Chris Worfolk's Blog

Dundalk parkrun takes place on the Dundalk Institute of Technology campus and consists of three laps around the playing field. While it is not the most exciting of parkruns, it was well marshalled and I had fun.

The Prince of Darkness has left us. Like everyone learning guitar, Paranoid is a key part of my repertoire. And Iron Man is one of the songs I regularly serenade Elina with. I like to think Ozzy had all of this in mind when creating the heavy metal genre.

My current research paper is qualitative and I’m using descriptive-interpreative analysis to analyise the interviews. I decided to try using some of the data analysis software available out there and settled on MAXQDA.

Overall, the experience has been good. You can code your text and play any audio or video recording you have along with it to make corrects. You can also group and colour code your tags for organisation. It also has tools such as word frequency that allow you to do further analysis.

Triathlon is back! I took in Kilkenny Triathlon a few weeks ago and realised how much I had missed it. I decided to keep momentum rolling and sign up for Tro Provinces Triathlon, which takes place in Lanesborough. During the race you cross the border between Longford and Rosscommon, hence the name of the race.

Unfortunately, it was heat wave weekend. Temperatures were predicted to peak at 28 with typical British Isles humidity. I’m not a big fan of hot weather and I would have cancelled, except that I had just started to get my confidence back in open water and was determined to capitalise on it.

It is about a two-hour drive over, the second half of which is on small roads. I was in wave eight, which started two hours after transition closed, at around 12:30 meaning we got the impact on the day’s sun. I tried to leave my wetsuit off until the last minute to stay cool.

The swim

I was very nervous again before the race and getting into the water. The water in Lough Ree was a beautiful temperature, though. Maybe around 20 degrees. Warm enough to be pleasant to get into and cool enough to swim without overheating.

It was a triangluar course around a single buoy. I decided to take it easy and do heads-up breaststroke to the buoy. Once I rounded it I felt my confidence building and went into front crawl that I did all the way back to the swim exit. Job done and really happy with that.

The cycle

The cycle route was on closed roads and once you get through the first two turns it was a pure out-and-back affair. There was a tail wind on the way out so we were all flying. Slower on the return as we were going into a slight headwind but the aero bars really helped here.

I decided to go with arm sleeves to protect myself from sunburn. In addition, I took a second bottle on the bike with water that I could pour over my torso and arms every few kilometres to cool me down.

The run

Finally, onto the run. This too was a mostly out-and-back affair with little shade. Thankfully, the race organisers had put a real effort into keeping us cool. There were two water stations, so four chances to pass them on the out-and-back, and they put a series of sprinklers on the course so that you could run through them as well.

I took a soft flask of water to pour over myself again. However, having been sitting in transition the whole time, it was like bath water and I had to dump and refill it at the first water station.

The result

I managed to leave my timing chip in my car after I had registered, so I don’t have an official time. But according to my watch, my time was:

1:23:09

And my splits were:

I wasn’t interested in the time; I just wanted to have fun. Not miles off the 40-minute barrier for the bike, though. And a sub-26 5k in that heat was lovely. I worked pretty hard for it looking at my heart rate!

The race was well organised and they gave out free ice creams at the end. Thank you to all of the volunteers who made it happen.

Lovely zoo. The habits looked large and well-designed but we still got to see plenty. We got lucky with the elephants and the tiger was huge. The hippo was hiding, unfortunately. They also have rhinos, giraffes, zebras, chimps, sea lions and loads more. But the highlight might have been the wolves. There was a pack of them running around. The gorillas were also brilliant.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis is a book by James Davies discussing the rise in use of psychiatric diagnosis and antidepressant prescribing.

Davies charts the rise of the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the standard textbook for psychiatric diagnosis. Now on the revision of its fifth edition, the DSM has massively expanded over the decades to include ever more labels. These labels have no biological basis and are generally the consensus of small committees many of whom have financial links to the pharmaceutical industry.

