Today it was meant to rain for the entire day but there was a brief window which it stopped raining so I went for a walk. I expected not to be rained on but within minutes I could feel a small spray of water falling on me. I walked anyway. It was nothing to worry about. I did the usual walk and although groups of people were walking they were easy to avoid. The rivers are nice and full today so rain is having an effect. Rain has melted the snow that had covered the landscape and filled the rivers. In some places there are traces that the water is slightly polluted.
I am listening to The Age of Wood as I walk. I am struggling to get into it. I did read about the Chemin De La Mature and that does sound like an interesting place to visit. It is a path cut through the rock. They didn’t cut through the rock from top to bottom though. They cut through it horizontaly. It looks like an interesting experience to walk along that path. In some images it looks narrow, but in others it looks comfortable to walk along. I need to find more information about the GR-10 walking route, to see whether it would be interesting to see the larger context.
I tracked the walk the usual way, with a gps watch, but I also tracked it with the Core-S4 and so far the results are good. I have tracked two walks over two days, without charging between the two walks and the phone is still fine. I don’t need to charge it every day. I like this. I like that I have a watch that I charge once a week or less, and a phone that I don’t need to charge every evening. This means that I could travel away for a weekend carrying less weight. I could go without chargers for the first time in years.
We will see what I play with tomorrow.
In about 23 hours I’m going to be ready both physically and mentally for a trip to the city of Malmo in Sweden. There I expect to find a city I have already been to twice in the past. It is there that I may find a cold wind, blankets in the piccolina Piazza… Lilla Torg and enjoy pear cider.
I take the tube towards central London and the bus from there to Stansted. I board a plane that will fly for around 1hr and 20 minutes, land in Copenhague, get to the train station, catch the Oresund train across to the city of Malmo and look at the big waves in the sea below the tracks. It’s a short enough trip.
I haven’t spent more than five weeks at a time in the same place since the beginning of the academic year. I love traveling and seeing other countries and their cultures. It may be the last time I drop by for cheap since the friend will be moving from Sweden within a short amount of time.
Three nights in Sverige
It may be time for me to learn some Swedish other than “what are you doing” or “you are cute” and learn more relevant sentences.
Thursday will make these decisions for me.
Flowing Water РA visual experiment is a simple one minute video. The first images were filmed at the Arboretum in the Jura and the timelapses show clouds playing above the Jura near La D̫le. La D̫le is where the doppler radar is located. That radar shows rainfall and precipitation so that air traffic controllers can advise pilots of weather conditions.
With the amount of rain that has fallen over the last six or more weeks every river is full of water. As a result of this they are flowing fast and debris can be seen. When rivers flow fast they are fun to watch. The next step would be to capture waterfalls over a period of minutes or hours. If we stopped recording just as the rain stopped we might get interesting results. The peak wouldn’t appear until soon after the rain stopped.
I was lucky with these clouds because they moved quickly from one side of the screen to the other. They also formed and dispersed quickly. As a result I could set the interval to take images every few seconds. I could quickly see the result and adjust. When I filmed the clouds I filmed the ground and the trees as they came in and out of the shadow of clouds, I filmed a tighter shot where you could see the transmission mast and then I pointed to the sky and tried to capture the movement of clouds with blue sky as a backdrop. Some moments are fun to watch.
During the 30,000 step walk at the Creux Du Van on Sunday I was wearing the Xero Xcursion shoes. For almost the entire walk they felt comfortalbe. These are light, thin soled shoes that are minimal. This means that you feel more of the ground, and the soles will take the shape of the floor beneath your feet. Step on a root and you will have your toes putting pressure and the rest of the foot adapting around the route.
With most barefoot shoes I feel the heel smash into the ground so I don’t like wearing them because I don’t like harming myself incidentally. With the Trail Glove Seven and the Xero Xcursion shoes I can walk normally and not feel my heel smashing into the floor with every step. These shoes were fine for the walk up. I didn’t feel any regret in wearing them. On the flat part I didn’t feel any regret either.
