Experience

It is amusing that I would be nervous about a linear path that goes from A to B. I am nervous because I haven’t had the race experience yet, although in recent weeks I have experienced two triathlons, once walking, the second as a volunteer, and I experienced a crtiérium a week or so ago. In effect I’ve been in a race context multiple times in the last month.

What I haven’t experienced is a social run that is a race. I’ve done three or four Wake Up and Runs by now, so I am used to these. With the Wake Up and Run I ran solo in Nyon, and with someone else in Morges.

In an ideal world, we step out of our home and we go for a walk, like they did in The Last of the Summer Wine, and we socialise, and see local people. During the pandemic we could step out of the house, and go for a walk, without worrying about traffic, and without automatically taking the car.

When lockdowns ended, and the dependence on cars came back, so the local walk was degraded by the increasing frequency of car use. Eventually rural roads along secondary paths became unpleasant so new routes had to be found.

It is easy to think “I fill the my car once I reach a quarter of a tank, and to keep that attitude once you get an EV. With faster charging cars this works well but with others the concept is flawed.

Today I drove to Geneva and back to drop into Digitec to drop off the Garmin Forerunner 570 because I noticed that transparent plastic of some sort was trying to escape from between the glass, and the rest of the watch. In the process I drove an EV.

We are all familiar with the phrase. We learn better when we write things by hand, rather than when we type them on the keyboard. For decades people have been against typing, saying “It’s cold, it’s dead, it’s impersonal”. Those same people will then say “you have awful handwriting” and yet still feel nostalgia for hand written notes. In the age of AI more is being lost.

Ten Thousand Hours of Practice

When people my age were growing up, if you wanted to sing, you needed to devote ten thousand hours to develop tone, timber and a good voice. I am not a singer, which you can tell by what I just wrote. The point is, to be a singer you needed to dedicate yourself to the craft.