I finished. I completed the 10000 kettlebell swing challenge. I will do it again in six months. I’m glad I did it, I am happier I completed it. Next time I will try it with a competition kettlebell which has a wider handle and should decrease my blisters on my ring fingers.

Now to find a weightlifting meet for this summer. The next goal is qualifying for Master’s Worlds in Weightlifting. I need six months of injury-free training to make a decent attempt. Competing in 2022 would be fantastic.

Yesterday, a client told me that her home exercise program took her ninety minutes to finish. She has four exercises from me and a number from her Chiropractor who referred her to me. Which begs the question, “How long should my home exercise program take?”

It depends. Improving health and fitness and rebuilding your entire body takes significant time and effort. Improving knee motion and preventing scar tissue requires effort, working through discomfort, but less time and more frequency. Avoiding certain positions and postures needs constant attention and correction. Undoing years of deconditioning takes daily work with some commitment of time and energy.

I try to focus the home programs I prescribe on giving the most bang for the buck. Trying to get patients to do any work at home much less compliant with a number of exercises in their home program has been a great challenge throughout my career.

I don’t always give patients home exercises. Sometimes I need them to do less. Sometimes I need clients to do much less. I need to decrease the inflammation and cutting their activity level for a few days helps accomplish that goal.

If you want more, ask for more. If you need to cut down the volume, ask which exercises can be cut. Ask yourself how much time are you willing to put into building a better body with more strength, motion, endurance, and less pain. The answer is probably more than 15 minutes. How much work are you willing to put into feeling better a year from now much less 10 years from now?

I worked around my perfectionism and doubts, and self-hate, and finished a video last night. Does anybody like their voice? Does anybody like their face?

After deciding that the less I am on the screen, the better the video would be, I was able to finish the editing and publish it.

There are a few tweaks left to make but I clicked the button and it went live.

Now it’s time to finish video number two.

Citibank recently had a massive mistake. They meant to restructure $900 million in debt and make an interest payment while doing so. Wrong buttons were pushed and the principal went out instead. Discovering their error the first call was to technical support. They asked for the money to be returned. $400 million came back and the recipients of the other $500 million said “Nope. We’re good.”

The judge ruled they were owed the money and could keep it. There is a multistep process for payments to go out. Citi is a big established company. They should know what they are doing.

For the last two months Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has been misprocessing claims. In-network services are being processed as out-of-network and checks for unadjudicated amounts are going to patients. What does that mean? It means the exorbitant rate that a provider charges before it is marked down is being paid to the patient. The rate nobody ever pays is being paid. And it is being paid to the patient. Imagine taking an ambulance ride and the $6000 bill is paid to you. Do you cash it? Do you spend it?

When an over-payment is made to a provider, the insurance company asks for it back with the threat of taking it back from future payments if it is not sent. How is Anthem going to get money back from 100,000 patients? I look forward to the lawyer representing thousands of these patients arguing that Anthem has been processing claims for years. They don’t make mistakes much less for two to three months straight. As the appeals letters we received say, these claims were processed correctly.

Straightening this out is going to be painful for everybody and will take months. It would have been nice if Anthem ever communicated that there was a problem to begin with. I guess they don’t make mistakes. I wonder if the judge at this trial will agree.

I spent two hours helping my daughter with her math last night. What used to be in our book, on notes, and worked out on paper is now done over 6 different tabs on the laptop. I do not understand what “show your work” means on a touchscreen laptop with calculations down on the laptop calculator. Helping your child with their math homework is challenging. This sucked.

I struggled to get my daughter to work out the problem on paper and break it down to pieces she understood. Laptops are great but so are chalkboards, whiteboards, and paper.

Tonight we will try again with formulas printed out and laid out in front of us, problems broken down on paper with pen and labels, and calculations done on a stand-alone Texas Instruments calculator.

Every winter my hands crack with dry air and frequent hand washing. This is how I address it.

