Minimalist running and Wicklow Gap

The beauty of running minimalist (no shoes, minimal clothing) is that I can be running along a beach or mountain track and, if an expanse of water affords, transfer to swimming and back to running without the tiresomeness of having to carry stuff, get dried and or change clothing.

For anyone wishing to emulate, I should add that running or cycling for too long in shorts that are wet with salt water will make the skin sore, and that drying oneself by running is inadvisable if the wind-chill adjusted temperature is below say 5'C unless you are much hardier than I am!

Which reminds me of my temperature scale:
below 0'C - freezing
0'C to 5'C - cold
5'C to 10'C - fair
10'C to 15'C - warm
15'C to 20'C - hot
over 20'C - tropical

This afternoon, after various duties, I cycled to the Wicklow Gap and back in record time in order to be back to enjoy a most excellent curry followed by plum crumble with Ali, and am now feeling suitably replete and worn out.

Corriebracks barefoot

The last time I tried Corriebracks was 5 years ago and I didn't make it to the top. Perhaps this defeat was what caused me to try again. Not that it is much of a challenge at 531m, except that you do have to get there if, like me, starting from home. And you do have to get back home afterwards, and it does have to be along a different route, and does have to be barefoot...

My track - 15.1 miles - anticlockwise

Corriebracks on the left, Church Mnt on the rights

Looked like it wanted photographing

The path over the gap starts as a narrow road

But becomes a track

Looking back, our lake in the distance

Looking forward, Church Mnt to the right

At the top of the gap looking down towards Donard

Top of Corriebracks looking East

Top, looking North towards home

Top, West towards Church Mnt

Cool sky and skyline

Cool Me

On the way down, same thingummyjig as in 2012 ascent

Perhaps foolishly I chose to return home via the King's River and lake shore. This entailed fording the river in order to avoid a nasty non-barefoot-friendly fence, and the river came up to my upper chest whilst wading smart-phone in one raised hand.  But the lake is very beautiful.

Back along the lake shore

Looking back

Community is...

...sharing the shower.

One of the folk here visits Kenya and Uganda several times a year to encourage the church there - he ministers not only in preaching but also in practical areas and reported after his last visit some of the needs - like people not being able to even afford soap. And yet when I step into our shower I have to negotiate vast numbers of shower-gels, shampoos, conditioners, women's under arm razors, those horrible fluffy wash poofs. Personally, in the shower I use water and soap, period, and anyway I like the shower enclosure to be free of ancillary stuff, more room for Me. I would not dream of leaving my shaving stuff in a communal bathroom: I can only imagine the cries if I did!

Community is...

Making house rules that everyone is supposed to keep but in the event it actually falls to a few to fulfil.

It's all too easy to say "please could everyone wash their own dishes at coffee time". But do they? Another one from days of yore - if you bring any personal food or drink to the table at community meal time you must offer it to everyone at that table. Such rules get lodged in the fabric of our mutual existence and revoking them never seems to be considered so, like case law, they accumulate. When new folk join the community of course they have no idea about these unwritten rules and no-one, it seems, thinks it important enough, or maybe we are too embarrassed, to present them with a list of do's and don'ts.

Today

Today I ran around the (Kings River end of the) lake. I used to do this quite often several years back, but last year only once and this year only once so far. The lake has to be fairly low, and it needs a couple of hours of spare time. Implied is the swim across where the river enters the lake and, for me, this takes a bit of psyching myself up. But I managed it - I did not panic and I did not drown. The weather was interesting - there was rain about and several times it came down quite hard for 10 minutes or so. Which added interest, along with the mud and stones.

Back to a hot shower and cup of tea, and then Ali and I cooked fish and chips with supposedly petit pois (according to the packet) but they were quite hard work and certainly were not petit. For afters Ali had made me Blackcurrant Pie With Ice Cream and it was most excellent. Some folk here do not like blackcurrants, a position I find hard to credit as they are my favourite. But then the same people don't like gooseberries so I suppose there must be something wrong with them.

Thanks, Ali, for being so nice to me.

Showers of blessing

In the house here and the attached courtyard buildings we have a total of seven showers, over which I have some jurisdiction as the default plumber. I will call them Showers of Blessing because I love having a hot shower (plumbers have to test their workmanship) and showers are one of the great inventions of the modern age along with duvets and smart phones. When I was a child there were none of these, least-ways not where I lived. I remember vividly the discovery of duvets and what a pleasurable difference it made to sleeping and in the making of one's bed the morning after. I remember, also vividly, my first smart phone - actually it was a PDA thanks to a small legacy that my Aunt Mary left me - the amazement of so much functionality within such a small space, and the wonder of GPS (I love maps).

Back to the subject - three are purpose built showers and the remainder are over baths. One of my first pleasurable shower experiences (thus discounting the communal shower at school) was at Oxford. The "bath room" was in the basement of my staircase in the Rhodes building - this open-plan room housed perhaps three full length baths (bliss) and several showers of what we would now call the "wet room" type. The floor and walls were raw cement rendered. Those of you surprised at the lack of modesty - in fact one hardly ever had to share the room with anyone else and, if one did, who cares? I should add that in those days Oriel took only male students. Both showers and baths were fed with large pipework with good water pressure so a bath would fill in minutes and the shower - 3/4" hot and cold feeds, separate valves on each (none of this namby-pamby mixer-valve nonsense), feeding an enormous "rain" shower head - what more need I say? Compared to those paltry devices called showers now-a-days it was heaven. Sadly, I am fairly sure this facility has been removed as part of the modernising process. But I may have said all this before.

Back at home, we have recently remodelled what has been somewhat tongue-in-cheek dubbed "The Best Shower in Europe" (or BSIE) so that instead of leaking into the room below in spite of its low pressure, it is now a power shower and hasn't leaked yet. Give it time, I hear you saying.

Back to the subject - my most recent "fix" is to improve the electrically heated shower in the turquoise bathroom (EHSITB). Hitherto this has never been satisfactory due to low and varying water pressure, the water coming from a shallow-well pump with a pressure vessel. Anyone familiar with such a setup will understand. The rest of you don't need to, as the point I am making does not depend on it. The improvement has been to feed it with a preset mix of hot and cold from the pump that supplies the BSIE, thus increasing the pressure and giving the electric heating a sorely needed kick start.

I had naively assumed that anyone in the first world now-a-days would have used and be familiar with how an electrically heated shower operates. These horrible devices are typically not thermostatic and have two knobs - one has three positions selecting: neither, one or both heating elements, the other adjusts the water flow rate and thus, indirectly, the temperature. A knowledge of some rather basic Physics is implied in understanding this operation.

I had naively also assumed that anyone would realise that many shower heads (aka roses) have several spray settings e.g. fine spray, vigorous focused spray, etc.

I had naively assumed that folk would appreciate the difference between an electrically heated shower and a conventional shower control that is supplied with separate hot and cold feeds, and that the later is usually but not always thermostatic, and that "thermostatic" implies a device that tries to maintain a constant temperature.

Having told a certain person (well known to me) of my improvement to the EHSITB, she kindly volunteered to try it out. Her report was not negative but I quickly realised that she was in fact not at all familiar with electrically heated showers or their difference from conventional showers, and had no idea that most shower heads can be adjusted.

Which only goes to show that you should never assume anything.

Community is...

...being the first one up in the morning, going to the kitchen to make a cuppa, and finding tons of dirty dishes...

Community is...

...having folk around that will encourage me - will even notice - when I am feeling low.