Do you remember those early days of lockdown?
The feeling that everything had changed.
The edge of emergency. Not knowing what you could touch or how often it can be practical to wash your hands. Uncertainty, confinement. The worry of ending up on a ventilator — and what that would feel like, if you were unlucky.
Did you observe, too, how much you missed the energy that comes from the little shifts and changes and transitions that we rush would through, back in “everyday life.” Moving from home to the bus stop, or the short bike commute to work. The small refreshing gaps we’d take for granted, usually feeling pressed for time.
Or, just heading outside for coffee with a colleague to chew a problem over – or to sit opposite a new client or prospect and meet them for the friendly first time, or a catch-up.
From saying hello to our receptionists on arrival at work, and then seeing six people in the elevator — some on their phone, some with music so excitedly loud that you can hum along for six seconds before the elevator arrives at your floor — to the kitchen area at work, where you’d cross paths with someone else or say a hello on the way to coffee meetings outside to break up the day.
And then the shift from work to something fun, and then to home in the mid- or late- hours of the evening.
During those early weeks of March, I felt so lucky that this quiet confinement was the extent of my COVID-19 psychological challenge.
And, I felt guilty in a way too.
More than half of my mind regularly drifting to think of the state of hospitals, checking the news, thinking about my brother and other people that I knew that were doctors or nurses. Those for whom life got way more intense. Those for whom a day of work meant the fear of ending up on a ventilator, and in the statistics.
My mind would so often drift to think about Dad back, in Co. Donegal in Ireland, all cooped up and freshly swilling in the unbelievable grief of having lost Mum on October 9th 2019 — in a short cancer battle that we’re still all taking in as true.
And a British friend in London had texted that his family had become a cluster, with his wife — a hospital doctor who had brought it home — in quite a worrisome way for a few days with the virus.
The British Prime Minister was on a ventilator.
It was an extraordinary time.
Deep down, I was quite ready for life to be a little less intense, with business travel snared indefinitely. Between March and the end of June, I was due to be in Canada twice, Ireland twice, Australia and New Zealand, plus three or four domestic US trips.
And I’d just come through a heavy head cold — though thankfully no clear-cut COVID-19 symptoms, no heavy flu, no lack of taste, no feeling of utter depletion with someone standing on your chest for days on end.
But too there was this fatigue from moving around within your own four walls. And, there was one flashing indicator of my state-of-mind changing, as each day went on.
I’ve exercised so enthusiastically all my life. The spirit I get from movement is a highlight of every day.
And this changed.
An early mid-life surfer, occasional triathlete and keen addict of little cookies of mobility work through the day – “moving better” practice, you could call it – I live athletically.
And, I’m a pretty disciplined guy that finds the desire to exercise comes easy. Though, I can be lazy in how hard I’ll push myself. Which is fine, as we get older 🙂
I am lucky that exercise — or training as I prefer to call it knowing the signaling value of the right word — has always taken its place in the day without too much effort. It’s just naturally important for me.
But, for a month as lock-down deepened into April in our 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, I completely fell off the wagon of exercise.
Perhaps for the first time in my life.
Many days, during this funk, I would grab a beer around 5pm…in a new way that was becoming everyday rather than occasional. Cheeky smile.
On my own, too, which just wasn’t me. And, whatever was going on in my head, a beer at 5pm was now an instinct that spoke louder than hitting the gym “back in the old days”. Or, jumping on the bike into the Presidio Hills. Or, going for a run out onto Marina Green on the San Francisco Bay.
On the odd night, one beer cracked open the second. And then some over-eating. Mischievous smile again— I’m a lucky ectomorph. And, not a chance of getting exercise back into the end-of-day roll.
Then, one day in May, a Question came to me. A Question that pulled me out of the funk.
I was on the floor on a yoga mat, in a web-streamed ‘mobility’ class run by a top physiotherapist that I have followed for years, Dr. Kelly Starrett.
Since 2014 I have been a member of Dr. Starrett’s virtual mobility coaching program, The Ready State, run by Kelly and his wife Julia Starrett. It used to be called MobilityWOD. And The Ready State is why I’d find myself in an airport lounge in the “couch stretch”, feeling a little self-conscious. Or, with a white softball dug into my hip on a hotel towel laid out on the chemically-smelling carpet in a hotel somewhere.
As well as being a New York Times best selling author and Physiotherapist, Dr. Starrett set up SF Crossfit down the road from where I live, one of the first CrossFit franchises. Kelly has been an athlete at the highest level, in the US national canoe and kayak teams in his competitive days. I joined the tribe after my sister bought me Becoming A Supple Leopard as a birthday gift, back in the year of first edition release.
Becoming A Supple Leopard is effectively a textbook on “mobility”, maintenance of the human body for athleticism. What I learnt in Becoming A Supple Leopard layered perfectly onto past years of exploring yoga’s techniques in my twenties. And loving the bio-mechanical learning in track sprint training, back in my teens. And, becoming curious about how to best keep it all together, in my thirties and forties.
So, it was very cool of Kelly and Julia to immediately offer daily 5pm live-streamed mobility classes, as soon as the Work From Home order came down on us San Francisco cats, as midnight struck coming into St. Patrick’s Day, on 17 March.
Members could tune into Dr. Kelly Starrett leading a mobility session live from his living room at 5pm every day. For the Supple Leopard tribe, it was prime time TV for ‘down-regulation’.
