Tag: running

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Monthly Review: February 2022

So that’s February done. I said in my last review that my focuses or themes for the month would be writing, diet, and injury recovery. I didn’t do great, but given the circumstances, it wasn’t too bad.
The big headline for the month in our household has been that Covid has finally visited us. So far, four out of five of us have tested positive, with myself completing of a week of snotty coughing. Needless to say, it’s affected pretty much all our plans. Running has been reduced to 1 milers for the majority of February. Although the running streak continues. I tested positive as the government removed legal restrictions on leaving the house. But I’ve been managing risks – only going out at around 9 pm, and swapping sides of the road whenever I see a pedestrian ahead.

Last month’s goals

Because of the enforced rest, my piriformis injury has improved a lot. This was helped along by stretches and bridging. I’m hoping over the next couple of weeks to start testing it a little, just as soon as my LFTs turn negative.

I arrived at some changes to my diet. The primary changes were to consume more carbs, while restricting processed sugars. The improvements started well. My weight was stabilising, and I intended to incorporate some principles from Racing Weight into my training. The main principles were to focus on running performance and body fat percentage. But, the Covid issue has led the past couple of weeks to a LOT of compromising. Myself and various meal delivery services have become very well acquainted. I hope to fix that as we all start to heal up.

The goal around writing more went ok-ish this month. Each week, I’ve been completing different prompts from Tracy Winchell’s Tame Your Monkey Mind. I’ve found it to be valuable. The most recent exercise I tried was writing a letter to your tomorrow’s self. This exercise externalises the events and feelings of today and sets out expectations for tomorrow. Serendipitously, RJ Nestor writes about this metaphor in his most recent newsletter. I recommend it if you’re at all interested in the “tools for thought” space. He describes it as “meta-work”, drawing a line between this exercise and the way modern teams communicate using tools like Trello. I’m going to endeavour to continue doing this, with more of a work-hat on over the next month.

Playground

When I considered what I did in the playground this month, I didn’t feel like I’d achieved all that much. In my head, I’d iterated what was already there and made the weight graph useful. But when I look at my commit log for it, I achieved a fair bit:

  • I introduced some rudimentary navigation. This involved getting all my check-ins and “windowing” them a week at a time.
  • I ripped out all the previous individual weight log pages (which was only ever going to be a temporary hack).
  • And I implemented a trend line, based on the ancient, but still useful Hacker’s Diet. That was more fun than I expected.

You can see my weight graph in action over here. It won’t show much activity over the past couple of weeks, due to a combination of illness and avoiding the truth.

Up next in playground land, I’ll attempt to integrate a calendar view. It may resemble the Contributions feature present on GitHub profiles. Originally, I wanted to wait until I had more data to display. But instead, I’d like to understand whether my data types are right before having to rework them later.

Podcast

I had the pleasure of chatting to Si Jobling on his always-fascinating podcast Make Life Work. We talked about my day job before diving into some of the history and learnings from my playground. It’s weird listening to yourself talk about this stuff. But it has given me some insight into what skills I can work on. For example, communicating complex subject matter. It’s a key part of my job, so to get some real-life introspection like this is borderline priceless.

March

Thinking about what I want to do in March has been straight forwards, there’s a lot of carry-over from last month:
  • More writing. This month though, I’d like to focus on my Zettelkasten. We’re starting a book club at work on the DevOps Handbook. It has made me realise that I’ve amassed unprocessed fleeting notes for my Zettelkasten. I’ve fallen out of the habit of focused writing/thinking. So with that, I wish to make an effort to process and develop my backlog. Also, to get in the habit of processing them as I create them.
  • My fitness plan is going to resemble to plan for February. I’d like to rebuild my running, eat well, and do more support exercises to help protect against injury.
  • And a little stretch goal – I want to start moving my musical muscles again. I don’t yet know what that will look like – Guitar, Ableton, Jazz, Chiptune? All three? Regardless of which, I’d like to shift my default fallback leisure activity from playing copious amounts of Slay The Spire.

