Saturday, July 18, 2026

Building a Base

So I have a tendency to take on a bit more than I should. I set a goal to attempt all the Olympic disciplines, but I will also turn 37 this year and my wife and I are expecting our first child after thinking it wouldn't happen. I just finished a difficult three year period at work and am trying to get my career back on track. My job also requires travel, which I like, but it does complicate plans.

I hoped to spend this summer improving my swimming ability, since at present, my front crawl looks a bit like drowning. However, I could not find a swim instructor in time, so that plan fell through.

With all these complications, I think that my best option right now seems to be building a base for future activities. I detailed my current plan below, with the silly little names I give them as a way to get excited for them.

Up & At'em
5-7 times per week
This consists of 5x15 kettlebell swings superset with Tim Anderson's Original Strength, get-ups, goblet squats, and breakfalls, then finished with suitcase carries or waiter walks.
The point of this workout is to get the bare minimum completed for the day, and to work on general movement quality.

Explorer
3-5 times per week
This is the main endurance training that I do currently. On a normal week, this includes three ~10 mile bike rides done at an easy pace and one or two hard runs. The runs can be anything from tempo/threshold runs, fartleks, intervals, or hill sprints. It just kind of depends on the week.
I usually do this in the morning, the bike rides are part of my commute to work which let me bypass a lot of the traffic. I have a short ride to meet up with my wife after work, so I don't have to complete the longer ride again.

I also try to do an additional ruck, hike, or other outdoor activity on the weekends. I do this instead of a long run or ride since I don't have any specific goals at this time.

Daily Work
3-7 times per week
This ideally consists of three sets of pushups and pullups spread out throughout the day, along with some mobility work as needed 

Adventurer
2-4 times per week
This is the closest thing to a strength program that I have been doing recently. My schedule has been too chaotic and I just haven't really wanted to pursue any specific program.
It consists of two workouts each done 1-2 times per week.
A) warm-up with kettlebell halos
Monkey Bars, 15-30 Jumps, and Ladder climbs
B) warm-up with squats (typically overhead)
15-30 medicine ball throws and Heavy Loaded Carries

The "A" workout is currently done in lieu of going rock climbing. It is a little difficult to create a workout that has the same sense of play and excitement as climbing. This doesn't really achieve that, but it is probably the closest that I can get right now.

The "B" workout is being done as a bit of an experiment, to see how much strength can be gained just through heavy carries. Right now I am usually using a 150 lbs sandbag and 2x100 lbs farmer handles. I used to be able to move a 200 lbs sandbag but after a few bad years of training, I need to build back up to that. In addition, I have to climb a steep hill to get out of my driveway which lowers the weight I can use on most days 

I have been fiddling around for a few months to figure out a routine that I could reasonably do. We live fairly far out of town, so I have to ride with my wife a bit into town before jumping out onto my bike. As her work schedule is pretty inflexible, that controls when I leave in the morning and when I need to meet up with her after work. In January, I had to adjust to a radically different (but much more enjoyable) schedule while also preparing for a kid. It has been a bit of a  slow process.

I often have other often very random constraints on what I can do and when, so I have been pretty happy with a program this modular.

In addition, I like to leave time to go for walks and do stretches with my wife, as these are really helpful for her right now.

I think that this routine should cover most of my bases while leaving room for flexibility and time/energy to go on adventures during the weekend or sometimes after work.

Thursday, May 7, 2026

Starting Line

 I have always enjoyed the Olympics, and it seems like every time the games come around I find a new sport that fascinates me. In 2024 Lachlan Earnshaw posted a series of videos where he and his brother attempted to do every event in the Summer Olympics in a week. It is a fantastic video series and worth watching if you haven't already seen it.


But this got me thinking, what would it be like to attempt to do every Olympic sport and to really give each one its proper due? What would that require? Then earlier this year while watching the Winter Olympics, I really started to wonder if I could do this. And when I finally brought this idea up to my wife, she insisted that I should try to do it. 

This will entail quite a lot, below are all the Olympic Sports and their disciplines. I have also included any individual events that I am interested in trying.

