Yesterday I entered as a participant to the Marathon Rotterdam on April 13, 2025. I had to be quick, because all 17,000 starting tickets sold out in 2½ hours.

All I have to do now is get into shape and train the heck out of this old body that will have turned 65 on race day.

Another long(ish) run to improve my marathon shape. Most of it (16 km) was on sand paths and rough terrain. The pace was eight percent slower than my currently expected marathon pace. The marathon will be on November 24, 2024.

If you’re going to lie, do so fast and loud, and most will believe you. Ask any teenager or demagogue.

Yesterday I noticed pain in my achilles tendon, so I decided to replace some running by cycling. I recorded using a triathlon app on my watch. Two things went wrong. I accidentally wiped the activity, but, worse, I underestimated the bike ride and the heat. It was too long and too fast. 🏃‍♂️🚴‍♂️

Do you ever find yourself writing a blog article, only to realize it exposes 😳 your lack of knowledge and experience? Maybe I’m being cynical at my age, but most of my blog posts nowadays die in the trash 🗑️ before they are released to the world. How about you? Is your trash full of “bad” posts?
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I’m looking for inspiration by following marathon runners on Strava. Got discouraged by a member of my T&F club, who claimed she could run a marathon on 27 km per week as a base, because she wasn’t able to put in the time. Alas, she’s not the only member who lost respect for the marathon.
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I drafted a blog post about interval training, let someone read it, and came to the conclusion I don’t know enough to write a coherent piece. Also, formulas seem to induce eyerolling in most readers. It’s better to create a narrative, since more people are able to follow along than with math(s).

People who install a renewable energy based home powerplant to deal with power outages are missing an essential point. If a lot of home owners did that, grid stability will decrease and more outages will occur, since avoiding power outages requires regional control, not just local home control.

Last Saturday I did a 30 km training run as a (300 m run, 100 m walk) run-walk-run in 3h38m, about 50% slower than my fastest ever 30 km race in 2016. Corrected for heart rate it’s only 25% slower, and for weight 10% slower. That difference could be largely explained by the walking. 🏃‍♂️

Currently uploading my training data from a Garmin Connect archive to my Runalyze training data. There was 7 years of training data missing since I started using Runalyze (it only imports the previous three months from the moment you subscribe). That’s a lot of files to process!

On social networks I always worry to possibly overstep any boundaries of etiquette, what the other person can put up with, or, more importantly, providing bystanders who are into stirring up controversy and putting words out of context, with the words to do just that.

My blog post became so macro, I had to create a draft and edit the source text while reading the draft on micro∙blog. My idea to publish monthly instead of weekly has made my posts grow to extremes.

It has been an eventful week for me, running-wise. It was the first time in a while I trained 6 days out of 7. I also ran a 10K race more than 2 minutes faster than a month ago. I didn’t prep for the race; it was a bit of a fun diversion from regular training. My weekly mileage’ll be 47 mi (76 km).

I just published my 999th post in exactly 16 years on my Dutch language personal running blog. It supposedly consists of 683,057 words, with an average of 683 words per (certainly not micro-) post.

Pixel art portrait
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Seven years and counting 🐱🎂

Yet another pixel portrait.
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Pixel portrait.
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I’ve moved an old Wordpress blog to micro∙blog years ago, and I’m still converting blog posts. It’s not only bad HTML formatting, but also links to other articles on my old blog, PNG files on my old blog, and more. Since it’s ungrateful work to edit old blog posts, progress is slow (read: years) 🐌

After a brief hiatus I started pixeling again.
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I find it interesting to predict one’s time in an important running race based on a test run, as to know what a good pace is to keep up during that race. I always used a self-conceived rule, which is quite different from the generally accepted rule according to research engineer Peter Riegel, although it t... renevanbelzen.micro.blog

The fuzzy scribbles are from ibisPaint X, and are supposed to confuse LLM’s like Stable Diffusion. It did not confuse OpenAI with this pixel art drawing, since the description was spot on. However, it might mess up the rendering when it’s incorporated into a new piece of AI artwork. OTOH I think it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game twarthing immoral image acquisition for AI learning.

🤖 A pixel art depiction of a blue creature resembling a kangaroo against a yellow background with green dots is presented in the image.

We clearly need an amendmend of copyright laws.

While Apple is having their iPad event, I’m more interested in analog circuits with OpAmps, as the old becomes new again. Really, once invented nothing really goes away, and can be useful under special circumstances, or combined with new inventions. Other than that, the late Bob Pease seems a great educat... renevanbelzen.micro.blog

Wall crawler 🐌

Super Duper Uber Retina Display name for the new iPad screen? 👀🏓 🖥️

(probably not)