The Christmas holidays

Every year for the Christmas holidays (usually from a few days before Christmas to the New Year), I take off from work but we don’t plan any trips out. I plan to do nothing other than sleeping, walking, baking, reading, and watching some TV. (I also add some mundane cleaning up the home, sorting and arranging my clothes, and the annual give-away of my clothes I haven’t worn for a few years to this ‘nothing’ list).

Sleeping

There is usually no problem with this during the holidays, the problem is trying to get back to the ‘normal’ hours once the holidays are over 🙂

Walking

We started the holidays with a Christmas eve walk at the Devil’s Punchbowl where T&D had gala fun running around with sticks.

Walk down to Loosely park, and two walks at Puttenham Common were beautiful with numerous photos for T and me (thanks to A) 🙂

Baking

This was the most successful task of the holidays with some tiramisu, brownies, oreo mug cake, chocolate mug cake, marble cake, and chocolate espresso cake all within the last 8 days! Thanks to A who did most of the cutting (chocolates and butter) and cleaning, we could do a lot more this time.

The marble cake which is my usual came out brilliantly this time, while the chocolate espresso cake was a new addition to my repertoire.

Reading

2016 was a terrible year for my book reading as I had finished only 5 books for the whole year until Christmas! In the last week, I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Talking as Fast as I can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and everything in between. I enjoyed all three of them and enjoyed snuggling up with my books even more.

Tomorrow is my last day off. I plan to get back to the exercise routine with a spin class and also relax with a bath before the hustle and bustle of the work week begins on Tuesday.

​A comfort embrace,

Four floors high. Trembling fingers,

Three spaces apart.

The Grand Meetup thoughts

A heavy heart was all I had, sitting in the lobby for a couple of hours as I said Bye to a bunch of people I had met for the first time a week ago. I didn’t quite understand why I was feeling so sad when I don’t really know most of these people well enough to miss them. After all, they have been colleagues and friends for one week to at most 4 months.

It was the week of the Grand Meetup, the once a year gathering of 500 (and growing) a11ns – the only time of the year when all of us are in one place, while we work remote across the world for the rest of the year.

I work across products with many teams and so for the past week I had made an effort to introduce myself to as many people as possible. I usually find it quite difficult to meet new people – I am rather talkative once you get to know me socially, but I am not the one who will usually start a conversation – so this was expected to be and was an intensive week for me. I had increased my Meetamattician score (the people I have physically met and had a conversation with) from 11% to 41% during the past week.

There were a lot of stimulating conversations, both in the townhalls and also in smaller groups. I attended a class on A/B testing, growth, and sign up flows and had very interesting discussions with the small group of diverse people in the class which I found very useful. I appreciated spending time with the teams I work with, having us all around a table and discussing strategy, design, product, pricing, customers, and user experience.

It took me almost 6 days to get used to the timezone and have a straight sleep through the night. Most days I was very tired by late evening and I found it difficult to focus or stay awake through the town halls. Hopefully I can catch up on a lot of those when the recordings are available.

Whistler is a beautiful place, with a lot of things to do around. I went against advice and common sense, to sign up for too many things, and paid the price. But the few activities that I did do (early morning 5k run around the golf course, swing dancing workshop, and the Via Ferrata) were so much worth it. The Via Ferrata was a particular highlight as it may have been the scariest thing I have done in the last few years. I underestimated the effort and the duration of this one. I wanted to give up, screamed and almost cried, had to push myself and conquer my fears, felt cold and lonely, but I was jubilant when I finished it. A big kudos to Maya, my guide for being patient with me and getting me to the top!

I would have liked to do the walk to the lakes, some of the beautiful hikes around, ride the gondola between the mountains, ride downhill on the bike, and ziplining… but then we are going back to Whistler at least a couple more years, and I will definitely get a chance to do some of those.

During the final day or two, it got a lot more difficult to have conversations with new folks. And I am guilty of skipping the last day’s lunch because I didn’t have the energy to meet any new people. I was feeling rather unsocial and gloomy and needed to preserve my sanity and recharge for the final party that night.

There was a lot happening with a packed schedule, meeting 500 amazing a11ns in a week brimming with energy, having passionate conversations on users and products, having fun, but I would have also liked a few more silent moments to have 1-1 conversations and get to know people as more than just colleagues. It is going to take time, but I hope to be around in the Automattic family for a long time and make lasting friendships.

Cravings

​When I only want what I do not have.