Consumption Highlights

Films

Good movie watching month, helped on by Covid layup. Highlights were aplenty, but I’ll stick to three for now:

TV

This month we blazed through Murderville, while Pam and Tommy has proven compelling. We’ve watched lots of other stuff too, but I don’t want to use this as a place for negativity. Those two were my definite highlights.

Podcasts

Reviewing my podcast listening for the month, two things occur to me. First, I need to take some notes on these, if only so I retain more from them than mere passive listening gives. And two, a lot of my favourite/most memorable listens come from the same source podcasts. But rather than regurgitate the same three sources, I’ve picked out a few different ones this time:

Books

  • In February I finished Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. A lovely book with some great lessons contained within it in a non-preachy way. I expect to look at more of her canon in the future.
  • I completed Team Topologies, it gets referenced a lot at my workplace, and for good reason. It overlaps with concepts found in literature such as Accelerate. As well as modern architectural principles like micro-services and event-driven architectures.
  • I started Greg Egan’s Diaspora, which is so far heavy but already rewarding if only in the amount it makes you think.
  • And I started Making Work Visible, another much-cited book at work. It’s too early to have formed an opinion yet though.
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Personal

Monthly Review: January 2022

At the beginning of the year, my only resolution was to review the past month and set some focuses, themes, and goals according to where my life was at that point. Hopefully as a way to try to avoid the pitfalls of all or nothing boolean resolutions. Consider this a trial into having a semi-public semi-regular monthly review.

The goal I set for January was to recover my fitness and get back to my pre-Christmas weight. Fortunately, as of this morning, not only am I sub-pre-Christmas, but my weight hit the goal I set back at the beginning of August when I started this journey. I have a couple of potential blog posts around the past 6 months and how I got to here – joining a running club, slow-carb-dieting – but they deserve some time and thought to themselves.

It’s not a direct goal or aim, but I need to figure out where to go next. I’ve never got to my goal weight before – when I’ve lost significant weight previously, it’s been until “that’ll do” and then it’s gradually (or sometimes quickly) piled back on again. So my focus needs to be, what about this eating program has really worked for me, and how do I adapt that to focusing on other things like fitness, strength, and not necessarily a calorie deficit? This is something I will think about over the next week, and in the meantime, I’m going to keep “slow-carbing” – if only because I have a leg injury right now and am running minimum mileage.

With that goal in mind, throughout the last month, fitness has been my main non-work focus. I’ve run in a couple of cross country events, and started to see some gains in my speed.

Outside of fitness, I made some decent progress on my playground project, without doing much more than fiddling with code while I watched TV. I did a bit of CSS tidying up – although that’s something I’m hoping to revisit after I have a calendar-like visualisation implemented (which might be a month or two away). It looks horrible, almost as if I’ve just mashed a bunch of styling together without much thought. Mad that 👀.

I got generic WordPress pages loading in, which allowed me to initially bring my /now page across – so I can not keep that up to date in two places, rather than one.

I think that most significantly, I got podcast integration working. I’m really pleased with this, it’s a set of data that I can’t look at at a glance anywhere else. It also might serve as a jumping-off point if I ever want to write anything about the stuff that I’m consuming day-to-day. I have a bunch of Permanent Notes in my Zettelkasten that start off as Fleeting Notes from podcasts, maybe there’s something I can do here to make some of that process public?

And I started in earnest doing something with my Weight data. There’s a bit of a spike over at https://playground.breakfastdinnertea.co.uk/weight/, but that might change significantly in the next week or two. I might even pivot libraries, given my experience with Nivo so far.

February

Next month, there are a few things I wish to focus on:

  • I want to write more. Not necessarily on here, but rather in Roam (or maybe DayOne, depending on what’s more natural) – whether that’s free journaling, morning pages, or something else. I know that if I want to write better, I need to write more. I also want to do more reflecting on what I’m doing to take stock a little and figure out whether I’m just doing stuff for the sake of doing it.
  • I want to lock down an approach to pivoting my diet and fitness regime to something more long-term sustainable and runner-friendly. I have something in my head around this, but I need to better formalise it – it’s a combination of things that work for me across Slow Carb, Intuitive Eating, and Racing Weight. But I guess I have to play with it and see if it meets my longer-term goals (improve running performance, don’t put weight back on, maybe lean up along the way), and whether it is sustainable as a set of life-long habits.
  • Finally, don’t let my ego get the best of me, and fully recover from this injury, even if it means my weekly mileage suffers temporarily.

