Month: February 2019

One of the fun things about rebuilding your life from scratch in your 30s is realizing how much easier self-improvement would have been if you’d started in your 20s.

An example: I’m officially at the halfway point of my eight week Orange Theory Fitness (OTF) “transformation challenge” and I gotta say, I’m feeling pretty pleased with how it’s going.

This past Wednesday’s workout included a 12 minute “run for distance” – i.e. a test to see how far you can run, without dying, in 12 minutes.

Now. Please remember that, as of December of last year (that is, less than three months ago), I had never in my life set foot on a treadmill. Moreover, I literally didn’t understand the mechanics of running for more than a few seconds at a time. I spent much of the treadmill time in that first OTF class trying not falling flat on my face.

Fast forward to this week and imagine my sense of achievement when I crossed the one mile mark of my run and the timer showed just a hair under eight minutes. An eight minute mile isn’t going to win me any road races – my cursory Googling suggests that eight minutes is an OK average per-mile time for a reasonably fit casual runner – but for me it represents gigantic progress.…

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Hi everyone.

Sniff.

I have a cold.

Sniff.

It’s pretty annoying.

Sniff. Sniff.

But it could be worse.

I used to feel sick every day. Lethargic, achy, usually with a headache. Sometimes I’d have heart palpitations. Or maybe my teeth would hurt, or I’d feel nauseous.

Those were the good days.

On the bad days, I literally couldn’t get out of bed before noon. Or 4pm. I missed meetings, and appointments, and friends’ birthdays, and flights. Those were the days when the symptoms until late at night, or even into the next day. Times when none of the purported hangover cures worked – not even hair of the dog. Drinking on a hangover just made me feel even worse, and made the next day’s hangover-hangover twice as bad.

I’m not sure if it’s because I drank more than most people, or if there’s some other physiological explanation, but my hangovers always seemed far worse than everyone else’s. Even on days when I wasn’t officially hungover, my baseline feeling was blurgh. Or perhaps urrrrrkkkkkkk.

I was not a well man.

Then one morning, a few weeks after getting sober, I woke up feeling great. Better than great. Spectacular. It was as if someone had crept in during the night and injected me with whatever that spider injected into Peter Parker.…

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First off, thank you to Katie for the hat.

Now, let’s talk about my impeccable sense of style…

…

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we’ve no money for butter.

— Jenny Joseph

In my early 20s, I discovered a great hack for getting away with being an alcoholic in London: Don’t dress like a drunk.

Back in those days, if you saw me staggering out of a nightclub or into a pub, chances are I’d be wearing a dress shirt with french cuffs, probably with a jacket. Possibly a cashmere sweater. But never, ever a t-shirt.

Understand, this had absolutely nothing to do with vanity, or style (I had plenty of the former but none of the latter) but rather it was a question of practicality. As readers of The Upgrade will know, back in those days I was something of a master of “blagging”: That is, talking my way into fancy parties or night clubs or conferences in order to score free booze and other entertainment. I also liked to hang out in members clubs, and other places where rich and important people could be found.…

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