Health

For many years I went for an after lunch or after work walk. I would easily walk eight to ten kilometres per day. With road works in Nyon that have already lasted for many, many months, and that should last for another year, for several hundred meters of road my walking habit has been made toxic through traffic density and exposure to toxic driving behaviour.

I used to love heading out for an hour or two, to see the fields and crops change with the season. I used to love walking a multitude of routes. With aggressive cars and dogs I shifted to rural walks. This worked for a while, until road works redirected traffic along a critical section of my daily walk, so now I no longer walk at all. I run instead. Even cycling has suffered. I didn’t want to drive during Caribana, because it’s during this event that someone crashed into me driving the petrol scooter for stopping to allow a runner to cross the road and during Paleo in around two weeks because traffic will be much denser.

We are entering the first Canicule of the summer today from Thursday and towards the 23rd of June. During this heat wave Minergie buildings, will climb towards 32°c plus, as will apartments. Cities will gather more and more heat energy and radiate it it. That’s when noisy music festivals can have deadly consequences, but it is also when it makes sense to get up at the crack of dawn for a group run.

This morning I set the alarm for five thirty, and I recharged my bike lights, head unit and more. I decided that if I felt good, and full of energy I would go for the group ride. I slept through the night and woke up feeling fresh, but I skipped the ride.

I had a cold, and when I got better from the cold I was double vaccinated against the flu and COVID. I then slept like crap two nights ago and now I feel good.

The more I use Whatsapp, in the Post pandemic age, the more toxic I find it. Last night I wrote something innocent. I wrote about rotisserie chicken and the temptation to have some before drinks. So far, so normal.

Someone I never met, and never talked with, in person, put a crying emoji and I don’t remember whether there was a comment or not. I wrote about how plants and trees have distress signals too, and that we should worry about their emotions too. There was a response but I never saw it because my response and another were deleted.

Last night, as I finished dinner I noticed that others were out so I joined them within twenty minutes or so. That wasn’t fast enough. They had decided to call it a night. As this impacted my mental health I decided to go for a run.

Often you see people are out, and you know they might call it a night by the time you get there. I had that thought. My decision was “If they have called it a night, by the time I get there, then at least I will have had a second walk.”

Over 107 years ago when the disease was not yet understood and under control when someone fell sick with leprosy they would be sent out of society to live alone in caves to avoid the spread of their affliction. It’s only later that the disease was understood and became treatable.

The documentary did not address much about the construction of the sanatorium except to say that convicts that were sentenced to death for a crime were made to build the ramparts around the city. These were two and a half meters tall and broken glass was put on the top. The aim was to keep the sick in. The local community was afraid of the disease that they did not understand.

For two days I rode twenty five kilometres, which, by my standards, are quite small rides. Today I rode with a group and for a while I was fine but then, when I climbed from Nyon towards Duillier I began to feel that I was fatigued. I slowed down and I couldn’t keep up with the group, or more accurately, the group had better acceleration and once you’re dropped you have to make more effort.

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.

Yesterday we could watch the conference live stream of the first indoor air quality conference. It was available in French, German, Russian and English. The link is to the English language version.

This is an interesting conference to have because, as two or more speakers highlighted, we spend up to 80 percent of our lives indoors, whether at work, at school, at home or at play. Think of indoor climbing for example, or the gym, and restaurants. By spending so much time indoors it is important to think about how we aerate but also ensure that air is healthy.

Yesterday I spent time in the sun in the morning, as a result of which I thought I would avoid going out in the heatwave. I changed my mind. Every Sunday a group of pétanque playing alcoholics play pétanque for several hours. They cheer, they laugh, they make noise, for hours in a row. I don’t want to hear that sound, especially since the pandemic is not over. People are still falling sick with Long COVID and they’re being disabled. It doesn’t take long to read posts on social media by people suffering from Long COVID.