Feeding the Seagulls
A woman feeding seagulls by the sea.
The Swiss travel an average of 30 kilometres per day in their cars, according to a new survey shared by the Radio Television Suisse.
I walk 14 to twenty kilometres per day, and if I go for a bike ride I travel 30 kilometres. I use the car twice a week, for food shopping and that’s mainly because of the 15 minute rule for refrigerated food, rather than laziness. During the pandemic I would do food shopping with the car but pick up the drinks by going for a walk. It’s a one hour trip to the shops and back for me.
My single biggest frustration with walking as I do in Switzerland is the network of roads that lead from everywhere to everywhere, with no pedestrian paths for walkers or cyclists. Some villages and streets are designed for cars, with no pedestrian option. No pavement, no cycle path. No limit to 20 km/h. It’s assumed that people will use the car, rather than walk. This is astounding.
When I drive I show respect for walkers and cyclists. I slow down to pass them, on narrow roads, and on wide roads I go to the opposite side of the road to pass cyclists and walkers. To reduce the need for cars people need to be able to get from their homes to walks and cycling lanes, without risking dangerous drivers. For five years I have walked more than driven. For five years I have seen how cars behave with. pedestrians and cyclists. For five years the toxic behaviour has encouraged me to drive with humanity, but also to desire a switch away from cars. We should not automatically get into a car to do things. We should automatically get our walking shoes on, or get on our bikes.
“Il y a un énorme travail à faire. C’est une question d’horaire, pour qu’on puisse se déplacer le soir et le week-end dans les heures creuses. C’est aussi une question de destinations: il faut que les transports publics soient facilités à destination des régions touristiques”
In brief, Vincent Kaufman says that public transport needs to be spread across the day, not just at peak times, but also that transport needs to be later in the evening, when people who want to go out socialising need to have transport. That’s what I have said for years, or even decades. We see how London makes it easy to get around even at night, whether with tubes until midnight or later, now, or night buses.
In the video interview he also speaks about how the Swiss transport network is geared towards commuters rather than pleasure seekers. I find this both paradoxical and ironic, since so many adverts encourage people to take public transport. Having said that, transport is to the tourist traps, rather than areas of unique and outstanding beauty, which is why I suffered so much, without a car one summer, and without the ability to drive a second summer. That’s why I pivoted to local walks and bike rides.
If there is an alternative to the car people will use it. If the alternative to cars is cheaper, then people will use it. I have happily explored every walk and bike route from Geneva, and even Yvoire to the West, and Lausanne to the East. I think that I know almost every road, via biking. For walking I think I know most paths within a two hour walking range of my current home. I used to go to the mountains every weekend, like described in the article, but with the pandemic, job insecurity, a broken arm and a summer without the car I have learned to walk and cycle.
My two frustrations are, first, that dog walkers don’t keep their dogs on leashes, so at least six times I have been attacked by dogs. People love to say “If you’re not afraid of a dog then it won’t attack”, that’s great, but then I am being attacked, precisely because I am scared, which is why I am scared in the first place. A few days ago I thought that my fear of being bitten would be realised but I had the right response. Principally I froze.
The second frustration is that cars do not respect cyclists and pedestrians. Every single day cars drive too fast by me. When I drive by people I either give them space, if there is space, or I overtake pedestrians at slightly more than walking pace.
And finally
I went from using the car seven days a week, for almost anything, to using the car just twice a week, and only because I need it for shopping. I have gone from driving one or two hundred kilometres a weekend, and 50-60km a day, to zero. I am the change they want to see.
I tracked the run and walk with the Garmin Instinct Solar. It is very easy to use while wearing gloves. You can stop the activity, change sport, start the activity, do the second sport, and then stop the tracking of the second sport, without taking off your gloves. Now that we’re in the cold part of Autumn this is useful. On the flipside anytime the clouds hide the sun this watch is unable to recharge itself. Despite this the battery life is still good. When fully charged it displays 27 days, but it loses around two or three days of charge per day with a tracked activity. This is still excellent. The Apple watch needs to be charged every single day. It is a watch that you can wear in the classic style of wearing a watch, i.e. keep it on for days or weeks at a time.
Today I tried running two kilometres and a walk home. In the process I found that wearing an FFP2 mask did not hinder my breathing in the least. I only ran for two kilometres because I want to keep from pushing my knees too far. I don’t like finishing a run, barely able to walk. I have made that mistake, and I will avoid making it, if I can.