Consumption highlights

Films

Not a massive movie month, but saw some corkers.

TV

I caught quite a bit of good TV this month. Yellowjackets was by far my favourite. Our lunchtime light binge has been Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, which I’m now sad to have finished.

Podcasts

  • This week, one of my favourite podcasts, The Tip Off which covers stories of fascinating and important investigative journalism cases, returned. This one covers slave labour in the British building industry, it is a great listen.
  • One from back in July, but I listened to a fascinating interview with UK Ultrarunner, Damian Hall on the Strength Running podcast – great listen, all about the dangers of drinking too much water and his experiences running stupidly long distances.
  • If you’ve not caught one yet, you should give Blindboy’s podcast a listen. His “hot takes” are amazing, I would love to see his process for putting this stuff together, because they go all over the place, make a billion great points, and then always seem to resolve to a nice take-home message full of nuance and humanity. I listened to one about pineapples in Ireland this month, and it didn’t disappoint.

Books

  • This month saw me finally complete Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track – a book that I finished the meat of earlier in the year, but I trickled the interview section as and when I had the breadth. Well worth a read for anyone wanting to know what a software engineer might do beyond senior. (Without spoiling much, it is one of a billion things).
  • I’ve also progressed and nearly finished Team Topologies, which is full of pragmatic wisdom about how to create teams that foster both autonomy and alignment. And in fictionland, I’ve been really enjoying A Wizard of Earthsea, one of those many “classics” that I’m only now getting around to.
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Personal Social Stream

Father’s Day. Celebrated with a run in calf-bursting hills.

Hand made father's day card. Theme minecraft - mine, and my son's faces pasted over the main characters'.
This is a bit of a yearly tradition now. Currently, he is obsessed with Minecraft, and so that got the homage treatment.

Gorgeous day for it, so went with the family to Ramsbottom. Left family to ramble up the hill, while I went on an adventure.

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Personal

My 2019 Year In Running

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, so I thought I’d reflect a little on what was a surprisingly active running year. I’m pretty out of practice with this writing lark, so apologies if it reads a little clumsy.

TLDR: It started optimistically. I got fat. I then lost weight. During it all, I ran some new types of races. By the end of it, I had clocked up loads of miles (2095, to be precise).

Started Optimistically.

I started the year with an accidental 18 miler, where I jogged to a Parkrun on New Years Day, ran it, found out there was another one a couple of miles away, jogged there, jogged that, got bloody nipples (there are photos in the previously linked Strava post, I’ll leave clicking through to them as an exercise to the particularly masochistic readers), and then realised that I was 6 miles from home with no public transport and Uber/taxis prohibitively expensive – so I jogged back.

It was a reassuringly smug (but slightly sore) way to start the year. Buoyant on a combination of adrenaline and Savlon, I gave myself a quiet mileage target of 2019 miles in 2019.

Got Fat.

In March, we moved house. My commute run grew 3 miles in each direction, the extra mileage led to an increase in appetite, the additional tiredness led to an inability to enact any kind of self-discipline, and like a shit Power Ranger, these attributes combined to create slow, inevitable weight gain.

I was eyeing the Rock’n’Roll Marathon in Liverpool as a late Spring race but ended up opting out due to an extra-stress-due-to-pork-pies-induced flare-up of knee bursitis. I get bursitis now and again, it’s a consequence of falling over a lot and not looking after myself. This was definitely the latter.

Lost Weight.

At the end of April, following my R’n’R did-not-start, I decided I needed to get on top of the weight situation or I’d see another streak ended. I have a long-lived todo to write more about my running streak – what happened to the original one, why I started another, etc – however, that’s a job for another day.

