Although the name of this blog post is bizarre it is inspired by the site of a fountain with a big block of ice, serving as a mirror to the tree, and sun, in front of me. The weather is still nicer, more springlike than it has been. More people are out on bikes cycling together. They are taking advantage of the good weather. In theory we could have rain in the next few days but the likelihood, as usual, is very low. An app said that it could be 90 percent certain, but I think it is 100 percent unlikely.
During the entirety of this pandemic I have hardly seen any rain, and if it did rain then it cleared up by the time I went for my afternoon walk. If we were not in a pandemic then I would love this weather, as it would mean going on adventures every single week. As we are in a pandemic it just means more people to avoid when out on my daily walks.
As things are going I think this spring and summer will be an unsafe one because those that should be working towards covid zero, are being complacent now that hospitalisations are declining. They are failing to take this type of findings seriously: Long Covid study finds abnormality in lungs that could explain breathlessness.
“They suggest that the efficiency of the lung in doing what it is meant to do – exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen – may be compromised, even though the structure of the lung appears normal,”
Several governments are looking at the low numbers in hospitals without spending any time discussing the prevalence and effects of Long Covid. They may be sleep walking into an entire generation of people with damaged lungs.
Solitude hurts, but after having a broken arm for one summer, I have learned that injuries are worse, than playing it safe. I will not expose myself to Covid-19 unless I am forced to.
At the moment I am walking with worn shoes, not because I do not have shoes that are not worn, but because I do not want to walk with shoes that have good tread at this time of year, due to the mud that gets stuck in them. When I walk with shoes with treads I collect mud during my walk, and I bring it up the stairs when I walk up, and I drop it off when I run back down. This leaves a mess, which, if I was a child, would be forgivable to some degree, but as an adult may be seen as immaturity.
The alternative is to take the lift, but to take the lift is to show a degree of laziness that I am not ready to show. Lifts are slow. I prefer staying healthy by running up and down stairs. The issue is that people in this building do not walk in mud so they leave non behind, but also that they take lifts, rather than stairs. This means that if I leave a trail of mud right to my door people know that it is me. There is a chance that the only people who know this, are the cleaner and me. I don’t know whether other people walk up stairs. I do not often cross people walking up or down the stairs.
Worn shoes do not collect mud, and if they do collect mud then an ordinary doormat can wipe them clean. With deep treads you need a screwdriver or some other tool to coax the mud out. I don’t want to do this too often because I feel that it damages the shoes and wears them out faster than if I just left the mud, to be knocked free as it dries.
We have a few more months of mud, so for a few more months I will have to be more cautious with the evidence, that I leave, after going for a walk.
Before you start playing with WP Rig make sure that you have installed Composer. Composer is required to use WP Rig during the build process. Composer itself requires that you have PHP on your machine. After that it should be easier to use. I also ran npm-install-peers because I kept getting error messages.
During the daily walk today I saw that the grass along the side of the road is dry and dead. It crunshes as you walk on it. As you look at other fields they are dry and probably crunchy too. We had some rain a few days ago, but within minutes of the rain stopping the landscape was dry again. We never get rain. I am impatient for a day of rain. I am impatient to look forward to good weather, rather than bad. It seems to be absurd to want rain in Switzerland. In winter skiers and snowboarders want snow.
I managed a 179 day reading streak with the kindle before I broke it. It wasn’t that I didn’t read, but that I didn’t read using the kindle. It’s frustrating to lose such a streak because it will take 179 days to get back to the same point. It makes no sense to reach for such a goal in the first place. These apps that get you to do things for an unlimited days in a row detract from the pleasure of doing certain things habitually. I have read a book every day for many months, probably years, but I use Audible, Kobo, physical books and the Kindle. I need to find an app to track reading streaks without it being locked in to one book store.
Today I felt like taking a break from studying Wordpress. I played with some code from a book I got for free on the Apple Bookstore. At this moment this code is consolidation. I will get to the challenging stuff later. I have read, from many sources, that it’s good to have examples of your work online when you learn to code.
There are two steps to take although I don’t think the order matters. The first is to create a new repisotory on There are two steps to take although I don’t think the order matters. The first is to create a new repository on WordPress. In my case it is Laughing Raclette. The name is ridiculous, but it’s available, and absurdity and humour are good. Once you have created a repository, it will provide you with help on how to connect your local directory. I connected it via Terminal in VS Code, to my online repository. The process was quick and simple.
When I work from books and courses I commit changes to git at the end of each individual lesson. If it is video based this will be at the end of the video. If I am working from a book it will be at the end of the chapter. I have the same break points as the course. We can then step through our work. We can revise a chapter that we are struggling to get to grips with.
If you writing code and you make a typo, then git and github are useful. With track changes you can compare your erroneous code with that of the instructor. Once you know what the error is you can move on with the course. In future you know to look out for that typo, or erroneous code.
The other benefit of studying code and commiting to Git and Github is that we develop the habits that will be required prThere is another benefit of studying code and committing to Git and Github. It is that we develop the required professional habits. We learn to use the active voice, and to write clear, and succinct descriptions.
It is when we study that we need to pick up good habits. It allows us to show the trial and errors, in some case, but also the rate of progress. The skills that we practice as we learn, have the time to become professional habits later on. We can also get feedback during the process.
Most shoes are designed to protect the heel with a cushion of air or material that absorbs heel strikes, before they are transmitted to the rest of the skeletal system. With barefoot shoes, especially the Vapor Glove 6 those heel strikes are not absorbed. You feel the force with which your heel is hitting the ground.
