MOJO

Since Persia fell at Marathon,

The yellow years have gathered fast:

Long centuries have come and gone.

And yet (they say) the place will don

A phantom fury of the past,

Since Persia fell at Marathon;

And as of old, when Helicon

Trembled and swayed with rapture vast

(Long centuries have come and gone),

This ancient plain, when night comes on,

Shakes to a ghostly battle-blast,

Since Persia fell at Marathon.

I've only run one marathon in my life and it sucked the whole goddamn time. I didn't run the marathon because I wanted to, I ran the marathon because as a physiotherapist there are some performative criteria that I am expected to fulfil. I need to know about running, swimming, cycling, weightlifting, and fitness. I am expected to have an opinion on the use of hotpacks, coldpacks, dry needles, ultrasound, infrasound, and sound management. I am expected to look like I take care of myself, to speak colloquially but clinically, with jargon and jokes, and to know who's playing at the Gabba or the Whacka or whatever they call it. I am expected to know a thing or two about sporting endeavours, different codes, and to have done some sport and reached some physical apices myself. This is why I ran the marathon - because it's part of the job description. That I needed to run the marathon or the marathon itself wasn't what was a problem - running is a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, repetitively, until you reach your destination. The problem was everything around the marathon.

A marathon is a sustained road or trail run completed over forty-two kilometres. This is supposedly the distance run by a Greek soldier who, at the Battle of Marathon, watched an enemy movement toward the soldier's home city. The soldier ran the distance between the battlefield and his city, some forty-two kilometres, without stopping, to warn the city of the manoeuvre. Upon reaching his destination, he dropped dead. Skill issue I guess. In memory of this feat, thousands of people recreate this event by running distances annually, some even longer than forty-two kilometres. It's not a small distance. It's kind of insane. You've got to be fit and functional to maintain pace over that length. You've got to build up to that level of performance. Training for a marathon takes time - months, maybe even longer than a year for people who aren't experienced with running. Training for a marathon takes resources - money for shoes if you don't have them, energy to research food plans, time to look at the route, even consider the weather if you're that game. Training for a marathon, doing regular recreational sport, even just being able to make healthy food choices takes effort, to say nothing of the opportunity. There aren't any shortcuts to it. You've got to go the distance.

Ozempic

Ozempic, Mounjaro, Victoza and other medications are GLP-1/GIP agonists used in the management of diabetes and for managing weight over the long term. These medications are indicated for prescription alongside a reduced calorie diet, regular physical exercise, as well as other interventions that might be in place for the management of diabetes. Luckily, that's all I need to know about those things because I'm a physiotherapist and not a pharmacologist, drug process engineer, or (thank God) an Actual Doctor. Semaglutides are a type of drug. They are chemicals which, in specific dosages, produce a generalisable range of responses in the body of the person into whom they are introduced. However, being chemicals, any drug can also be offered on an off-brand basis. Saxenda, Zepbound, and Wegovy are available off-label and informally, and people can use them for their reasonable response, being weightloss. I know that this is happening for a fact because I regularly see the discharge cartridges discarded in front of the staircase to the second level of my apartment block. I live at the back of the block. Either someone in my block is using this drug or someone with an absolute cannon of an arm is hucking it in front of my door. Semaglutides are available outside of Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and so people will pay a higher cost for them. They absolutely do. At time of writing in the Year of Our Lord 2025, the consumption of semaglutide medication by the Australian public has spiked more than tenfold in five years according to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, who are in fact, Actual Doctors. These medications used for diabetes control are extremely popular weightloss drugs because of their profound, reliable, and demonstrable effect, the ease of access, and the simplicity of using a drug.

As an offside, I'll say that to me, it's extremely funny that people made such a fuss about the COVID vaccine but are now more than happy to spike the demand for diabetes medication because it also makes them skinny (For a time period - In March 2023, a study found, that people using semaglutide to lose weight regained two-thirds of their original weight loss one year after discontinuing use of the drug.)

