Author: Tim

Postbridge and Bellever Walk

Living in Plymouth means that we are only about 30 minutes away from the excellent walking terrain provided by the wide open expanse of Dartmoor. This ought to mean that we go walking there a lot but that 30 minute barrier seems to be enough to make it quite an unusual occurrence. Yet every time I get out on the moor I think how great it is and how we should be making the effort to get ourselves out there. I think there are two keys to overcoming the psychological barrier that the short drive poses. First, it’s obviously a good idea to have good quality kit so that when you do actually go for a walk and inevitably (on Dartmoor) end up walking through a bog, your feet stay dry and comfortable. Secondly, I think it is really important to plan and have made the decision to go for a walk well in advance. We took care of the first of these last weekend when we bought new walking boots (Scarpa Terra GTX with Vibram soles, Goretex lining and simple leather design) together with some new walking trousers (I gave all my previous ones away to charity shops because, after losing over 20 pounds in weight and 2 inches off my waist in the last few years, they didn’t fit me anymore). And then earlier in the week we decided that with no rain forecast we would take ourselves out for a walk today deciding last night that it would be a 5.5 mile route from Postbridge to Bellever, towards Laughter Tor and then back through the forest.

The weather was cloudy, so we weren’t blessed with the best views but there was little wind and no rain so the conditions were pleasant enough. The route we were following got a bit confused around the mid-way point and I ended up using the map to pick out a route back from Laughter Tor following forest tracks that may not have been the way that was intended. It was all easy enough, the new boots seem to have done their job well.

Here are a few photos that I took along the way…


View back towards Postbridge

The East Dart river at Bellever, looking south

View towards Yar Tor

Rock outcrop on northern side of Laughter Tor

Moody skies (classic Dartmoor)

Psychic Scientific American

Over the years I have subscribed to Scientific American magazine on a couple of occasions, most recently since January 2016. I enjoy reading about a broad range of scientific endeavours and see it as part of my effort to keep generally up-to-date with what is going on in the world of science.

I like to treat reading Scientific American as a discipline, reading each month’s edition from cover to cover and making sure that I do not skip articles or news items just because they are not about something I am obviously interested in. The trouble with this approach is that on occasion I find myself getting behind and then I start to wonder whether it is worth the money for the subscription and whether the fact that I am behind is an indication that I am not really as interested in the content as I would like to think I am (or, as a scientist, should be). I ended up in this position in late summer last year when I somehow managed to be at least three months behind and it was in response to this that I tried to get into the habit of reading about six pages each day to catch up. Six pages is about the length of most of the more substantial articles, or a half to a third of the front part of the magazine (letters and smaller news items) or the entire back part (book reviews, pieces from the archive and a couple of one-page columns). This approach worked fairly well although I never quite got caught up.

More recently, over the Christmas/New Year break I turned scientific reading into one of my ‘dailies’ and, as a result, I swept through the December 2017 edition and, yesterday, completed the January 2018 edition. This meant that FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MONTHS I had caught up. I had read the last part of the January 2018 edition on 12th January and had no Scientific American reading in place to do (but I do have articles from two recent copies of the Royal Meteorological Society magazine, Weather, to get through).

What do you think turned up in the post today, making a big thump as it hit the hall floor? Yes, you’ve guessed it, the February 2018 edition…

My 50 (Work-)Day Exercise Streak

It’s pretty obvious from even a minimal perusal of this site that I run quite a lot and, for my age and given that it is less than 5 years ago that I properly started running, I would like to think that I am not a bad runner at all (7 marathons, 3 ultramarathons, blah, blah, blah). But despite the obvious fact that all of this running makes me pretty fit I am not, and never have been, anything like what you might call ‘strong’. My arms and upper-body are particularly weak and my core isn’t much better which is probably the reason why I sometimes get accused by my wife (or at least USED to get accused) of slouching. I’d very much like to be stronger and on a few occasions in the past two or three years I have embarked on ambitious programmes to build myself up, albeit these have always been home activities using minimal apparatus. My most recent attempt at this was my second attempt to follow a 10-week Bodyweight exercise programme by ex-US Navy SEAL Mark Lauren but although the programme looked quite feasible when written down on paper I found it too much to fit into my life and too hard. I wrote about this here: How My Arms Stopped Working.

