June 6 marked the one year anniversary of when I first began working out three times a week, every week. Quite an achievement, given that my relationship with physical fitness of any kind has always been a difficult one, having always been slight with little or no effort. There is a thought in our circles that you are either in business or you’re fit — said, of course, in jest — but the sub-text is that keeping fit takes an enormous amount of time and energy, and if you are running a successful business, you most likely do not have the time and energy that it takes to sculpt a perfect body. And perhaps there may be some truth to that.

I adore working (a little too much at times, perhaps), and when we began running TIG full-time, I happily threw myself into the work, simply because I loved it so, and love it still. However, all the long hours and late nights at the office lead to a somewhat sedentary lifestyle, which in turn lead to weight gain—a little at a time, nearly imperceptible, until one day, I no longer felt like myself . . .

With the start of many long walks and climbs up Arthur’s Seat and bicycle rides along the coast in a new city, the weight began falling off, and I began thinking that perhaps it was time to find a compromise between working & working out, and that the two need not be mutually exclusive, but rather, that the working out could actually help with the work (energy, creativity, etc.). Since then, I have been training at the gym (with the help of someone who knows what he is doing) three times a week for a little over a year now, and have never looked back.

Our workouts involve strength training (working with weights), and phrases like progressive overload (gradually increasing the stress placed upon the body during training to continuously increase the demands on the muscoloskeletal system in order to gain strength and endurance), Bulgarian Squats with weights, and Dead Lifts, (among other rather ambitious things), and a lot of hard work.

I still work too much, but I also take as much time off as I like, whenever I like (we recently took a four-day trip to Ibiza, left) and more importantly, I now make time for fitness and I look and feel like myself again, only stronger, which may be the best achievement of all.