In 2023, the understood side-effects of semaglutide medication were nausea, vomiting, headaches, and dizziness. Currently, we know that GLP-1 medications affect mental health, resulting in increased depression, anxiety, suicidality, and affecting the effectiveness of birth control. The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has released a safety alert informing that the drug should not be used during pregnancy. It is also now more widely understood that the effects of GLP-1 drugs also include muscle loss, decreased immunity, and increased risk of infections. If nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, how do you think it feels to be frail and diseased? What's the point of having a beach body if your ass falls off? Being realistic, there are patients for whom standard regimens of exercise are not sustainable - some people are too unwell, too disadvantaged, or unable to access structured, sustained, and sequential systems of exercise, diet, and wellness in spite of our best public health efforts, but the effect of the health outcomes caused by the mass short-cutting of the other benefits of engaging with these systems - increased health literacy, proactivity regarding organisation of physical activity, structured routine, even just a little extra dopamine, have yet to crystallise within the ever-shifting topography of our epidemiology. The fact that we have this shortcut available means that we can just snipe the end result without developing the necessary grit that comes with trying, because the trying is what makes the difference and what builds sustainability. Losing weight without some kind of physical activity modification is like balling without knowledge, like writing clinical notes by using an AI (and I'll get to that in a minute) or working on a Ferrari without having an espresso machine in the building. What happens when you get results without doing the work you need to get those results? The only way those things will come clear is with time, observation, and with road underneath our feet.

Triathlon

I've only run one triathlon in my whole life and it was a miserable experience from start to finish. Sure, I might not be running as far as a marathon, but the concession given by that shorter distance is more than invalidated thanks to the introduction of two of my other nemeses, cycling and swimming. Who decided to give humans wheels? Who decided to make it a competitive endeavour? Why am I swimming when I have all the hydrodynamic properties of a lead brick wrapped in asbestos fur? I don't have the physiology to run long distances let alone run, cycle, and swim. I have the body type that should spend most of its time reclined on a chaise lounge being fed figs drizzled in honey. Triathlons don't even have an ancient point of origin because I am abundantly sure that they did not have bikes in Ancient Greece. From what reading I was able to do in anticipation of publishing this article, it appears the first Triathlons were run in France in the early 20th Century, where sportsmen engaged in running, cycling, and in a canoe segment which was eventually replaced by a swim. This Gallic dalliance has apparently evolved into what we know today, being the swim, the bike, and the run. To me, a triathlon is not only more ridiculous than a marathon because you start it with a swim, but because by the addition of two more sporting movements it becomes that much more systemically difficult to prepare for the main event.

First, think of the bike. A proper sporting bike is inhibitively expensive. I'd rather spend money on my uncle's half-dead second Mercedes or my completely-dead first cat (RIP Domenico you were too good for this world) than buy, service, and fret about another bike. Buying the bike and the accessories doesn't even begin to approach the level of black terror I've felt when RIDING a bike. Melbournian drivers are one bad merge away from degenerating into motoring maniacs, and I say that as someone who drives regularly. Being able to train on a bike means being able to get a bike, take time to ride the bike, find places to go on the bike, and use the bike in appropriate commuter infrastructure so you don't become the next Australian Dashcam star. Secondly, think of the swimming. Pools in which to swim are large, maintained bodies of water whose continued use requires an infrastructure of support that itself requires space, time, money, coordination, and chlorine. Pools are such a luxury that any time there's a house with a pool on it, the pool is always front and center. Being able to use a pool, swim, and use that regularly takes infrastructural support and time, so much time. Most people do not have pools in their home, so they must take time to go to the pool, use the pool, and come home from the pool. Triathlons are not something you do lightly. You need resources, commitment, and a plan. I have infinite respect for people who run triathlons because it's not just about doing the work once, but multiple times, without any rests in the middle. That takes guts, grit, and grind. The more you invest in this sort of thing the harder it is to bail out of it because even starting preparation for a triathlon means that you've worked up to that point and now you're in too deep, it's sink or swim, and that's at least a third of the problem. That being said, the fact that people do this is endlessly impressive to me - the fact that someone can structure so much time and energy in their lives to do this. If losing weight requires a little reframing of a person's milieu then running triathlons with any kind of regularity requires reframing someone's whole lives. If you tell me you run triathlons then I can reliably assume a bunch of things about you. One of those things is that you've got something crucial - willpower.