Consequently, it is with significant pride that I am delighted to report that this morning I completed my 50th consecutive work-day set of exercises courtesy of the National Health Service (NHS) Live Well programme. I stumbled upon these exercise programmes sometime in October and started them in earnest on Monday 6th November (10 weeks ago). They are nothing like as difficult/involved as, say, the Mark Lauren programme and judging by the explanatory photos that are used to illustrate each exercise on the NHS website they are not exactly aimed at people like me. But I like them and, CRUCIALLY, I have continued with them because 1) they don’t take too long to do and 2) they are not TOO difficult. In the scheme there are six sets of so-called 10 minute exercises together with short (5-6 minute) warm-up and cool-down sections. I have been using five of the exercise sets, ignoring the one called ‘cardio’ because all of my running takes care of that aspect. I have done one of the remaining five exercise sets each work-day morning (actually non-work days including Christmas Day and New Year’s Day also when these are not weekend days) as the first thing I do when I get out of bed. In each case I do the warm-up then the exercise set and then the cool-down. I have been rotating the exercise sets so that I do the same one on any given day so it has been a case of Monday = toning, Tuesday = legs, bums and tums, Wednesday = abs, Thursday = bingo wings! [my exclamation mark] and Friday = firm butt. I have toyed with the idea of picking one of the five at random each day whilst making sure I do all five each week but for now I am sticking to the same sequence. It has to be said that the name of the programme is a bit of a mis-nomer. Some of the sets (especially toning and legs, bums and tums) take me significantly longer than 10 minutes to complete, but others (bingo wings and firm butt) only take about 5 minutes. All of the sets can basically be done in 30 minutes when the warm-up and cool-down is included. I like my sequence because the ones earlier in the week seem to me to be quite a lot harder than the Thursday and Friday ones which provides an extra little boost once mid-week has passed knowing that only the easier ones are to come.

10 weeks (or 50 exercise sets) in I can certainly detect a difference. It would not be too much of a lie to say that it is now possible to see muscles in my arms, chest and core. When I look at myself in a mirror (don’t worry, I don’t spend ages admiring myself) I can see signs of a 6-pack, although I am not sure whether anyone else would agree, it MIGHT just be optimism. And I can certainly complete more exercises, more easily and more strenuously. For example, whereas at the start I would do 8 half-press-ups during each of two circuits of the toning workout I now rattle off 15 full press-ups the first time round and usually get to 10 or so second time round before switching to half ones to conserve myself a bit for the rest of the circuit. At the start I could practically not do a stomach crunch or oblique at all – now I can reasonably comfortably do 2 sets of 15… So these exercises work and, most particularly, they work because I do them regularly. On the one hand a streak length of 50 days doesn’t seem that long but on the other hand it has spanned getting on for one third of a year so it is not too shabby and having reached this point I find myself wondering what I will be like by the time I have extended the streak to 100 days.

More generally, I was musing yesterday about the value of streaks, noting that I was (then) on 49 weekdays for exercises, and at least 11 days for 10-minutes of mindfulness meditation and reading a few pages of science content in Scientific American (or similar), and 9 days for writing entries on this blog. The value of thinking in terms of streaks like this seems invaluable and really powerful. This morning when I woke up I really struggled to get moving, but knowing that 49 was going to become 50 was a huge motivating force. And similarly, seeing my other streaks breaking through into double-figures is making me absolutely determined not to let any of them slip either.

Subtitles

Last night I watched a Swedish film (no, no, no, not THAT sort of Swedish film) – ‘A Man Called Ove’. Unsurprisingly, because the film was Swedish, the dialogue was in Swedish and so I watched it with subtitles switched on. Now, I am not a huge one for foreign language film or TV although I have recently watched three series of ‘The Killing’ (Danish), two series of ‘The Bridge’ (Swedish) and a few episodes of ‘Inspector Montalbano’ (Italian) and so watching programmes with subtitles isn’t something I do often or something I have thought about much before.

Anyway, once the film had finished it immediately struck me that I had been almost completely oblivious to the fact that I was listening to dialogue in Swedish but reading subtitles in English. I FELT as if I had just been watching a film as I normally would, assimilating the dialogue without any different effort or attention than I would have done if everything had been in English. I had certainly been reading the English words and I had certainly been hearing the Swedish words but my brain had tricked me into thinking that I had just been effortlessly absorbing everything, like I had been rearing/heading AND INSTANTLY UNDERSTANDING Swenglish (for want of a better name). It was quite a weird realisation. It then occured to me that I might quite possibly PREFER watching a foreign language film with English subtitles because I suspect that to do so I had to focus more intently than usual and so had probably entered something more akin to a ‘flow’ state (at the very least a minimally distracted state of mind).

