January

• Journal • Writing

I’ll be running Val d’Aran Ultratrail on July 7th, 2 weeks after Ironman Frankfurt (duh). The race is 105 km long, has over 6000 m elevation gain, and takes place on the Spanish side of Pyrenees. If I am able to finish the race, I will be able to enter the draw to participate in UTMB next year which would be the ultimate goal. But, with that I am getting ahead of myself, first I need to get a lot of volume into the legs that didn’t even fully recovered from the cycling camp in Spain.

As a side note; I also got my entry in Berlin Marathon and I still have my entry from previous year to the Prague Marathon. This year will be heavy and it’s about the time for me to learn to recover properly which I hope will be easier thanks to the new addition into my clever wearables; whoop.

And as a second side not; I also signed up for the DoloMythesRun, ultramarthon (60k) in Dolomites, Italy. It will take place 2 weeks after the Val d’Aran Ultratrail that takes place 2 weeks after Ironman. I think I should start training recovery.

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This blog got a little rework, I moved the navigation to the side on large screens to make better use of the availanle space. The colors have also changed slightly, instead of raw black and white this website now uses off-colors that I sunjectively find more pleasant to the eye.

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My wrist started hurting lately, especially after prolonged periods of working (programming) so I decided to switch to split keyboard. After some research and a few hours of contemplating whether 300$ is a justifiable price for keyboard I ended up ordering the Ergodox EZ. As of writing this pragraph I am on my 3rd day with the keyboard, still early in process of getting used to grid layout and other nuances of not having your hands close together anymore. The biggest difference so far is using the thumb for multiple things not just the space bar. The other significant difference is the grid layout; I still struggle to hit z and q precisly. And last but not least, I still need to figure out where to bind the brackets to to make them easier to work with.

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One of the greatest pleasures of this month was learning about MIT Mystery Hunt, puzzlehunt competition taking place yearly on the MIT campus during the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend (January). The competition started in 1981 and currently attracts more 2000 participate every year. I spent some time in the evenings this month reading about individual years and going through some of the puzzles and oh boy… if there ever was definition of nerdy it would be the MIT puzzle hunt. The puzzles are wonderful, clever, with tons of pop culture references as well as remarks to scientists, artists, and wide variety of niche topics from nautics, to biology and music. And they are hard, MIT hard. For reference, there’s usually over 100 puzzles varying in difficulty and it takes the best teams around 2 to 3 days to solve all of them, and we are talking about teams composed of MIT profesors and teachers, without too much exaggaration the brightest minds you could possibly put together.

My favorite so far was 2021 hunt titled Yew Labs that has whole RPG game built with NPCs or MIT students and teachers.

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How do we learn useful things?

Reading

Watching

Everybody is free, in long runs you don’t have captains, we don’t have bosses but we have leaders and we expect everybody to be a leader in his own capacity and to be in charge of the long run. We don’t train people to perform or finish long runs but we train people to be human beings when they are running around Eliud Kipchoge

This week I learned

Listening

Stats