Dr. Starrett live, on his floor, cat licking his face (many episodes). With often hilarious pithy commentary, during a long hold with a textured ball digging into your shoulder’s rotator cuff. Moments that would remind me of an english cricket commentator remarking colorfully on something in a break in play.
What a privilege to have one of the best mobility educators in the world in teaching you live for half an hour, as a thank you for your $9.99 membership per month. Relaxation energy and wind-down vibes all bundled into a perfect time of day to shut down the laptop lid and step away.
On one of those days, it was early May I think, I found myself gazing up from the floor, thick in the pain of releasing some knot in some joint, with a lacrosse ball angled into it.
My eyes ended up looking up and down across my bookshelves — which I’ve gradually organized a little bit by topic. And, I found myself musing on a very random question that popped into my head from nowhere.
What is the one area in which I could most effortlessly read, with endless curiosity, for the rest of my life?
Kelly Starrett had just referenced a book in the session — The Body Builders: Inside the Science of the Engineered Human — and I had this impulse to want to one-click on it straight away. But too remembered my recent awareness of the need to one-click on new books a little less.
While I strive to a certain minimalism at home, and have a Kindle collection too, I adore buying real books.
The $11.99 or $16.99 or $21.99 for me always represents an investment in an area of interest, and a small symbol and memory of an era of my life or a direction in which I want to head in the future. For the price of a few coffees, sometimes a paragraph can shift your life or open up a whole new aspect of the world and being alive.
I remember reading a fantastic FT article Here’s How to Organize Bookshelves with Style by one of its FT Weekend columnists and the mention of the idea of books being gathered by era of our life, rather than topic, which resonated. Think how a book cover — sometimes even a page or the smell of a page — can take you zooming to a sepia-tinted freeze-framed moment of your life, in the corner of an apartment or on a train.
Surf guides and surf literature are gathered on the top shelf. And then there’s psychology and philosophy and some wisdom and spiritual books on the shelf below. And then Business, Marketing and Finance and Money on the shelf below that. Fiction is holed up on the other side of the room.
And, on the bottom shelf, at eye-level as I lay on the floor, I found myself scanning the large collection of books on athleticism, fitness, and health and nutrition that I’ve gathered in these last nine years living in San Francisco, as I have increasingly tuned into how my body is evolving as a thirty- and forty-something athlete.
All in the aim of keeping myself surfing when I’m 80!
I started quietly reflecting on how much I love reading and how I feel like I could read endlessly, as I wondered whether to add another book to the collection.
What is the one area in which I could most effortlessly read, with endless curiosity, for the rest of my life?
It’s a hard question, right?
Because our interests and direction changes and evolve. And so therefore will the answer, too.
As a boy, I loved the outdoors adventure books, Enid Blighton’s Famous Five adventure series, Mark Twain’s novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Arthur Ransome’s Coot Club and Swallows and Amazons.
And then I had a teenage phase of reading about music and musicians, and music history and theory.
Then, choosing A-Level (high school final exams) Economics and Art – in a tie-breaker over Music — I started to enjoy pulling down Dad’s MBA books from the shelves at home, getting into Economics for the first time, and Organizational Theory and Marketing and Business. I remembered Dad’s well-leafed pages of Drucker’s famous In Search of Excellence.
A whole new pot of intrigue and learning back then, with a hat tip to Dad’s book case in the hallway of our home in Surrey, near London. And, business and finance and non-fiction current affairs held the upper hand through my early twenties — through trainee financial analyst years at Merrill Lynch in London and onto the beautifully polymathic decision to temporarily abandon finance to study Environmental Management at Masters level in Sydney, Australia for fun. That was the result of another question one day in the Merrill Lynch library, when wanting to make a move to specialize within one sector of business and finance, again driven by pure interest and curiosity.
And so followed years of gathering books like Rachel Carson’s epochal Silent Spring and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, James Lovelock’s important In Search of Gaia and statistician Bjorn Lomborg’s contrarian The Skeptical Environmentalist. And then surf non-fiction and fiction collections started to build during the Australia days of long weekend road trips, breaking from textbooks of ecology, organic chemistry, environmental law, and the economics of timber (all calculus) and natural resources!
The Question shone a light on an era that started in my early thirties in London, where I started to practise yoga in earnest, which was an intriguing area of learning and release and helped new levels of athleticism in recovering creaking mobility from rugby days. To current San Francisco days where my human movement book-buying theme seems to have spread across functional movement, breathing and nutrition…and, many more surfing books.
Exercise, sport, just movement has been sugar to my spirit all of my life.
The sheer joy of our body’s chains of energy driving me through a long run, or the rhythmic dance of a hill-climb on a bike. When it feels like shit, too. The adrenaline release of smashing into another human and knocking him off his feet playing rugby. Or, finding that tiny point of balance within your palm in a handstand. Or, the haul of a sprint paddle to pull into a glassy wave, and the turn-and-drop as gravity feathers you down the face.
All of my life, I’ve had this feeling of destiny — with total certainty — that I will end up a track coach. I had been signed up for a weekend primer course this January 2020, in fact — that had to be cancelled.
Fresh off the back of the tragedy of losing Mum to cancer in four short sharp months in the second half of 2019, there is a sign dangling in front of my eyes every day now with the reminder that life is short.
I’d asked the question knowing the answer, and liking the realization of how much exercise and movement means to me!
