case anymore. The skills and exercises in crossfit have actual analogs in the real world which makes them transferable.

I won’t tell you that the past year has been easy–I’ve had to change the way I approach a lot of things. I will say two things though:

First, anyone can do crossfit. You don’t have to be super joe athlete, you don’t have to be a former high school varsity sports star. In fact, you’ll have less to unlearn and be skeptical about if you don’t have that background.

Second, if you’re not doing crossfit, chances are you’re not using your time as efficiently as you could be. I won’t proclaim crossfit to be the end-all-be-all, but I will say that I’ve achieved my results by spending the past year doing workouts of 3 to 30 minutes. I’m in and out of the gym in less than an hour and that includes warming up and cooling down.

This is my official endorsement. If you’re thinking about resolutions for the new year, find the nearest crossfit affiliate and give it a try. It’ll be one hour of your life that I guarantee will be more fun than running on a treadmill and could very well be the start of a brand new, balanced, functional you.

This train ride feels like forever. I don’t mind. Today is meant for slowing down. The body’s been pretty beat up lately. I lean my head back and get lost for a bit. My left hand starts to tingle. I look down and examine the calluses across my palm and start thinking about the workout I just finished. Thrusters and muscle ups. Thrusters–a visual materializes in my mind. I start dissecting my performance. Did I get low enough? Did I lock out at the top? Is my shoulder going to explode later this afternoon?

Why am I thinking about this?

Muscle ups. Bar Muscle Ups. That was a first time experience. I’ll probably have a nice bruise across my chest for the next couple of days. At the time, a bruise sounded better than a no-rep.

Why am I doing this, again?

I used to tell people I workout so I could eat whatever I want, but that’s not really true anymore. Lately the work has found a way to impose its will on my diet. No more drinking. No more processed sugars. Lots and lots of meat. My carbon footprint has increased dramatically over the past month.

Why am I doing this, again?

Now, I tell people I train for life. For the opportunities it affords me and the confidence it provides. Want to run a 10K next week? Sure. Hike up a hilltop tomorrow? No problem. Debug a program? If I can deadlift 315 pounds, surely I can bend these tiny bits to my liking. It’s a pretty good feeling.

But today, I train to remember. I push harder because it helps bring back memories of her. The aches remind me of high school evenings, coming home exhausted from practice to see nanny cooking in the kitchen–the sound of the stove hood whirring and the smell of ginger or garlic running through the house. It helps me remember weekend mornings mowing the lawn while she worked away in her rose garden. It reminds me of how much further I need to grow if I’m ever to live up to the example she set for me.

It’s been nine years to the day, and this year I find myself back in the city that took me away from her. While I no longer mourn, I do often wish she was around to see the home we’ve created–that, for once, I could treat her to a home cooked meal or maybe show her around the city. The alternate reality in my head thinks she’d like that.

Today I train to remember. I don’t worry about PRs or Rxs. I don’t worry about how heavy the weight is. This is training for life. This is a new kind of fit.

Five days into the Etsy tenure and other than a sloppy focus mishap (damn you Mac!) and feeling like my brain is going to get heartburn (telencephalon-burn?) from all the information I’ve digested, I’d say it went pretty well.

Actually, better than well. I can’t stop talking about this place. Dogs in the office? Awesome. My own lab coat? Awesome. Telephone booths? Awesome. Craft night? Awesome. Eatsy? Delicious. Having one of these in our kitchen? Awesome.

Most importantly, the people? Incredibly smart, talented, hard working and–wait for it–awesome.

Oh wait, I haven’t even talked about the work! How many places are there where you can go from zero to production deploy on day one? Or find yourself the subject of CTO tweet and team leader blog post?

Like I said, I can’t stop talking about this place. The good news? You can experience it for yourself because we’re hiring in NY and SF!

Switching teams tomorrow. Postgres and Python, here I come.

Oh, and we’re going to give it another go with the Mac. Anyone know if those things support sloppy focus yet? Also is spaces anything close to decent yet? (i.e. can you wrap and drag windows amongst spaces?)

are the new double-unders

Just finished serving as 6th man for team No FOMO Runners (a.k.a. Team Eat Strong) in this year’s Ragnar Relay. 24 hours. 184 miles. 12 friends.

