This a number I have heard from a far, far older source than this: martial arts training. In the FWC art of Kung Fu we are taught that 10,000 is a minimum number of repetitions to become consistent, another 10,000 to become practiced and a further 10,000 for it to begin to be an instinctive reaction. Of course you can usually do many more than one repetition of any movement in an hour (about 100 FWC patterns on average) so that amounts to a lot of repetition. Still, practice makes perfect.

Suddenly the bank holiday weekend creapt up on us and we had absolutely no plans for it at all. Instead, we just made it up as we went along. On Saturday morning we went to Decathlon at Canada Water and bought ourselves a new pair of inline skates each. From there we skated along the river to just before London Bridge where we took the skates off. We then spent a few hours in Borough Market. After that we took the skates to Hyde Park for some practice time and realised that cycle lanes in parks are a bad idea on blades.

First of all, a bit of a catch up:

Thursday night I went to a work ‘do’ which gave me a chance to catch up with some old colleagues and refresh some friendships. It wasn’t a particularly late one, but I’m still not used to a 9-5 never mind a 9-9!

Friday was a planning day for work where I learned that we will be doing development using a bastardised version of the agile “scrum and sprint” methodology. The difference is that all the design and most of the planning is already done.

Hmmm. That came out as a grainy shot and makes it look like a really minor wound.

We were training in Queen’s Park with Instructor Karim, doing fitness training. What this involved was tying a couple of car tires one behind the other on a rope behind you and then running up a slight incline for about 80 meters. It is reasonably tough and gets your lungs working like a bellows and your legs pumping like pistons.

Rope Burn.

Tonight is my last class as a kung fu instructor, as I step down from the post as of tomorrow. I am sad I have had to do this but I am convinced it is the correct decision for me to make in my circumstances and I have worked hard to make sure that all of my students will carry on training with other instructors, I sincerely hope they do.

It has been a mad week full of things I never expected (like having interviews for jobs after I had already signed a contract with my old company), and a lot of well-wishing emails from students, friends and family.