I used to do this 8 years ago in Arabic. A digest of what I did in the last week that takes 2 min to read.

I thought of being this back now in English. Helps me keep a diary of my weeks.

Something I keep doing

Exercise for 5 days a week. Trying to keep my walking AVG > 9000 steps a week. Setup is:

1. 1 session of Zone 2. I’m aiming to target 180 minutes of Zone 2 with 2 sessions a week atleast from now on. Via Peter Attia.
2. 1 session of VO2 Max. 30 minutes. 8 intervals of 4 by 4. Via Peter Attia.
3. 4 Strength workouts.
4. Long walks on Saturday and Sunday. >15,000 steps each.
5. Now the summer is coming I can ramp up more on the daily walks. Weather is nice. Better to have the breaks outside.
6. If I’m to combine Strength and Zone 2 workouts in the same day, I have to do Strength first. Via Peter Attia.

Something I keep using

My strength working app, “Workout”. It’s good, not the best.

I hate the UX of this screen though. Can you figure out why?

Best of what I listened to

Tim Ferris interview with Nick Kokoans, Link. It’s during Covid early days. I like Nick. His insights and antifragility showed as a restaurant business owner and experience-maker. Talks about his trail of thoughts managing one of the most famous restaurant, Alinea, with $300+ a table to selling $35 a meal. A really interesting conversation.

What I’m reading?

A book on Arabic literature and history. الجامع في تاريخ الأدب العربي ل حنا فاخوري. My father-in-law recommended this. It’s good. I like reading books in Arabic again.

Earlier this year I was reading Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species for Charles Darwin. He was particularly sad in his biography that he didn’t spend more time on poetry, literature and the arts.

“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

― Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

I’m trying to get back more into this. And it’s an absolute joy to read something like this for Imru’ al-Qays امرؤ القيس:

Something I failed at

Fixing my knee to run again. Discovered this guy, the KneesOverToes guy by Huberman‘s interview with Tim Ferriss. And I’ve started adding knee exercises to my weekly setup.

Best buy of the week

I love these VBall 0.5 Pilot pens since I was in high school. I got back at using them 5 years ago. I still do. I love fine tips and they are really good.

Something I’m learning

Politics and Philosophy. An easy intros for these are DK’s guides like this one. Am also watching Yale’s course on the Moral Foundations of Politics. It’s good. More on this next week.