Why Social Media has put Albert Camus & me off football

Football is, at best, a trivial game. This is obvious to me but it wasn't always so.

Until my first football game I had little appreciation for team sports. Perhaps that's why the team ethic at work is important to me...perhaps like Albert Camus, French philosopher, substantial parts of my education is owed to football - or, as he put it:

"what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport"

As Wikipedia states, "Camus was referring to a sort of simplistic morality he wrote about in his early essays, the principle of sticking up for your friends, of valuing bravery and fair-play."

Yes, precisely that. 

However, for me football is dying. It has been for a while but it's taken Facebook and Twitter to demonstrate it.

Let's start with Twitter. Everyone knows that Match of the Day is terrible. The pundits are overpaid and  incapable of basic communication. Their insights are insipid and unremarkable to start with, perhaps due to a preoccupation with employing ex-footballers, so they suffer terribly from being reheated every week. Sky is a bit better but not a great deal. As a result the focus shifts away from analysis to comment - at which point, football is lost.

Because that's where Twitter takes off; comments drive more comments but very little analysis or insight. The coverage often gets an almighty kicking on Twitter. As do the players. And the officials. (Amusingly, when referee Chris Foy was confused with cyclist Chris Hoy.)

The Twitter action demonstrates that the football itself isn't the focus anymore. It could be any sport. In fact it could be anything. Wound up fans wind each other up more, as they do on non-football or non-sport messageboards the world over. Fans even wind up their own clubs - which demonstrates the sport's obsession with the media, but also shows how the unique qualities of football that made it important to Camus have been lost in the barrage of irrelevant commentary. Sure, there are pearls of wisdom in there somewhere but they're cast before swine.

Perhaps more serious is what I see in Facebook. Inevitably feelings run high after a match and everyone piles in with vitriolic comments which always look more serious in print, without facial expressions to mitigate delivery, or the chance to buy a reconciliatory pint. People defend the indefensible (cf. recent high profile racist abuse cases) and it all gets a bit nasty. 

These days I watch football at home. Really, there's nothing at the match I need to see, though there's much to be missed. Most importantly, the TV goes off when the half-cocked opinions come out. I avoid the Facebook threads and trending Twitter topics where football is driving people mad. 

Perhaps social media is just exposing what had been there all along. Idiot footballers with little to say have historically been in luck as they weren't required and had limited platforms for saying what little they did. Now we all get to listen to them. 

And everybody else.

100,000 calories later...

September 10th, 2011, I decided it was time I went for a run.

Here I am, 95,000 calories, 190 activities and 916 miles (304 on the bike) later.

Back then, running 3.03 miles took about half an hour - at 10:32 a mile, mixing a bit of walking in there to keep me going, it was not fast. Now, on a good day, I'd do that same route in about 22 minutes.

Right now I'm running nowhere; last week I needed to have a bit of my abdomen hacked out, so it's all recovery for at least another week.

However, I can look back on some highlights;

• An early morning run out of Portwrinkle in Cornwall. Sunday sun, no-one else on the road.
  
• Great Manchester Run; a 50 minute 10k.

• Running 4 miles in 30 mins; my objective when I started, broken in July - averaged 7' 20"

And on the bike:

• Ride With Brad; thoroughly enjoyable, opened my eyes to sportives and 'proper' road cycling. Might well be hooked.
  
• Grinding my way over Kirkstone Pass in the driving wind and rain.
  

Not counting a couple of days here and there, this is the first real break. In March my achilles were complaining a bit, so I took a couple of weeks where I concentrated on the bike. Then, in preparation for the Ride With Brad sportive, the cycling came before the running again in August. Outside of that, it's been mainly running.

What now? Assuming recovery goes ok, there are some targets worth thinking about for the next 12 months:

• Average 100 miles/wk on the bike - with a few sportives helping to make that up

• The 7 min/mile 10k
  
• The 8 min/mile half-marathon (1hr 44 mins)
  
• Some running in the mountains
  
• A quick (but not sub-24 hr) Bob Graham Round

Obviously the wheels could come off any second. But life's too short not to try.

Publisher + Advertiser + Health Advice = Cover up?

This is pretty much the text of an email I sent to trailrunning@bauermedia.co.uk on 22nd July. I thought I'd leave it until they had time to respond but they chose not to.


A friend lent me a copy of Trail Running magazine (@TrailRunningMag). I liked the mag - otherwise I wouldn't be writing this - but there were a couple of articles that I felt were of low quality. The most serious of these was one on Dehydration, on page 26 of issue 8.

The alarm bells started to ring when I read the line, 'thirst is not a good sign of dehydration', which is point of view often trotted out by sports drinks manufacturers. The article also gives potentially dangerous advice on quantities which could lead to drinking too much, and it's ultimate conclusion ("even death a possibility") is completely unproven. It struck me as scare tactics.

