My reduced running plan meant I thought I could get away with one pair of running shoes a year. But I hadn’t counted on all the dog walking, nor running with A and so the shoes I got in April were beyond knackered by November.

Owing to my budget I’d been looking into Decathlon, because a) Even with my recycling discount Hylos would be more and b) Hylos aren’t good in the mud or for dog walking. I went in for a pair of Easytrail, (£40), but the 10.5 size was too big and that was the nearest size they had. I came out with a pair of Kalenji Run Active Grip (£35) in a 9.5; I wasn’t aware of these shoes as I’d only looked at the trail shoes online and these fall under the road shoes.

These Active Grip are superb for the price. They will 100% do my requirement of road/trail/dogs. The nearest comparison I can think of (on my radar) is Pegasus Trail, but do I want to wear a £130 shoe to walk the dogs? Nope.

The Active Grip do seem to have quite a hard sole as opposed to “sticky” rubber. They might not be great on wet stones (not a problem for me), but they are great on wet leaves on the pavement. And mud. They do also seem to rely on quite a thick/plush insole for cushioning as opposed to the midsole. But I’ve come from Free Run / Terra Kiger / Hylo and so I’m ok with not a huge amount of cushioning.

Only 74 km on them so far, but I can’t fault them.

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Of sorts, although things aren’t that bad.

I somewhat recently dropped my (now old) new old phone and cracked the screen. It was still usable, but I’d been toying with getting the battery replaced via a third party since it was at 45% battery health, but with the screen broken I’d have to replace that first and at that price might I might as well get a second hand SE 2020 instead. If I had that much money. Which I don’t. So I switched back to my original iPhone SE (85% battery health). I was amazed at how much better and brighter the screen is. I can use Apple Pay without it freezing the screen. It’s so light and small I don’t even notice it in my pocket. The A9 processor is still fast enough. This was the peak of phone technology.

In hindsight I would have not bothered with the iPhone 8, I got that because I anticipated the iPhone SE going out of support, but it actually took a year longer than I thought it would until the latest iOS wouldn’t run on the SE, plus Apple pretty much do support the previous iOS for another year anyway (iOS 15 just got an update so really it’s only going to be right about now as iOS 17 is released that it is unsupported). I’ve decided it can last a little bit longer still and then maybe I’ll have to get something on contract - I’m paying £10 a month anyway for data/minutes/sms, if I got a contract at around £20 a month then that seems really quite reasonable.

My plan for one pair of running shoes a year is not going to work out. I’m not even at six months and I’ve had to re-glue the sole on one shoe and stitch a tear in the upper in the other (to be fair, the tear is exactly where I’ve removed the internal reinforcement cage, because it gave me a blister). I had not factored in all the dog walking, and what’s more the shoes getting constantly soaked from dewy grass which I’m sure has weakened the uppers. I hope they can keep going a bit longer (more glue, more sewing) and then I think I’m going to try some cheapish Decathlon trail shoes (£40 for the Evadict Easytrail to £60 for the Evadict TR2) which can do the combo of road, trail and dog walking; I slipped over at the weekend on a muddy trail run in my “road” shoes so it’s time for something with more grip.

And this was going to be a separate post, but actually there isn’t that much to say so it makes sense to be part three here. I’ve sadly given up using Teuxdeux (again) and have switched back to Taskwarrior. It’s going to save me a bit of cash and I wasn’t thrilled with the direction the preview was going in: Function over fashion, whereas I really appreciated the fashion of Teuxdeux, if I want pure functionality… well, there’s Taskwarrior. Since I last used Taskwarrior the bugs that impacted my reports have gone so I don’t need any wrapper scripts, etc and I can have simple reports like so:

#Custom report - Teuxdeux
report.teuxdeux.description=TeuxDeux style
report.teuxdeux.sort=due+/,tags-,description+
report.teuxdeux.filter=(status:completed or status:pending) and due.after:sow-1min and due.before:eow and -BLOCKED
report.teuxdeux.columns=id,uuid.short,tags,due,description.truncated_count
report.teuxdeux.labels=ID,UUID,Context,Due,Description

