Richard's blog

Tag: sports

  • The Desire to Participate

    The Desire to Participate

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I saw that there is a hike taking place nearby. I would have really liked to join it but I would have been participant eleven with a limit of ten people. I wanted to participate because it would have required walking to Nyon, and taking the train de St Cergue to St Cergue and then walking for a few hours, before taking the train back down and walking home. Both my carbon footprint and my travel time would have been small and the environment would have benefited.

    As I write this it isn’t that I don’t have a social thing to do this afternoon. I will go for a bike ride. I suspect that my bike really needs a service. I suspect that the rear wheel needs to be taken apart and cleaned so that the ball barings are as efficient as when they were new.

    Riding with slow people, this doesn’t matter, but this afternoon will be a hard ride. I will be slowed down, not by the lack of power in my legs, but the loss of efficiency in the bike. That’s why a walk would have been better.

    If things had gone to plan yesterday afternoon I would have swapped the old bike with the new bike, at least for this ride, before leaving the old bike for a service. It hasn’t been serviced in years and now it’s starting to show.

    I considered sneaking onto the activity. I could easily have walked to Nyon, and accidentally crossed paths with that group and joined in, under the radar. If I had had no backup plan I would have tried that, but since I knew about the bike ride for weeks I had no valid reason to "break rules". If I had been told "no, go away" I could have, with ease.

    The Weather

    Yesterday was beautiful and sunny but cold and today is overcast and bland, so by not going on the walk I am not missing beautiful weather. The weather is good, up above, but it will be cold. At this time of year you get the thermal inversion by going to the mountains.

    And Finally

    My desire for that walk was based on it being local. I don’t know the participants and according to recent years whether I socialise or not, my solitude does not change.

    By going for the bike ride, as planned weeks ago I am breaking new ground, personally. I’m used to riding when it’s sunny and warm but I am not used to riding when it is barely above freezing. If I am not too uncomfortable during this afternoon’s ride, then I will have opened the door to winter cycling in cold weather.

  • Garmin and Other Services

    Garmin and Other Services

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    Yesterday I wore the Suunto Peak 5 alongside the Apple Watch SE rather than the Apple Watch SE and Garmin device as I usually would. The reason for this is that I want to continue playing with Suunto devices, and I’d like to wean myself off of the Apple Watch, for at least a week or two.

    In the process of doing this I was reminded that although the Apple watch is pivotal within the iOS app ecosystem Garmin is very well connected with other services. I share Garmin data with 11 services. These services are Adidas Running, AllTrails, Asics runkeeper, Decathlon (added today), komoot, Nike, Ride with GPS, Strava, TrainAsOne, Walk the Distance and Zwift.

    Although connected I use Zwift, TrainAsOne and other apps much less than I used to. The point is that we often think "I need to keep wearing the Apple watch because of all the apps that feed off it, which although true to some degree, is no less true about Garmin and the apps that it can feed with data.

    Yesterday, by not wearing the Garmin watch 11 services got no data about my walks into and out of Geneva and Nyon yesterday. To some degree Garmin is more central to my fitness journey than the Apple watch.

    Who Cares?

    I wear an Apple watch, and I would like to stop wearing it. I don’t because of all the connected services. At the same time, as I noticed yesterday and this morning, 11 servies get their data from my Garmin data, not the Apple watch. In light of this the Garmin device is more integral than the Apple watch.

    And Finally

    The Suunto Peak 5 currently thinks that my fitness age is 55 so I want to wear it when doing sports, to see my fitness age descend back down to 25, as it indicated a year or two ago. It’s silly, but I feel this compulsion. For that to work I should go on an endurance bike ride for several hours but I don’t want to tire myself ahead of friday’s 5:30 run.

  • On Rest Days

    On Rest Days

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Doing the Via Ferrata(VF) on Sunday, and then hiking down was physical. For a start, I was doing a Via Ferrata, something that I have done once, before, within the last six or seven years. The hike down was also quite physical. Combined the VF and the hike tired me.