Running with the mask didn’t hinder my breathing at all. I could breath in, and I could breath out, and I never felt that it was getting in the way. This is due to two reasons. The first is that we’re over 20 months into this pandemic and we’re used to how masks feel and behave. The second reason is simply that it is cold. Wearing a mask provides a bubble of heated air, to prevent us from breathing cold air, or feeling cold air on our faces. I was also worried that if I took off the mask my face would feel cold. This means that I wore the mask for at least an hour. Nothing by some standards, but not bad, in the middle of the countryside with few or no people around.
Today I went for a 12km walk over two hours in 26°c heat. According to the Suunto 5 Peak I have depleted my resources. I am at just three percent now. I need a proper night of sleep and some rest to recover.
According to the Suunto app I am in productive training and my fitness is increasing, but in the process my form is declining. I am, at least theoretically overtraining. This is not unusual for me. I walk, cycle or run every single day. It has been my routine for years.
What is not routine is getting up at 6 or 7, to do sports in the morning. Usually I do it in the afternoon, after a productive morning. I prefer to study and blog, before I go for my daily walk, bike ride or run. I prefer to be fresh, when I need to think, and procrastinate once my focus is gone.
Earlier I noticed that I could change which metric I was looking at, so I chose to look at steps rather than calories burned. I am currently losing patience with the Apple Watch and Apple Fitness App. The phone knows how many steps I have taken, and yet it insists on showing the data from the Apple Watch.
There was a time when we would be desperate for good weather so that we could do things. Now I want the opposite. I’m tired of the never-ending sunshine and never having an excuse to take a rest day. If the weather was bad then I could think “tomorrow I’m staying in.
The weather forecasst for the rest of the forseeable future is sunny and warm, and I’m tired of it always being sunny. I never exptected that I would want rain.
The landscape desperately needs rain. It rains, but so little that the ground doesn’t soften enough to absorb the rain, so we’re back to walking on dirt, rather than mud. In the last two or three months, maybe even longer, I have had to clean my shoes of mud twice.
I miss the rain. I miss the excuse to stay in and study. When the weather never changes, rain becomes a treat. I never expected that I would want rain
I wrote this post a day early because tomorrow morning I’ll be procrastinating rather than studying.
For three hundred and sixty two days I have struggled to find a topic to write about. In that time I have, more than once, felt, during my walk, that I had a great idea for the next day, only to deflate the next morning.
Yesterday as I was running I considered writing about the On CloudNeo Shoes. They’re shoes that you pay for, monthly, rather than weekly, and you can get them replaced every 90 days. If you browse to the site you will see a count down for when to get them replaced.
They started being so clean and white that I didn’t like having such obviously new shoes on my feet. I don’t like when clothes are so obviously new. I prefer them to have a little more character.
Or maybe I just prefer darker colours on my feet. Light grey shoes are fine. The thing about white shoes, in rainy weather, is that they quickly get caked in mud. Once they’re muddy the’re less obviously new, so they’re more comfortable to run in.
The CloudNeo are interesting for two reasons. The first is that they enable you to get running shoes at a monthly cost, and the faster you wear them out, the better the deal you get. The other advantage is that running shoes are often 200-300 francs per pair. That’s a lot to pay for shoes, that, in the end you don’t find comfortable.
Years ago I bought expensive hiking shoes, and I used them in the arctic circle, at first, before using them for hikes, via ferrata and climbing for years to come. That’s right, years. I then bought another pair of hiking boots and they lasted days, or weeks. It’s not the boots that failed. It’s that they were too tight around my ankles and I felt as if my ankles would break if I continued to wear them.
I then bought a cheap pair from Decathlon and these are nice and comfortable. The point is that expensive shoes can just as easily be fantastic, as cheap shoes, so it’s worth trying cheap shoes first.
When you get the Cloud Neo shoes they come in a white bag with velcro. You open the velcro, pull out the shoes, and wear them indoors for a bit, to see how they feel. This is because you have 30 days to test these shoes before you’re commited for six months. If you try them outdoors and find they’re uncomfortable then they’ll be dirty and will be recycled, rather than sent to someone else.
