2011 Streak Day 303 (Wednesday Nov 2nd): habit

2011 Streak Day 303 (Wednesday Nov 2^nd): Run - 3.11 miles, Time - 31min, Weather - cloudy but mild

Again another run keeping the heart rate down. I am beginning to enjoy this routine of running every other day before breakfast. The mystery is why I can never do this at home.

Here it feels easy to wake-up put on running kit and leave. Once I am out of the door I walk for a few yards, gentle jog and then get into a rhythm of slightly more active plodding. I am on quiet lanes with no one in sight and the sun coming up. It feels just right and for this house it is my habit.

Back home I can never maintain the pattern and it does not feel the obvious thing to do. I have tried but after a few days the effort peters out - perhaps after many years my morning routine is so ingrained it resists change.

One of the strands of the Mindfulness book is to become aware of ones habits and try to break them: do things differently. On the whole I like that idea. I like, for example, to randomly take a different route or doing something new but it has to be after breakfast. Everything before then is a matter of waking-up and sorting myself out. And breakfast, well breakfast is the most habitual thing I do. Almost every morning I eat exactly the same thing. 

I actually don’t know if this is a good or bad. It is what I do and it is comfortable but that is not the same thing at at all. 

Today’s picture comes from Cognac and shows that the tourist season is over. La Dame Jeanne takes groups of people up and down the river but is now undergoing maintenance. I suppose I should not have been surprised at how shallow the draft is and that it is flat bottomed but I must admit that was my first reaction. A couple of moments thought though and I realised that was the appropriate design

Juneathon Day 2:On habits and eating

2011 Streak Day 153/365: Cycle - 13.71 miles, Time 54min 38sec, Weather - warm, with a grey haze

Squirrels playing with buckets

Part 1

Last night I after I had finished watching a dvd I made a cup of tea and some peanut butter on water biscuits. As I bit into a biscuit I enjoyed watching the way the peanut butter held the crumbling fragments together and I concentrated on finishing before the whole thing fell to pieces. It was far from elegant eating but I was enjoying my snack until I realised I should not have been having it at all.

Damn I thought - why do I keep doing this? Why do I graze without thinking, merely because I am a little peckish and something is easily available? How can I do it without thinking, do it before my will-power has even got its boots on?

Damn.

Juneathon is all very well and establishing the habit of exercise is an excellent objective. Being smart about training, so that each session has a focus and objective, is even better. But the thing that would make the most difference to my running times is to lose some weight but that is something I find difficult because it requires 24hr attention.

I need to remind myself to go to bed each night feeling slightly hungry but this is easy to forget as there are so many little habits about eating that bypass the conscious mind.

There is a wonderful quote from Dr Johnson about habit (there is always a wonderful quote from Dr Johnson on almost any subject)

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

I think I will have to think about that the next time I reach for the jar of peanut butter.

Part 2

Today's exercise was a straightforward ride along a familiar route to the field of alpacas. Unfortunately the alpacas were too far away and would have looked like little furry balls in any photo. Instead I took a picture of some buckets, mainly because a couple of squirrels had been exploring them and I had been amused watching them scurrying about.

2011 Streak 112/365: Mountain biking

2011 Streak 112/365: Walk - 22.5 miles, time - 2hrs 15min, Weather - sunny and hot

For about 12 years, before he went to New Zealand, my friend and I used meet-up every fortnight to go mountain biking. Mostly we went on the trails around Ashridge, tweaking and extending our routes until we knew we had found something close to perfection, which we then kept doing, many, many times. Instead of getting tired, the repetition seemed to increase the pleasure. The more we got to know it the better it felt and the more we went out, the more we saw. The seasons and weather always changed and so there was always something different, some new challenge.

For every section we developed our own names. These could be merely descriptive like 'the unfeasibly bumpy bit' or enigmatic like 'the 95 percenter' but they all evolved from things said on the rides, over time. For example we once remarked that a particular section was always harder than we remembered and so it became 'the hidden hill'. In this way we developed our own private cartography - a pleasure that can only come over time. 

