The Temptation of the Bus

One of my frequent struggles when doing the 10k steps journey is the series of temptations to give up on the walk. Here’s how it works. You walk on the sidewalk, and you walk by a bus stop. The moment you’re there, a bus stops, and it goes to the co-working space. It will be there in 5 minutes, and if I kept walking, it would take me 20.

This was the evil bus that tempted me today. As it’s clearly written on it, the direction is hell.

Lots of the reasoning behind my radical walking approach is that walking only doubles the time it takes to get anywhere, compared to a bus or a car. You need to get to the car, clean it from leaves, drive in the traffic, find parking, pay for parking, and so on, and so on. However, if you are already at the bus stop, and there’s a bus conveniently waiting for you to hop on, there’s no cleaning, waiting, parking or anything. It’s like a teleport to the final destination. The only reason to keep walking would be that you want to walk, you want the pain, and the fitness that comes with it.

I chose the hard path because I value persistence and I have a long-term goal of achieving the 10k, and eventually being able to climb Vihren again. If I took the bus today, tomorrow I’ll be tempted by a bus that will arrive in 1 minute. Or a taxi. Or my car that’s parked right in front of the building. The path back to the car brain mentality would be wide open.

The Morning Walk

I keep insisting on reaching an annual average of 10K steps per day. Over the 2 years, I crawled to the goal by slowly replacing car time with walk time. The rule of the thumb is that 30 minutes of driving in the city can be replaced by 1h of walking, reducing the overall time cost of walking. However, I fully eliminated the city driving without even reaching an average of 8K.

I also do weekly hikes. These started with weekend walks in the park. Over the summer, we switched to doing hikes with my wife. The hikes can easily exceed 20k steps and move the average significantly up. However, it’s not possible to do that every week. Weather, babysitting, and health issues seems to make hiking unreliable.

The system I experiment with right now is the morning walk. Start the day with 7-8K, and then it almost doesn’t matter if I move at all, or if I do the weekly hike. The 10K average gets achieved. This approach is not without problems as well and I’m not sure it can be sustained.

  • It’s 8 am right now, 2°C outside, it’s cold
  • Dogs walkers everywhere. Stray dogs have not been fed by their humans. It feels unsafe. I was attacked once already, thankfully by a slow pug of some kind
  • Rush hour traffic – toxic fumes near the streets greatly limit the possible paths
  • It hurts. I’ve not figured that part out bit there’s pain.

The morning walk has other advantages – I can process the news and requests I received overnight, think about who does what and when. I feel like it slightly improves my productivity.

So, although the system with the morning walk consistently moves the average over 10k and adds processing time, I feel like I can’t sustain it. I’m not sure if it will be the cold weather, the darkness, a dog bite, or something else that will end it.

The Books I Read in September

Last month I made an off-by-one error and posted the list on August 30th, leaving a day not covered. The Troll Mountain was read on August 31st. So technically, I read 9 books last month but this post will cover 10.

Best books from last month:

  1. Dodger – there are books you can imagine when you close your eyes. The imagination takes you to a warm place. Dodger has that feeling. I gave it 5*, and it sits like that.
  2. Bion 1&2 – looking forward to book 3, which is supposed to be 70% complete, according to the publisher
  3. The Sunlit Man – Brandon Sanderson got a boost by the nice cover and illustrations

Worst book:

  1. The Sum of All Men – I gave it 4/5 but all that I remember in the weeks following the completion of that book is the horror of the main magical skill. The forceful extraction of people’s skills. I wouldn’t touch the continuation with a flagpole.

WCEU Sofia 2014

Photo by Vladimir Petkov – Kaladan

Facebook just reminded me that WordCamp Europe in Sofia took place 10 years ago. Many great memories came back to me. As a member of the local team, I spent many hours per day in my car during the weeks leading up to the event, handling all sorts of errands—printing t-shirts, badges, stickers, sponsor deliveries, and such. I stepped in dog poop while collecting speakers from the airport. My car smelled terrible, and I had no idea why. Brrr!

These t-shirts were unusually good I shipped the same to either Seville or Vienna.

Rain

The Sunday walk didn’t get to 10k steps. It rained and I had to settle with a few cat and flower photos.

Last time I hiked regularly, I wouldn’t skip a week for bad weather. Couldn’t imagine going to the mountain to soak and get cold.

The red flower is Begonia, taken near DCC-22, Sofia. Kudos to however keeps this tiny garden.