AI

I have been flagged for the use of Artificial Intelligence in every single academic essay or project I have submitted in the past three years, which is also the time in which I did most of my postgrads. It is not my fault I write like a machine. It is not my fault that the use of generative and consultative machines are so pervasive in academic and professional contexts that to see work that is polished, arranged, and curated makes another machine think that it is seeing nonhuman output. AI is everywhere and it's not going away any time soon. Two of the people with whom I attended highschool are founders and CEOs of a medical transcription engine and an AI that generates entire advertisement campaigns. The only thing I've used AI for is to generate images of my cat Domenico scratching the shit out of Henry Kissinger's face in hell, because I'm pretty certain that the latter's hell is in at least some way the former's heaven. The afterlife is nothing if not efficiently managed. AI has its own efficiency too - a strange, saccharine tone of voice that seems all-too polished and all-too prim and proper at face value. There are live-driven AI phone agents whose plodding declension and viscous tempo give them away just as reliably as anyone who's tried to discreetly be high in front of a Federal Cop. These machines can do the work of thinking, analysing, presenting and reflecting. These machines can do all the mental work needed to reach a conclusion and then all a person has to do is click commit, send, generate, accept. What the hell is this? What the hell is this going to turn us into? Am I as a clinician eventually going to turn into someone whose job role is just to verify the output of a third-party cognitive engine whose own internal workings are so esoteric to those engineers who develop them that there's a very real chance my clinical scribe may tell me to off myself if I ask it about knee pain? Nobody can accept liability for their work without accepting responsibility for it. Nobody can accept responsibility for something without taking ownership of that thing, that process, that act, either. Liability cannot be abrogated - it is responsibility, and responsibility demands ownership.

When I look at the work my peers in physiotherapy, ergonomics, and health and safety are producing, I am stunned. These are thinking, considering, reflecting people abrogating the responsibility of thought because it's convenient. Why don't you just break your legs and shit in a bag to save yourself the inconvenience of going to the bathroom. When did we become so weak as to not trust the content and functions of our own minds? Yes, people are fallible, finite, and so are able to fail, but that fallibility and the knowledge of our own limitations should drive an awareness of those limitations, of vigilance toward ourselves, our thoughts, and our actions, of an awareness of not simply what we are doing, but why we are doing that. In everything we do we must reason, reflect, act, engage, and so make real the content of our own minds through the actions of our hands on the world around us. When we abrogate the human responsibility of thought itself for an engine whose output is situationally articulated to appeal to our biases and which itself shapes its face to mirror our own, we lose that connection to ourselves. What happens when the momentary, necessary vigilance of observation gets turned into the uncritical acceptance of mechanical outputs? I am fond of saying that our species is not Homo Sapiens, the man that thinks, because there are animals that can think, cogitate, learn, and reflect. I think of humanity as Homo Faber, the man who works, and that work is not undertaken as obligation but as reification of what it is to be human, to mark the world with our hands in the same way that the men of Lascaux pressed their palms to the walls and floors of their home and so in their way reach forward and backward through time itself and say - here I was, I was here, I worked, I loved, I lived, and I have reached forward to you, my inheritor, the benefactor of the fragile life I tended to like the coals of prehistoric fire, and so now you are, with fire harnessed in the batteries of your machines, spewed from the engines of rockets, trapped in combustion cylinders and held, always held, in hands that work, love, hold, live, cherish and care, and reach backward and forward through the now and forever, reaching home and onward, always reaching, always working, always responsibly tending the Garden of Man. There's a beautiful narrative irony in the fact that an AI can have trouble generating hands, don't you think?

