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Today I participated in two Zwift events, a social ride and a race. The social ride was one hour of pedalling at a comfortable pace trying to keep to the same speed as the group. Rather than trying to be as fast as the group I was trying to pace myself to be within the peloton rather than riding off. 

Social rides are amusing because you start on the peer and wait for the counter to get down to zero and when it does you go from being on a home trainer in the real world cycling on a home trainer in the virtual world to cycling on the roads of Watopia. Social rides are interesting because you have people from Australia, England, Denmark and many other countries, so long as they are in a timezone where it would be reasonable to cycle at such a time of day. 

I have 100 move day goals reached. The difficulty of this goal depends on how high you set the bar. If you set the bar at two hundred calories a day then the goal is easy to achieve. If you set the goal at 500 or 600 calories then the achievement is slightly more interesting. 

An easy goal to reach, one days with the move goal achieved.

I would have reached it sooner if the screen on the apple watch had not broken and if I had not had a few sub-goal days over the last three or more months. I set the goal high enough that I would need to walk for more than two hours a day to reach it. On the bike I reach it within 40 to 50 minutes. 

This summer I climbed over 8848 metres in a single month and now I have just completed the Zwift Everest challenge as well. This challenge, on Zwift, is much easier than in the real world because you are not carrying water, the weight of your bike, dealing with keeping yourself balanced on your bike or traffic. 

Using a Fluid Trainer.

I don’t use a smart trainer. I use an Elite Qubo Fluid trainer and to climb I use information on speed to decide how hard to work. If I feel lazy I can pedal at 100 watts for a long period of time to get to the top but that isn’t in my nature. I like to push myself. I push until I get tired and then I recover, and then I push again. I also loe to sprint to the end and try to beat my previous time. Yesterday I rode up at a relatively lazy pace. When I got to within 1.5 kilometres of the top I really put out a lot of energy and when I reached the summit I was spent. 

Yesterday I went to Magnetic’s Geneva Premiere and I really enjoyed some segments of the film and found that others were less interesting. Keep in mind though, that this film is two hours long and that this increase and decrease in interest is normal. 

What made this screening special is that many of the people that we saw in the film were present at the event. Before the film started they were presented to us individually, said a few words and then one person won some skis and another won for tickets to a ski resort. 

Translated from French, Sport the nicest of meetings reminds me of the legend that is told in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. In Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso we hear about the guy who waits outside a woman’s window for one hundred days and nights to show his devotion to her, and in the end he loses interest. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=144&v=a8fsWRHfg6g

This is following the same theme except that rather than a man lusting after a woman it is the other way around. Instead of a woman using crappy dating apps and other rubbish she sees someone she finds visually appealing and so decides to take up running. At first she is slow but with time she gets fitter and she can keep with the group for longer and longer. 

As an introvert, I have a tendency to listen and daydream rather than talk. It is for this reason that the Nanowrimo challenge is an interesting one. It encourages me to be verbose, to use more words than I would usually use. It also forces me to find 1667 words of inspiration on a daily basis. This is a challenge. When you’re inspired it can take about an hour and a half to two hours depending on typing speed or it can be split into chunks. 

Bernie Goldbach - Jan 4, 2019

What’s your current watch? I’m burning through Suunto watch bands probably because I swim with my Ambit.

The Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro and the Apple Watch Series 4. Sometimes I wear both.

I want to discuss Planned obsolescence as fragility. In the days of Nokia you could buy a phone and give it to a teenage boy and expect it to survive without breaking. I know because I was a teenage boy with a Nokia phone. So were plenty of my peers. It was more likely that someone would lose or drown their phone than break it. I only broke one phone display in those days and that took some effort. 

Recently I have been thinking about bike locks. I have been looking at the variety of options that there are and for a while I was worried about bike theft. It is for that reason that I never left my bikes unattended for more than half a minute to a minute during bike rides. 

This is easy when you’re going on 30-100km bike rides where you spend all of your time with the bike but what about when you replace your scooter with a bike. I never worried about leaving my scooter unattended and so far no one has stolen it. Logically I should have felt the same way about bikes and bike locks but I don’t. 

After just three climbing activities the Apple watch screen broke, rendering its smart features unusable. 

Indoor Climbing and the Apple Watch are a bad mix. They are a bad mix because the Apple watch has an unprotected glass screen. The screen is so exposed that last Thursday I shattered the screen without realising until I got home and tried to use it but the capacitive screen did not respond.