On Blogging and a Good Training Session

Normally I don’t like interval training because I don’t like pushing myself too hard. I like, instead, to work on endurance. I’m fine with a 23km hike with 1200m of climbing and I’m okay with a 5 to 8km social run but I don’t like interval training. Specifically I don’t like pushing myself too hard.

Having said this, yesterday I had a high energy lunch with beef and Spätzli which provided a good energetic base for my evening social run. The goal was very easy. The aim was twelve one minute intervals at 10k pace with a minute of recovery between each hard interval.

I was lapped twice by the fastest, but I stayed towards the front of the group running at 4'15’’ per kilometre or so consistently, although I ramped upwards during the interval, accelerating rather than hitting my maximum speed and then holding it. Remember, these were meant to be 10k pace intervals, not faster. I pushed myself, but I didn’t need to.

The reward for this was to be told that I’m productive, once more, by Garmin.

My running habit is being noticed by TikTok, Facebook and Instagram so I am seeing more content by runners. I also notice that recommendations for people to follow include people that I run or cycle with so Strava, Garmin and more seem to be feeding into other platforms.

People I know in person keep their Strava and Instagram profiles private because they are mid to late adopters. They came to these platforms when conversation and friendships were a thing of the past.

Blogs are also a thing of the past. They require a lot of time, energy and thought, so people prefer to record running inspired reels and sharing those. People no longer browse the web, so people stick to the web portals like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, rather than navigating from site to site.

I could shift towards generating video content for reels but I prefer not to. Blogging might be a waste of time, but so is antisocial media. We scroll, and scroll and scroll, but in the end reels are no more engaging than watching broadcast television for hours and hours.

If I spend an hour or two scrolling social media, I benefit others, through their view counts increasing, but my social network is as small as if I had spent an hour or two writing. That’s why it makes sense to run, and blog, and update Strava.

The follow cost on Strava involved social runs, hikes and bike rides. On antisocial media it required me procrastinating by watching low value content mindlessly.

That’s why blogging makes more sense than creating reels. Watching content that is now just time wasting doesn’t make sense, so creating videos that waste other peoples’ time doesn’t either.

I see that my blog posts can be read within 30 seconds, so the cost, to skim readers is much lower. I could pivot to write about running rather than other topics.