James Koole

Back when Twitter imploded under the weight of new ownership, I initially fled to Mastodon. It was a reasonable choice at the time as it had some momentum, the techie/geek users that I wished to follow and interact with were mostly there, and the federated nature of Mastodon and Activity Pub were appealing to me as a fan of the open web.

But Mastodon growth generally stalled after a time and it never went mainstream. The inherent flaws of the federated nature of Mastodon meant that the “average” user just couldn’t figure it out. The whole server thing, weird apps, toots, alt text zealots and other factors limited Mastodon.

Then Threads came along and for a time it seemed that it had a shot to take over from Twitter and become the next big short post social network. Meta leveraged the massive scale of Instagram to build a user base quickly and the said all the right things about federation in order to appease the nerd types who really wanted to continue to use Mastodon, but also be able to interact with users over on Threads.

I went all in on Threads and it was good…until it wasn’t. I never liked Meta, and it’s CEO/founder. I put aside all those feelings and “trusted” them and their claims that they wanted to be a good social network and an upstanding member of the fediverse. And for a time, it seemed they did. But Meta is Meta and I just couldn’t stomach being part of it all anymore. So I deleted my Instagram and Threads accounts and decided to give Bluesky a go.

Bluesky is interesting, to say the least. It’s really the AT Protocol that’s interesting, but Bluesky is the front-end for ATProto and a bit of a poster child. At first, I was put off by its origin story as a Twitter project that had the support of Jack Dorsey. But Bluesky is not part of Twitter, and Jack hasn’t be involved in a long, long time.

To me it feels like a nice mashup of Mastodon and Threads. There’s an interesting and open protocol at it’s core like Mastodon and Activity Pub. But there’s also a very polished official app which is more akin to Threads. The app ecosystem is more like Mastodon than Threads with multiple different third-party apps out there doing interesting things like photo sharing (Flashes) or feeds (Surf).

The list of interesting projects being built atop the AT Protocol is long.

And then there is Leaflet.pub. This one is particularly interesting to me. It’s an open source tool for shared writing and social publishing. What does that mean? Right now you can create a blog or “publication” on Leaflet and post to it. It’s also something like a Notion/Google Docs hybrid where multiple writers can collaborate on documents and publish them online.

Yes…it’s a little different and maybe a completely new paradigm. From a Bluesky perspective, Leaflet publications are very interesting. They utilize the AT Protocol - posts on your Leaflet publication live on a Personal Data Server (PDS) which is the same thing that powers Bluesky. I won’t get into the nerdy details but with Leaflet, you can now create a blog (and soon a newsletter) atop your Bluesky account. Neat.

In fact, this post lives both on my micro.blog and also on my Leaflet publication. I can see a future where Leaflet is my website, a publication is my blog and Bluesky is my social network. Super interesting!

Lately, I’ve been experiencing some pretty bad symptoms of burnout. It’s not the first time I’ve found myself here, but this time it feels a lot heavier than ever before. I’ve reached out for help in the form of psychotherapy to try to better understand the root causes and also how to manage things. It’s been very beneficial, but I’ve got a ways to go still.

For many years, running has been a helpful refuge from this kind of work/life stress. It was a reset button I could press midway through the workday. Especially since COVID (when my company transitioned to 100% remote work), I would often bust out of the basement office at lunchtime and get in 6-8kms of me time. A podcast or audio book would provide some entertainment or learning and it really helped to take my mind off whatever situations or stressors that my job was offering up that day.

But that’s changed recently. I still run three or sometimes four weekdays plus my weekend runs, but it hasn’t been working the way it used to. Instead of escaping, I now find myself carrying all the overwhelming thoughts along with me. I can put on a podcast and at the end of the run, I don’t even remember what it was about because my brain was too busy processing thoughts of doom and dread and the podcast just went in one ear and out the other.

As I said to my therapist the other day, being alone with my thoughts is not a great place to be lately. Needless to say, it’s been a difficult summer. As someone who is quite literally a professional problem solver in my day job as a product manager, not being able to quickly identify a root cause and apply a solution has proven to be very frustrating.