Using a spreadsheet I found on Reddit, I began to track my Total Daily Energy Expenditure and laboriously counted calories. I kept myself engaged by adapting that spreadsheet into a mini-side-project, teaching myself a bit of TypeScript, D3 and Gatsby. Again another blog post, but the repo/mini-write-up can be found on GitHub, and you can see my progress up until November on this little graph here. It stops in November because Christmas has happened and I’ve fallen off my chubby little wagon – again, another thing to come back to later, maybe I’ll get to it in my next year in review (i.e. the next time I update this thing).

New Types of Races.

2009 has seen me run 6 races. This isn’t all that prolific, generally speaking, but for me, it is a record. This year has also opened up new race experiences, from trail running, through to beer runs:

My “season” started in June, where I and a few workmates ran the Pizza 10k in Heaton Park. We did a 5k version in South Manchester last year, and this year it had expanded to two laps of Heaton Park. It’s a good atmosphere, has a fun & interactive warm-up (our three-year-old loved joining in), and we received an awesome pizza-shaped medal & a couple of slices of pizza at the end.

A month later, I ran my first ever trail race – the Royton Trail over by Tandle Hill in North Manchester. A small evening run, held over fun terrain, it was an absolute blast – and the egg mayo sandwiches afterwards were delicious. I liked the trail running experience so much that I actively sought out off-road races after this. A few weeks after, I was able to race literally across the road from my new house at the Hopwood Trot. I found it doubly hard due to it being 2 loops of an awful hill, but in retrospect, I think I performed well. I look forward to running that one again in 2020.

August contained the highlight of my year – the Marple Beer run. 4 pints in 4k. It was an entirely new experience, but one I’ve been passively training myself for since around 2013 – anytime I have a pint or 4 and then run home (would not recommend, by the way). Consequently, I performed way beyond expectations, to the point where I expect I’ll have to train extra hard next year if I want to get any faster.

October saw me take on another beer-related race – the Beer 10k, fortunately, this one was based at a brewery, and the drinks are consumed afterwards, rather than during. The pre-race intro was especially entertaining here – the race director went into all of the calamities that had befallen the race that day (from discarded drug paraphernalia being found during the pre-check through to a freshly fallen tree which required the introduction of a plastic “step” to help scale it) and had us all in stitches. Anyway, by this point, I was starting to feel the benefits of shifting the weight – I was down about 12kg and my times were coming down without really trying.

Which brings me to my most recent race – the 13 Arches Half. A beautiful trail marathon in and around Prestwich. My personal record for a 13.1-mile race was the Great North Run back in 2012, and I think based on this performance, I’ll be able to clear that if I run a bigger road half. I say this because I clocked in at 5 minutes under my PR – I’m not considering it a PB though because the mileage fell a fair bit short of 13.1 (0.4-0.8 miles depending on whose watch you go by). I wasn’t running this to any break records, it was a genuinely enjoyable trail race (even with it being a rainy mud fest), and I’ll go out of my way to run it next year.

Loads of Miles.

I kinda buried the lede with the whole table of contents in the tl;dr thing, but yeah, I smashed through my optimistic-at-the-time intention of running 2019 miles in 2019 by clearing 2095. It’s one of the reasons I’ve had an easy/fat December (my love of all things Stollen aside) – I cleared that target around the 7th December.

My lowest mileage month was January, where I struggled with ITB issues (I resolved to always stretch after that. I’m pretty terrible with resolutions of any type, it seems), but still managed to log 115 miles. And I peaked in October with 228 miles. No particular reason for that, mind – I was just loving running at that point in the year.

I have some plans for what I want to do next year, but I’m kinda keeping them to myself. I have found that what I once thought was some sort of personal-but-public call-to-accountability is in reality documented hubris. It leads to me making every “I’m-gonna-do-this-cos-I-wrote-it” promise an all-or-nothing-throw-it-out-the-window-when-things-go-awry weight around my neck.

And so, I’m gonna stop writing now. Mostly because I’ve run out of hyphens to spew over WordPress. Cheers for making it this far.

