In the late nineties I was a runner (but not a very good one), I would try and bunk off work to go for a run in the middle of the day or run at weekends. I would run from home but when I had the chance I would run around the perimeter road of Rushcliffe Country Park near where I live, which is a road that has some significance to me and to Alison and our relationship for one reason or another.
I used to write my runs down in a book, it’s just a little notebook that I had and it still sits in the bedside table.
I had a watch (which wasn’t very good) and a pen and some paper, some of the run times were quite good for me and I enjoyed writing them down and seeing the improvement’s, more than 20 years later things are different.
I went outside this weekend to my £1,600 smart bike “In the shed” that has an iPad Pro attached to it because it needs to have a screen really, to utilise the functions of the bike. I took my £350 bike computer and my £240 wireless headphones and my mobile phone, which costs god knows how much. Before you can get there everything needs to be charged and the iPad is a bit funny now (it’s a bit old) so it turns itself on automatically and then the charge runs out, so you have to make sure it’s charged before you get there. You need to make sure that the Wahoo bike computer is fully charged and on this occasion the headphones ran out of charge so I couldn’t listen to anything while I was on my bike.
The phone acts as a wireless hotspot because I don’t have Wi-Fi in my shed but it wasn’t working properly today so that pi***d me off that I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do on the iPad because I had no Wi-Fi.
In the end I did a tempo session, which took 52 minutes (which is pretty much the pretend easy session when I don’t want to do anything else).
The fact of the matter now is logistic of getting into the shed is almost too much and almost overwhelming and this is partly where my head is at the moment but I couldn’t get outside because the weather was so bad for the bike so I wanted to go into the shed but now going into the shed seems like a barrier because the technology required (and the cost) and the time it takes to get everything right is stupid.
I can’t run anymore because of my knee and how I miss the times when I just put my trainers on and could run down by the river, whatever the light, whatever the weather.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better and I’m not even on Zwift which is the avatar based bike computer training program where you can talk to your friends over gamer apps and shout at each other and ride in a group in cyber space.
Tomorrow I will ride to work, hopefully longer than the shortest route, without headphones, without my phone but still with a backpack with a laptop and phone and all the other electrical nonsense that all of us seem to have attached to us nowadays, which we didn’t have 20 years ago.
Blog Post Number - 2307
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