The author then goes on to connect this to the rise of neoliberalism. As Thatcher dismantled trade unions, increased inequality and reduced working-class people’s quality of life, something was needed to explain this suffering that depoliticised and managed that suffering. The answer was labelling people as mentally ill.

Today, if you are sad because your zero-hours contract means you both have a job and still need to rely on food banks, it is not because of inequality it is because you have an anxiety disorder, or a depressive disorder. It is you, the individual, that is broken, and not that you are living in an unfair society, or so the biomedical model of mental illness would have us believe. And wouldn’t you know it, uber-capitalism can sell us the solution in the form of some antidepressants or a course of CBT.

Some people do find labels helpful. But currently, this is the only lens we are using. And often, the only solution is antidepressants, or if you are lucky some non-trauma-informed CBT.

Thus, mental health has been redefined to conform to the needs of uber-capitalism. Someone who is “mentally well” is someone who can work. IAPT was explicitly set up with the idea of getting people back to work. And programmes like mental health at work initiatives or Mental Health First Aid try to teach us that we should find new ways to handle the suffering caused by low wages, lack of job security and 24/7 work stress.

Work can be meaningful and promote self-esteem. But many jobs today do not provide any dignity. 10% of nurses are using food banks. People are being forced into the gig economy never sure if they will get a pay cheque. People work in warehouses that are gutting their local high street while their bathroom breaks are timed.

Crucially, everybody suffers. Even those with well-paid jobs find themselves lacking meaning and social connectedness. So we try to fix it by buying more stuff. This creates a cycle of consumerism, and then having to invest in security systems and increased policing to protect our stuff, and that in turn divides communities further.

So, what do we do about all of this?

First, we need a model of mental health that targets the root causes: inequality and social isolation. Putting more money into training counsellors will not help because individual distress is a symptom of wider social problems and not something that can be fixed in itself.

Second, we need a wellbeing economy. We need a form of capitalism that works for the benefits of individuals, not for the benefit of capitalism itself. A good start would be undoing the harms of deregulation and rebuilding trade unions to move away from uber-capitalism to more balanced social democracy. This is the exact model that operates in Nordic countries who have the highest quality of life.

Last weekend, Black Sabbath played their final gig. I wasn’t there but it sounded amazing. See the BBC News write-up.

Alongside them they had Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, David Draiman (Disturbed), David Ellefson (Megadeth), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Travis Barker (Blink-182), Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Ronnie Wood (the Rolling Stones), Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Sammy Hagar (Van Halen), Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) and KK Downing (Judas Priest). You couldn’t get that line-up anywhere.

Mountlucas parkrun takes place in the Mount Lucas wind farm. It is a single lap trail course and you get to pass right underneith the turbines: their foundations are just off the side of the trail and the blades pass over your head.

Lovely to have the one lap and I got a warm welcome from the volunteers. Thanks everyone, and happy 8th birthday!

I completed Kilkenny Triathlon two years ago when the swim was cancelled due to water quality. That meant the last open water race I had finished was IRONMAN Copenhagen three years ago and my confidence was not in good shape coming into this race. I registered for the try a tri as it is the same course as the sprint but with a shorter swim.

I got down there and registered fine. Despite the cloud cover it was baking hot, especially once we had our wetsuits on. We walked down to the swim and I felt nervous, especially when getting into the water. But I did it, and despite plenty of in-water nerves, too, I finished the swim.

The bike was pretty standard. Some back ache towards the end but I generally just had fun. I don’t think I used my aero bars much.

The run course was different to previous years. Last time it followed a similar route to the parkrun course with two laps around the castle grounds. This course took us onto the side of the river behind the castle and then back along the river in a lovely one-lap circuit.

My overall time was:

1:23:46

In 2023 it took on a duathlon format with an additional run at the start I cannot compare the two. Slightly slower on the cycle an slightly faster on the run, though it was probably a little flatter. My T1 looks horrendous but the mat was at the bottom of the hill by the river and included a long run up to transition.

I’m not fuss about the times in any case, I just wanted to finish a triathlon with an open water swim again and I did that so job done. I’m proud of myself. Also, it was fun!

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.