It was interesting.

Incidentally, I enjoyed the film a lot. It was tinged (understatement) with a lot of sadness but also softly and playfully humorous throughout. And it made me want to own a classic Saab car (but obviously not a Volvo…) [watch the film].

Introducing… Dudley Disrupter

This morning I went for a five and a half mile run before work. This meant I got into work a little later than usual but this was all part of my original plan for the week. In truth, by the time I got into work (after a two mile walk) I was 14 minutes behind schedule, but I had already sneaked a look at my email Inbox and knew that there was nothing much in there that was going to take my time. So, I was confident that I would be able to get back on track pretty much straightaway. My plan for the day followed the same structure that I had (successfully) deployed in the last couple of days, namely a short spell devoted to email first thing, a short buffer of spare time, a longer timeslot of concentrated work on a substantive project (lecture planning in this case), a break for lunch, a planned timeslot for some research reading/activity, a second session on email and miscellaneous tasks and then a two hour meeting to end the day. After two days in which I have stuck unbelievably well (for me) to this kind of plan and made real progress on the substantive tasks I had set aside time for, I felt cautiously optimistic about the day ahead.

Anyway, back to the run. As I ran, I found myself remembering some cartoons I used to watch as a little kid. What I vaguely recalled was a cartoon in which the main character (possibly Mickey Mouse) had two little imaginary characters sitting on his shoulders, on one side a little angel who tried to get Mickey (let’s assume it WAS Mickey) to make good choices and behave well and on the other side a little devil who had the singular ambition to get Mickey into trouble. I have no idea why this particular cartoon idea popped into my head when it did but as I ran along I found myself thinking that my frequent struggles to stick to plans that I have made bore a lot of resemblance to the cartoon. Instead of Mickey generally going about his business there is me, trying to keep focussed and remain productive at work, and perched on my shoulders are the two imaginary characters, the ‘good’ one telling me to stick to my plans and the ‘bad’ one doing absolutely everything in his power to disrupt them, whispering things like: ‘It won’t matter if you just take a break here, you’re tired and you will work better later on if you do’ or ‘There’s no harm in not replying to that email immediately, it won’t do any damage if you just leave it there and then notice it and think about dealing with it another twenty or thirty times…’. I could see that this bad character was just hell-bent on disrupting my best-laid plans, and for that reason I decided that he would need a name with Disrupt or Disrupter in it. First off, the name Disrupter Dave came to mind, but I have a friend called Dave at my running club and he is friendly, helpful and just a generally really nice guy so I couldn’t bring myself to adopt that name. After a bit more thought I settled on Dudley Disrupter – the character Dudley Dursley in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novel series isn’t the nicest (although he is far from the worst of course) and I liked the idea that Dudley could be shortened to Dud which is exactly what I become when Dudley Disrupter gets his way.

I suppose there must also be a ‘good’ character on my other shoulder who also ought to have a name but I don’t really find that he gets in my way very much and so I hardly notice him. Consequently, at present, I am content simply to assume his presence but leave him un-named.

I decided on my run that one of main challenges in life is to watch out for Dudley whispering in my ear and trying to pull me away from my planned path, and I wondered to what extent Dudley might show his face today…

Now, at the end of the working day (I arrived home not long ago) I am glad to report that Dudley didn’t come out to play today. For the third day in a row I stuck to my plan and for the third day in a row I got some really USEFUL work done, as opposed to just getting some work done. I don’t doubt that Dudley Disrupter will appear on my shoulder again soon, tap me on the head and try his best to steer me off course, but it feels as if, by flushing out his existence and giving him a name, I might just have stumbled on a strategy for keeping him out of harm’s way.

Going Japanese

Saturday will see a rare event occur – I have just booked to go out to a restaurant for a meal with my wife and daughter (it will be a birthday meal for my wife). I almost never go out to eat in restaurants and when I do eat out the venue is generally a pub or a chain restaurant (cheap and easy). The chosen venue (my wife’s choice) is a local Japanese restaurant which should be interesting as I have only eaten Japanese food a few times and my only real recollection of eating it is from around 45 years ago when we had a Japanese visitor (a member of a group of teachers visiting local schools) staying with our family. If my memory serves me well his name was Mr Natsume and the occasion of us eating Japanese food with him was quite a memorable one…

Mr Natsume (I will assume I have remembered correctly) stayed with us for perhaps two weeks and at some point towards the end of this period he announced that he would like to cook real Japanese food for us. After a little thought he decided what he would make (Tempura was the main thing I remember), relevant ingredients were bought and the evening came for him to cook. I remember him setting to work in the kitchen and it getting later and later and later with no food appearing. Eventually (and I really do mean eventually), the dishes were ready and much later than planned and so absolutely starving hungry we tucked in (the food was absolutely delicious). Conversing as we ate, it turned out that he had NEVER cooked before as his wife always cooked for him, and his efforts were based entirely on his observations of her preparing and cooking food at home. This went some way to explaining quite why it had taken so long for fairly basic ingredients (vegetables, batter) to transmogrify into delicious morsels.