When I want what I shouldn’t have.

A play for the head or heart?

Memories

​When I close my eyes and silhouettes remain. Memories. 

Sometimes when you are surrounded by the most number of people, is also when you feel the loneliest.

An A11n

For the past 4 months, I have been working for Automattic (the people behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, Akismet, VaultPress, Simplenote, WooCommerce and more). We are a pack of c.500 people who live and work from c.50 countries. We don’t have offices – our homes, coffee shops, libraries, and beaches with wifi serve as our offices across the globe. It has been a welcome change of culture and flexibility compared to any of my previous jobs, and I am left wondering why more companies don’t treat employees as adults as we do.

Mind you, it isn’t easy, it isn’t for everyone, and it is a difficult line to draw between when work ends and home begins. But even within 4 months, I have begun to appreciate this environment, and I am willing to trade one for the other. I am learning to get better at managing my work day, at improving my productivity to give my best at every working moment, at communicating by writing, getting to know information by reading, and collaborating remotely with my colleagues across timezones.

Once a year, we get all Automatticians (yes, all 500 of us and growing) to come together for a week to work together on projects, take classes, do fun activities, and get to know each other better. I am on my flight to Canada for this year’s Grand Meet-up at Whistler. I have been excited for far too long about this and I can’t wait to meet all the amazing a11ns.

Follow our adventures for the next week on twitter (#a8cgm and @AutomatticGM) and instagram (#a8cgm).

Join us next year? We are hiring.

An inherent love for sports – part 3

Continued from here and here

Sports and Remedial Massage Therapist – this sounds the most practical of all the options I have explored. Given the number of running injuries we all get and the importance of recovery for our continuous pounding of the pavement, roads, trails and hills, a sports massage is one thing A and I wish we could afford more often. And one that every good runner does invest in at least once a month. This combines human science, running and rehab and looks like something I can practically do part-time. I can do this course over Saturday sessions over 5 months at St.Mary’s (a tad expensive at £1600). The fact that this can lead to practical experience to advance into physio / sports therapy makes it all the more attractive.

Sports therapist / Sports Rehab specialist – this is the closest stream leading to being a professional sports doctor unless I actually pursue an MBBS degree – it would take ages and a lot of luck before I could get to working for a big level professional club, and is not the reason I want to do this. But the line of work – sports injury prevention, treatment and rehab is exactly what would make me happy. I could at some point follow this up with a post-grad course in Sports & Exercise medicine.

It bugs me immensely when anyone vaguely suggests that exercise and outdoors is so injury prone that they would rather suffer middle and old age ailments. Someone said at lunch that people spend as much on treating running injuries as much as they spend on smoking! Even if this was remotely true, I would rather run, injure myself (oh, know how to prevent, treat and recover) than spend on that dreaded cancer causing nicotine tubes – I want to help as many people as possible believe in this.

Physiotherapist – Even though the sports therapist is the ideal path I would like to advance into, this page explains very well what I have read about sports-therapist vs. physiotherapist.

In short, Physiotherapy is a much better recognised degree compared to Sports-therapy. Almost all the Sports Physios I look up have done a Physiotherapy degree. And there are career opportunities with NHS as Physios which don’t seem so wide spread for Sports-therapists.

But the biggest difference I can see is that a Physio degree can be funded by the NHS once I have my Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK (which I am eligible for from Feb 2016) – saving me £27,000 in tuition fee for the 3 year program! Given I really would like to be a Sports-therapist more than a Physio, I am hoping someone proves me wrong and shows me that the Sports-therapy / Rehab degrees also have this funding. For an added challenge, the funding obviously makes it very competitive to get into the Physiotherapy course – with only 35 accredited providers for all of UK.

An inherent love for sports – part 2

Continued from here

A dump of my confused thoughts on the various options:

Personal Trainer – this seems to be one of the most acquired qualifications in the fitness industry offered by a bunch of training providers (Premier Training, YMCA, Discovery, FutureFit, The Training Room etc.). It is expensive (averages around £3000) and is available to learn mostly online with a handful of practical days OR part time weekend course supplemented with online learning OR as a full time 12 week course. I like what personal trainers do, and someone like me would be motivated to work with one and would see good results. But the course content and assessment puts me off. It looks very theoretical, and for the price, all one seems to be acquiring is a fast paced certification. I have seen some good personal trainers and I wonder if the S&C coach is a better way to get there. But then, the PT certification also seems to be a stepping stone for all the options I have looked into (a very expensive one at that – just putting down these thoughts makes me wonder maybe if it is just a certification, does it really matter which training provider I go with… should I just take one of those online options which are cheaper.. I really don’t want to spend money on this for nothing) – especially for someone like me, with no relevant academic or practical qualification or background in the sports / fitness field and given I did my A level equivalents 15+ years ago in another country, this seems like a way to get some experience / qualification to tick that pre-requisite for most competitive in-depth courses and degrees.

