The Daily Parker

Just a few more notes about last Saturday's 43-kilometer walk to Lake Bluff. First, some photos, including the obligatory Baháʼí Temple photo from about 14 km in:

And the Green Bay Trail in Glencoe, Ill., around 27 km:

The walk felt much easier than previous years, so I ran the numbers to find out why. For starters, this year I took longer (6:32:38) to get to 42.2 km than in 2020 (6:20:32) or 2021 (6:17:41)—but last year I took even longer (6:41:36), so that's only part of it. This year was the coolest, peaking at 22.8°C compared with last year's and 2020's 26.1°C and 2021's 24.4°C, which also helped.

But the most interesting data point turned out to be my heart rate. Here's the comparison of the four completions (remember, I didn't finish in 2022):

Huh. This year I spent the least time in the threshold zone, and over 20% of the time warming up, while in previous years I pushed myself a lot harder. I did that on purpose; I really didn't want to exhaust myself as I had in every previous year. I just wanted to enjoy the walk with my Brews & Choos buddy. Data: in all previous years I completely bottomed out my Garmin Body Battery score; this year I had 20 points left.

So, a couple of takeaways. First, most importantly, do the walk in October and not September. My birthday weekend almost always feels like summer even though it's officially autumn; mid-October, we've got cool weather. Second, if I manage my sleep, diet, and energy levels well enough, I can start next year's walk feeling great, and (third) if I manage my heart rate, I can end it feeling great, too.

But maybe it's OK to push a little harder. Could I have cut 15 minutes off my 42.2-km time by moving in the threshold zone earlier? Probably. Should I have left 20 points on the field? Probably not.

Before then, however, we're planning a Brews & Choos-ish like we did last November. Look for that in the coming weeks.

Moving this annual 42 km walk to October really helped:

I'll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow. Right now...I'm a bit sore, but a lot less sore than I was last time.

The sun is just coming up over the trees east of my office, I'm having a bagel and coffee, and I'm checking the forecast for today's 42-kilometer walk:

Right now we've got 9°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, meaning a chilly start to the walk. But with the forecast high at our end point of 22°C with dewpoints under 6°C all day, and just a few clouds (bottom panel), I couldn't ask for better.

Here we go!

I've just pushed Weather Now v5.0.9057, which has some of the coolest shit I've built into the app, ever. Introducing: maps and charts!

At my real job, I did an evaluation of charting tools for the app we're developing, and determined that Syncfusion had the best balance between ease and power. Boy, does it ever. I managed to get a community license for Inner Drive Technology and spent the last few days playing with it.

There are also a couple of bug fixes, and one change to cut down on all the screen-scrapers that have been hitting me (you have to register to get archival data).

I invite all Daily Parker readers to check out the new features, and please give me feedback. I think it may need some usability fixes, and I still have a lot of work to do on personalization—particularly around people selecting their preferred measurement systems.

Still, I'm jazzed at how quickly all the features came together, and how easy Syncfusion's tools are. I hope y'all enjoy the new toys.

As I've done a few times since 2020, I'm planning to walk a marathon distance this coming Saturday. Last year I got to 42.2 km in 6:41:36; this year I hope to break 6:30. The weather forecast looks incredible for Saturday, which makes me optimistic:

Starting nice and cool with the dewpoint staying below 9°C all day is perfect. Combine that with light winds out of the north (middle panel) and crystal-clear skies (bottom panel) and you've got perfect conditions for a long walk. Last year it got up to 26°C with a dewpoint of 15°C, which we did not enjoy all that much.

And that, of course, is why I moved the walk to October. The trees along the route are near peak foliage, the weather is cooler, the sun is lower in the sky and sets earlier—all things that should help our pace.

This should be fun!

I didn't get up at 2am to drive to Mt Rainier like one of my friends, but I did spend almost all day outside yesterday. Cassie and I met friends (one human, one dog) in Elmhurst for a 9-kilometer walk down the Prairie Path in the morning. And my car flipped 30,000 km on the way back from the walk:

That 2.1 L/100 km (112 MPG) is for the entire life of the car. In fact, I used some gasoline yesterday for the first time since June 15th, so this year my car is getting closer to 1.5 L/100 km (151 MPG)—and of course infinite MPG for over three months. And of course, 30,000 km since 22 December 2018 is an average of 14.2 km per day, which is exactly how I avoid using gasoline most of the time.

Finally, yesterday evening Cassie and I went to Spiteful Brewing to enjoy the 24°C weather:

Today we're heading to the dog beach and the Dock, which closes for the season tonight.

I decamped to Marseille on my last full day in France last week, since I had a flight before 11 am and didn't want to add another hour coming from Aix. I will have to visit the city again, hopefully before I'm too old to negotiate the steps to the train station:

I walked around a bit, up through the Panier district, where I caught this view of the Vieux Port:

But this is probably a better view:

I finished the evening at this little corner bar near my hotel. If it were in Chicago, it would just have an Old Style sign out front:

And that's it for Europe, for now. I'll aim to get back to Provence in 2 years or so, and I'll bring my real camera.

I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started:

You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei.

Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too:

Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh darn I just dropped a bit of pork on the ground. (Lucky dog.)

Finally, this screen shot shows why I love Europe so much. (It's in French because I switched my phone's language settings to help practice while I was preparing for the trip.) The blue dot in the center-left shows where my train was at 20:06 France time (18:06 UTC) on Saturday the 21st. The stuff in the upper-right corner shows my phone's GPS utility. If you look at the left side of that box, you can see "Vitesse 303;" i.e., a speed of 303 km/h, or 190 mph. And that isn't even the train's top normal operating speed.

If we elect people in this country who actually care about climate change, we could have trains like that here, too. But given the proportion of the electorate who plan to vote for the convicted-felon rapist demented geriatric XPOTUS in five weeks, I am not optimistic.

I meant to post more photos from my trip earlier this month, but I do have a full-time job and other obligations. Plus it took me a couple of days longer than usual to recover, which I blame squarely on the shitty hotel room I had for my first night causing a sleep deficit that I never recovered from.

I posted a couple of these already, but with crude, quick edits done on my phone. I think these treatments might be a little better.

Sunrise at O'Hare on the 18th:

The hills of Hampshire:

Invasive megafauna preparing to attack:

Why I decided to walk for 10 km through Hampshire in the first place:

The Grand Canal:

It might take a few days to get more of these done. I'll post more as I get to them.

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T.

I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may even read that before turning my Surface off.

Next stop: Chicago, home, and dog.