So, as I look forward to Saturday evening I have two key things going on in my mind. First, I am excited because I can still recall just how delicious Mr Natsume’s Japanese food was and I am looking forward to more of the same. Secondly, I am wondering how many snacks I should eat on Saturday afternoon, just in case it turns out that slow preparation is not only something for a first-timer trying to mimic the efforts of their wife but, rather, is a general characteristic of Japanese food.

Putting Up Barriers… Sticking To The Plan

It is Monday today. On Friday last week I determined to try to make two changes to the way I work this week with the overall aim of making better progress on substantial tasks and getting less stuck hacking my way through email-related work and other stuff that comes up. Change number 1 was to schedule specific times to handle work email each day – usually one at the start of the day and one at the end of the day or as close to that as I could get given other commitments – and to switch to offline mode at other times so that I could still work on tasks that required access to emails and attached documents but would not see anything new incoming. Change 2 was to schedule largish blocks of time (minimum two hours) that were pre-allocated to specific substantive tasks. Linked to this I made a new sign for my door that indicated that I was not to be disturbed (to be displayed during these work sessions) and which also showed when I COULD be disturbed at other times.

The result was that for today, I planned to do an email catch-up from 09:00-09:30 followed by a 30 minute buffer of unallocated time, followed by a two hour block to work on a new version of a Workload Data Collection Form, an hour ‘spare’ over lunchtime and then a three hour block for marking some reflective reviews by Final Stage students with a final one hour block for further email catch-up at the end of the day.

It is now almost 5pm and I am somewhat surprised to find that I have more or less stuck to my plan. I found that I needed about 40-45 minutes on my email this morning but I was still able to fit in 10 minutes of meditation and a trip to the kitchen to make a cup of tea into the shortened buffer period. I then did more like two and a half hours concentrated work on the Workload Form before having lunch despite forgetting to switch the sign on my door and being interrupted by a colleague for about 20 minutes (albeit that it was an important interruption). Lunch over-ran a bit due to some interesting conversation with colleagues (who, incidentally, were amused by the sign on my door that said I was ‘Open for Business!’) but I was still hitting the marking by 1.30pm and managed to mark 18 pieces of work (one third of the total amount) before 4pm which represented a rate of progress that I was happy with. I then switched my email back on to find about 12 new incoming messages including one important one that I was expecting which required a fair amount of thought/effort to respond to. Clearly, given that I am writing this now, I managed to do everything email-related that I needed to and still had time to write this entry. I also had time to read a Scientific American article about the search for Dark Matter (axions) in between completing the marking and starting email again this afternoon, which provided a kind of break.

So far so good then. I have set things up with an almost identical structure tomorrow so I ought to be fairly optimistic of another day of success, but Wednesday gets a bit more messy as I (currently) plan to go for a run for an hour or so before work (so will get in a bit late), have a big two hour meeting at the end of the afternoon and have populated the hours in between with some different types of task that I need to get to (bracketed by email sessions again) – an hour for some initial planning for four new lectures I have to prepare and an hour to do some reading relating to a little piece of research I am trying to do at the moment (on atmospheric tides). Then, on Thursday, I have two teaching sessions to complete that will dominate the day and so I have only scheduled one email session that day. Friday is currently left more or less open as I wanted to see how the first part of the week panned out and leave myself plenty of time clear in case something unexpected and important cropped up.

Frankly (Mr Shankly*), I will be pretty amazed if things continue to go as well as they have today but I have had quite a bit of success recently getting unstuck and getting things done so there’s reason to be hopeful.

[* Anyone who is a fan of the music of The Smiths will appreciate that it is virtually impossible to write or say the word ‘Frankly’ without continuing (perhaps internally/silently) with the words ‘Mr Shankly’.]

