Chris Worfolk's Blog

Last week, I completed my first triathlon. Except it wasn’t a triathlon, nor was it anything like a real distance.

It was the “GO TRI Temple Newsam”, a novice event designed to get people into triathlon that is organised by the British Triathlon federation. It took the format of a duathlon with a 2km run, 5km bike and another 2km run.

Despite a slow start, leaving me dead last, I managed to pull up the pace and pass most of the field. In the end, I came home in 22nd position, out of a field of 58. Not a total disaster for my first event.

My time was 37:07.

Coming off the bike was hard. I did a duathlon training session on my birthday, and for the first kilometre, I had no running legs. That’s not a huge thing when you are running 10k, but quite a big thing when you are only running two.

It was also a good reminder that my descending on the bike sucks. I lost a few places coming down the hill because I was on my breaks and other people weren’t. Luckily, what goes down must come up, and I was a faster climber than everyone who overtook me.

Event-wise, I think it was good. It felt a tad disorganised at times, but that didn’t really matter: everyone knew what was going on and there were marshalls at all of the key points, so that is all you need.

My only criticism is that we were promised a secure transition area for our bikes. But, that turned out to be the middle of the field. Not a problem when you are riding a Halfords-own-brand bike, but if you brought your £1,000 bike (which is pretty common if you are into your cycling) you would probably be quite annoyed.

It was good fun and I would do it again. Especially when it warms up a little bit!

Yesterday was a write-off. Venla was ill again, so I spent most of the day looking after her. The time I did get free I spent at the gym and doing biological psychology reading. I think that means I have technically failed the challenge. Thanks, Venla.

But some of the work seems to be paying off. Four people requested a personalised report yesterday. It’s not currently hooked up to my mailing list, as I wanted to monitor people’s behaviour before I do that, but so far it looks like it could be a valuable source for reaching new people.

Paying customers are coming through on the Mindfulness for Social Anxiety course, too.

Today has been a little better in terms of work. I’ve queued up week 8 of WAM’s Running for Anxiety course and scheduled the email announcement, too.

Second, I went through my new book with my editorial team (Elina) and made all of the corrects. I still have some further editing to do but things are looking to be in good shape.

On Thursday, I started with everyone’s favourite task: software upgrades. WordPress has released a new version so I went around securing all of my installs with the latest software.

I then moved on to closing a website, and a small chapter of my life, in the form of Mountain Wallet. The store is now gone.

In more exciting news, Worfolk Anxiety now offers personalised reports to anyone who completes the mood assessment. After you complete it you get your score and a short explanation, and you can put your email address in if you want a more detailed PDF.

Finally, I have also written some scripts for a set of new videos I am going to film for WAM.

Yesterday I finished course pages for Mindfulness for Social Anxiety and my existing 5-Day Mindfulness for Anxiety course and then went through and deep-linked any relevant blog post back to these pages.

It doesn’t sound like much, but I’m reasonably pleased with it for a day’s work (in between a full day of lectures and looking after Venla) as writing good sales copy is really hard. And, in my case, writing mediocre sales copy is hard, too.

Today was a grinder: four hours of back-to-back lectures in the morning, a quick lunch, and then four hours of back-to-back labs in the afternoon.

Despite that, I’ve got some business stuff done. First, I’ve re-done my actionable priority list. This is essentially my short-term business plan for things I think I can get done this month.

I’ve finished off the PDF generation of the personalised reports for WAM. I am now looking at how users can sign up to get access to them.

I have also gone through the recent blog posts and cross-indexed them with the site content.

I’ve also added a new courses page to WAM and added a new page for the new course which links off from that. Currently, there is very little information on the website about our courses, so I’ll be fixing that.

Yesterday was filled with uni work and volunteering with Anxiety Leeds, so not the most productive of days.

However, I did write two new newsletters for Worfolk Anxiety. One was my weekly newsletter, this one looking at tryptophan and cognitive reappraisal, and another that is reminding people to register for Mindfulness for Social Anxiety.

Metrics on Udemy have been promising. More people signed up for the new course yesterday and three people wrote reviews of my courses yesterday, too.

If you know what a canal lock is, you can probably work out what Bingley Five Rise is.

It’s quite a climb on a bike. I’m not pretending that it’s long, or it’s anything like what the professional racers are tackling on grand tours (for kilometres at a time). But, compared to the rest of the canal, the 18 metres of climbing is a lot. Wikipedia pegs it at 20%.

Indeed, having done around Eccup and the airport, I would say it’s as short, steep and nasty as anything that Leeds has to offer.

I haven’t been beaten by a climb yet, though, and this one was no exception. A bit of first gear and some riding out of the saddle and bingo, you’re at the top.

Except you’re not at the top. Because, when you get to the top, you run into a gate. Still on the hill, so you can’t just comfortably put your foot down and wheel yourself through. You’re still on the climb, trying to navigate this stupid wooden fence.

And yet, if I were to take a chainsaw to that wooden fence, in the eyes of so-called British justice, I would be the one in the wrong.

I studied law at high school and I was very good at it. But one thing I could never get my head around was the six aims of sentencing. When it came to punishing people, what was the point of any of it, other than rehabilitation? Surely that was our only job?

Times of changed and now I am older and wiser. My idealistic view of humans has taken a kicking at the hands of Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer. So, here are the other five aims of sentencing and why they are important.

Reparation

Never had a problem with this one. If you can make it right, you should. I don’t think that view would be in any way controversial.

Protection

A necessary evil. Sometimes we need to lock people up to stop them hurting other people, or even themselves.

Detterence and denunication

I’ll put denunciation in here because there is a lot of overlap with general deterrence. Specific deterrence is making the individual criminal think twice before doing it again; general deterrence is making wider society think twice before doing it in the first place.

Both of these are important. Why? Because people are not inherently good. They’re not evil, either. They’re just people.

And, ultimately, people weigh up the consequences of their actions. And if the risk is worth the prize, they risk it.

So, you need carrot and stick. You need to give them a job and a place in the community to give them something to lose if they commit a crime. But you also need to make the deal not worthwhile with some stick, too.

Retribution

This is the most contested aim of sentencing: punishing people because they deserve to be punished.

Why do we need to do this? Because people want to live in a fair world. And it causes us distress when that view is broken. When you find out there has been wrong-doing, you feel bad. You physically feel it. It makes us sad when we hear about unfairness.

So, crimes have to be punished. Just for the sake of adding an extra wrong, because, as we adults know, two wrongs do genuinely make a right. When someone is punished, it restores a sense of fairness to the universe and we all feel better.

I was so busy smashing the inaugural Go Tri: Temple Newsam today that I had little time for business concerns. But here is what I’ve done…

I’ve scheduled the release of week 7 of my course, Running for Anxiety.

I’ve completed all of the captions for my new course, Mindfulness for Social Anxiety. Those are now live. Yesterday, I invited some of the loyal fans of WAM to be the first to sign up for the course and the first six people already have.

Recently, Elina and I bought cycling helmets. You may think that they would just be one design for everyone. After all, men and women have basically the same head. Sure, men have larger heads, on average, but that isn’t a reason to gender them: just make them in a variety of sizes.

But that isn’t how it works. Men, who presumably spend more money on such gear, get a range of sizes. And features. Mine, for example, has MIPS. This is the latest safety standard to protect my head in the event of a crash.

Sounds good.

Elina on the other hand, bought a woman’s helmet. Here is what hers has:

Yep, it has a little hole where you can put your hair through. It’s not even special. I can do that with my helmet.