Some people were watching the football last night. Others were working towards qualifying enough hearing loss at a music festival to get hearing aids. I decided that on Friday morning I would wake around 04:30 to run in Morges at 06:00. Many would see waking so early as a crazy and absurd thing to do. It is crazy and absurd. It requires trying to sleep early, despite a heatwave, summer festivals, football supporters standing in a garden nearby, and then waking early.

Last night was the first night of the Caribana and for the most part it was quiet. It was quiet until 23:30 when one of the less competent sound gremlins got to the audio mixing desk and made it tremendously loud. So loud that I could hear the music clearly. If I knew the artist I would tell you who was playing. Given that noise pollution is encouraged, from music festivals in summer, on a regular basis, despite all the hot air about them caring for the environment I have come up with a splendid solution.

For years I have been struggling with the Apple Watch concept. With the Series 4 it’s because a hairline fracture killed the touch screen functionality. That’s why I got an SE, and eventually the SE 2. Now, with both of these the screen survived, and with the SE 2 I got the battery replaced so it is good for another two to four years. The Apple Watch SE 2 is one of the cheapest Apple Watches.

We are entering the first Canicule of the summer today from Thursday and towards the 23rd of June. During this heat wave Minergie buildings, will climb towards 32°c plus, as will apartments. Cities will gather more and more heat energy and radiate it it. That’s when noisy music festivals can have deadly consequences, but it is also when it makes sense to get up at the crack of dawn for a group run.

Recently Strava added MCP AI decorations, with the idea of making workout feedback more interesting and dynamic. In practice when Garmin Suunto and Runna did that they forgot a key aspect. Allowing humans to add real context. AI is a guessing algorithm, not true intelligence. It will look at data, but it won’t understand it. It will only correlate it to other data and provide a guess according to other contextual information.

Over the last week or two I tested the Garmin ForeRunner 570 when navigating from Crans-Montana to Leukerbad. I also tried a group run navigating with the 570 during a Décathlon run, before spotting that the Coros Nomad and Coros Apex 4 offered full map navigation without paying the Garmin premium price. Hiking with the 570 is a red line on a black line. You look at the squiggle and intuit where you’re meant to go.

Tomorrow there is an event in Cossonay that could easily involve cycling fourty kilometres to get there, and cycling whilst there, and then cycling back. The low estimate would be an eighty kilometre day and the high estimate would be at least a century. I was looking at the train, from Nyon to Cossonay, but the connection in Renens is four minutes. Plenty of time, in theory to swap from one track to the other, but with sluggish people that seems less likely.

On Monday we were running in the rain, and getting soaked and two women were discussing Caribana, Paléo, Festineuch and more. During another hike people were speaking about Montreux, and during a book discussion someone said “I don’t think I can be at the next book discussion because of a concert. Now, on the flipside you have groups that wake up to run at 6am on a Friday and normal society says “But that’s too early” because normal society considers that going out at night until 2am, or watching TV until late is a good use of an evening.

For many months I have been using a Fiat 500 and I usually charged it to around 80 percent before stopping the charge because the last 20 percent took an hour, and I paid for electricity that was wasted as heat, when the car trickled charged to one hundred percent. I knew that if I drove two trips to Morges I would either need to charge when I got home, or ideally on a private charger at destination.

The hike from Aminona to Leukerbad is a 22km+ hike with 1200m+ of climbing. You begin by catching the cable car from Sierre to Crans-Montana, and then the bus to Aminona, before walking along the road for a bit, before turning right and disappearing into the woods and walking along trails that head downwards for a bit before heading up a “steep” gradient. During the steep gradient I found myself thinking about the mechanical difference between cycling up a hill or mountain and hiking.