About

My name is Matthew (I often go by Matt).
I was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa and lived the first eight years of my life there. When I was eight, my parents and I moved to Melbourne, Australia. I sound, act, and very much consider myself Australian, except when watching cricket or rugby, where I am a die-hard fan of South Africa's national teams. I lived in Australia for twenty-one years before moving to North Carolina in the US to be with my girlfriend. We married in 2021. In November 2023 we welcomed our little boy into the world. As of May 2024, we're back in Melbourne. Next year, in 2025, we'll get to spend six-months in Copenhagen.

This is us in June, 2024

Growing up I thought I was going to be a professional tennis player. Not because I was a super star, but because I just loved the game so much and couldn't imagine doing anything else. The sport defined me from the age of ten until my mid-twenties. But at the age of eighteen, following a visit back home to South Africa and a few trail runs with my uncle, I got really into running. I dabbled briefly in triathlon between 2016 and 2019, rapidly rising to Ironman distance, but triathlon never captured my imagination in the way tennis or simply running did. It's unsurprising that my passion for these hobbies led to me beginning my career in the fitness industry. For five and a half years I worked as a personal trainer, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to pause, reflect, and ask myself, if I really wanted to do it for the rest of my life. The answer was no. And so, a fresh start in the US enabled me to explore ways to move my career into research. In some ways, I've now come full circle, remaining in research as a PhD candidate, but in exercise physiology and molecular genetics. Research, I've come to realise, is very nicely tailored to my personality and I feel very fortunate to have found what I love to do while still fairly young (in the grand scheme of things).

But this is not just a blog about training and science.

My first attempt at university was actually to pursue a career in journalism, and in June 2016 (very early personal training days), I was inspired to start writing in a journal. I had no way of knowing then that I would still be doing so eight years later. But what I've learned is that in addition to keeping training logs, sketching, or goal setting, what I enjoy most is the mindfulness that comes with deliberately sitting in an idea for long enough to write about it at length. Whether that be music I'm listening to, a craft beer I might be tasting, reflecting on fatherhood, or ruminating on a profound sentence or paragraph in a book I'm reading. I also have a deep-seated passion for wildlife - many in my family do - and find being outdoors with birds and animals among the most powerful positive experiences one can have. I've recently come to really appreciate the benefit of travel as well. I've had little geographic stability in the last few years. Something that would have terrified a younger me, but it's become addictive. My wife and I are particularly enamoured by the romanticism of long-term travel. We've both been fortunate enough to experience this and would love for our little boy to experience the same. It's very important to us that he, and any other children we may have, place a premium on the value of wonderful experiences and time with loved ones more so than the 'perceived' value of a shiny new material knickknack. We live in a world today that is so cluttered with distraction, where everything is trying to hijack our attention. As our son grows up, I expect it to get even worse. My intention is to set an example for him and move slowly and deliberately, choosing what to fix my attention to, rather than have that decided for me by clever algorithms.

My own father's time with me came to a tragically short and abrupt end at the age of forty-two (I was nine). Perhaps I understand more than most the importance of staying in the moment. As I transitioned into manhood, there is much I would have loved to ask him. From advice to stories. So I like the idea of capturing the arc of a life in real time. Hopefully it's useful to my own children one day. It also has the tremendous benefit of keeping our friends and family updated as we live our lives as a mobile family (at least for the time being).