I used to be able to see Mither Tap in the distance from when we lived in the countryside. It took thirteen years until we finally drove there and walked up it. It’s taken another four years for me to get around to running up it. At least living in town now I can get the bus near to there, even if the opportunity doesn’t arise very often.
When I stopped cycling I envisaged having about three years off for a decent rest, but eventually getting back into it. Of course that never happened (it’s just far too expensive compared to running to do for a hobby) so I’ve stuck with running, wearing my banana cycling cap most of the time. I did technically get to wear it once or twice cycling, but not properly.
And now I never will. Annoyingly the peak has snapped in the washing machine (it really needed a wash) and look mum no hands are sadly no more.
I will have to find a new identity.
"Try a strap or belt at shoulder width around the elbow crease. I swear it gives me magic super powers. It's so easy and comfy for me, I can stay up for a while, come up and down on my toes, walk in a bit. All good. Without a belt I got nothing and I'm just hanging out on the top of my head."
Amazing tip I found on Reddit for getting into the wheel pose in yoga. Don’t know if it’s a placebo or actual magic, but it works. Without this I’m too scared to even try.
Wanted to write a post about running the amazing Les Calanques trails in Cassis. Realised I might as well just figure out including what I already have on Strava here. I can’t say I’ll be making many of my Strava activities public, but I can’t see the harm in making ones that are no where near home public.
When it comes to holiday destinations, A is driven largely by what she sees on Instagram. It was just pure luck on my side that the pretty harbour town of Cassis happens to be next to the Calanques National Park. So my main holiday worry was whether the trails were going to be open during fire-risk season - I figured I should get at least one day out of the seven we were there. As it was I managed two trail runs. In theory I could have done more, but it meant getting up early after we’d stayed up late drinking, it’s much hotter than Scotland, and it was on holiday and so not all about me.
Some notes:
Obviously there is much more to explore here than the relatively tiny bit I got to run, but longer distances are probably best not in August. I was happy I got to do this loop once. Absolutely stoked I got to do it twice.
Just a short post to say I managed to get a second hand (but barely used) pair of Nike Juniper Trail 1 for £20 (bargain!) to finally replace my Decathlon Active Grip.
These are cheaper than the cheapest pair of Decathlon running shoes. They are, unsurprisingly, much better than Decathlon - little bit lower to the ground, better mesh covering, softer, better grip, etc. But they are over twice the price (when new) of the Active Grip.
They are also a very good road/trail/dog shoe. The only downside is I doubt I’ll get quite so much distance out of them - the heels are wearing already from walking because of the softer rubber.
Going to try to appreciate them as much as possible whilst I have them though and make sure I get some off-road runs done.
Keeping it short, but I can’t actually fault them for £35. This photo is at 800km of running. But there could be that much again of walking on them: I don’t track walking or dog-walking, but on average do 30km of running (extra because of running with A) and 90km total distance a week… some of that is walking around in the house, I also have one other pair of shoes (for “best”), but it seems safe to say there could be 1600km total on these).
Of course nearly all the grip has worn down, but that’s ok for this time of year. The toe-hole in the mesh started at around 370km of running, got to this size and thankfully didn’t get any bigger.
I might see, though, if I can treat myself and spend a whole five pounds extra on the EasyTrail next as they have a bit more toe coverage and 1mm extra grip to wear through. That might be my ideal road/trail/dog-walking shoe.
But unsurprisingly these are going to have to last a little longer first.
On a related note, watched this recently on Netflix (twice!) and it kind of blew my mind.
"Most people probably don’t know, but I’ve got no anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee, because I tore it when I was 17 and never had reconstructive surgery."
What?! I was amazed at her before this, now I’m just gobsmacked.
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.
[EDIT: 2024-05-27] See long-term review
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:
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 -DELETED 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 -COMPLETED -DELETED 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.
[EDIT: 2024-11-15] Added in -DELETED and -COMPLETED. Noodling on doing something like for when I have a mixed bag of due dates on tasks:
for tuuid in $(task +INSTANCE -COMPLETED -DELETED uuids)
do
hour=$(task _get $tuuid.due.hour)
if [ $hour -eq 1 ]
then
task $tuuid modify due:'due - 1 hour'
fi
done
These are the ten most recent posts, for older posts see the Archive.