Rowing
After putting it off for an embarrassingly long time, this month I finally tried the indoor rowing class at Rock the Cycle – and I loved it. As someone who dreads cardio, I only ever really enjoy it if it’s packed with high energy, upbeat music, and a feel-good community vibe, which is precisely what these classes are about. High-stress, heart-pumping, and full-body – it’s surely a workout worth a try and also all those sore muscles you’ll get afterwards. If the class doesn’t sound much up your alley, you can still give the exercise a go during your routine workouts; usually you can spot indoor rowing machines at local gyms. – Marina
Marble Palace
As if to compensate for my stay-at-home mood of late 2024, I found myself attending a cultural event or an exhibition almost every week of January. And within this cultural dust-up I happened to visit the Marble Palace for the first time. At this branch of the State Russian Museum, the first thing that caught my eye were not paintings but meticulously crafted interiors – the statues, the floral-patterned parquet and all the features of a neoclassical palace I rarely get to see in everyday life. But in the end, the artworks eclipsed the decor. The museum holds a small yet impressive collection of renowned modern artists like Basquiat, Warhall, and Picasso, as well as many others. For me, the highlight of the visit was the temporary exhibition on Sergey Kuryokhin’s Pop Mechanics, which filled my playlist with music and my YouTube recommendations with absurdist content for weeks to come. All in all, it seems that the palace has something for everyone if you look closely! – Elizaveta
12 Week Year
As a planning geek, I can’t go by a new planning method without trying it. This January, it was the 12 Week Year, which guides you through first creating a bird’s-eye view of your next 10-15 years (a vision), then describing a more concrete three-year plan, and finally breaking it down into several goals that you set for, you guessed it, 12 weeks at a time. However, apart from seemingly just rethinking quarterly planning, the method’s authors introduce several accountability measures: you quantify every week, grading your performance, you are encouraged to meet with your peers weekly to discuss your progress along the way, and you are expected to gain momentum near the end of each 12-week period, much like that late-November-mid-December rush to hit every mark – but now four times a year! So far, four weeks in, I am still experimenting with the best way to implement every practice; but what I’m definitely getting is the vision-centric outlook. Keeping my future forty-year-old self in mind has definitely put things into perspective in my daily choices. – Catherine
Scale modeling
As a kid, I used to be really into making scale models – planes, ships, cars, anything. There was nothing quite like getting to admire (and play with) something you’ve made with your own hands. And yet, for quite a few years now, I’ve been wanting but failing to get back into it. What changed? Well, now I know: the thing is, it’s one of those hobbies where you’re very much inclined to go “all in”: thinking oh, I’m gonna need this airbrush; oh, and all these paints; and what about this special decal glue? The “toolbox fallacy,” they call it: the idea that you can’t start on something until you’ve got all the right tools.
This is what kid me didn’t care for. As long as I had some glue, a can of paint, and a healthy dose of elbow grease, it’d be all I needed. So, that’s what I did not long ago: I grabbed the first kit I liked, a handful of the bare essentials, and got to work. Is it going to turn out as polished as those super pimped-out dioramas you see online? No, and it doesn’t need to. All I know is that the next one after it is going to be even better – and so on, and so forth, rinse and repeat. – Vadim