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.

Today I went trail running in the Jura near St-Cergue and I found the experience okay. I think that the group stopping regularly helped make this a relatively easy run despite the gradient. Cycling got me used to making hard efforts, not for seconds or minutes at a time but for an hour or more, especially when heading up the Jura.

When I run, my fitness has a positive impact, and because running is more egalitarian than cycling, I suffer less to keep up. With cycling I have a heavier steel frame, heavier aluminium wheels, less efficient group set and rim brakes rather than disk brakes. All of those mean that for every climb I am at a disadvantage. I climb faster than some, but it costs me more.

Last night I went to the outdoor cinema again, this time to watch Compostelle. It’s a hiking trip movie. It’s a film that is centered of walking from point A to Point B, over a period of months.

The three main characters are Fred, the adult ‘éducatrice’, Adam, the problem child, and Estella, the girl/woman walking the Camino for the second time, after aborting her first effort. she does so with a leg missing.

Yesterday I went to Gland for a mid-afternoon run before watching Disclosure Day at an outdoor cinema. The run route took me along the Toblerones up to Vich, and then I turned East and ran along a road I often cycle along, before then heading back down, over the motorway, and then over the railway line, back to Gland, and then back to the field where the film screening was taking place.

There is the idea that the way to fight against heat is to add air conditioning to every single building. This would be true, if we were in Dubai and the temperature never went below 20°c at night, but in Europe it very often does. This means that a mosquito net is more interesting than air conditioning, and far cheaper.

Air conditioning is great when you deal with heat for weeks or months, without the opportunity to get rid of that heat at night. In Europe, nights are usually cool enough to lower the temperature inside buildings. As I write this I have the balcony door opened fully, trying to vent residual heat from this Minergie building.

Densification, also called urbanisation, is a double edged problem. The first problem is that bringing more people closer together you increase noise pollution. The more people live nearby, the more people need to learn to be quiet. The second cost is an inability to shelter from the heat on a hot summer’s day.

In Paris, Geneva, Nyon and London plenty of people have moved from villages and houses to apartments. The result of this migration from a multi-level house to a single floor apartment is that during a heatwave people are stuck in hot apartments with nowhere to flee.

In theory we will get a storm this afternoon and I am impatient for it. I am impatient for heavy rain to cool the roof and walls of this nightmare minergie building. As great as it is to have a cheap building to heat in winter, it is a deadly building in summer, especially when neighbours open their windows to aerate and let hot air in.

In normal buildings, if you open windows you get a draft, and that draft circulates air and it’s refreshing, and when you close windows that freshness lingers. In a minergie building, if you leave the window blinds open the sun heats every surface, and the air. The space heats up just like a car.

I ran five days out of seven this week. I ran Monday, twice and then once several days. Most of the runs were easy and early, for two reasons. The first is that we’re in a canicule so pushing hard doesn’t make sense. The second reason is that there are fewer social rides organised.

Today I ran four times around the Lac de Divonne, to meet the distance required by Runna. I didn’t actually run 13km not because of pacing but because of heat. We’re in a heat wave and Runna doesn’t have the intelligence to see the heat and say “stay healthy” and “don’t overdo it”. For Runna it has a program, and that’s what you have to do. Heat doesn’t matter, gradient doesn’t matter.

I was very sad to see that tomorrow’s evening storm is cancelled due to lack of interest. I am very interested in rain falling heavily from the sky. I want it to drench and cool the minergie building within which I live. I want the cool air to help make this building I live in liveable again.

This morning I woke at 6am or so, to go for a group run at 0800 with Décathlon Chavannes and the conditions were good. It was around 23°c and felt like 25°c, so nice and fresh. We ran, and during the run the temperature rose a little. When we got to the forest it felt nice to be sheltered somewhere nice and cool. Evapotranspiration is fantastic for cooling down humans during a heat wave. It’s especially good that we could end the run in the shade.

Monday we went for a run in the Canicule heat. For the most part we skirted woods where we could, and stopped twice at the same fountain to drink, splash ourselves, and recover from the heat. In so doing we cooled ourselves and stayed hydrated.

After the run we went to the Plage De Promenthoux for l’apéro, which was mainly chips and a drink or two. We also stood in the water for a group photo. “That’s a lot of shells” I thought. The bottom of the water was sandy with a few stones. It was obviously around 21°c.