Night Fox

A couple of nights ago I was driving back from watching a film (Battles of the Sexes) at the Arts Centre and was almost home when one of these beautiful creatures ran across the road in front of me, jumped a wall and headed down towards Blindman’s Wood (a very small piece of private woodland sandwiched between the estate out house is on and one of the largest road junctions in Plymouth):

I think foxes are quite possibly my favourite wild animal. I haven’t seen them that many times – I recall one occasion when I was probably about 10 in fields on the Somerset Levels, another time a few years ago in a field near Minehead and the previous most recent sighting, very early one morning in the very same road that I saw my recent sighting. That one stood in the road and looked straight at me as I slowed the car so I got a really good view of it, unlike Friday’s one which was clearly in a hurry to get to wherever it was going.

Today I have driven just over 300 miles from Plymouth to Southampton and back and saw ANOTHER four foxes. Four in one day! But sadly all of today’s foxes were dead ones, littering the roads; collateral damage from the human desire to rush around at top speed all the time. Heartbreaking.

Thankful For A Fit And Strong Body

This morning I went for my longest run for ages (since 6th October to be precise) – an 11.4 mile loop down to and then along Plymouth’s waterfront before returning home via Devonport and Blockhouse Parks. It was a cold, crisp morning, only one or two degrees above freezing but I wrapped up well and the sun was out so I ended up feeling plenty warm enough. It was a good run. I was a bit worried that my left glute, which has been giving me a bit of jip for quite a while now would play up, what with the increased distance from most of my recent runs, but it was basically fine – a little sore but not to the extent that it held me up.

As I started on my way back from the waterfront, running up through Devonport towards the park I was passed by a man coming the other way on a mobility scooter. He was probably not too dissimilar in age to me, huge and clearly not at all fit, healthy or mobile. The thought that ran through my head as I ran along was how thankful I was that I have been able to run for the last (almost) five years and have a body that is now fit and strong and capable of propelling me along under my own steam for quite large distances and at a reasonably respectable pace (I guess that I could probably run further than a mobility scooter on a single charge and also faster, at least over a short distance). So this post is just to acknowledge this gratitude and to count my blessings in this respect.

What Am I Trying To Prove? (and who am I trying to prove it to?)

Last night I went out for a run with my running club. I nearly didn’t go – about 15 minutes before I was due to leave the heavens opened (again) and it became clear that the evening was going to be a wet one. But I told myself that I couldn’t keep not going to the running club every time a bit of water fell out of the sky. It was still raining by the time we got out for the run about 45 minutes later but the amount of water on the ground seemed out of all proportion to the time the rain had been falling. Much of the run was spent splashing through almost ankle deep puddles and/or trying to avoid them. The end result was that I found myself retreating into my own little space and musing about the difficulties I have been having trying to decide on my running plans for the year ahead.

Usually at this time of the year I have a pretty good idea of the focus for my running in the first part of the year. For example, last year I had set myself the target of a 50 mile ultramarathon in May and the year before I had set up a succession of races of steadily increasing distance ahead of the 32 mile Dartmoor Discovery event in June. This year I have been vacillating badly. I haven’t yet entered a major event and I haven’t been able to decide whether I am going to go proper long again. I had almost decided to start running the entire South West coast path over a period of about 5 years and, with this in mind, I had almost fixed on a set of race events in March, June and August that would cover almost 95 miles of it. But the snag has been that these events are all ones that are popular (so many races seem so much popular than they were even a couple of years ago) and so likely to book up quickly which has meant that I have been trying to make fast decisions on whether to enter them and having to think about associated transport, accommodation etc. And then there was the nasty issue that entering just these three key events was going to cost approximately £150 just for the race entries, a big hit in one go.

Anyway, back to last night’s run. As I ran I found myself wondering whether I really wanted to do any of these events, or rather whether I really wanted the hassle of deciding and committing to any of these events right now. Why couldn’t I just run a bit, enter an event when I felt like it (accepting that certain races would be full), and not feel the pressure of having to decide and plan the year’s running out in advance? And then my mind started to ask the killer questions… by entering and completing race events what was I trying to prove and who was I trying to prove it to? I don’t have an answer to these questions yet. In fact, I am not sure that I want to find answers to them. As I ran it struck me that maybe I should just not be bothered about setting myself a major running target in advance this year. Maybe I should just run, follow a general training plan designed to get me up to marathon plus distance by, say, May, and then, or along the way, see what takes my fancy. Perhaps an event that I thought would book up would have spare spaces after all. Perhaps I’d feel like doing a different event on the spur of the moment. Perhaps a real desire to do a particular race would take hold at some point. I decided none of it really mattered because, I realized, in the final analysis I have no need to prove anything to anyone.