Weightlifting

Weightlifting is the only sport I have enjoyed and the only exercise that I have stuck to consistently over the course of my life. You wouldn't know it by looking at me, though, I'm too fond of cheeseburgers and I'm too liberal with the beer to look like I take care of myself. Weightlifting is an ancient sport - there are historical, archaeological, and anthropological records of feats of strength and training from Ancient Greece, Old China, Latin America, and throughout history. Weightlifting is a diverse sport, containing powerlifting, bodybuilding, calisthenics, strongman sports, and so many others. Weightlifting is easy for me, because while a marathon requires a distance to run, and a triathlon requires water in which to swim and a bike on which to ride, it's possible to lift weights by using the resistance of our own bodies. I can do a squat on two legs, one leg, deep, shallow, quick, slow, jumping, hopping, and in so many other variations that exercise strength, coordination, and the heart and lungs. Weightlifting works for me because it is easy, it is accessible, and it is centered in my own body. It's better to say that strength training works for me because it's easy. The less infrastructure I need to deal with and the simpler the whole thing is, the better. The fewer steps there are between me and the workout, the better. I can use my body to build my body, to use the metal to sharpen itself.

I prescribe strength training to all of my clients. I tell people to do squats throughout the day, no more than twenty at a time, and no more than one thousand during the day. The squat is the perfect exercise because it tests the feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, hips, lower back, middle back, upper back, core, diaphragm, balance, heart, and lungs. The squat is the basis of every single postural change a person will execute throughout their lives, from lying to sitting, sitting in place, sitting to standing, and is the basis of walking by virtue of using those same muscle groups to do those movements. The squat is also quintessentially human - strong gluteal muscles are the basis for sustainable upright posture in functional mobility, and are one of the evolutionary adaptations that were necessary for humans to be able to stand upright and tall. Squats, strength training, and flexibility are all necessarily core, human capacities. The ability to run and swim are important too, but strength is as essential to humanity as the ability to think, to work, and to create with my hands.

Art

I was lucky enough to catch up with some of my old classmates recently for good wine and decent dumplings (Thank you Shanghai Dumpling House my beloved). I caught up with people younger and older than me, and there were teachers there too. One of the people there was my old art teacher, who planted their hand on my shoulder and said that they never knew why I kept up with art while I was at highschool. I think it might have been for three reasons - the first is that as the child of first generation migrant parents and also being a migrant myself, there was more than a little encouragement to get a white collar black suit kind of job. The second is that I myself didn't know what it was that I wanted to create. Art itself isn't an output, it's a process. Art is the volitional act of technical problem solving through which a person exercises choice in the resolution of a task that is best solved with art, rather than with mathematics or power tools, and in making decisions in a value-based system of consideration to solve a problem that person achieves a catharsis where their person's soul and lived experience become reified into more concrete things like pictures, music, and the written and spoken word. Creativity requires conscious choice and decisionmaking, and I'd never reflected on or thought about the tools I'd be using to solve a problem through art before then. The last reason is that I wasn't mature enough to think about the decisions I was making. Time and life have made me more aware of myself and have given me the chance to think more about myself, not in a vain way, but to understand how I am the person I am and how that person makes themselves into tomorrow's person as well. That's the process of living, and so it's the art of living too. The process of living requires choice, decisionmaking, contention with the friction of life around me and the growth that occurs through discomfort. Even more powerful is the growth that comes with engagement with that discomfort in certain ways, in engaging with more or less, putting yourself out there, and learning the lessons you need. You build your mojo little by little, in those moments when you're tested.

