It’s been an exciting time to be running Marlay recently. First, Paul Sinton-Hewitt (parkrun’s founder) made a guest appearance a few weeks ago. A got a five-high and a handshake. Then last weekend, they celebrated their 500th event. I wasn’t in photo and there wasn’t cake but that’s understandable given they would have had 688 runners plus volunteers to feed.
Last weekend, Trinity hosted the Neurodiversity Intervarsity Conference conference.
UCD are doing some great work with body doubling, which is where you pair up with someone to help you focus. There is some great work going on with inclusive design at TCD, as well. And a talk neurodivergent bodies looking at the way neurodivergent individuals interact with their environment. Adam Harris gave the keynote speech and it is always a pleasure to hear him talk.
Wouldn’t say it was the best year. The Eagles took care of The Chiefs easily so no historic three-in-a-row after all. Why couldn’t thir offensive line have collapsed last year when they were playing the 49ers?
Also, I really scaled down the amount of food I made and still ate too much.
It’s been five years since I completed my yoga teacher training and it has been a brilliant journey. While I have enjoyed teaching a lot of the asana classes we would be familiar with in the UK, a lot of my teaching has focused on pratyhata, dharana and dyhana and allowed me to bring in a lot of my mindfulness work and that has been fantastic.
In many cases, such as my Yoga for Resilience workshops, we’ve combined multiple aspects of yoga to produce a well-rounded course and I feel that this has been when I’ve done my most impactful teaching.
I’m excited to announce I now have sufficient teaching hours to reach the E-RYT designation, which stands for Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher.
Alongside this, Holbeck College is now a Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Provider. Later this year, we will be rolling out some Yoga Alliance certified CPD courses.
Another Virtual Race Series has come and gone. Fourth this year. Just of the podium. Well done to JP, Paul and Naomi. And also a big thank you for JP to organising.
The other thing that has kept my blog relatively quiet over January is that Elina had surgery. It was a success but recovery hasn’t been as smooth as we hoped so it has been a busy time caring for both Elina and Venla and still attend to work, studying and my own wellbeing.
I’m delighted to have her back home with us. She is the centre of my world and I love her so much.
Her health insurance covered her to recover on a private ward. Check out how nice it is:
This is a good place to recover. It’s quiet enough that you can get some rest. Food comes with vegetables. And staff don’t tell you off if you have a panic attack. Everyone deserves this level of care.
This month, I’ve been doing a daily video on Chris Is Proud Of You. Each video is a short/reel/tiktok that reminds you that you’re great and should be proud of yourself.
It’s been fun but challenging. I originally thought it would be relatively easily to short a portrait video each day. I could shoot it on my phone and upload it directly from there. But the time it took to write something meaningful to day, get the sound right, get the lighting right, do even minor edits, encode and upload turned out to be a lot of time.
The videos were well received and I was pleased to provide some additional content for my students. But nothing went viral. I clocked up around 17,000 views on TikTok and 3,000 on Instagram, which is tiny numbers in the grand scheme of things. YouTube numbers aren’t in yet as the videos are still being published there. All in all, it has been a fun month but also a relief to take a breather.
I’ve been using Adobe Premiere Rush this month as a video editing app for my phone. I tried a few different ones out and decided to go with this one as I have an Adobe Creative Suite subscription, so I got access to any premium features it has without additional costs. And it does what it needs to do.
It’s easy enough to use. You start by importing video files and then you can slice them up and apply colour effects. It also has graphics and audio tools but I haven’t really used those. Mostly I’ve just been cutting the start and end off and then altering the shadows and highlights.
Once you’re happy with it you can encode the video and then you get options to upload to a variety of different platforms such as Instagram and TikTok and it opens these apps for you with th video ready to go. It is video editing so you need plenty of storage space and some patience while the videos are encoding if you are shooting in 4K.
Since November I’ve been losing weight, mostly successfully, and getting back into longer runs. It has given me a chance to explore a bit further afield and while I still end up often doing laps of the park, I am at least lapping a different park now. So far, I’ve been feeling good, which has surprised me a little, so that has been lovely.
One of the main reasons there is nothing on my blog this month is that I have my head burried in writing a research paper. Even though I’m not at the writing stage yet. The paper is on mental health in ultra-endurance athletes and I’m currently on the data analysis stage. Watch this space. But not too closely because it’s a slow process.