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Personal

End of / New Year update (2014/2015)

I’m not going to blather too much on here. Just dot down some bullet points to update you and remind my future self how things are going:

  • My running streak is still alive, it hit 3 years as of yesterday. My real celebration happened in October, when I passed day 1024:

  • Weight is once again well up. This is a problem I continue to have despite putting in 40-60 miles most weeks. It’s the result of a bad diet, a complete lack of discipline, and the high mileage.
  • I read “Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance“* over the Christmas break. It has given me a lot of ideas about how to lose weight while doing my lengthy commute runs.
  • One of the things it recommends is to track body fat rather than weight. So I got myself a set of Omron BF508 Body Composition and Body Fat Monitor Bathroom Scales* in the Amazon Boxing Day sales. I don’t know how they compare to “accurate” methods of measurement. It is a baseline from which to track my progress.
  • According to the book, I’m in the 5th percentile of “athletes” of my age. I’m not an athlete, but it gives me an idea of what other people doing a similar workload to me carry. It also tells me that maybe I should look after myself better.
  • Currently, I’ve marked the book as 3 stars on Goodreads. I shall revisit this in about 6 months and review it based on my results.
  • I once again intend to update this thing more, as a blog that reflects me and where I am right now. Expect more running, more tech stuff, as well as some reflection on the things I have consumed. Revisiting that stuff is both rewarding and useful. I should do it more.

\* I’ve stuck some affiliate links in there. Delete them if you care.

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Personal

Passive Mileage

In personal finance, they often talk about ‘passive income’ and making your money ‘work harder for you‘. The idea being that you set-up a side project which starts trickling in a bit of surplus cash each month without having to do any extra work. It’s not something I do – most of the traditional ways seem a bit leechy and middle-manny for my liking. But even so, it is something that has always stuck in the back of my head.

Before I started streak running, 20 miles in a week was a great week for me. When I started doing 2 miles a day, I realised that I was getting in 14 easy miles without even trying. It reminded me of this passive finance idea. Passive mileage, if you will.

Last year, about 15 months into my streak, I moved to a house which was 5 and a half miles from work. My workplace provides showers, and so I started running in to work 2 days a week. My passive mileage had doubled.

Since then, I have gradually grown it, to the point where it’s not unusual for me to do 4-5 11 mile days on the bounce. I never intended for this to happen. I guess I just enjoy the commute – it’s as fast as public transport, cheaper, and it lets me indulge in hours upon hours of podcasts. Without going out of my way, my mileage now always breaks 30+ in a week

This doesn’t come without cost: I find eating well to be a challenge. There have been some weeks where, despite running 40+ miles, I’ve still managed to put on considerable weight. It’s tiring – I’m not sure that come Friday, I’m that pleasant to be around (insert a joke here about Friday being no exception). And it limits what you can run at the weekend. Thanks to passive mileage, I no longer have a Long Slow Distance Run. It would be a foolish recipe for injury if I didn’t rest up at the weekend.

But these are all things I’m working on. I’m measuring calories, and the weight is coming down. And I’m not currently training for anything. Needless to say, when I do train for a race again (I have my eye on a couple), this routine will all shift up.

Is passive mileage for everyone? Goodness, no. But it works for me, I mean – it doesn’t make me run fast, it doesn’t make me run particularly far, but it does allow me to run a lot. All without having to adjust my normal routine. And that’s why I like it.

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Personal

Overly introspective post about my running streak.

Some of this year's spoils (the wear on the right included mileage done pre-2012)

For the past few years, I’ve found running to be a decent way of shifting some weight (slight aside, since the age of twenty, I’ve been the classic yo-yo when it comes to weight – between 11.5 and 17 stone, depending on what the dice spell out in any given week). The only problem is that it can sometimes be hard to motivate yourself to go for a run. Excuses are very easy to come by: the weather, needing a sandwich, hangovers, the sniffles, Emmerdale’s on, Christmas, not really feeling like it today, bone-idleness, needing a poo… Basically it’s much easier to not run than it is to run. Which is one of those really obvious things that someone who could write probably wouldn’t be writing.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.  – Benjamin Franklin

Pretentious quote – check.

