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.
The Garmin Instinct Solar is an excellent watch if you like to hike and walk, but falls short if you want more detailed stats when you’re running. It doesn’t have HRV monitoring, fatigue and other features.
Years ago, when I was in Spain I was playing with the watch. I would leave it in the Spanish sun for hours at a time, making sure that the solar panel was facing the sun. I also used a solar panel to charge the watch with solar energy via the charging cable.
Recently I noticed that when I type a comment or write a post on Facebook there is a considerable lag between when I start to type and when it appears on screen. We’re speaking about more than a second of lag.
For an instant I was thinking that it might be because the local drive is getting full and the machine is suffering so I checked storage and it is fine. I then tried to type something in Bluesky and noticed no lag.
On Monday I went for a run. When I stopped the tracker on the Apple Watch and the Garmin watch I noticed the same number. 9.99km. If I had run just one more straight, or one more curve of the track I would have had a 10km run. I couldn’t restart the tracker to get that round number since it was too late.
Today someone did run extra, just to round up, and I suspect that if I had seen 9.99km I would have run that extra 100m. One hundred meters is nothing. It’s a few more seconds of running.
Today, for fun, and out of curiousity I swapped eSIMS between two phones. If you’re old enough, you remember that swapping physical sims required turning it off and on again. it being both phones. Today, with eSIMS the process has been simplified since the last time I tried.
Today if you want to transfer an eSIM from phone to phone you simply go to Add eSIM on the destination phone and choose “Transfer from Nearby iPhone” and that’s almost it. You then need to select which sim you want to migrate, and then type in the username and password for your Swisscom account if you’re migrating from Swisscom or Wingo, or Galaxus if you’re migrating from those operators.
Some series, like Last of the Summer Wine, follow people going on local walks and getting up to mischief. We often hear of people that love to go for walks on the weekend. The issue, as traffic density increases is that the local walks that were along quiet roads are now along busier and busier roads.
At the same time, when road works block one road traffic is diverted along secondary and tertiary roads. Recently a very important road was shut to traffic entirely. As a result of this closure a route that was once an agricultural road, reserved only for rural roads was used by a Transport Public de Nyon bus as well as a French car from Ain. What was meant to be a quiet road, exclusively for farmers, by being metalled, became a short cut for local buses and commuters.
Normally I don’t like interval training because I don’t like pushing myself too hard. I like, instead, to work on endurance. I’m fine with a 23km hike with 1200m of climbing and I’m okay with a 5 to 8km social run but I don’t like interval training. Specifically I don’t like pushing myself too hard.
Having said this, yesterday I had a high energy lunch with beef and Spätzli which provided a good energetic base for my evening social run. The goal was very easy. The aim was twelve one minute intervals at 10k pace with a minute of recovery between each hard interval.
A few days ago my fears were confirmed. After a run I had a short talk with one of the people that prepares pedestrian routes during road works. When I spoke of one area he said “I don’t really know that area”, and more. It took professionalism, and empathy of my own not to be too heavy and annoying.
If I was planning pedestrian access for road works that were known to last for two years I would do something very simple. I would go on foot, and walk the routes to see where the friction points would be and I would work to preserve the shortest distance walk I could, to avoid disruption to a maximum.