The bigger an achievement, the more it’s just the start of another stage in your life. Maybe swimming across the Hudson was my start of learning that you don’t have to fly to create life experiences, that we don’t have to accept what others consider impossible, and that we aren’t risking our lives to do things people have done for thousands of years. I’ve used the picture of my swimming[…] Keep reading →

Longtime readers know my inclination to speak to people with different views, not disconnect. Rob and Andrew host After Dark on the conservative America Out Loud network and we connect on communicating more, not less. They’ve been guests on my podcast and I’ve been a guest on their show. We agree on various issues and disagree on others and have become friends. Rob lives in New York City. He and[…] Keep reading →

Different people define middle age differently, but having just turned 51 I think I’m in it by all definitions. Physical My first sense of my body physically declining came in my early thirties, when my potential to compete in ultimate began to decline. Before then, I always felt motivation to practice since I knew the next year my potential would be higher. After then, no matter how much I practiced,[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I wrote Equal parts misery and glory: today’s ride from New York to Princeton. Today: puffy white clouds and blue skies. It started chilly and foggy but warmed up to make yesterday’s ride worth it, like when the home team is down and scores to come-from-behind and win in the final moments. Still lots of plastic packaging that nobody seemed to care about. Today we rode about 55 miles,[…] Keep reading →

Unrelated to sustainability, sidchas, leadership, education, famous no-packaging vegan stews, burpees, and my usual subjects, I’m embarking on a new experiment. For years I’ve woken up to mild back pain. I suspected my mattress was getting old. I bought it around ten years ago and it felt like some parts lost their support. Was I sleeping on a not-flat surface? Maybe it was just me getting old. I started looking[…] Keep reading →

An auspicious beginning to my second decade of my calisthenics sidcha: my heels reached the ground in one of my stretches, the downward dog. I did yoga regularly for a few years before starting burpees. Yoga means a lot of downward dogs. In all those years, my heels never touched the ground while doing them. At best I reached something like this: This morning my heels reached the ground. I[…] Keep reading →

I just finished my second set today of twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. Normally, I do my second set in the evening, but since I started the habit on December 22, 2011 and today is December 21, 2021, today completes my first decade. I already finished my first decade of publishing blog posts, nearing 5,000. Here are all of them. 20 percent of the time has been on a single load of[…] Keep reading →