Archive for June, 2025

Lovely parkrun along the canal. It looks like an out-and-back, but it’s actually a loop as the canal towpath and greenway run parallel to each other. Technically then, it is one of the few single loop parkruns! It was supposed to be dry all day but rained the whole time. Classic Ireland.

Skerries is a popular triathlon that takes place up the coast. We organised a relay team for the club consisting of Chris L swimming, Hugh cycling and myself running. I’ve never done a traditional relay before so I was excited to give it a go.

The biggest pain was that registration closed at 7:15 in the morning. I’m sure lots of races start this early and I’ve just forgotten, but I did not appreciate the 5 am alarm to meet Chris at 6:00. Still, all was well and we got down to the race in plenty of time. At which point there was not a lot to do because we had very little to set up in transition.

The swim starts off down the beach and goes out in the bay and then along the coast to Red Island where transition was located. Despite not having raced a sea swim before, Chris was one of the first out of the water from wave two, which is where all the relay swimmers were placed. He was so fast he almost took us by surprise. The way it works in relay is you have a transition pen where you hand over the timing chip ankle bracelet.

Hugh theen set off on the bike. There was a strong headwind going out meaning that the athletes on the time trial bikes had a big advantage. Despite this, we think Hugh was around 11th fastest overall on his road bike. I was nervously waiting in the pen at this point. And I was nervous. We were in the lead and I did not want to blow it, but I also knew how much it was going to hurt. I got a proper warm-up in and then did some pacing while we waited.

My turn on the run. It was a wierd experience. Usually, I have come out of the swim near the back and spend the entire run overtaking people. But today I was out with some of the faster athletes and while I still managed plenty of overtakes, there were also some people that came flying past me.

At this point, I did not know what gap we had on the team in second place. I thought I knew what their runner looked like but wasn’t sure if maybe I had missed him. Maybe they were only five minutes behind and he was an 18-minute 5k guy. The run course is a beautiful out and back along the beach and as I came to around the 3.5/4k point, I saw the second place team’s runner heading out on the run. At this point, I knew we had it in the bag! Cue a classic finish line celebration.

Some may try to diminish our victory by saying that there were only five relay teams in total and that everyone else was just there for the craic. But having never won anything in triathlon before, I’m chuffed to bits. You can only beat who turns up on the day. It was a well organised race at every point so a big thank you to Fingal Triathlon Club for organising.

While we were down in Waterword we hit the beach. We had already ben to Tramore and Dunmore East so we decided to head over to Clonea in Dungarvan. Beautiful sand and I managed to get a sea swim in.

Venla and I also built a sand castle. Classic three-ring construction.

Still chasing down some Ses for the snakes challenge. This one was number seven. Lovely parkrun. Four laps of the sports field, so not too exciting there, but the volunteers were lovely, it was fairly flat and they had a nice cafe with toilets in the leisure centre so there nice to hang out after the run.

Every year, Blackrock Atheletics organises a run down to Teddy’s ice cream in Dún Laoghaire and the club buys everyone an ice cream. This year, I finally made it! Thank you to Gerry for organising.

Bartleby, the Scrivener is a short story by Herman Melville. It tells the story of a lawyer who hires a new member of staff, Bartleby. At first Bartleby works hard but gradually refuses to do any work or even leave the office, answering each request with “I would prefer not do”.

It’s well worth a read. For me, the exploration of the psychological processes the lawyer goes through in responding to such a situation are both relatable and fascinating.

The Burnout Society is an essay by Byung-Chul Han.

In the essay, the author argues that there is too much positivity in the world. We now live in an “achievement society” and a “can do” culture, but we are the poor saps that have to do the doing. We find ourselves in a perpetual state of hyperactivity, unable to say no.

Traditional models of psychotherapy stem from Freud. But Han argues these are based on the repressive values of the Victorian era. Today everything is permissible and there are no rules, except that we must achieve and the potential to achieve more is endless, leading to burnout. We never reach the ultimate goal or achieve closure.