I have made no secret of the fact that I dislike artificial and assistive intelligences, generative engines, and utilised LLMs. I understand the science behind them, but I do not understand what is to be gained from removing the necessary engagement with friction that drives growth. Contending with the world around us demands creativity, art, and diligence. Visual art requires sight, reflection, thought about every decision that is made, and physical effort every time a brush hits the canvas or when a stylus hits a touchscreen. I've worked with artists whose arms and hands had as much tension in them as pipe welders from the sustained postures into which they were obliged to contort themselves to create images as simplistic as a dog urinating on a fire hydrant. I've worked with musicians whose breath control could rival that of some elite sprinters in the way that they could pace their exhalations, brace themselves, and adjust their intonation through their postures. Don't even get me started on dancers. How much discomfort would all of these people need to endure to be able to make something that wasn't there before? How much friction would a dancer have to fight against to hurl themselves in an upward corkscrewing spiral against gravity, or a charcoal artist balancing the pressure of their pencil to darken their line without snapping the brittle lead, or a singer holding their note on the warbling edge of a note have to endure for the sake of art? That's why I respect artists as people - to create is to be brave, to create is to contend, and to make that their livelihood is a decision I could never make. That's why I do physiotherapy. That's why I look at what I do with an artist's eye, conduct my work with an artist's mind, and go the distance with what I hope is an artist's bravery, where everything I do with my eyes, my mind, my hands in some small way composes itself into a greater work whose goodness surpasses my own as an individual. I can only hope that that's what happens at the end of it all.

Marathon

I think the story of the first Marathon in late summer and early autumn, described by Ronald Thomas Ridley as the greatest moment of the Athenian Hoplite in his book L'Antiquite Classique, is all the more compelling if firstly, we accept that the legend on which the race is based is historical truth, and consequently if we put ourselves in the shoes of the person running it. His name was supposed to have been Pheidippides, and there are several legends about the run, all of which appear to have been tangled together. One version of the story says that Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta and then back to Athens before the battle began, after which he marched with the Athenian army to Marathon, fought the battle there, and then ran back to Athens in the one go. Herodotus does not mention Pheidippides fighting at Marathon, a subsequent Marathon to Athens run, or his death. There are some conjectures about the man's name - Pheidippides may be an alteration of another person's name or a joke by Aristophanes (Save the horses) used in his play. It appears that Lucian's retelling of the story, in which Pheidippides ran from the battle to announce the Athenian victory is that which has been taken as fact. I think people accept this version more readily following Robert Browning's poem about the event. Nevertheless, that there was a battle is known, and that there was a runner is likely, and that this story happened is compelling. I therefore proceed on that basis, and imagine the man running the distance. Pheidippides would have been a professional long-distance runner, necessary in a time before formal post as well as when horses weren't as widely used as they were in the West. He also would have been a soldier in the Athenian army, which, just like knowing someone runs triathlons, means a few things.

Unlike modern professional armies, Classical militaries were drawn as needed from the citizenry. Athenian men may have been called to service from the age of eighteen to sixty. This army was non-professional, it was drawn up as needed, used mindfully, and its organisation was not standardised as far as I am aware. While there may have been state apparatus for the furnishing of armed forces with equipment in times of war, it was generally on the soldier to provide their own equipment aside from the spear and shield. If you wanted armour, you had to pay for it. You couldn't even wear your ancestors' armour because it might not fit you properly, and you and your dad might be called up for service at the same time. Where those soldiers and their families were rich, they may even provide cavalry, which made Athens unique in its ability to field mounted troops given the wealth of the Athenian ruling class. Maybe that's why Pheidippides needed to run the distance instead of riding - some rich nepo baby didn't want to give up his horse. Hoplites themselves, the backbone of the Classical Hellenic ground forces, were drawn from farmers, tradespeople, and business owners. Officers in the army were the social equivalents of the men they led. Imagine marching into battle next to the guy that cuts the grass, or holding up a shield next to the post officer. That's what it was like then. An army was drawn from the citizenry of a place and that citizenry went to war. When deployments were made, work was not done. When soldiers fell in battle, their businesses stayed shut. Wars were short and costly because when the army was drawn directly from the working population it was only possible to support an army for a short period of time. That is also because war in this time of history was particularly and singularly brutal. There were no formal international conventions of war. It was a gorefest. It was a grinder. The battles of the Ancient world were so horrific that some of our first recounts of post-traumatic stress disorder come from this time, where soldiers were visit in their waking and sleeping hours by the ghosts of men they'd killed in battle.