S&C coach – my introduction to strength training was from Stephanie Twell, who was doing her M.Sc in Strength & Conditioning from St.Mary’s university. Obviously her running pedigree gives her significant knowledge and experience and she had a pretty bad injury that affected her career for a couple of years – just listening to her made me realise how much she knew about her body. The S&C coach is what I am looking for with a personal trainer course – the issue is they wouldn’t admit me for this course without a background / experience in this field 😦 Also given this is a going to take at least 2-3 years of study at the minimum, I would need to be sure this is all I want to do – realistically, I want S&C to supplement my interests in coaching, sports-therapy and rehab and not be the only thing I do.

Running coach – this excites me. And scares me. Every running coach or coach in training I know has run at least a few marathons… and I am at 18.75 miles as my longest run. Given how happy I am when I see one of my friends complete a workout, I want to get involved in beginner’s run coaching – to motivate women to get out and do their first 5k & 10k and hopefully like me, they would fall in love with running and get new found confidence and keep going 🙂 Reading Dan’s account of the Leadership in Running Fitness course by UK Athletics, it looks like I would enjoy this (I also know Laura, Sarah and Justin who have done this and they all coach runners; Laura and Dan have also completed their Coach in Running Fitness qualification while Sarah and Justin are on their way :)) – given this is a 1-day course at £160, it isn’t too bad an investment to try this out.

(continued here)

An inherent love for sports – part 1

I became an investment banker by chance. I did not actively look out or prepare for these roles. I vividly remember a chat with one of my batch-mates – I wanted to apply for a research analyst role and he was trying to convince me that the IB role would have a lot more perks and money! True to his word, the only IB role I was interviewed for landed me a lucrative job that paid for a lot of travels and luxuries. Along the way, IB was also the reason I was able to move to the UK with more than a generous relocation support from the IB employer. I enjoyed the work in the first year post-MBA and then it has been downhill – with increased money though. I quit this 4 years ago and moved to the corporate world. The pay was lesser, but the increased and flexible time on the hands made up for it. The work was again good for a couple of years, but for more reasons than one, I have lost interest in my most recent role. There isn’t a wide scope of what else I can do and there doesn’t seem to be any interesting offers available for what I can do.

The science of the human body interests me. I have always liked sports. When I was in high school, I wanted to become the team doctor for the Indian cricket team! In the last 2 years, running has changed my life – and my attitude to many things in life. I got injured on the way and was intrigued by the Physio (& internet) provided information on prevention and recovery techniques. I had never done weight training before Dec 2014 and it fascinated me what just a few weeks of strength training could do to my running. When I got bored of the gym later in the year, I read up on the various ways to build strength outside of the gym – resistance, suspension, kettle bell, circuits and more. I get inspired by other runners on Twitter and Strava. And I feel immense happiness when someone I encourage goes out for a run (my dad, Ranj, Aruna, Preeti, Roshi and even Ankita far away in Bombay!).

Given my dead-ended feeling with my current career, I want to explore doing something with sports. Given my interests, the paths I have researched include:

• Personal Trainer
• Strength & Conditioning coach
• Running coach
• Sports and Remedial Massage Therapist
• Physiotherapist
• Sports therapist

The one basic topic that needs study across all of these is Anatomy and Physiology of the human body. I paid Coursera for the first time and am currently learning Introductory Human Physiology by Duke University. It hasn’t been easy (a lot of concepts to learn and I am so out of touch) but I am currently in my 6^th week of the 10 week course. I am happy I am trying this before going full-fledged and spending on something bigger – the course has set the reality straight on my concentration / focus levels and my out-of-touch state with anything to do with reading and learning. The flexible deadlines have helped (I have reset deadlines twice already!) and I hope to finish the course before the end of the year. The instructors and the content of the course have been very good and I would highly recommend the course for anyone interested in the topic. It gives a sound background in a very wide subject. I intend to read the book – Anatomy for Runners – to get a background into the other human science (Christmas reading?).

(continued here and then here)