I thought for a long time that I could get through what I was dealing with by using various coping strategies, but eventually those stopped working. That was the big flashing sign for me that I needed to seek help. I can confidently say that psychotherapy works. Having good supports in my relationships at home and at work has been a big help as well. If you are struggling with mental health, burnout, depression or anything else, do ask for help.

I’ve done a variety of streaks over the last bunch of years. I find the whole streak concept to be a decent motivator for things like fitness, daily tasks or trying to establish or break habits.

But sometimes a streak can be less than positive and for that reason, I think it’s more valuable to “break” a streak if you find it isn’t providing positive motivation anymore.

An example of this for me is something like the Wordle streak or completing the New York Times crossword. Wordle is an interesting one because you can lose your streak even if you still do the puzzle everyday because if you don’t get the word in six guesses, you lose the streak even though you put in the effort. That seems a bit counter productive to me and for that reason, I think it’s best to not care too much about that one.

Something like waking 7,500 steps a day is another one that I think is hit and miss. Sometimes life just gets in the way and maybe you can’t get out to do all the steps. For example, if you are travelling by plane or something and it’s just not possible to walk the 6-7km needed in the day. For situations like that, I’ll just lower my daily goal to something that is reasonable for that day (or week) and continue the streak. For me, it’s not “7,500 steps a day”, but rather “do a good bit of daily walking”.

Keep your streaks in perspective and don’t get too invested in keeping them up for streak’s sake. Remember the real goal of whatever you are tracking with a streak and focus on that instead. If you like the break that doing the Wordle provides, then do the Wordle. But don’t fret if you miss one…it’s not about “winning” but rather about taking some time to do it.

My daily routine for the last little bit has been to wake up, go for a swim, make a coffee, do the Wordle, The Mini and the New York Times Crossword. Now that we’re not at the cottage anymore, the swim part of that routine will have to go away since I don’t have easy access to a lake or a pool.

I could replace that with a 5km run, but I don’t think I want to run every day for a while. And I also like having the run to split my workday in half.

But I will continue to get up, make coffee and do the puzzles because they are a good way to get my brain engaged and ready to face the day.

We’re just back from a lovely week at a cottage down near Perth, Ontario. It’s on the north side of Christie Lake which is a very nice, clean and deep freshwater lake. We were at this cottage last July as well and as I did last year, I made a point of doing some “wild swimming” every morning when I woke up.

Wild swimming is what I call swimming. Over the last few years, people have seemingly discovered that you can swim in lakes, rivers and even the ocean! Amazing. Who knew that you could swim somewhere other than a swimming pool? Me. I knew.

In the summertime I wake up most mornings between 5:45am and 6:00am (right around sunrise). Each day on this cottage visit, I quietly got out of bed and made my way down the 40 or so steps to the dock on the lake. After taking a photo to document the time and lake conditions, I made my way off the dock and out into the water for a swim.

Sometimes it was five minutes and sometimes it was more like 10-15 minutes. But whatever the case, I always made sure I start the day by wading into the lake. It’s always peaceful, quiet and serene. No boats, no traffic, no sounds of anything other than the odd loon and the quiet splashes I make wading in and swimming around in the water. Just a few moments to wake up and be there for a bit before the day starts.

I also went for one swim late at night at around 9:30pm That is a decidedly different experience. The moon is the only illumination and the water changes from being transparent to being completely black with no sunshine to illuminate the depths. It’s just as quiet though, with fireflies on the banks and the odd loon call coming in across the darkness of the lake.

Here’s my photos from each day.

I live in what would be considered one of the more walkable areas of Toronto - the Upper Beach, or Birch Cliff area. We have a streetcar line (503) about 600m from our front door that runs to downtown. There is a bus route (12 & 117) about 100m from our front door that goes to a subway station (Victoria Park) that is 1.5km from our front door. The regional GO Transit train stop is 1.6km from our front door.

I can walk to three large grocery stores within about 1.2km from our front door, and two of them are about 700m from our front door. We are about 2km from the lake, complete with a boardwalk and sandy beaches where you can stand-up paddle board and even swim (if you like cold water).