“Don’t Break The Chain”

I’ve been interested in Seinfeld’s don’t break the chain ‘productivity secret’ for a while now, it makes sense to me and is simple enough to follow. And I’m now, a year in, convinced it can and does work. At the beginning of the year I decided to see how many days I could go running without breaking the chain. The only rule of the running streak was that every day I had to go at least 1 mile. The only tool I needed was the brilliant joesgoals – it’s not the slickest or best looking app, but it does one thing and it does it well. And reasonably consistently (I do see the odd Coldfusion error screen now and again).

The running streak itself started reasonably inconspicuously, a couple of days, a week, two weeks  – no bother. But then I got to a month – and this was now a ‘thing’, it was at a stage now where people were asking if I was still ‘streaking’, and there was a pressure to keep going. And it got bigger, and bigger – 90 days, 6 months. I started only recording binary milestones – 64 days, 128 days, 256 days – because monthly was now too often to brag about, and I can’t help but be a geeky attention-seeker. The pressure to not cock up was overwhelming – some of the hangovers I ran through were ridiculous, but by now, that I was going to run – come rain, shine or coma – was a given.

It is said that it takes 21 or 66 days to form a habit, dependant on who you ask – but I guess it was a fair bit longer than that before it was a really natural thing for me to do each day. Now however, I find it as weird a feeling to have not run as I do to have not brushed my teeth. Not that my feet grow fur or anything.

The Perils Of Running Streaks

Is streak running for everyone? Probably not – running alone is reasonably high impact and  not taking a break does increase the risk of injury. The US Streak Running Association have a very good post that explains the risks and everything that goes with the hobby far better than I ever could. In every exercise regime, rest is required in order to allow muscles to recover – so in a typical week, I have one or two one-milers, which I consider rest runs – they take less than 10 minutes and exist to keep the discipline enforced and my running streak going.

You also have to be realistic and listen to your body – I’ve had to cut runs down due to suspicious aches in my shins. And I’ve also always had to be prepared to break the streak, it’s better to let an injury heal before you start a new streak than try to run through an injury and be out for a year. Luckily, that hasn’t come up yet – because while this sort of thing is very easy to type, when an injury does occur, I’m not sure my ego will find resetting that magic number so simple a task.

Yay! Go Running Streaks!

Some of the spoils of my running streak - my shoes

That warning aside, running has been one of the few constants in my life this year (yeah, this is where the introspective, self indulgent bullshit stuff begins – bet you’re glad you read on now, eh?). Despite changing jobs and cities – among many other things – running has kept going alongside all of that stuff, regardless. It has been something to turn my attention to, something to set goals against, something that has given me a continual sense of achievement, and something to force myself out of the house in order to clear my head. It has been great, both physically and otherwise.

Speaking of achievements, at the beginning of the year I set a target of 500 miles, figuring most of my runs would be in the 1-2 mile mark. But due to training for the Great North Run, my mileage was upped considerably and I ended up hitting 1124 miles on my 365th day. Not too shabby.

So yes, with all this in mind, I would say that starting a streak of any type gives you an incredible impetus to get a task done, and I would recommend it to anyone with a goal to achieve of any sort. Running is a great way of staying active and keeping your head in check, I’d recommend that too.

I was going to post about my goals for 2013 here, but that seems to have developed a life of its own and should hit this website in the next week. Cheers for reading this far – and if you haven’t had enough of my self-indulgent running bollocks, I post updates on dailymile and I sometimes natter on about it on twitter.

Edit / Addendum

Allan Whatmough asked on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/allanw/status/286835193174716416

Which raises a great oversight in this post – how do I not forget the odd run? Well I prioritise the run as the first thing I do everyday. I don’t eat, I have a glass of water if I’m dehydrated (always sure to hydrate if I was drinking the night before), and then I just run. I find it hard to run with food in my stomach anyway – I’m just conscious of it being there, so I guess this system works pretty naturally for me. Even long runs don’t justify food yet (15 miles is about the longest I’ve ever gone). I guess this is a similar solution to disciplining myself as saver’s use to make sure they ‘pay themselves first’ – which I’m sure works nicely.