  • Aquatics
    • Artistic Swimming
    • Diving
    • Marathon Swimming
    • Swimming
      • 1500 m Freestyle 
      • 200 m Individual Medley
      • 400 m Individual Medley
    • Water Polo
  • Archery
  • Athletics
      • Decathlon/Heptathlon/Pentathlon
      • 5k Run
      • 10k Run
      • Marathon
      • Steeplechase
      • Race Walk
  • Badminton
  • Baseball/Softball?
  • Basketball
    • 3x3
    • Standard
  • Boxing
  • Canoeing
      • Slalom 
      • Sprint
  • Cricket?
  • Cycling
    • BMX Freestyle
    • BMX Racing
      • Mountain Bike
      • Road
        • Road Race
        • Time Trial
      • Track
    • Equestrian
      • Dressage
      • Eventing
      • Jumping
    • Fencing
        • Epee
        • Foil
        • Sabre
    • Field Hockey
    • Flag Football?
    • Football (Soccer)
    • Golf
    • Gymnastics
      • Artistic
      • Rhythmic
      • Trampoline
    • Handball
    • Judo
    • Lacrosse?
    • Modern Pentathlon
    • Rowing
      • Coastal
      • Rowing
    • Sailing
    • Shooting
        • Air Pistol/Air Rifle/Pistol/Rifle
        • Skeet
        • Trap
    • Skateboarding
    • Sport Climbing
        • Bouldering
        • Speed
        • Top Rope
    • Squash?
    • Surfing
    • Table Tennis
    • Taekwondo
    • Tennis
    • Triathlon
    • Volleyball
      • Beach
      • Indoor
    • Weightlifting
    • Wrestling
      • Freestyle
      • Greco-Roman
    • Biathlon
    • Bobsled
      • Bobsled
      • Skeleton
    • Curling
    • Ice Hockey
    • Luge
    • Skating
      • Figure
      • Speed and Short-track Speed
    • Skiing
      • Alpine
      • Cross-Country
      • Freestyle
        • Moguls
        • Ski Cross
      • Ski Jump (maybe) also Nordic Combined
    • Snowboard
    • Ski Mountaineering
    That is around 80 sports to try, which feels fairly impossible, especially as the IOC constantly adds and removes sports and disciplines. So how do I plan on accomplishing this? I plan to try each sport in one of three ways: compete: enter into a competition with some degree of preparation with the intent to win, personal challenge: take part in the sport either in a competition or informally with the goal of seeing how well I can do, and experience: in one way or another just get a sense for what this sport entails. In addition, some of these sports, like Climbing and Surfing, are deeply tied to cultures that do not really align with competitions, so for a few of these I would like to try to take the activity back to its roots and experience it that way.

    Some individual sports have some unique considerations. For Swimming and Athletics, there are too many events, so, for now, I will focus on combined events: the individual medleys in swimming and hopefully the pentathlon/decathlon to do as many events in short time. For the summer sports with a question mark, these were added for the 2028 Games, so if I do not get to them by then and the sport is then dropped, I will likely not do those sports. 
    I am very interested in trying Track Cycling, but some of the events involve either teams or require a field of competitors, so I might have to figure something else out. The history of the sport is really interesting and I might look back into it to find a suitably intense replacement. For wrestling, I want to do an event that is focused on takedowns, but adult greco-roman/freestyle tournaments are rare where I live; I might try to do a beach wrestling competition or I just might end up writing about wrestling in high school.

    For the winter sports, I think that I will mostly just find ways to experience them; however, I am interested in doing at least one cross-country skiing race and maybe a ski mountaineering race. I have been downhill skiing on and off since I was 10, so I will likely just use this as an excuse to take lessons and try to get better at downhill and moguls. That is not to say should an opportunity to compete arise that I would not take it.

    In addition to all of this, I want to try to take classes or enter competitions for the artistic disciplines that were once contested at the Olympics. The "pentathlon of the muses" are:
    • Architecture
    • Literature
    • Music
    • Painting
    • Sculpture
    I am not artistically inclined, so these may be the most difficult tasks for me. In addition, I will definitely be taking on outside challenges and finding other distractions which I might write about as well.

    Building a Base

    So I have a tendency to take on a bit more than I should. I set a goal to attempt all the Olympic disciplines, but I will also turn 37 this ...