It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

a blog by hewbrocca

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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

Rowing

I Bruised My Piriformis

3 January, 2020

No seriously. My Piriformis. Back in September I fell/slid down the companionway of our boat in France and landed on the left side of my butt. I got a grapefruit-sized bruise on there, and it turns out it included this muscle that is way down underneath the rest of your butt muscles called the Piriformis. I am capitalizing it because why not.

It turns out everyone with hips has two of these things and their job is to open your hips, that is to say pull the outside of your femur back toward your spine. I guess it’s a fairly important muscle although I had no idea I even had one — two, in fact — until I bruised it.

Anyway the tricky thing about bruising your Piriformis is that it runs right over your sciatic nerve, which is really a big bundle of nerves that pretty much operates your leg. When the damn thing gets bruised, it can get scar tissue on it, and this (I discovered) can produce an exquisite little inconvenience called Sciatica. Sciatica is another word for “My leg hurts so bad if I don’t sit down right now I’m gonna fall over, and also all my leg muscles are atrophying.” If you’ve never had it it’s hard to explain how debilitating it can be. Also having it and complaining about it of course makes you feel like an Old Man. It’s just excellent all around.

There’s not a hell of a lot more to this story other than that my Piriformis did eventually heal, with some help from an acupuncturist here in Boston who was truly excellent, and that took care of the sciatica. I still have some leg weakness three months later that I’m trying to train my way out of. I find this particularly disturbing because I’ve always had reasonably strong legs and it’s mildly horrifying to find out one of them can just sort of wither away over the course of a few weeks, because of something as trivial sounding as a bruised Piriformis.

Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.

A decent translation is here…

Filed Under: Music, Rowing, Yoga

Good Customer Service

16 January, 2019

I just had a very nice experience with Concept2, the company that makes the rowing machine I spend a lot of time sitting on. The electronic monitor on my machine has been throwing errors for a while, which doesn’t really hurt much but it’s annoying in the middle of a row. So I finally got around to emailing them about it. Turns out they use Zendesk to manage their support inquiries, which I have seen before only because Kim just started using it at Harp Column.

Anyway, it turns out that the monitor on my rowing machine, which is about 5 years old, was from a batch they have had consistent problems with and they are sending me a replacement for free. Good customer service, that. The only way to do better would have been not have the problem in the first place.

Consider, though, the amount of effort it took to make that customer service good:

  • They had to be tracking complaints about this particular performance monitor
  • They had to have a tracking system in place
  • They had to have a team of people trained to use the tracking system
  • They had to have a way to replace defective bits for customers — spare parts, etc.
  • They had to build into the product a way for customers to check what version it was to tell the support team
  • Finally, they had to have the actual will to be good at customer service

I used to think that just having a policy of caring about customers and being nice to them was sufficient. Turns out it requires much more effort than that.

Filed Under: Rowing, Work

Losing Weight Is Hard

8 January, 2019

Film at 11, right? Like, oh great, another blog about how it’s hard to lose weight. Next up, whingeing about people who whinge about things.

Seriously though, this business of trying to look less pudgy while still holding down a productive job and living one’s life is not at all trivial. Not drinking helps, of course, but then where does that leave you — sitting at home wishing you were having a glass of wine?

I think honestly the toughest thing about it is the time scale. Eating is immediate — it is something I do, right now, that relieves hunger. It is absolutely essential, and a pleasure, and my whole life is more or less organized around it. (Well, and also coffee, but that is a different story.) The steps required to be in decent physical shape and not too heavy, on the other hand, are most certainly not immediate. I’m going to go sit on a rowing machine in a few minutes and work myself into a lather for an hour or so, and that is not going to have any immediate effect on me other than making me sweaty. I’ll only notice the effect a couple of weeks from now when it’s easier to walk up steps.

To make matters worse, the rowing — beneficial as it is to my physical condition and my attitude — does not help one bit with the weight, not on a timescale I care about anyway (longer than three months). Not one iota. Nor, to be honest, does switching out carbs for protein or eating more fat or less fat or going vegan or any of the other things one tries. No, the fat just stays there until you make a “lifestyle change” that changes the condition it depends on.

Which, sadly, means I’m going to have to keep on with the not drinking. Clearly, if there is any kind of deity, its principal business is to mock me by first putting wine on the earth and then making it bad for me to drink it…

Filed Under: Coffee, Rowing

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Meet Hugh

I'm the Research Director for Red Hat, married to harpist and writer Kimberly Rowe, living in Boston. We lived in Brno, Czechia until pretty recently. Read More…

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