I walked through several muddy parts without caring because I knew that by the time I got back to the care the mud would have dried up and fallen off. It fell off during the walk down so when I did check for mud there was none. The other thing that surprised me is that when I walked in muddy patches water did not make its way into the shoes so my feet remained dry. Mud is not the same as heavy rain. These shoes are fine in mud.
It’s on the way down the hill that I noticed slight discomfort. It wasn’t serious discomfort. I could just feel my feet sliding and putting pressure on the inside of the shoe. I have no blisters after the fact so it was just a sentiment. I might wear proper hiking socks just to be safe.
I have been wearing “barefoot shoes for months by now so my walking style has adapted to “being barefoot” with the Trail Gloves. Vapor Gloves, Trail Glove six and the Merrel barefoot shoes I have are not comfortable for long walks. I only find the Trail Glove 7 and Xero Xcursion shoes comfortable. Experiment with shorter walks and normal walks, before doing a 16km hike.
The advantage of minimal/barefoot shoes is that they’re very light. They are not rigid so your foot can adapt to the ground beneath with ease, rather than balancing. For the most part they were so comfortable that I forgot that I wore them. The fact that I could descend with such ease is good. This was a proper test. 30,000 steps and with 900 meters of climbing and 860 meters of descent. I didn’t push through snow because I wasn’t worried about mud. If I had walked in snow I probably would have wet my socks. That’s why I had a spare pair in the car, in case. I would hike again in the Xero shoes.
Today I asked Google Bard whether I should wear two watches at a time and it told me not to. Specifically it told me not to wear a Garmin watch, and a Suunto watch at the same time as they may interferer with each other and more. Before the Apple Watch I only wore one watch at time. I wore the Suunto Spartan watch. When I got the Apple Watch I started to wear two watches at a time because they feed two different databases and the data is not shared from one to the other.
Recently, I noticed that Sports Tracker plays very nicely with the Apple Watch so it tempted me to play with Suunto again, but Suunto does not play nicely with the Apple Fitness App. Neither the Apple Watch nor the Garmin watch play nicely with each other. The result is that if you want data from Suunto, and Garmin, and Apple, you need to wear three watches, for the three apps. Since I have two wrists I can feed two services at once. We are forced either to wear two or three watches, or give up on collecting data for one service.
When asked whether I should wear a Suunto and a Garmin Google Bard feels that I should pick just one and stick with it. If I ask it how many people wear two watches it tells me:
“There is no definitive answer to this question, as it is difficult to track how many people wear two watches. However, anecdotally, it seems that the number of people who wear two watches is increasing.”
If you are considering wearing two watches, I recommend trying it out and seeing how you feel. There is no harm in experimenting, and you may find that you like it more than you thought you would.
I am not wearing two watches because I like wearing two watches. I am wearing two watches because Garmin and Apple want to force me to wear their devices in order to get data so that I can use their apps. With Sports Tracker, and the Apple watch I can track what I do via the Suunto App and via the Suunto App, I can update Sports tracker and Apple, but not the fitness App.
The other reason for which I want to reduce the number of watches I wear, down to one, is that Suunto and Apple Fitness data clash, so after a one and a half hour walk the Apple Fitness app says that I have burned one to two hundred calories rather than the 500+ that both fitness trackers agree with. I look eccentric for nothing if I wear the Suunto watch and the Apple watch together.
As I wrote this blog post I asked Google Bard a number of questions. In so doing I learned that it discourages you from wearing two different brand watches at the same time due to possible interference and more. If you want advice about which to pick though, it will provide you with what makes them different from each other. Google Bard will provide you with a side by side comparison of the key feature differences between two or more watches.
The Suunto 5 Peak will become my primary watch. The Garmin Etrex SE can track my walks and hikes, and the Garmin Explore device can track my bike rides. It’s amusing that in all of this thought and consideration I don’t think of Strava, where all of this data is collected anyway. I lost interest in Strava years ago, when I read about venture capitalists investing millions, because at that point the site stopped being on a human level.
Wearing one watch at a time is fine.