There is a nice, pretty walkable area on Kingston Road with some small shops like a good coffee shop, a florist, nail salons, a book store, clothing stores, a thrift shop, and a pretty big YMCA with a pool, fitness centre and programs for all ages.

And yet, compared to a similar neighbourhood in Amsterdam, it sucks here.

Amsterdam is Different

We spent a few days in Amsterdam in early June, living in a lovely Airbnb that was in the Amsterdam-Zuid neighbourhood. At first glance, it’s very much like the area we live in. There’s a tram line that will take you into Amsterdam Centraal, or to Amsterdam Zuid train station. There are shops and a “main street” area where you will find things like a florist, book store, restaurants, coffee shops and a grocery store.

Kingston Road in our area of Toronto is a terrible road and is used heavily by people going from downtown Toronto to the east-end suburbs and places like Pickering, Ajax and even Oshawa.

On Kingston Road, there’s a constant stream of cars through our neighbourhood. They clog the streets, race through at well over the posted 40km/h speed limit and generally make a mess of the entire place. Traffic is a nightmare at the best of times and, as a result, the cars head to the residential streets to get around the traffic which makes those areas dangerous to pedestrians.

The streetcar on Kingston Road is terrible. It takes ages to get downtown because it’s mixed in with all that car traffic. You can very easily outrun it on foot. Cycling, if it wasn’t basically a death sentence (trust me on this), is easily the fastest way to get into the city.

Our nearby grocery stores have giant parking lots out front and the store is positioned in the back corner of the lot, meaning you have to walk across the parking lot if you dare do something crazy like walk to the store.

Beethoven straat in Amsterdam is a beautiful street. The shops are lovely and while there is some traffic on the road, it’s calmed with the use of narrower lanes and other measures that force drivers to slow down. The tram has priority at intersections. There are bike lanes and wide sidewalks that encourage people to use those modes of transportation to do things like take the kids to school, or pick up groceries or visit a coffee shop or restaurant.

The local grocery is an Albert Heijn which, by North American standards, is pretty small. The entrance is pedestrian-friendly and car-hostile. There is literally no parking. Nobody drives to do groceries. Instead, people pick up a few things a few times a week. Sometimes they stop on the way home from work. Or they bike over and grab what they need for the next day or two. Nobody does a “big” grocery run like they do in Toronto.

The Problem is Cars

We own a car because we live in Toronto. We would love to get rid of it because it’s a 2011 and needs replacing, but it’s basically impossible to be car-free in our neighbourhood. Not having a car in Toronto would suck. It’s not impossible…but it would be a major headache.

Despite the fact that we have ample transit options within a short walk from our home, it all sucks. It’s infrequent outside of weekdays and it’s slowed by all that traffic a lot of the time. Maybe we could use a car-share service when we needed a car, but that’s also not great in Toronto (yet).

If we lived in Amsterdam, we would definitely not have a car because having a car in Amsterdam would suck. There’s no place to park it and it’s really more inconvenient to try to use a car in Amsterdam because the city is not built for cars. It’s built for people who walk, bike and use transit.

So we’re stuck here in our crappy car-centric neighbourhood with our car. We love our neighbourhood, but it could be so much better if somehow Toronto could become less car-centric. A few things would help but there is no chance they would ever happen.

1. We should ban parking on Kingston Road and make the streetcar lanes for the streetcars and not for the cars. That would destroy the commuting route for all the people who use our neighbourhood as a quasi-highway to get from their suburb to downtown each morning and back again in the afternoon. Those people can take the 401 and the DVP highways and if it takes 30 minutes longer, well, too bad.
2. We should make the neighbourhood streets impossible to use to get from main road to main road. Some bollards or even a series of one-way streets that prevent through traffic would dramatically reduce the number of cars using those streets. Of course, it should be possible to bike through those streets because we want to encourage cyclists to use these streets to get around.
3. We should put a smaller grocery store on our main street. The “big” grocery stores should be torn down and rebuilt at the front corner of the lot, incorporated into housing so that they meet the street. Put a bit of parking around back for those that still want to drive, but make it so that people on foot or using bikes don’t have to cross the parking lot to get to the entrance.