Amlactin lotion will moisturize and eliminate the dry skin. Lotion up. Put latex or nitrile gloves on over the lotion. Wait thirty minutes or more before removing the gloves and washing your hands. Doing this every week or two will moisturize them, keep them soft, and prevent cracking.

I wash my hands at least a dozen times a day and use hand sanitizer at least another forty times a day. The gloves and Amlactin lotion help me survive each winter and have protected my hands throughout the pandemic.

I decided this year to post videos on YouTube on the TheraPlus account to improve search engine visibility and marketing. With a face for radio and voice for mime, what could go wrong?

Just getting a welcome to TheraPlus video filmed, edited, and uploaded took ten times as long as it should have. Ninety second videos of the drive to the clinic took me several years to get done but are finally online.

I have footage for four videos shot, went to look at the footage and really hate what I saw. One YouTuber I follow says to upload what you have and each one will get better. The first 100 videos will be awful. Accept it and get on with it.

I don’t think I can tolerate that amount of work and effort for 100 awful videos.

My mantra for the week is get just one done. Start with one. Just one. One. One. One. One.

I have a life goal of competing in the American Birkebeiner commonly referred to as The Birkie. Let me rephrase that as a goal to participate in The Birkie. The race is 43 kilometers cross county skiing in either classic or skate technique.

The Birkie rabbit hole led me to the Arrowhead 135. 135 miles across Northern Minnesota on foot, snow shoe, fat tire bike, or ski. In 2019, the race went on with temperatures dropping to -40. Forty below is where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. Forty below is forty blow everywhere across the world. The race was cancelled with Covid this year.

I read a ton of blog posts by participants who finished and did not finish the race over the years. The tales are brutal. Equipment failure, frostbite, skin breakdown, moisture control problems and freezing all contributed to the DNF. Some athletes have attempted the race multiple times.

The most brutal blogs wrote about the racer’s self-talk. Thirteen miles into the race and their self-talk became vicious. “You are the worst person here. Quit now. Why do you do something you are obviously so awful at?” I thought I had some negative self-talk but these athletes are in a different league.

Why do I want to try cross country skiing? I did it a number of times when I was younger and had some great times out there with old equipment. One of the most memorable rides was at Grinnell College. I was out with a friend north of campus. There were solar flares that night creating the most amazing and visible northern lights ever seen at that latitude. People enveloped in the lights on campus had no clue that it was happening. We were out there for an hour and a half and I want to have that feeling again.

I need to choose a 10K cross country ski race and see how I do. If it goes well I will sign up for the 14K Prince Haakon race or 26K Kortelopet at The Birkie.

Can I transition from strength sports to skiing for four plus hours? It will be fun to give it a try. I started roller skiing in 2019 and have a long, long way to improve. I will tune up the roller skis in March and work them into the routine.

Here’s hoping that the world is in a better place and I can achieve my Birkie dream the next two years.

I keep having this dream I call an exoneration dream. I read a book that talked about exoneration fantasies where the burden was lifted in someone’s life. In my dream I invested a ton of my retirement money in GameStop stock at 4 dollars a share and started selling it at $350. My retirement portfolio value increased by 90 fold. Now I am sitting on $50 million between my IRA and Roth IRA money.

This did not happen, of course. I could not see the future and my risk tolerance is too low to play with stocks or options like many did. Congrats for those that hit their lottery ticket dream with GameStop

I did go shopping on Zillow the next day. I am intrigued by the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. They have the water in the summer and skiing in the winter. Maybe I should vacation there before buying a house sight unseen on Zillow.

There are gorgeous multi-million dollar homes with relatively small property taxes. Even with $50 million I am cheap. I wanted the $4 million dollar house and having one with property taxes under $15,000 was icing on the cake. Lower property taxes meant plenty of money for a boat, gas or electricity, lift tickets, and skis. Can you imagine having an electric wake boat? You could surf, ski, and tube for 3 hours and then rapid charge over lunch and then do it again.

I realize that having that kind of money means you have a different burden and other challenges. But it makes for an interesting dream.