Today was therefore a big day: for the first time in five years we were going to retrace our paths and try to recapture the enjoyment of something once deeply embedded in our pattern of life.

All I can say is that it was brilliant. We did all the things we used to do, stopped at places we used to stop, look at things we used to look at. Even the skylark was there (there is a particular downland section where we always seemed to hear a skylark).

Can it really have been five years ago? Time must have passed but it felt just the same.

Except (and there is always and except) … I have lost fitness. Coming up the scarp slope my legs went watery and I needed recovery time at the top. Not good. Not impressive. These gentle strolls I have been having this year are all very fine but they don't achieve much. Action needs to be taken. I need to press harder.

2011 Streak 63/365: Back Home

2011 Streak 63/365 Walking - 6.34 miles, Time -  2hr 5min, Weather - back to grey

How many habits do we have? Most of us like to think we are not totally predictable and have some spirit of spontaneity; but how many of our actions are really free? How often do we follow along well established channels?

I ask because although I know I have certain routines and repeated patterns, I am sometimes unaware of all of my habits. For example when I come back from being away my first outing is always to the canal. It is as if I don't think I am fully home until I have run or walked the stretch between Boxmoor and Nash Mills.

So today's picture not only comes from that stretch it also continues the theme of return. I first saw this wrecked boat on January 5th and posted a picture. Since then nothing much has happened, apart from a soft barrier protecting other craft from bumps and the inevitable smashing of windows. Something left abandoned will attract kids at play and damage will result. Once the damage has started, usually, more and more will be broken until everything is smashed. I hope this boat doesn't go that way

I really do not know what happens when canal boat sinks. What does an owner do if he lacks resources (I had previously seen the owner of the boat and I don't think he had much money)? What does British Waterways do to ensure the canal is clear?

All will be revealed over time and as I frequently pass by I might be able to find out.

Other than that the walk was a reminder of the greyness of the weather and the dullness of Hemel Hempstead compared to Barcelona. We will never be a destination town!

I think it will take a couple of days to adjust to finding the pleasure in my surroundings

Not The Perfect Doughnut - But Good Enough

Juneathon day 7: run 7.16km time 42min

Geoff Dyer is one of those authors I like and admire without feeling passionate about. He manages to be very artful, write well and make a number of acute observations (that you wished you could have made yourself), whilst giving the impression he is merely knocking off some thinly disguised diary pages.

Today he has an article in the Guardian about living for a short time in New York, finding the perfect cup of coffee and doughnut, and how important they were to his daily routine.

“Nietzsche so hated what he called "enduring habits" that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of their chains. Unlike Nietzsche I succumb all too easily to enduring habits. I like to go back to the same few places all the time – then, as soon as I break free of the prison of routine, I am left wondering why I kept going to a place I had stopped enjoying years earlier.”

I can relate in many ways, except many of my habits tend to be self limiting as once I realise I am doing things out of routine rather than real desire, I will stop - for example I had a period of really liking the almond croissants from Cafe Nero but I have not now had one for a couple of years. However in matters of running routine is important.

I have a small number routes I like and I tend to run them again and again. Occasionally I will make a point of trying-out different places, and I enjoy doing that, but most of my runs are meat and potatoes - standard fare. In fact it is all a lot like food. Most of the meals we cook at home come from a fairly standard and often repeated repertoire but every so often we make a conscious effort to try something new. Most of the time we don’t want to think too much about cooking, we want to eat. It is the same with running most of the time I don’t want to worry about it I just want to get out.

So today was along the Nicky Line.

“Delectica had been my base, it was the point from which my sense of familiar and localised happiness had spread. It was the epicentre of my wellbeing – what Marx, in a non-pastry-related context, termed the heart of a heartless world. I've always been dependent on places like this wherever I've lived.”

For me the heart is more the canal than the Nicky Line but the principle is the same.

Juneathon statistics
run 5/7
distance 36.62km

time 3hr 36min

Cycle 1/7

distance 21 miles

time 1hr 32min

Gym 1/7

time 45min