Starting Again, Again - Yet Again 👟
December 14, 20258 min readA Sunday Like Any Other ☮️
I went out for an hour walk today after watching a YouTube video with my wife and daughter. The video inspired me and made me want to go outside and breathe the fresh air, get my legs moving and spend some time on my feet.
The three of us were in our living room in the early afternoon of a lazy Sunday. We sat on our comfortable couch infront of our television, having just had a nice late morning breakfast of scrambled eggs and sourdough toast with butter and honey and almond butter.
Our warm house was comfortable and I was spending time around people I love.
The video, which I had seen before but wanted to share with my wife and daughter, was the following:
LUCY'S DAD is a beautiful short documentary about Ash Bartholomew, the father of ultra trail runner, Lucy Bartholomew. The doc reminded me of one of the most important aspirations in my life: to live a life of striving for adventure. The joy and the peace that comes from solid effort and doing things ( or more importantly, attempting things ) that challenge me.
It is remarkable how easy it is to forget about my commitment to adventure on a lazy day. Being sedentary on a sofa, while gathering information or inspiration, does not get me in the condition for athletic feats. Moving my body - a lot - is a better choice for preparation for those things.
So, I walked out of our warm house and did some easy exercise under the cloudy sky in the cold. I went to a neighborhood nearby which is under construction - half built houses and many recently clearned gravel lots - where there were very few cars and some good empty roads and sidewalks.
I listened to an audio book by Cameron Hanes on the walk called Undeniable, that I have listened to before - and that also inspired me.
So much of my life is simply showing up to a particular endeavor that I am engaged in. And trying to show up consistently - whether that is programming projects or whether it is a physical thing. I did not run or climb any mountains today - but I did move my body and get some time on my feet for about three miles - which took me about an hour.
I came back to my home feeling better than when I left it - like always after getting outside for these things. That hour in the cold was worth it X 5.
Getting Lighter 🧁
I have been struggling for some time with my weight - or, more precisely having too much visceral fat on my body for good health. It is also slowing me down as a trail runner - particularly with vertical gain on the trails. Much of gaining elevation in the woods is about power to weight ratio and I have been going back and forth and around in circles with finding a proper way of eating that works for me. I have struggled for years with my relationship with food.
Yesterday, my two sons brought this back from a food bank - where they volunteer every Saturday:
And I was tempted to have one of these cinnamon buns yesterday - even at night before bed - the worst imaginable time to eat a cinnamon roll.
I was tempted again this morning. But I resisted it - knowing that this sort of sugar does not help me with my goal of accomplishing more in my trail running. Quite the opposite.
So I took a picture of the buns on the table - and I decided to keep the picture as a momento of being able to say no to this temptation.
I actually toyed with the idea of eating one as a farewell to sugar - again. But I decided saying no to it - and making the picture of what I said no to - was a better route to take in this situation. Incredible the mental gymnastics I can go through with this stuff
My relationship with food - atleast "terrible for you" food that is all too common in our modern life - it boils down to an addiction rather than true hunger and that is something that I am working on.
Sugar is one of the worst vices I have - and one of the hardest that I have been struggling with in recent years. I have seen time and again that I am very sensitive to the inflammation brought on by excess sugar and it something that I try very hard to be conscious of. Whenever I eliminate my sugar intake beyond natural fruits and honey - I can feel the difference in 24 hours or less. The harder part is REMEMBERING the feeling that comes from feeling the difference.
I have a project I am just beginning that is a web application called sokay. The app is intended to help people with their relationship to food - by becoming mindful of their consumption of junk food.
I have built a Rust based terminal user interface - using the ratatui framework - called Mountains - designed for logging trail running daily training.
Random Items 🂷
It was a good day today.
While taking breaks from writing code this weekend, I watched several episodes of a great documentary series on AppleTV entitled Mr. Scorsese.
That has been fascinating and fun.
I have recommited to writing posts for this blog.
This is my first blog post in a few years. It is my first writing intended for public consumption in an equal number of years - other than the many pieces and notes I have made in Obsidian that I plan to shape into blog posts eventually.
I have missed sharing my thoughts in a public way like this. So I am starting again.
I am falling more and more in love with the Zed editor.
The editing experience and the Vim keybinding implementation is incredibly good and I am becoming rapidly convinced that it is the best text editor I have used in the eight years since I wrote my first line of code. For programming, including with the AI features and all other features, it is first rate.
I have found I love using the editor for writing my own prose, too. Although, I will never use AI features for that.
I am becoming more and more convinced as LLMs become more powerful and useful, the things that make us human - including our own points of view as expressed through writing - become that much more valuable.
I will write an entire blog post on Zed very soon.
About Writing ✍️
One of the wonderful things about writing, whether on paper or in digital ink like this, is the satisfaction that comes from getting down ideas that are important to me in my own life - ideas that I want to last and persist in my own consciousness during my own daily existence. I am finding more and more that it is an iterative process. It is a practice that can only be chipped away at a little piece at a time.
The point of view of the individual has now become everything in the act of writing. Maybe it always has been, but I suspect individual point of view has become more important than ever before in this age of AI hype and powerful LLMs.
With all their imperfections, humans still have the advantage there.
This post is my act of stepping back into the arena of writing and offering up my own point of view.
Thanks for reading!
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