    ## 62 Hours of Rest

    According to Sportstracker I needed to give myself 62 hours to recover from the huge effort. It’s over 400 minutes of exercise, of which some of it was walking at up to 1900m for the first time in years. I could feel that I was out of breath where I usually did not struggle.

    The walk down from the top is also physical. It’s two hours of walking on a rough surface, with the knees taking a lot of abuse. For the first time in years I could feel that my left knee had enough, and wanted a rest.

    That’s what yesterday was about. Yesterday my walk lasted just half an hour. Normally I would walk for an hour or two but I could feel that my left foot, and the mobile part around the toes needed a rest. It’s good to rest, especially after a physical day.

    ## Setting Limits

    I skipped the VF two or three weeks ago because I was worried about my left foot. It was fine during this VF so I think it’s healed. Yesterday morning, however, I could feel that it needed a rest, so I considered not going for a walk at all. I went shopping, but I wasn’t going to have an afternoon walk. In the end I did and the foot felt okay. I don’t want to push too far, and to be stuck having another socially isolated summer, due to an injury.

    ## And Finally

    Some people would have gone to the hospital, to get an x-ray and make sure that everything was fine. I didn’t. That’s why I need to keep an eye on the injury, to make sure that it is getting better, and to set more conservative recovery regimes, until it feels normal again.

    I will go for an easy hike this weekend.

  • The Pleasure of Meetups

    The Pleasure of Meetups

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    On Friday I organised a Via Ferrata at the Via Ferrata du Moléson and it went well. I met new people including people that were not part of the group. The weather was cool so there was no risk of heat stroke or dehydration.

    What made this VF so relaxed for me, is that I was behind someone who was afraid, so I continued at a relaxed pace behind. It gave me time to look at the landscape, to take pictures and to speak with someone who was stuck behind us. I wasn’t in a rush, and luckily neither was the person behind.

    The thing about VF is that it’s not always easy to converse because it might be hard for people to hear each other. I found a good spot, turned around and looked at the landscape, looked at the details, tried to recognise places. At one point a plane flew by us, and then a glider flew by.

    It’s the stop for a snack at the top and the hike down that provided to the value of this event. I spent the climb slightly isolated from the group. I could have stayed close but I observed the safety rule. Stay one or two clips behind the person ahead of you in case they fall. I also followed the rule of waiting patiently where I could, with ease.

    Speaking and snacking at the top was good, but so was the hike down. This is a VF where you can take the Funiculaire to Plan Francey and then do the VF, and then take the telecabine back down, and the train back down. This is usually a shame, because by doing that you cut the experience short. The télécabine and Funicaire cut the trip down to just half an hour.

    By walking down you get two and a half hours to three hours to chat with various people, to get to know about them, what they do, what they enjoy and more. I think that this added tremendous value to the day. I think that it’s good to be in the moment.

    ## And Finally

    From the moment I broke my arm, through the pandemic years to recently I really missed doing group activities, either through Globals or meetup or other sites. One of the things I missed is that I didn’t see anything being organised, in the first place, so I couldn’t join in.

    Now that COVID denialism is endemic, people like me have had no choice to just compromise, and do things in groups again. Luckily everything I enjoy doing is outdoors. Part of my reason for wanting to walk down, rather than take the télécabine is that I didn’t want to be enclosed in a small space with others.

    I think that walking down was the right choice anyway, because by walking down we had a chance to talk with everyone. Sometimes you do a VF, and if you’re in the wrong place you’re isolated. By throwing in the hike you get to speak to everyone.

    Yesterday was a good day, and I’m happy I organised it.

  • Mischievous Shoelaces

    Mischievous Shoelaces

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    Today I went for a run earlier than usual and had to deal with mischievous shoelaces. They decided to come undone at least three times during the first three kilometres before I finally got them to behave.

    I went for a run earlier than usual because rain is forecast for this afternoon and if I go after lunch then I get rained on. I prefer not to run in the rain, if I can avoid it.

    It rained anyway, but light rain. The type that doesn’t soak your clothes and you down to the bone. It was rain that is noticed, but doesn’t stick around. It evaporates by the time you’re done with the run.