In fact, there is not a single instance of a dehydration related fatality at a distance running race. On the other hand hyponatraemia, where runners drink too much liquid leading to a critical dilution of electrolyte has killed quite a few and hurt many more. Fully 13% of finishers at the 2002 Boston Marathon were clinically hyponatraemic...and I just had to go to Wikipedia for that information.

Even on a subject of this seriousness getting the facts wrong is perhaps understandable; perhaps the journalist's research has taken them down paths that differ to mine. Yet this article was written by Professor John Brewer (@sportprofbrewer), presented as an expert in the field.

Why would John Brewer want me to drink lots of liquid on a run? Is his advice independent, if misguided?

Perhaps I could have made a decision on that if I'd been presented with the fact that he worked for GlaxoSmithKline for 5 years and now 'evaluates the efficacy of sports nutrition products'.
Interestingly the link I used to find this out has been hidden behind a password. How interesting.

Clearly someone cared about my email...Possibly an editor with an advertiser to protect?

Happily we have the internet so he's easy to track down along with information that his research projects are funded by Maxinutrition - part of GlaxoSmithKline and that he used to be Director of Sports Science at the Lucozade Sports Science Academy.

Surely, we have a right to full disclosure when an article may affect our health?

What do you do if you can't be 'on it' every day?

We live in a world where the ambitious, dedicated and determined are expected to be 'on it' every day. Anything less is a dereliction of duty, regardless of what's going on in your life outside the office. 

Here's the truth; you can't be 'on it' every day. Some days you're recovering after an illness. Other days you're recovering after the kids have been up all night. Party animals might have the odd day here or there where they're feeling worse for wear.

Those days of sub-optimal performance are what I call 'sludge' days. Classic symptoms are being easily distracted, finding non-core activities intriguing and exciting, and worrying about your clothes too much. It's a day you feel like you're trekking through mud. It might be signalled by feeling tired, fidgety or demotivated.

The best thing to do is to recognise that you're having a sludge day, accept it and work out a coping strategy. 

Buzz disperses sludge

Only one thing can actually disperse sludge; an inspiring conversation that shifts the sludge with a big or stimulating idea. Buzz beats sludge. Sometimes sludge days are actually good for generating those ideas if you accept the downshift.

If you have buzz deficiency then you can't win. That's why you need to identify some 'sludge work'.

Sludge work

Sludge work is work that you don't need all of your brain to execute. It's work which is perhaps repetitive and low risk. 

What constitutes sludge work depends on what you do when you're whizzing along on an optimal day and the kind of person you are. Here's some that work for me: 

• Read all the updates on tickets executed by the team; gets me closer to what's going on day today and updates that are notable will disperse sludge. 
• Invoice related work; any that gets to me is largely repetitive.
• Research papers or blog posts; things you need to just get into your brain for use later.

Too much sludge

I think the odd isolated sludge day is fine. Two a week, or two consecutive sludge days indicates a problem, either with your personal life or your job. 

There's a problem if the culture of the company indulges sludge days as they tend to proliferate. Some enterprise have a culture that permits bits of sludge (see below) to creep into a typical working day. 

Bits of sludge

It may be appropriate to do some sludge work in an otherwise busy, buzzy day. So perhaps you have a circadian dip at 1400 to 1500 every day, just after lunch. This might be a great time to get through ticket updates done by the team in the last 24 hrs (see above). Then it's coffee time and off you go, back into the zone of optimal performance.

So that's how I handle those times of sub-optimal performance. In time, you could start to respect these times as opportunities to rest the brain whilst staying productive.

Press releases suck; go live or go home

When a company makes great claims, it's a natural reaction to want to see those claims proven. Today we were discussing a press release from IBM which talked about a 'new category of business intelligence' and made reference to 'hyper-intelligence'.

I can take a little hyperbole, but it has to be backed up by something tangible. If you're going to make claims let's see something in action. Get it centre stage. Ship it. Put it out there on the internet for us all to use to its fullest and give feedback on.

Of course, in the world of enterprise software most vendors can't, don't and won't.

They can't because they're scared; of exposing their ideas to the market, of what users and commentators will say, of the fact that these much-vaunted products don't actually do anything new. Even if there was a genuinely good product, a live, public platform would need sign off from so many different levels of hierarchy that a public site that really flexes its muscles is never going to happen. Large enterprise software vendors are just not agile enough.

They don't because they don't think they need to win your business; they think they've already won it just by being who they are. Their FUD strategy is so institutionalised even they believe it. Why should they risk their reputation by actually putting a live version of their solution out there, in the public domain? They don't need to...so...

