Today marks 12 months of e-road cycling and e-mountain biking for me! and tomorrow will mark 12 months since I got my own eMTB (pictured below).
Nakamura e-summit 950
3011 kilometers, shown in orange on the SportsTracker map!
Map of the area showing in various shades of orange the area I have covered on my eMTB. It goes as far as Fréjus and Roquebrune in the Var at the West, Mons, Caussols and Gréolières at the North and Saint-Laurent du Var at the East.
Most of it was recreational but a lot of it was a substitute to driving for errands and commute, or to meet people.
I think (*) I have driven fewer kilometers than I cycled in the last year, as a result.
I enjoy myself biking way more than anything else. I’m not very good at it but I don’t care. I’m not very bad at it either!
Biking makes me happy and I look happy on a bike. I selected from the last 12 months a few pictures of me (taken mostly by my co-biker, former colleague and friend Daniel) that I like in particular.
(From the back of the book) We are coming apart. We’re a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time. America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal. Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves. Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever.
I gave this book 3/5 ⭐️ because it’s a dystopian novel about the future, written in the past, where that future is horribly plausible and is already happening. Also because it’s a story about strong people of color, strong women, human rights, climate change, greed of the wealthy who treat people like a commodity, and hope in mutual help and good sense.
It took me over three months to finish the book. I went weeks without reading it. I hope to get a sense of closure and that the series makes sense, by reading “Parable of the talents” which continues the heroine’s story.
I found the climate change dystopian context riveting (the story, written in 1993, takes place in 2024-2027.)
I did not care for the religious or philosophical aspect of the novel which I found unconvincing and I was surprised and disappointed how little resistance the heroine encounters as she assembles a following to create this religious or philosophical community.
I was disappointed that I found so little character development. That so many things are painstakingly detailed while others are glossed over. It gave me a fuzzy and partial visualization interspersed with very precise events narration. I would have liked more balance.
I think the author made the right choice to write this as a diary. It makes the shortcomings a little less worse. It also allows the young (15-18 year old) protagonist to boast, be a bit smug, and quite manipulative. I still found it hard to believe that however cunning and smart she is, she is met with hardly any resistance from her fellow travelers.
Today was a very lazy Sunday. I’m aching all over! Mostly, my legs are stiff and my arms feel heavy. A few days ago my legs were stiff and my shoulders were screaming from trying a different kind of push-ups. So today I woke up several times during the night and the morning, and finally got up late after “third sleep”.
Gif: camera zooming on a cat resting on its back on a couch, propped on a pillow.
Be that a coincidence or not, yesterday evening I read articles about biphasic sleep. For millennia and up until the Industrial Revolution such a sleep pattern (the kind where nighttime sleep is split into two segments) was the common pattern: people would fall asleep some time after dark for two to four hours, wake up refreshed for a few hours to do stuff, and go back to sleep for a few more hours until around dawn. (I enjoyed reading about this subject particularly in this BBC article.)
I am reassured there is an explanation to the middle-of-the-night insomnia, although it makes me angry that our society prefers to shame us into thinking it’s wrong and against the interests of how we’ve organised the school and work lives of our fellow humanlings and humans.
As to what is causing my body fatigue, I am not sure. Nothing obvious, that is. I went from no exercise to daily exercise but that was 3 years ago. There was a time period where my daily exercising average was over the top (nearly 3 hours every day on average) but right now it’s been about 90 minutes every day on average for about a year.
Screenshot of the Health app showing the exercise minutes between september 2022 and september 2023: Gradual decrease from 125 minutes per day on average in September 2022 to about 60 in January 2023, then rather stable around 70 until August 2023 where the bar goes over 100. Daily average for the period rounded to 86 minutes per day.
It could be a combination of the heatwaves we’ve been having these past few months (hot nights never under 24°C/75F and blazingly hot days in the range of 30-35°C/86-95F which feels like way more given the humidity), and some intense workouts.
This week for example I discovered a particularly wicked 10-minute “functional strength” total body workout by Greg Cook on Fitness+ that is done only with body weight which killed me! Squats where you never fully stand up between each repetition, walkout pushups, and lateral lunges. This week I also rode my bike as far as its battery could take me (with the hills to climb, that’s about 65 km/40 mi).
Could be that work is stressful (and has been a kind of different stressful for about a year) and adding this to the mix probably explains the fatigue.
My brother and I turned 48 ten days ago. Our mother called him and left a happy birthday message on his voicemail. She didn’t call me.
I didn’t expect her to, actually. Our relationship is complicated and has been forever (i.e., as long as I can remember.)
She can be really nice, but not for very long. Not just to me, but it seems like I coax it out of her, somehow. Never deliberately though. I just don’t think we are suited for one another.
So most of the time she’s been absent from my life, and some of the time she’s been very nice to me. I remember a lot more of the former, sadly.
Sadly? Not, really. It’s too bad, for sure, but I have been accustomed to this for decades so it’s just part of the ebb and flow of our relationship.
In the last ten days, two emotions filled me:
I was vexed for a couple of days. Nothing new. Each time she plays favourite feels like a slap to my face and it hurts for a bit.
I now feel liberated and much much lighter.
How did I go from one emotion to the other? I simply chose to stop caring about this: I chose to give her up.
I am aware that in doing so I renounce any hope for a healthy mother-daughter dynamic, and that I will regret it when it’s too late. But on the other hand, I did try very hard for so long and, it was probably never going to happen. So I closed that book and shelved it. I am no longer in the expectation. I am lighter, free-er, and less sad.