This is the setting of the battle - one in which our man who may or may not be Pheidippides has marched from his home wearing gear he had to pay for out of his own pocket alongside people who he knows from his day to day life, men whose families probably recognise him and among people with whom he could count his friends, among people who where probably cut down by Persian ballistics that outranged the spears of the Phalanx or shredded by short-swordsmen who ducked under the long Athenian polearms, and where all of these men have left their home to defend it against a force many times their number. The Battle of Marathon was such a singular achievement for the Ancient Greek Civil Army that it dominated politics and social life for the remainder of that century. Our man whose name may or may not be Pheidippides was here, at that moment, at that time, and saw the course of that battle and its outcome. Can you imagine what he felt in that moment? Can you put yourself in his exhausted, dusty, sandaled feet and think about the emotions that would have gone through that man, a man like yourself and me, a man who after having left his home and watched his friends die then who heard, in the words of Robert Browning, when Persia was dust, all cried "To Akropolis, Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due, 'Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go shout!" Can you blame him for doing what he did? Did he ask permission to run, was he told, or did he just start moving as the emotion overcame him? Did he throw down the spear and shield his city-state had given him or did he try lugging that equipment for a short while out of a sense of duty? Did he feel a sense of conflict or doubt when he took off the armour he had to pay for himself so that he could run more effectively? Did he pay for that armour himself, or did someone else pitch in, his parents, his friends, his partner at the time? Did he feel lighter because he shed the dream of protection bestowed on him by his loved ones or did he feel ill at ease? Did he feel some kind of strange reified relief that he'd spent his whole life running messages, and that now he was in the right place, at the right time, to deliver the most important message of his life? Did he believe that perhaps this was the result of some Divine work, where all of these factors lined up perfectly, right here, right now, and it was Mercury at his heels lending wings to his sandals? What did he see as he ran from the battle, did he see the hills and roads of his home, orchards whose trees were heavy with fruits ready for the September harvest, that same season when the battle had been fought? Did he feel the Summer sun high in the sky, beating down on him, the wind blowing through the land that was his, its breath filling his lungs with the scent of home? What did he feel when he ran - did he feel the exhaustion of his limbs that were tired from the fight, or was adrenaline enough to keep him going? Did he stop, did he feel like he needed to stop, did he berate himself to keep going, where did his strength come from? Was it fear, was it love, was it joy, what was it? Can you tell I'm so totally normal about this? Can you imagine the pain he was in as he ran that distance after having fought next to his best mates? What did he feel when he saw the silhouette of Athens rising from the road ahead of him? Did he meet the gazes of those men and women on the streetside who saw a bloodied, exhausted, sweaty runner absolutely hauling ass up the main road or did he just shout his message "Rejoice, we conquer," and as Browning said, the joy in his blood bursting his heart, and dying there under the mid-day sun in the place that was his home. I hope he felt the cool breeze on his face after his effort. I hope he died face-up when he collapsed. I hope that he felt the warmth of the sun's light making bright and colourful a land that he had helped keep free on his skin one last time, in peace. I hope he felt some comfort as he strength faded from his body that it had all led to this, that the effort of his life prepared him for this, and that this was exactly the way, right now, that things were meant to happen.

Who could have done this if not someone shaped by life, friction, someone who had tried, failed, and contended with themselves, who had conditioned their body through the work of their life and had their mind set on their end by the sincerity in their heart, to run the distance, to take no shortcuts, and to do it all as a sacrifice made in the name of love?

May we all be so lucky to feel a moment of triumph, to know it was all for that, and to know that it comes to something more than what we are.

So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute

Is still "Rejoice!"--his word which brought rejoicing indeed.

So is Pheidippides happy forever,--the noble strong man

Who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a god loved so well,

He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell

Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began,

So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter be mute:

" Athens is saved!"--Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed.

If you've read to the end of this, thanks. This was disjointed, long, and didn't really go anywhere. I just needed to get it out of my system so I could put a line on the end of this year and step into the next one having left some feelings behind after having dealt with them.

See you in the new year.

But into soundless Acheron

The glory of Greek shame was cast:

Long centuries have come and gone,

The suns of Hellas have all shone,

The first has fallen to the last:—

Since Persia fell at Marathon,

Long centuries have come and gone.

- Villanelle of Change, by Edwin Arlington Robinson