I woke early on Friday to go for a run. From 5am onwards people start to gather and at around 5:15 there is a quick warmup and at 05:30 the run begins. The run is without a timer so this isn’t a race. It is a persona challenge instead.

I was right at the front of the race, with the fastest of people, running at 3-4 minutes per kilometre. When I noticed I slowed down to a pace that I thought would be sustainable for 5km. As a result some people overtook me and I resisted the desire to speed up.

I love to be part of online communities that also meet in the physical world on a regular basis. I enjoyed tuttle meetups, seesmeetups and more. I also really enjoyed when running and cycling groups have whatsapp channels where we can chat. The reason for this is simple.

There are five to ten running groups in Nyon, and several dozen between Morges, Rolle, Geneva, Nyon and Lausanne, without excluding Divonne and other places.

Recently I went out for the entire day and when I came home I had a swarm of flies sitting by the velux, two days in a row. The buzzing was loud. It’s a good thing that I am not squeamish about flies because this was the stuff of nightmares.

This summer I’ve had puce de canards burrow into my legs and die causing discomfort for a few days, I’ve gone for monday runs where midges were an issue, and recently I saw clouds of flying ants, but luckily these insects didn’t pester me.

Yesterday I ran twice the distance I usually run during a social run. As a group we ran from Bassins to Nyon via at least part of the Toblerone trail. We had aimed to run along the entire trail but we missed a turn near the top and ended up following the roads that I usually cycle along instead.

If we had taken the right route we would have run around 18km, mostly downhill, along the Toblerone defensive line. It is a narrow trail with Toblerones, pill boxes and more. It goes through the trees, by the river, and can be quite technical, with tree roots and rocks sticking out as well as other obstacles.

There are four types of ride. The first is a solo ride, where you ride where the wind takes you. The second is a solo ride where you draw a route on a GPS and then go out and explore. The third is a group ride where someone draws a map and you follow them, and the GPS track on the device you’re using for navigation.

The fourth is that you go for a ride where you know you want to explore a route, but you haven’t drawn it on a map, and you haven’t spent hours seeing whether it is gravel, tarmac, or other.

The cycling season is almost over and this year I barely cycled for three reasons. The first of these reasons is that during the cycling doldrums I took up running. The second reason is that the cycling group that I very often cycled with stopped organising such regular rides and the third reason is that after an intense summer of cycling last year I experienced a solitary winter.

Cycling is a great sport, and I really enjoy it, but to cycle with groups you need to be at the same level as they are. This means that you need to be very fit, because usually people who cycle as a group are exceedingly fit. The second reason is that cyclists often invest in light, aero wheels, and efficient group sets, and aerodynamic bikes, and light bikes. This means that for the same effort, on a 1000 CHF bike you’re going to exhaust yourself compared to the person on the 10,000 CHF bike. Cycling rewards financial investment. Scuba diving has the same issue but that’s another topic.

Last night, before going to sleep I had a thought. If the meeting time is 05:15 then I can’t wake at 4am as planned, I need to wake half an hour earlier, to be there in time for the warm up, and possibly earlier to pick up the running stuff.

In the end, after struggling to sleep properly I woke at 03:20 and decided that it was time to wake. I turned off the alarms and got ready. I then drove to Morges and when I got out of the car I was struck by how warm it felt. I had expected to be cold. I removed a layer and left it in the car. There was no need for it.

Recently I looked at Instagram and I noticed that almost all of the “content” is vertical videos. When I look at Facebook and TikTok I notice the same thing. Yesterday I noticed that Bluesky were promoting that they have ten minute videos. I think all of these people have forgotten that we’re using antisocial media to connect with others, not to watch long videos.

Of course, there is a very good reason for allowing longer and longer videos. Ads. If we watch a video that is several minutes long we are likely to stick around during the ad break to see the end of the video. The longer a video is, the more ads we see, and the more committed we are not to skip them, or force quit the app.

A few days ago I saw someone say that they will never use self-checkout because they don’t want to do someone else’s job, and they want to be paid for the act, if they were to self-checkout. In New York, recently, there was talk of a ten percent discount for people who checkout by themselves, rather than use a cash register.

For me, the beauty of self-checkout is that the time you spend in food shops is finding the food and other things, and then within thirty seconds paying for everything without queuing. At Décathlon as well self-checkout works extremely well. You pick up some stuff, dump it in the “bin” and it recognises the RFID codes, and shows how much you owe. Within a few more seconds you’ve paid, and you can leave. The more you do it the more fluid the action becomes.

Yesterday was an ordinary Monday. When I got to Colovray I was struck by how warm it felt. I thought that summer broke. It didn’t. The heat is still here. It was interesting to run with the social run group because I felt slow and less energetic. Eventually I checked and saw that we were running faster than usual for a social run. We were running at 05:50 rather than the usual 06:30 minute per kilometre rate.