For posterity:
Leg 6 – 12:00pm – 4.9 miles – 36 min
Leg 18 – 10:40pm – 7.6 miles – 59:50 min
Leg 30 – 7:30am – 6.9 miles – 57:00 min

Total: 19.4 miles.
Average pace: 7:52

New firsts:
First time I’ve run 19.4 miles in 24 hours.
First time coconut water has ever tasted good.
First time calves have been non-functional.
First time Carmen has walked faster than me.

Notes to future self:
Train for it next time.
Advil and ice are your friends.
Soaking in a cold bath after 19.4 miles is priceless . . . as long as you get past the first 20 seconds.

You can re-live the experience at eatstrong.tumblr.com.

Are morale annihilators.

the crab preempted me, but here i is, Windows 7 on Fedora 12 via KVM. Although the fedora kids would have you believe the setup is a walk in the park, it actually isn’t. Some things to note:

1. You must have a processor that supports the virtualization instruction set
2. you must enable said instruction set in your computer’s bios
3. the default virtualization lib install only supplies the qemu emulator. this will not work with windows 7. many BSODs await you on this path.
4. Instead, install the kvm emulator packages.

and that’s it! I should also mention that the performance on this thing is pretty sick. I can’t even tell i’m running two operating systems at the same time.

now to see if i can get ie6 running and to hookup some network routing magic.

Last saturday was our turkey day warm up dinner. Happy to report that a good time was had. While it didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked, all the food got out and we set a new record in attendance (14!).

On the menu:

• empanadas
• Crackers with Fromage d’Affinois and Sarabeth Marmalade
• butternut squash soup
• mashed yams
• corn bread pudding
• brussel sprouts cooked in bacon fat (mel special)
• macaroni cheese (mel special)
• challah stuffing
• bourbon cranberry sauce
• turkey

Other new additions this year included real plates and cups! Maybe next year we’ll have real chairs.

Many thanks to our wonderful guests who provided all the booze and desserts as well as fantastic company for a night of eating and drinking. Also, major props to mel for the mac & cheese and brussels as well as tessa for a wonderful home made apple pie.

As always, we’re looking forward to next year’s dinner. We’re hoping to see all the smiling face of those who could and couldn’t make it this year. With the new job, we might not be trying as many new recipes this year, but i’m sure we can find something interesting to add to the menu.

Finally, many were curious about the infamous spreadsheet, so here it is. Enjoy.

a season of new has arrived. new job. new fedora. new dev box. new kings season.

one of those things doesn’t quite belong. anyway, first week and a half down and things are still in the feeling out stage. exciting and daunting at the same time as scope is large and time lines are aggressive. It’ll work itself out, i’m sure.

On another note, new fedora! I am quasi sad to report that i’ve finally officially switched to using gnome . . . there, i said it. for those in the know, this next sentence will blow your mind even more. I’m now booting into run level 5, too. wow. i feel so dirty saying that, but alas, it was getting too difficult to figure out all the new daemons i had to get windowmaker to run in order to keep up with modern laptop features. in general, the box is fast enough where i don’t notice the performance difference between windowmaker and gnome. the panels still annoy the hell out of me, but i’m slowly learning how to use them. also, if i enable compiz and workspace as cube mode, i can drag windows between workspaces. kinda crazy that gnome requires you to have 3D acceleration just to drag windows between workspaces . . . so dirty . . . the one last hurdle hurdled was how gnome window geometry was absurdly large. my 80×25 emacs windows would take up a full quarter of my screen at 1400×1050. unacceptable. here’s the magic sauce in my .Xdefaults file that did the trick:

emacs.font: Monospace-12:antialias=True:pixelsize=12

you can mess with the pixelsize to get things to your liking. after each edit you have to hit

$ xrdb ~/.Xdefaults

speaking of emacs, after years of failed attempts with multiple major modes a la mmm-mode, it looks like there’s finally a good solution to be found in nXhtml. Finally a mode where php, javascript, css, and html can live happily together. the only down side are the hideous background region colors that are used to demarcate each mode. you can fix that by putting this in your .emacs:

(custom-set-faces
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-major ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode1 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode2 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode3 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode4 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”)))))

well, that’s all i got for now, folks. enjoy you turkey day!