Time for something a little different. If you’re like me you’re using a service similar to Galaxus TV. In the good old days when I was younger we had a satellite dish and that satellite dish had a tuner, and the tuner had a PVR. You could record series and more, rather than watch live TV, and we did.

We watched recorded programs rather than live television for a simple reason. WE could skip ads, but we could also shift programs to a time that didn’t dictate our evening.

Friday I had two social runs, one pre-dawn, one, after sunset, and the next day I went for yet another social run. As if three social runs wasn’t enough pressure on my system I went to a MAS training session on Monday which was hard and then on Wednesday I had Garmin telling me to run between 4:55-5:05km and that was too far.

My vision started to play up and I aborted the run. I still walked a little but I was reminded of a single thing. Garmin Coach is not human, and taking rest days is extremely important. My first mistake was to run so fast, within a short time of lunch. Lunch was inadequate so my body didn’t have the resources for such a workout, and it was tired.

Imagine, it’s Monday morning and people are rushing to work or to the shops to get food for the week ahead. You turn up early at the shopping centre. You see that all the chargers are free so you check the price. Thirty Three centimes per kilowatt hour. You see a fantastic opportunity so you park by a charger, plug in the charging cable and start to charge.

This might trigger you to say “Who cares?” and I’d answer that thirty three centimes per kilowatt hour is a good deal. In other places it goes from thirty nine centimes to eighty centimes, if not one franc twenty per kilowatt hour.

As an early adopter it makes perfect sense for me to have played with an Apple Watch but it doesn’t make sense that I would keep wearing it. The reason for it being absurd for me to wear an Apple watch is primarily that I managed to damage a screen on an Apple watch indoor climbing many, many years ago.

The second reason is that I already wore a Suunto watch, followed by Apple, and then Garmin, and then Coros, and Garmin, Suunto and Coros fill the niche I want them for. I want a fitness tracker rather than a smart watch. I want step counting, run tracking, cycling, and more. I rarely use IM functions. I sometimes check the weather but every modern fitness watch offers this, with built in thermometers, barometers and more.

Yesterday the Garmin Forerunner 570 crashed mid-workout while doing MAS intervals at a critical moment. It crashed while I was running at 4:35 per kilometre so I couldn’t reboot the watch with ease and re-start the workout.

I had to stop, type in the code, re-start the workout, and then start running again. This glitch teaches us two things. The first is that beta versions of Garmin software do, sometimes, crash, and the second, is that having a backup watch is always worthwhile.

For years, or even decades many of us backed photos up using Picasa, Flickr, iPhoto and other apps. We’d download photos from cameras and import them to these photo apps and we’d have a local library of all of our photos. With time our libraries grew so we backed up to the cloud and as our needs increased, so they offered more space for our photos.

Eventually they decided that they had trained their models sufficiently to start charging us for using their storage. In the process, because we had gigabytes of data it became hard to recover photos from the cloud so we were trapped. We had to pay more and more each year.

I noticed that when I park above ground in a zone with good mobile coverage the car sends its data to the Leapmotor app when parked. If I park in a basement where there is no cell service and when I park on the surface where there is no cell service then the car thinks that I am still driving until I park where it has network coverage.

It can be extraordinarily frustrating when you live in an apartment and park the car underground to charge. Not only does the app say that the car is “driving” rather than parked and locked, but it doesn’t log charging events. The result is that unless you go out of your way to charge where there is cell service car apps are just decorative, with no value or use.

The reason I quit walking and cycling, this year is the same. I don’t feel safe because of road works that aim to seperate cars from cyclists, without addressing the key issue of traffic density.

Highlight:

I cycled 2700km, ran 945km, hiked 89km and walked 890km this year. A year earlier I walked 1670km, ran 247km, cycled 5300km and hiked 403km. I am not negative out of ignorance. I am negative due to chronic exposure to danger.

It is amusing. This morning I thought about skipping the 6am run when I woke at 4am. Within ten minutes I decided to suit up and go anyway. I felt cold when I stepped out of the car, but I also felt fatigue.

I do not think that the fatigue came from my eight kilometre walk yesterday afternoon. I suspect that it originated in the interval training run I did on Monday. Running, with a group, is usually slow and relaxed, once you achieve a certain level.

Yesterday, yet again, I deactivated my Facebook account. I kept seeing negative posts about Oxford Street being pedestrianised, and especially radicalising people into hating cyclists. I felt that I was absorbing and radiating that negativity as well. I didn’t like that I was being so negative about something that changes nothing in my life.

I don’t live in London anymore. I don’t walk on Oxoford Street anymore. That the street was pedestrianised and that bikes are not meant to use it changes nothing in my life.