Winding Up
I tried three walks with the Vapor Gloves. I decided to try purchase and try the Trail Glove 7 as a result of my Vapor Glove experience. I like the Vapor Glove shoes but I was worried that if I used them too often, too quickly, I would end up with a fracture or pain. The Trail Gloves are great because I get the “barefoot shoe” experience, without the unforgiving heel strikes.
The Long Walk
Yesterday I went for an 11km walk with the Vapor Gloves and I felt fine for almost the entire walk. I felt fine until the last kilometre when I felt that the base of my foot was getting tired. Feet do not get any assistance with the Vapor Glove 6. After walking with them I can feel my leg muscles, my heels and I could feel the plantar fascia getting tired. Today I will rest my feet by wearing either normal shoes, or the trail glove shoes, for my daily walk.
Feeling Textures
Walking with barefoot shoes is interesting because you feel textures. When you walk on the painted lines you can feel the contour. You can feel the change in texture from tarmac to smooth paint. You can feel the edge.
When I was walking with the Trail Gloves two days ago I could feel a much softer than usual feel under my feet. The rubber felt really smooth compared to normal shoes. It felt like the bike tyres after they have had time to warm up. It was that same quality of smootheness. It’s enjoyable.
Trail Glove Wear
I have logged around 60km with the trail gloves and they are showing signs of wear. The tread is gone from the left heel as well as from the left toes. I have the same wear pattern on normal shoes. It will be interesting to see if I get a similar wear pattern on the Vapor Gloves.
In Summary
I was reading a book where I read that normal shoes are like casts. Our shoes are encased and move minimally. As a result of this immobility our feet become weak. Our weak feet affect our knees, our hips and the rest of our body. By wearing shoes with a raised heel we are walking uphill even when we are walking downhill. With barefoot shoes we are dumping all of the assistance provided by normal shoes, and we are re-learning to walk as if we were barefoot. That’s why it’s meant to be done incrementally, to avoid injury. So far I have enjoyed the experience.
I would like to see more climbing documentaries where there is a timelapse of people making their way up. They look like ants rather than humans as a result. That part is 2 minutes and 20 seconds in.
The first time I climbed up to La Barillette on a bike it took me two and a half hours. This time it took one hour and sixteen minutes. I was going so slowly that I had to work to keep the bike upright. Since then I have gone from a mountain bike with tyres that weren’t pumped enough and soft suspension to the same bike with slick tires, hardened suspension and higher pressure in the tyres. I then swapped that bike two or three years later and tried the same climb. I struggled with the road bike as well. I had to stop at least two or three times. I also found that clipped in pedals on such steep gradients are a hindrance because you can’t stop until the flatter bits.
This time I wore normal shoes and I set off from around Nyon. I cycled up to the start of the climb and i just started climbing. Above Cheserex I already had to stand on the bike to get enough thrust, then sit down, and then repeat. As I went up I saw two or three groups. One group set off just as I was getting to them and the second stopped where the first had been.
I like having a group in front of me. The group in front gives me a goal. It gives me a pace. I want at the minimum to keep up with them and ideally to overtake them. The person I used for pacing gave up within the first four to six kilometres. I then continued at my own pace as the other people were now a long distance away.
As I go up this hill I often daydream and my mind wanders to something completely different. It’s the closest I’d get to meditation. You’re making a physical effort but the body is so used to it that the mind has time to think of other things. I don’t remember what I was daydreaming about.
I’m used to doing this climb in the heat of summer when it’s 37°c or more. This time it was no more than 20 or so. I didn’t need to take two litres of water with me but I would have been happy with a rain coat and a third layer. The reason for this is that the beautiful weather I set off in turned overcast and cold.
As I got closer to the top I could feel the temperature begin to drop, and i felt the need to close the zips, to preserve heat. I even thought of putting my spare layer on. I continued.
When I set off you could see the top. By the time I got back down this is what it looked like.
When you’re climbing you know what your previous times were and during this time I got to a certain point where i saw that I was going to beat my previous best times by a nice margin so it encouraged me to keep going, but also not to stop and rest, and not to wait for two cars to figure out how to pass each other. I cycled through the grass to overtake them.
When I finally got to the top I saw people get out of their cars, smoke cigarettes and talk loudly. I had two Balistos and then headed back down. The view was so bad that I didn’t take any pictures.
As much as you think you suffer during the way up, which I didn’t this time, going down is the difficult bit. When you’re going back down you’re cold and you’re not doing much. You’re letting gravity undo the work that you just spent an hour doing.
My tyres have over 4000km in them so as i went down the hill I was slower than I needed to be. The surface was also wet and therefore could be slippy. I was holding the brakes for a good portion of the descent, to such an extent that I thought this was a good finger strengthening exercise.
Just before I got to the pond my rear tyre suffered a puncture. I can see two marks where I think a thorn or some other object punctured the tyre and deflated it within seconds. It didn’t matter as I had a spare tyre with me.
This winter I changed tyres frequently for the indoor trainer so the process has become automatic. What I especially enjoyed about changing a tyre on the side of a mountain slope is that you don’t have to worry about getting the floor dirty. Within minutes the tyre was changed and I could continue the descent.
This ride is unique because the night before I decided to do this climb we were discussing a via ferrata with two friends but they don’t have the equipment. The compromise was going to climb indoors but I didn’t feel like doing that because 1. the weather was nice and because 2. there are free sports to be enjoyed. I woke up that morning, opened the blinds and because of what a beautiful and warm day I saw it would be I decided to go for a bike ride and enjoy it. It felt so good to get on the bike after several days, or even weeks of not riding.
I was fully within the moment yesterday. I profited from the good weather, I set a goal and I achieved it, and I lived in the now, rather than later. This is rare for me. This ride, despite it’s physical nature, was relaxing.
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