When I determined that they were comfortable, walking around indoors, I tried running with them, and they felt okay so I kept them. I’ve been with them for several runs now and they’re fine. My knees don’t hurt as I run with them.
I did notice with normal shoes, after wearing barefoot shoes, that my ankles tend to roll more, especially on rough surfaces. I don’t know whether it’s because the shoes are not stable, or because I lost the habit of wearing normal shoes. In either case I have had to relearn to run, in normal shoes, on uneven surfaces.
I like a little more rigidity in the back. I often find that my heel folds the back of the shoe as I put them on. Other than that I like the shoe laces and I like that they’re light. They’re not weatherproof but they’re so light that if they do get wet it doesn’t matter because they dry without any concious effort.
The base of the shoes has very basic grip, so if the ground is slippery you’ll know. Some people might see that as a drawback but I see this as an advantage. If you go running through mud, for any reason it takes seconds to clear mud away from the shoes, rather than minutes. Last year I regularly spent 10-20 minutes after every walk clearing the mud from my shoes. With these shoes I don’t need to.
They are aimed at road runners and dry trail running, not muddy or uneven surface running. It’s on roads that you want good padding so they’re well suited to various types of road running.
After 90 days, or when you’ve worn them through, within six months, you can get them replaced and get brand new recycled shoes and start again.
These shoes are made from bio-based resources and the expectation is that you will recycle them every three to six months. They say “You don’t own these shoes, you just use them for a bit, and then return them.
When you get the shoes they come in a white bag with a velcro fastening. Within this bag you have the shoes, but you also have the return address for the shoes. You can send the shoes back, and a new pair will be sent to you.
With conventional shoes you wear them, and once they’re worn out you attempt to get them recycled but they’re counted as bulky recycling so I don’t know what happens to them. With these shoes they’re sent back to their home, they are shredded, cleaned, and then turned into new shoes.
An added bonus to having shoes that are made from “bio-based resources” is that as they get worn down through use, their remains are not harmful to the environment. Mine will, in theory, be ready for recycling in over 65 days from now.
If you replace these shoes every three months then they come to about 105 CHF. If you replace them after six months they come to 210 CHF. The faster you wear through a pair of shoes, the more affordable the plan is, but conversely, the worse your habit is for the environment, since shoes require energy to be recycled and reused.
Although they are sold as running shoes I wear them for running and walking. I usually run for a set distance and once I have finished the run I walk. These shoes are okay for both but I don’t like these shoes like I like the Merrel trail glove 7 shoes. If I had this deal for Merrel Trail Glove 7 then I would be very happy. I have been using Merrel shoes for years and I like them, especially since some of them are so cheap, but I wear them out too fast. With a subscription model I wouldn’t worry about how fast I wear them out because I would get a new pair when I needed it.
As I write this I believe that a good niche market for this would be children, because children grow out of shoes, before they even wear them out. By renting children shoes you would ensure that children always get new shoes when required.
The moment when I don’t like these shoes is when I am walking in the grass to avoid being run over by a car driver who doesn’t slow down or take precautions when seeing pedestrians by the side of the road. I feel my feet and ankles twisting at unsafe angles. That’s why I walk on agricultural roads where I know there are very few cars.
Running shoes are usually expensive, so paying monthly to spread the cost makes sense, especially if they are replaced every three months. If they’re replaced every six months then they’re much more expensive and the deal is less interesting. You have one month, tho choose to keep the shoes, and then you’re committed for six months, before you can terminate the contract. There is a huge “cancel plan” button, should you decide to cancel the plan.
These shoes fill a niche. They fill the niche of the person who runs 600 kilometres every three to six months and wants their shoes to be recycled, and turned into new shoes. It fills the niche of the person who wears through shoes at a rapid rate. I do, so such a deal is interesting for me, especially if I burn through 600km per three months.
At a rate of 8km per day it would take 75 days to walk/run 600km. This puts me comfortably within the 90 day recycling window.
There is a hill that is steep. You often see people struggle up it, trying to beat their own records and in so doing get knackered by the top. Yesterday I went up such a hill and I felt low on energy so I didn’t bother to sprint. I just focued on getting up to the top. As I went I saw a group of runners running down towards me and I wanted to take a picture but I was too slow so I took a picture of my shadow as I cycled instead.
I showed the bison road to someone else. I think it would be a good place to walk or cycle, if people have the motivation, and the range.