Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
It rained today, the kids needed things, and I only managed to have a walk in the evening. The park was empty. It was kind of depressing, except for this fountain that spread light and color. I hope it serves some purpose other than me noticing it in the early evening.
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.
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.
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 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.
Not the first time I feature this bridge on my blog. It offers great views in all directions and an exhibition with empty whiteboards.
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