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I went to Madrid last weekend (Friday morning until Monday morning). 

It was an absolute joy.

I think it will become an annual pilgrimage in the Campbell calendar for at least the next few years.

I went with my great friend Colin Burns, whom I have known indirectly for many years but with whom I have worked closely for about the past ten years. 

Colin has been a Real Madrid fan for 25 years, and we went to see them play in a league match on Sunday afternoon.

But this is not a blog about football or about a visit to Madrid; it's a blog about the trade-off for humanity and health and friendship and kinship and understanding when enough is enough.

When we arrived in Madrid on Friday with Callum, my son, and Tom, our marketing director, at the practice, we decided to have a few sociable beers in the hotel bar.

Colin had not arrived yet, and he would tell us the next day that you can have the love of your partner, your faith in God and any number of joys in your life, but there is nothing better than afternoon drinking!

I don't drink very much anymore these days at all, but I have drank a little bit more over this Christmas time than I would have done usually, and I drank more in Madrid than I would typically under most circumstances.

And so, for the discussion of this paradox, I want to show you figure one, which is the Garmin stress score that I had when I woke up on Saturday morning and through Saturday.

The big yellow bit on the left-hand side of the graph shows that, in effect, I did not sleep, and my stress sat at around 77 when I woke up (my normal resting stress is in the teens). 

This is inherently bad for me; it's inherently bad for anyone, but it's particularly bad for me.

Then, on the second day, I drank a little bit less and got to bed a lot earlier, and you can see that the graph score hits high in the early part of the night and then gets better into the blue area in Figure 2.

Figure three shows what happens when you don't drink the following day and get lots of sleep.

What's interesting about this is that all the health stuff tells us how bad the drink is.

It's described now that one drink of an evening reduces your performance by 10% (athletics or otherwise), two by 19% and three by up to 48% in lots of different metrics measured.

I am fully aware of this, and I think we all are; in fact, I actually think it's why lots of people hate Mondays because they drink on a Sunday.

But the flip side of this is that the camaraderie and kinship and friendship that we shared in our Madrid weekend was absolutely glorious and a memory that will last for a lifetime, and for my mental wellness and my happiness and contentment moving forward, it was marvellous and helpful and good.

January is the month where I am the worst version of myself.
There is a photograph of the four of us beside a European Champions League trophy before the match, and I hate myself and the rolls around my middle. 

At this time of the year, I want to be better at being a father and better at being a husband and better at being a dentist and better at being a business owner and better at being everything, and I can get consumed by this inadequacy and the need to feel like a better person.

But that never lasts for too long as I get back into a rhythm and back into a pace of life, which makes me feel that at least I am contributing in parts of those areas at least some of the time.

Life is indeed a trade-off when I am at my very, very best athletically (loosely speaking), I'm not at my best in many other parts of my life because I am selfish, and when I'm at best at other parts of my life, I am the worst athletically.

And so I will still pursue this goal or this vision of trying to be someone who achieves a balance, a balance in each of these different areas, including looking after myself.

I suppose from now on, I will refer to that to myself as the Madrid Paradox.

Blog Post Number - 3703