This Will Never Happen

Politically, this will never happen. The outcry from people who drive through our neighbourhood would be massive. And even those who live here wouldn’t have the vision to see what our neighbourhood could be like if we removed the focus on the car.

So instead, we’re stuck here. Stuck owning a car. Stuck dealing with crappy transit. Stuck cycling on dangerous roads and streets. Stuck with getting pedestrians getting run down by cars (there have been multiple car/pedestrian “accidents” in our area including more than one fatality in the past few years).

I’ve always just used the standard(ish) formula to determine my max heart rate and then the various heart rate zones to train in. The one I liked is the 207 - 0.7 x age method. For me that results in a max heart rate of 170bpm.

Recently, I was watching some YouTube videos that suggested it would be far better to determine your actual max heart rate through an informal or formal fitness test. So, today I set out to do that.

The run was structured like this:

• Easy’ish first kilometre to get at least a little bit warmed up and ready to push things hard.
• Two more kilometres at escalating pace to get up to a higher heart rate and ready the body and mind for a big effort.* 800m at close to maximum effort to ramp things up and stress the body more.
• Short slower 400m to recover and then…
• A very hard effort for as long as was sustainable, on a moderate incline just to add to the fun.

The result of this was that I hit 161bpm at the top end of that last effort. I probably could have gone another 15 seconds and maybe pushed up the heart rate a few bpm more, but that was me really giving it everything. So let’s call it 165bpm?

That seems reasonable to me, although the various calculations would have me at about 170bpm. That seems a bit high for me, but I also have a genetically lower heart rate including a resting heart rate in the low 40’s and when I’m really working on the marathon training, in the high 30’s.

I might repeat that test at some point here and perhaps push just a bit more, or maybe just run a flat out 5km on a track and see what happens. The other option would be to do a proper VO2 Max and max heart rate test at one of those places that hooks you up to a mask on a treadmill and tries to get you to pass out while running.

We humans tend to notice milestones. Turning 37 is not a big deal but turning 40 means a special party. It’s nothing special when the stock market hits 9,642, but at 10,000? That’s a big deal. I remember the massive parties around the world for Y2K including a massive fireworks show at the Toronto waterfront. In 2001, there were no fireworks off the CN Tower and we probably just went to bed early.

Running Milestones

Running has some of the same things. We have 5km and 10km races. There are 10 milers. Things get a bit weird with the half marathon and marathon thanks to some odd history that may or may not be true but after that, 50km and 50 mile ultras are special.

A lot of runners are looking back at 2024 right now as Strava has dropped their “Year in Sport” round up on their app. Many, myself included, are looking at our goals for 2024 and seeing how we did.

I started the year with a goal to hit 2,400km in 2024. That’s 200km per month and it’s a total I have hit in the past. Everything has to go pretty well to get there and of course, a few things did not go too well this year so 2,400km was out of reach.

I missed a week and a half with COVID-19 in May, after the BMO Vancouver Half Marathon. And I fell on a run on July 21 and busted my finger pretty badly. That cost me 4.5 weeks and a lot of fitness lost.

After that, I revised my annual goal to 1,600km and then more recently, to 1,000 miles (1,609km). I’m just a couple of days from topping that total for the year. I’m sitting at 1,595.6km right now which is 991.5 miles. Saturday’s 8km will push me past 1,600km for the year, but I’ll need Sunday’s run to get over 1,000 miles.

Goals Matter

Tracking goals and milestones like this are important providers of motivation throughout the year. At the start of each new year, I always set some goals and track them; maybe it’s to run 2,400km, or to do 12 half marathons, or to run more than 250 times.

Personal bests in various race distances are always great goals to set and go after, but at some point the personal bests just aren’t attainable anymore. I don’t know that I can get back to my 5km PB anymore, for example. But annual goals are far more attainable since you can alter them based on your current level of fitness or other factors.

I’ll be putting some thought into my 2025 goals in the coming weeks and I’ll be sure to put them down on “paper” here. Maybe 2,025kms is a good total to try for?