In 2009 I achieved some significant things that weren’t on my list of goals, although they’re not concrete achievements in the same sense.
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According to this article, rats’ brains produce neurons when they exercise that are functionally different from those produced by non-exercising rats, and the identified functional difference is that the neurons have less of a response to stress.

It’s not a huge leap to think that this applies to other animals as well, including ourselves. So at an even more fundamental level than previously thought, exercise can help prevent stress.

I made it to CrossFit Ireland today, eventually—it wasn’t that easy for me to find it, and I probably should have watched their driving video rather than just using Google Maps. As I’ve stated before, Irish signage is terrible, and I shouldn’t have expected that it would be easy to identify the Hibernian Industrial Estate.

I did find it in the end, and even managed to just about be on time.
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(Actually, I’m considering a return to a wider variety of omnivorism, but that’s not as cool a title.)

I gave up eating meat about ten years ago. Since then I’ve been an ovo-lacto-pesce-vegetarian. Now, for the first time, I’m seriously considering eating meat again.
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I started CrossFit proper, after having done three intro classes, on 01 Jun. I’ve managed to keep it going since, five days a week with Fridays and Sundays off. (I missed one Tuesday because of the first PyWebSF meetup.)

In that time, I’ve run a 5K, run a 10K, gained the ability to do overhand pullups, done some ridiculous number of burpees, and lifted serious weights for the first time in my life.
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So last week I started CrossFit proper, that is, not doing intro classes but actual CrossFit classes. In certain respects it didn’t make a difference, since the workouts are still scaled to what I can do. I did five sessions, taking Friday and Sunday as rest days.
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No, I’m not going to write about every WOD I do (hopefully I will soon be doing them almost every day), but I think that yesterday’s WOD was interesting because it was so different to Monday’s. This time, the WOD was:

• 378m run (should have been 400m)
• 50 squats

Repeat four times.
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I took my first Intro to CrossFit a while ago (2 Mar) and then failed to go to another for a while. Even though it really wasn’t a tough class.

Despite this lack of commitment, I quite like the philosophy of CrossFit (summarized in the “World-Class Fitness In 100 Words” section on this page), and the reading I’ve done around it suggests that it’s quite effective. So yesterday I pushed myself to go to another intro class.
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