#Custom report - Teuxdeux
report.roll.description=TeuxDeux rolling
report.roll.sort=due+/,tags-,description+
report.roll.filter=(status:completed or status:pending) and due.after:-2days and due.before:5days and -BLOCKED
report.roll.columns=id,uuid.short,tags,due,description.truncated_count
report.roll.labels=ID,UUID,Context,Due,Description

I am trying to use it mostly like Teuxdeux, but with:

• annotations for links, etc instead of markdown in Teuxdeux
• sometimes using tags instead of short prefixes like I would in Teuxdeux

I.e. just keeping it as simple as possible. I also resurrected my crontab entry for rolling over incomplete todos.

I never finished off updating Haskerdeux for the new Teuxdeux API, but using Taskwarrior means I could easily update my Apple Watch shortcuts so I can once again see and complete todos from my watch. I thought about setting up a sync server, but I might as well just have my home todos on my server and my work todos on my work laptop and separate things that way. Simple.

[EDIT: 2023-10-30] Turns out the daylight saving bug is still there in Taskwarrior. Almost nine years since I provided a patch. For now I’m not going to update my patch and rebuild from source because I’m using on my work macOS machine and my NetBSD server so it’s easier just to use the binary. I’ll just modify tasks after daylight savings occur using task $(task +TEMPLATE uuids) modify due:'due + 1 hours', etc; At least I just use recurrence.limit=1 now; I did think about just setting my recurring tasks to midday, but this other old bug screws up my report grouping.

[EDIT: 2024-04-01] Can also do task $(task +INSTANCE ids) modify due:'due - 1 hours', etc to modify the child tasks. I would reapply my patch, but 1) Lazy / no time and 2) Just that really.

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Not in the literal sense of the title - I use the brilliant WorkOutDoors for that, but rather I got fed up of my phone thinking it was being touched when I was running and going crazy - mostly skipping songs in Spotify, etc - although I’ve also had it lock me out of my own phone or randomly ring my emergency contact or 999, etc. It’s frustrating that there is no way to remove the Spotify controls from the lock screen, which would at least solve the skipping music side of things. As to the general issue, it’s definitely not a sweat thing - it’s in my fetching pink bumbag. Plus I’ve also had my camera randomly activate with my phone just in my jeans pocket which drained my battery. Technology is shockingly shit.

Anyway, I’m very late in discovering this trick, but it turns out you can solve all of this by using Guided Access. So what I do now is start playing something through my headphones, use them to pause it, start guided access (I have it on triple click since I have a ye-olde home button iPhone) and then disable everything apart from the sleep/wake button (so volume buttons can’t get knocked either). Then I can use the sleep/wake button to turn the screen off, but it doesn’t matter if it comes back on as no touch works AT ALL. I just control music through my headphones (not with Siri - ha) and then unlock guided access at the end. Works so, so well.

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First month of the year done and so far so good for my plan of 75 minutes of vigorous exercise plus 75 minutes of strength a week. Managing to build up a streak again.

This mostly works out as:

• Monday: 15 to 30 minutes of strength
• Tuesday: ~37.5 minutes of running
• Wednesday: 30 minutes of yoga
• Thursday: Whatever is leftover to get to 75 minutes of running
• Friday: Whatever is left from Monday to add up to 45 minutes strength

For the running I aim to keep my average pace under five minutes per km. Which is fast enough for me to be putting some effort in.

This routine is minimal enough that if I miss a day I could squeeze a couple of activities into one day or use the weekend. And swop things around if the weather is bad - I’m not running when it’s icy as I don’t want to injure myself. I could also split up the running into three runs instead of two if pushed for time (I am frequently pushed for time).

It’s a lot, LOT less in hours than I used to do, but achievable given changes in life and I am at least really trying when running. Also, the strength training is novel and so interesting. I’m using the Nike Training Club app for that like I do for yoga, it really is a superb free resource. I’m improvising with a couple of Brewdog growlers filled with water as dumbbells which works out at about 2kg each which is the light end of dumbbells, but enough for my weedy arms for the time being.

If I can keep this routine/plan going I’ll be happy enough.

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