    Today’s run was meant to be a 5.6km run and I did run most of the distance, except for the three stops to retie shoe laces, and a short walk when I felt I didn’t have much energy after yet another climb. A run that should have taken half an hour took fourty minutes. I did not feel as energetic as sometimes and this wasn’t helped by having to stop and start a few times.

    I’m on week 11 of 12 of this training program so when next week is done I will be able to try another training program. The aim will still be 5k, but with a better time.

    And Finally

    I am trying to develop a running habit but I still don’t enjoy it. I still struggle to run the required distance. With cycling I struggle to go at a certain speed, or over a specific distance but I don’t find it as hard. Walking comes naturally to me. I don’t struggle. Walking and cycling feel natural. I haven’t reached that, with cycling. The day that I can daydream whilst running is the day that I will have achieved my goal.

  • Getting Back Into Running

    Getting Back Into Running

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    I am getting back into running at the moment. I have run several times recently, irregularly enough not to feel pain in my knees or other articulations so this is a good sign. The advantage of running, over other sports, is that it’s easy to catch a bus, car, train, parapente or other form of transport and start running. The second advantage is that it is twice as fast as walking.

    Six or seven years ago I ran regularly. I kept pushing until I reached over 10 kilometres in a run but I had to stop because I got pain in my legs that was so bad I sometimes questioned how I would get back. It’s not that I couldn’t run faster, or further, but that I didn’t reach training plateaus, and then improve speed and stamina. If I achieved A I went for B, and from B to C, without ever giving my body time to strengthen and adapt. That’s why I ended up injured, and why I paid the price for several years.

    This time I sometimes ran only until the first feeling of pain and stopped. By doing this a few times I allowed my body time to be pushed right next to the limit, without overdoing it. As a result of this more gentle and understanding training regime I got back to running for seven minutes, and walking for three minutes, without feeling any pain.

    The next workout will be seven kilometres of running and one minute of walking three times. I could try tomorrow, or Saturday. I think it’s better to do this workout on Sunday. This gives my body time to adapt to running, and recover. I want it to recover. I don’t want my progress to be blocked because I was too greedy to allow my body time to adapt.

    Running is a good winter time sport because you can do it in the mud, on the side of roads, through fields or in other locations. You can also dress quite normally, compared to cycling and other sports. It is also flexible gradient wise, unlike rollerblading, where you need to learn to stop on steep descents in a landscape like this one.

    And Finally

    My goal is to run five kilometres, first, and then to keep running five kilometres, but faster, without pushing myself beyond a threshold. Eventually I may run further but I think I would run the routes that I usually walk. When the cycling season comes back I should be able to resume cycling in good shape.

  • Another Pandemic Weekend Without Plans

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Normally at this time of year, as the snow melts and the temperatures increase the opportunity for spring and summer sports returns. These sports are via ferrata, outdoor climbing, hiking and more. This year is different because although today is Friday no plans have been made for the next two days. There is a excellent chance that I will either hike or cycle alone. Usually I avoid cycling on Saturdays because that is the day when people are anxiously driving between their homes and their shops.

    Walking feels like the safer option on such days. It’s usually on Sundays that I like to go for a bike ride, to range a little further than when I am on foot, and to enjoy different sensations. During this pandemic my favourite route is not possible because it crosses the Franco Swiss Border in two places and I prefer to avoid crossing the border unless it is essential.

    At the moment the prospect of everyone being vaccinated, and of everyone being able to meet in groups of ten to fifteen to do via ferrata, hike or climb seems unlikely. It would seem that this is another year of relatively solitary sports. Hiking and cycling are good solitary sports because we often go at our own speeds anyway. These are also sports with almost no carbon footprint. You just walk out of your house and enjoy.

    Scuba Diving, Climbing, Via Ferrata and other sports sometimes require a two or more hour drive to go to and come back from the activity location. With cycling and local hiking you burn no petrol, except for the rubber soles of your shoes but those wear out quite slowly. We’re speaking grams, rather than litres.

