Routine

For many years I went for an after lunch or after work walk. I would easily walk eight to ten kilometres per day. With road works in Nyon that have already lasted for many, many months, and that should last for another year, for several hundred meters of road my walking habit has been made toxic through traffic density and exposure to toxic driving behaviour.

I used to love heading out for an hour or two, to see the fields and crops change with the season. I used to love walking a multitude of routes. With aggressive cars and dogs I shifted to rural walks. This worked for a while, until road works redirected traffic along a critical section of my daily walk, so now I no longer walk at all. I run instead. Even cycling has suffered. I didn’t want to drive during Caribana, because it’s during this event that someone crashed into me driving the petrol scooter for stopping to allow a runner to cross the road and during Paleo in around two weeks because traffic will be much denser.

Naturally we think of doing group activities in the evenings, after work, or over the weekend, when we’re free for the entire day. Some people take the opposite approach. They wake up early to go for a morning sunrise run or a croissant loop bike ride.

The concept is simple. Instead of waking up for work, you wake up early, and you do an hour of sport between 0700-0800. In so doing you get your bike ride or run, before your day of work. It then includes a café, a croissant, possibly breakfast, and then to work we go.

When it is rainy and overcast going for a walk at sunset is not rational. On a sparsely cloudy day this makes a lot of sense. On a day where the sun is shining, to go for a walk at sunset, is an opportunity to see golden hour colours. Last night that’s what I did.

It is unusual for me to take so many pictures but the light was great. It’s just a shame that I was in an urban landscape rather than a natural one. We see power lines and cars parked. We see traffic. I tried to avoid having too much traffic iin shots but to do that I had to climb on one thing or another. I had to hold the camera up above my head, to get certain things out of shot.

Normally I like to go for a run in the afternoon, after I have had a productive morning. This morning I went for a run first. This afternoon I have to go to an indoor meeting, which doesn’t fill me with euphoria. I feel an e-mail would achieve the same thing within a few minutes. Having said this I have skipped that meeting for three or four years so I feel obligated to go this afternoon.

The US has a culture of streaking. I don’t mean running around naked at events. I mean of trying to do something daily for weeks, months or even years. As great as it can be, to develop consistent habits I believe that it can have a negative impact.

For months I wanted to get my daily streak of Duolingo, and eventually I got mentally tired and gave up, after 270 or more days in a row. With Kindle they encourage us to read daily which is great because reading is great, but it’s detrimental because I think finishing a set number of books per month is healthier.

This morning I went for a bike ride before taking my daily shower. I rode through Nyon and then turned up towards Duiller and from Duiller I headed for Genolier. When I was in Nyon though I cycled down towards the lake before cycling up one of the steep hills before heading to Duiller and onto Genolier. along the way I considered whether I would go all the way to Arzier and changed my mind, because it would have required a long descent on carbon wheels that I am not yet used to.

Today I’m going to write about happiness, and specifically about routine happiness. During the pandemic I noticed that people with children all looked happy. There is a simple reason for that. Children don’t understand what a pandemic is, so to give them a feeling of normality you distract yourself from the pandemic with children. The result is that all the parents I saw were in their own little happy world. I noticed that parents were laughing, happy, going to parties and more, ignoring the pandemic, despite having the most to lose.

I know that driving to the house where I charge the electric vehicle will take about 20 percent. I also know that driving to the shops will take less than one percent per drive. This means that if I had an electric car, and I had a plug at home, rather than a climb up the Jura, I would need to charge every week or two, rather than almost every time I drive the car.

This morning I decided to go for a benchmark run for a new Garmin training plan. After I ran the required 5 minutes and four minutes of walking I continued with my walk. I had a route that I wanted to walk but because I saw people, and dogs on the paths that I was thinking of walking down I took a bigger loop once, then again, and then a third time. In the end I walked 12,000 steps this morning. I walked from Nyon to Cheserex to Borex to Arnex and back towards Nyon.

Today is an unusual day. Originally I had planed to walk over one thousand meters up the Jura, before realising that I had too little sleep, so I decided to sleep a little more, do laundry, write a blog post and then eat lunch.

Lazy

After lunch I didn’t feel like going for a walk, still. That’s highly unusual for me. I don’t know whether it’s because I am tired from a mediocre night of sleep or whether it’s because of the heat that hasn’t left yet. It’s the 9th of September and it’s still 29 to 30°c. I feel slightly under the weather so I’m skipping the walk.