How to be more interesting

"There are people who exercise and jog for hours every day in order to be fit and healthy. They watch their diets and carefully select what they eat. They load themselves up with vitamins and supplements. The result is often excellent. But how much time do they spend on developing an interesting mind?"

Ouch! That was a quote from How to Be More Interesting by Edward de Bono. The book contains exercises, all of which I have done before. Now I'm doing them again in a slightly different way. I get random words, for example from Random Word Generator, and use them to generate new fresh ideas. It works.

According to the book, possibility is very largely the basis of interest. It is possibility and speculation that can make anything interesting. Possibility is only limited by imagination. 

I thought it might be interesting to see what some other blogs say about this subject.

• Russell Davies believes in taking at least one picture every day and posting it to flickr.
• Penelope Trunk focuses on the moment of uncertainty.
• How To Have More Social Success thinks it's about introducing people to new things.

Then there is the following cautionary advice at wikiHow: "Never be so interesting that you become plain oddball". 

Maybe that's not such an awful danger. It's probably better be extremely interesting than boring.

 

The first Kona Ironman

Mark Montgomery was one of the brave competitors in the first Kona Ironman Triathlon on the Big Island of Hawaii in February 1981.

His interesting retrospective trilogy was published at slowtwitch.com (a triathlon website owned by Dan Empfield, another participant in the race).

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

There is also a recent John Howard interview by Herbert Krabel.

Smoke: to run or not to run?

Western States 100 has been cancelled due to smoke caused by wildfires (see photo above).

I wasn't going to run there anyway, but lots of dedicated runners like Scott Dunlap were. What a bummer!

However, I'm sure they made the right decision. It makes no sense healthwise to run in smoke. Well I guess most people would think that running 100 miles in perfect conditions would still be totally crazy.  

Talking about crazy, I hope they will be able to improve the air quality in Beijing before the Olympic Games in August. Just look at the photo below: the air seems to be pretty smoggy there. 

But wait there's more insanity (or should I say cognitive dissonance): there are marathon runners who smoke! 

43K with unexpected shoe issues

This is how my Salomon XT Wings look like after I've run 400K with them. They are in fine condition, except for one thing. Can you guess what it is? 

One of those (bleep) shoelaces snapped today after 6K. I'm kind of happy that it happened now and not during next weeks Zermatt Marathon. I tied the loose ends together, but there was no way to fix them properly. Luckily I was able to continue, as there was a long way to go.

By the way, exactly the same thing happened to my previous XT Wings after 900K. I'm not sure what's going on here. I'm not wearing them extra tight or anything like. Actually I prefer to err on the loose side.

The rest of the run was awesome. The weather was fabulous with some sun and cool temperatures around +15C (60F). At 22K point I went home to eat and taped my left ankle once again. 

I ran 43.1K (26.8 miles) in 5:31. This was my 26th ultramarathon of the year and there's 26 more to run before we call it a year.

21st century flying Finn

There's a new blog posting with lots of photos about Asprihanal's (aka Pekka Aalto) running day in the 3100 mile race. He won it in 2007 and is currently leading the race with a comfortable margin. He seems to be a 21st century flying Finn.

In a recent interview (in a Finnish Metro-newspaper) he said that the first ten days feel always easy and then the rest of the race will probably be more difficult. He's been running a steady 70+ miles per day pace since day three. Check out the daily results to see if he can keep it up.