Category: Random stuff

Today, at work, I discovered a new coffee shop on the university campus. This one was a Costa and was located in the Students’ Union, somewhere I don’t normally go. A colleague had arranged a meeting there to discuss an upcoming module because unlike the other cafes/coffee places on campus it didn’t shut at 4pm. Unbelievably, since it is the only ‘branded’ coffee shop on campus, it turned out to be the cheapest – my Americano cost just £1.18 – presumably because the ‘student’ prices did not include VAT (Value Added Tax). This one joins six other cafes/coffee places that I can count on campus, all within a region that is just a few hundred metres across in each direction. Working roughly north to south there is: The Reservoir Cafe, Portland Square Cafe, Drakes Cafe, The Library Cafe (actually I think this one might also be branded), The Writing Cafe and Roland Levinsky Cafe. So that’s seven cafes in a tiny space, and I can’t help but be beset by a nagging feeling that I have forgotten one. It is much the same picture in the city centre and, for that matter, every other place I visit these days. It is like there is absolutely no limit to the number of cafes that a place can sustain. They pop up everywhere – there are at least another half dozen within 5 minutes walk of the university. Now I like coffee quite a lot, but honestly it is getting ridiculous. Surely they can’t all make enough money to be sustainable.

On Sunday evening, I was surprised to see evidence [think about it] that I was rather dehydrated. By this I don’t mean just a bit dehydrated, I mean running a Marathon dehydrated… This didn’t make sense – I had done a fairly long run on Saturday morning but nothing on Sunday and I thought I had been drinking plenty of water. Then, this morning, the evidence was even more plain, I wasn’t just Marathon level dehydrated, I was ultramarathon dehydrated. In fact, based on my limited ultramarathon experiences so far, it was even worse than that. Was there something wrong with my kidneys? More to the point, was I suffering from internal bleeding due to some rare intestinal disease? Call the doctor, fast.

And then I remembered, or perhaps ‘twigged’ is a better word. Over the weekend I ate quite a lot of home-made beetroot and carrot coleslaw. Now, if you are not sure what the significance of that statement is then I challenge you to try it. Go and eat a load of beetroot and then sit back (literally…) and await the show…

With a daughter at university studying Film you would think that I might watch a lot of them and it’s certainly true that my movie watching has increased many-fold in recent years driven in part by her interest and recommendations. I’ve been keeping a list of the films I have watched for a few years now – here: Film list. But last year my film watching declined markedly and partly I would put this down to her absence. I had a bit of a flurry of activity in the summer when she was home but still only managed to see 12 films between January and November inclusive. That all changed in December, actually quite late on in December, when she came home from university. Just two days later I was watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi and that was followed rapidly by the excellent The Florida Project and then a host of other films over the holiday period. Things have continued in similar vain through January since she went back to university with six films bagged already including tonight’s viewing of Beauty and the Beast [not my choice – my elder daughter loves it]. I even have tickets booked for three films at the Arts Centre in February – Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Darkest Hour and The Post. It seems that this year is going to be big year of film watching for me. In fact I might even finally get to watch The Shawshank Redemption…

I woke up this morning, Monday morning, with that feeling of ‘oh, here we go again’ and a fairly deep-set tiredness. The latter probably isn’t surprising as yesterday I ran 7.2 miles and then walked about 5.5 miles so I deserve to feel a bit tired, but I think it was more a result of having had a heavily planned and highly productive week last week which I carried on, albeit to a lesser extent, over the weekend. I oscillate between thinking that it is better to fill every scrap of time with some kind of activity and leaving plenty of space for recovery. Somehow, I am not convinced that the former makes me feel more tired or the latter more refreshed because inaction often leads to a sense of lethargy and missed opportunity and action often leads of a burst of extra energy. But I did feel tired this morning and knowing that I want to keep trying to push forwards with my heavily scheduled working days I decided that it would be sensible to do something to try to build in a bit of extra slack/rest. Out of this came my plan for this evening…

On Monday and Tuesday nights the TV series Silent Witness (forensic pathology drama) started up a new series last week. It is a series which I can watch but don’t particularly enjoy, whereas my wife and elder daughter (who is at home at the moment) do both like it – so what tends to happen is that we record it and then they try to squeeze watching it into ‘spare’ time in the day. On the other hand, there are some TV series on at the moment that I quite enjoy (e.g. Hunted) but my wife doesn’t like so much which makes it difficult for me to watch them, and there is also usually some decent football on Monday nights (although tonight it is Manchester United so perhaps decent isn’t the right word). Consequently, tonight and tomorrow night I plan to get myself to bed at 9pm when Silent Witness comes on, and watch either the football (tonight) or Hunted on catch-up (tomorrow) on my iPad, switching off at 10pm to pick up a book and read. This plan should give me a bit of extra-lazy rest time and has the added bonus of getting me to bed early so that I might actually read for a bit, as I have developed a bad habit of getting stuck downstairs (e.g. watching the news headlines at 10pm) and not making it to bed with much time left to read. The exact detail of this plan isn’t really so important. What I like about it though is that I am deliberately opting to take a positive step towards rest/relaxation rather than either watching something I don’t really want to watch or being generally inactive in an entirely passive way. I’m not sure I have really managed to capture my thoughts very well in this post – man decides to go to bed early and watch TV isn’t exactly a profound revelation – but I know what I am trying to express and, in any case, I am rather looking forward to my little bit of lazy space-time.

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)

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.

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].