    During my walks I often visit the old phone boxes that have been converted into libraries. I browse through the books. Some villages have a good selection of free access books. No one has thought to block access to them during the pandemic.

    If I wrote a blog post for every walk or bike ride at the moment it would either be a clockwise or an anti-clockwise loop that always begins and ends in the same place. The main change are the crops, the animals and people I see, and the weather.

    Yesterday I did meet someone in the physical world, for a walk, and I came to the conclusion that I much prefer to meet people for bike rides. The problem with walking with people during a pandemic is that you don’t have the freedom to walk into a field or patch of grass as you’re walking “with a person” rather than alone. You’re also working on set paths.

    I like to walk along roads and other paths, and I like to change route as soon as I see people come the other way, or to climb up an embankment, or to choose a path between two fields. When I walked in Geneva yestreday I decided to take off my mask because I thought that there would be an opportunity to always be two or more metres from people but this wasn’t the case. If I was alone I would have put the mask on. In this context I didn’t feel as free to do so.

    Cycling, during a pandemic, in contrast is excellent. The first reason for this is simple. You’re going at 20 to 30 kilometres per hour so whatever you breathe in or out is going to be diluted into the turbulence that is behind you. The second reason is that you’re on a road or path and the pedestrians you encounter are close for just a second or two, not even two breaths.

    The other advantage is that you’re on some type of agricultural or normal road and there are usually not that many people on the same path so it provides us with greater freedom. People are cautious of bikes, but not of other pedestrians. Being on a bike makes us safe.

    During my walks I often see people on bikes. Today I was surprised to see three women riding alone. Usually it’s two or three guys at a time, riding together and talking. It makes a nice change. Having said this the conditions today were unpleasant for cycling, a cold strong wind. These are the right conditions to make cycling cold and tiring.

    I hope that Sunday will be good for cycling.

    How far will we cycle in pandemic solitude? We will have to see.

  • Day 38 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Contact Sports

    Day 38 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Contact Sports

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    By May we may be able to go back to doing sports in groups as long as they are not “contact sports” in Switzerland. For me this means hiking, running cycling and other related sports. For me climbing is a contact sport because we touch the same hand holds as everyone else climbing the routes, we use the same ropes and we share quickdraws and belay devices.

    This being said I also have no desire to do sports like climbing at the moment because they require us to stand around and socialise and I haven’t really socialised in at least 38 days. I need to ease back into the world of the extrovert. Hiking is a good way to do that.

    Visual Studio Code

    Today I started watching a course on Linkedin learning about using Chrome for webmastering but got distracted with the idea of installing a server on my mac book pro. I then got even more distracted by Visual Studio Code.

    I like this piece of software because it’s free, intuitive to use and quick. A few days ago I had spent hours playing with another html editing tool and the process was so laborious that i wasted a lot of time. With Visual Studio Code it’s fast and I’m getting through the task of making the old part of my website mobile friendly.

    The process is interesting. The more pages I optimise the more experience I gain and the more efficient I become. I found that if I remove some bits of code the page is mobile compliant within two or three steps and I can move on to the next page, and the next one after that.

    In theory these pages should always have been mobile friendly because they’re light. There is no CSS or other clunk. Images are also small as bandwidth was an issue in those days. It still is, but we have a firehose rather than a syringe today.

    Webmastering is great because time really flies when you’re working on a website. You can easily spend ten or more hours a day working on something and still have a few more hours of work. That’s why some professions look so busy compared to others. Of course it’s time consuming because I am still perfecting the work flow. By the time I’ve optimised every page I’ll be proficient at an updated skill.

    TikTok

    Last night I was unable to focus so I installed TikTok and looked at plenty of videos to clear my mind enough to be able to think about dinner. I must have been in the right frame of mind because I enjoyed quite a few of the videos and flooded my facebook timeline with examples. Don’t worry though, out of the flood I only got one like. It seems that no one saw the flood so it didn’t happen.

    1SE – One Second Every Day

    More in character with me is the One Second Everyday app. I created a compilation for every day of quarantine so far but I won’t share the video too frequently because it will be most effective when it has at least sixty more days.