They won't because there's too much to lose. They know that under the microscope their key value propositions break down, that the total cost of ownership for a big vendor solution is a big number; that if you went to a smaller vendor with a similar budget you'd get an awesome solution, not an awful one. (Or at least a useable one, eh, SAP users?). Under the microscope relying on FUD is unsustainable, as numerous dictators have found.

But times are changing. Users want to engage honestly and are willing to engage  immediately. So if it works, ship it. Get it on the cloud so users can honestly evaluate it.

If the big enterprise vendors don't, their agile competitors surely will.

Finding the sublime in the routine

Every year our family spends a week with the extended family somewhere remote, by the sea, with an indoor swimming pool. And no internet or mobile connectivity. It's a bit of a shock.

Chatting to the pensioners and contemplating the hillsides and waves, it struck me how much of their time our grandparents must have spent alone; tending sheep or cattle, or maintaining their buildings and land, or operating machinery, or hacking coal from the walls of a mine - as it was for my grandfather and his. Although physically strenuous they permitted time where communication took second place to activity. Effectively, the workers suspended higher function thinking in favour of not accidentally slicing off a limb.

All of these activities would be regarded today as intense physical activity and they'd be punctuated by by periods of intense social activity. My grandfather would follow his shift in the pit with clog fighting in the showers - effectively kickboxing with wooden, steel-toed clogs - for small change. Then it would be time for serious socialising at the pub, where they'd sink six or seven pale ales before heading home.

Perhaps the life of the pit worker back then was an extreme example of routine social and physical exertion but I think it's no accident that in our neighbourhood there are so many people running every night. Strenuous physical jobs have largely been replaced with machinery or other types of employment, so those runners, cross-fitters, spinners, weightlifters and the rest are finding things in leisure our grandparents took for granted; self-reliance, pride, an extension of their day-to-day experience - and the opportunity for some communication downtime, some time to reflect and 'pick over the bones' of the day.

Similarly the tendency to use social media indicates our evolutionary need to be connected is being satisfied in new ways. The routine conversations, the day-to-day noise, is where the sublime is hidden.

Yet to find the signal in the noise you need to find time away from it. I believe the brain is fantastic at offline processing; working through the data it accumulates almost silently. Paul Arden in his short book 'How to Have Ideas' describes a period of downtime during which ideas surface as if by magic. I'm sure we've all had those moments. They can do this only if you're not constantly surrounded by noise.

Our ancestors had lives which allowed time for either an absence of communication noise, or if fortunate, periods of introspection and reflection. I think that in a world which would be unrecognisably noisy to them we need these periods more than ever if we're going to filter the data we accumulate to find the meaningful; to find the sublime in the routine.

6 thoughts from watching my 4 y/o climb

Yesterday my 4 year old daughter climbed a 12m climbing wall. A couple of weeks ago we were watching other kids on the wall and she was transfixed; she was wary but wanted a go. At the top of the wall there's a bell ringer; anyone who's around (and there's always people around when a little kid goes for it) can't help but applaud. The photo below shows her at the top of the wall, reaching for the bell pull.

Here are a few thoughts that occurred after she was back on terra firma.

1. Occasionally look down.

Ok, I'd be the first to admit I was saying, "Don't look down," but sometimes you need to appreciate what you've done and that although you're 12m in the air, you're actually safer than everyone else thinks you are.

2. Everyone goes first.

Sometimes you're genuinely breaking new ground; most of the time someone has done something similar before and you just have to find them and learn. The way you incorporate your experiences and learning to that point produces a unique experience; yours.

Of course, when others see you pursuing your unique experience they are moved to find their own; lead by example. 

3. To be brave you have to be scared first.

Fearlessness isn't particularly admirable. Not being scared is stupid - as is incorrectly assessing risks so as never to do anything. Respect the size of the task, respect the risks, then do it anyway. 

4. Focus on the very next thing.

The best bit of advice I felt I could offer was, "One step at a time", or some variant. By simply finding the next good hand/foot hold and stepping up, you can make surprisingly good progress. There are many ways to the top of the wall and all of them are achieved in the same way.

5. Getting above head-height is the tough bit.

That bit where you leave ground is easy; the point where you leave the comfort zone and the risk sharply increases is hard. Mental strength is required to realistically assess the safety provision and analyse the risks. It's equal parts discipline and trust. 

6. Only those on the wall know what's going on.

From 12m away you can't know what the hand-holds are like, whether the rope is holding, whether some clothing has been snagged. All you can do is talk in generalisations; direction, energy, progress. Only those who actually have their nose, feet and hands on the wall can make the tactical decisions.

Of course, I had a go and it was great. But as a 4 y/o it would have been something more than that.