Traditionally, capitalism has achieved oppression by directly oppressing the working class. But in this new world, we are victims of self-oppression, believing that we are free and simply striving for better, which is supposedly good somehow, but are actually still mere slaves to the capitalist machine. Reduced to the essence of life, health becomes the new goddess. All focus is on keeping the body alive to serve the machine of capitalism.

It’s a hard read. It’s like reading Marx; I felt like I had been dropped into the middle of conversation at times and, again like Marx, he flips between a few different languages. Worth trying to get your head around, though.

It’s a parkrun. On a beach. You literally run ip the beach for two and a half kilomtres and then turn around and run back down again. It’s amazing.

The surface is surprisingly good. The sand is hard so you do not get the exhaustion of running on soft sand. It is probably not a PB course, but it’s not difficult going, either. There are a few streams to jump over and some seaweed to dodge which is all part of the fun.

It was raining heavily the day I went and continued to rain throughout the entire run. None of that killed the fun for me. No chance of sunburn, exhaustion or dehydration. It was beautiful. Where else would you want to be on a rainy Saturday morning?

Except you cannot be here every Saturday. One of the quirks of the events is that they can only run the event at low tide so it only takes place around half of the time. It is well worth the trip if you can make it, though. This is a contender for my favourite parkrun.

Industrial Society and Its Future, perhaps better known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is an anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski. It was published in 1995 in The Washington Post. I watched the Netflix documentary on Kaczynski and thought I would give the essay a read.

Kaczynski argues that technology is the source of most of our problems. Industrial society is a system and human autonomy (which he calls the power progress) has to be limited in service of the system. If you are going to have a factory production line, you have to have workers there, at a time that suits the factory, working on the line.

Technology then becomes pervasive. For example, when cars were invented, you could live just fine and have a car or not have a car. It was good. But now, owning a car involves a driving licence, insurance, MOTs. And because people have cars, cities spread out and so now you have to have a car. Or rely on public transport, which limits your freedom even further.

It’s not correct that humans did not have an affect on the world before the Industrial Revolution. Yuval Noah Harari talks about how early humans eliminated most of the large mammals in Sapiens. But we are doing exponentially more damage now, as well as increasingly making ourselves miserable.

So it is arguably a good critique of the problems of our technological society.

He is wrong about everything else, though. Starting with the fact that he killed a bunch of people to get the thing published, which, it goes without saying, is morally wrong. Maybe things would have been different if social media had existed back then, allowing him to spread his message without violence.

Kaczynski would have hated me. The work starts and ends with an attack of “leftism” which is ill-defined but generally the political left including socialists, communists, and any group gammons would call “woke” these days such as LGBTQ advocacy groups or feminists. He argues that a lot of the people complaining are well educated white people. Which is true, because we are the people who have a voice. That’s how oppression theory works and I don’t see any understanding of oppression theory in the text.

Finally, he doesn’t offer any real solution. His solution is “nature”. But what does this look like? How does it work? Even if we wanted to live without all of our modern technology (such as a antibiotics, for example), how would we stop people just reinventing technology?

The Female Profile of Autism: A Guide to Clinical Assessment is a book by Isabelle Hénault and Annyck?Martin. It suggests its intended audience is both clinical professionals and autistic women looking to understand how autism presents in women and what the assessment process looks like.

It has three parts. The first talks about autistic experience in the third person. The second is a narrative written by Martin about her experience of discovering she is autistic. Part three is some guidelines for clinical assessment.

I wasn’t too sure what to make of the book. There is clearly a lot of relevant clinical experience here. But is it neuroaffirmative? I’m not sure. It’s not medical model but it’s not the language I would expect to see in a new book. However, it was written in French and then translated to English, so it is fair to say some of the language may have got off point in translation.

It also leverages the work of Tony Attwood a lot. Now, Tony Attwood is a legitimate bigwig with his own Wikipedia page. But some of the language is like “and the magnificant Tony Attwood says…” as if he is the Wizard of Oz. Maybe he is; I’ve not met him. But I would like a clinical book to reference research and integrate ideas a little more. And again, maybe some of this is the translation.

The assessment guide provides a lot of useful questions. I would tweak the language to pathologise a little less, but the questions hit on the relevant issues. Overall, I would say this is a useful book for clinicians working with autistic women and girls.