    That’s it for today. Time to think about dinner.

  • Strava – The Escape Plan

    Strava – The Escape Plan

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    Strava – The Escape plan has the goal of getting people to move 15 minutes a day 5 times a week for four weeks. This includes all sports from Alpine Skiing to Yoga with walking, hiking, kayaking, cycling, swimming and more. In other words your walk to the shops, the café and the work commute are included.

    With so many sports activities included in this challenge, it should be easy for everyone to achieve. You could walk to work the first day, cycle the second, swim in the evening on the third, play on one of the elliptical machines on the fourth and follow a yoga session on the fifth. There is no reason not to succeed. As I look through the list every one of these sports would be practised for extended periods of time beyond just 15 minutes. I can’t see many people going for a fifteen-minute hike. I would expect it to be for longer.

    Most of the challenges on Strava are based on specific sports and specific distances. In these situations, you can compete with others and see whether you are in the top ten. In this case, you simply log a fifteen-minute activity and you’re done five days a week four weeks in a row.

    This is a habit-forming challenge for those who either do not do fifteen minutes of exercise in one go on a daily basis or for those who never consider a fifteen-minute walk from the train station to the office as an activity.

    As a point of reference, I am on day 71 of the move streak goal. It’s set at between 400-500 calories per day and requires at least an hour of walking to reach. I don’t need to “get moving”. I need to continue moving.

  • Slalom Swimming

    Slalom Swimming

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Slalom Swimming isn’t talked about enough. Slalom swimming is the type of swimming you do when you’re one of the stronger swimmers but not the strongest. You’re going fast enough to overtake certain swimmers but too slow to keep up with others. As you overtake some swimmers you’re forced to swim to the side to overtake them.

    Linear swimmer

    As well as having the slow swimmers to content with as you overtake them you also have the linear swimmers. These swimmers swim in a straight line without ever moving to accommodate other swimmers. You are the one forced to move out of their way over and over again. When you’re swimming one or two kilometres this means that you’re swimming more than the length of the pool on each lap. These are the people that impact my enjoyment of a swim.

    A lane to myself

    A week ago I had a lane to myself for an entire hour. During this hour I swam back and forth along the centre line for the entire duration and it felt good. It is for this reason that I swam such a distance. The length of the pool was just twenty five metres so i had to do quite a few back and forths.

    For the last two lengths of the swim, I practised breath-holding. I swam my penultimate length under water successfully and then took 30 seconds or so to get my breath back and swam the final length underwater as well. When you perfect the technique of swimming under water it feels like you’re gliding. You make one stroke, let yourself glide, and then you do another stroke. you repeat this until you’re at the other side of the pool.

    Cold water

    Many years ago when i was taking swimming lessons as a child I would always get cold and start to shiver. Eventually the swimming teacher would let me get out of the water and go to the showers. As children we would stay under the showers until we had used up all the hot water and then we’d get out and be really thirsty and enjoy an ice tea. It tasted so good.

    My reason for not swimming is often that I like to be warm and swimming pools are, or at least, were cold. I like to swim when I know that I will be warm when I get out of the water. Thanks to the most recent heatwave my psychology changed and I want to swim again.

    Having a broken arm and limited access to swimming, cycling and other sports also helped. Swimming with an arm healing with a break is simple to do. You don’t need to worry about lifting weights, about pulling, pushing, torsion or other forces. You can also modulate the strength of your strokes according to what feels comfortable.

    Price

    One of the strongest motivating factors to go swimming is that it’s a third as expensive as gym membership and more affordable than climbing gym memberships for a year. A year’s membership would be amortised after just 45 swims. If you go swimming five times a week you’ve amortised it in five weeks. The other advantage of membership is that you can go for just half an hour or an hour. You work out and get out and get on with the rest of the day. You also get a full-body workout.

    No need for an internal combustion engine.

    The final advantage is that you don’t need a car to get there. As it’s within walking distance you can easily walk there without worrying about petrol, traffic or parking. When climbing, you always have to worry about those aspects.