Chris Worfolk's Blog

I have never watched cycling before. For the obvious reason: that men peddling away on bikes for five hours does not sound that interesting.

However, when you are working with Sky Sports, you sometimes get caught up in the excitement. It happened with golf, and now it appears to have happened with cycling, too.

Plus, I have stopped watching Formula One since Sky announced they were getting almost-exclusive live coverage of it. So, I am in the market for a new boring sport to watch. Cycling seems an excellent candidate.

Not as boring as it looks

A cycle race may seem like a bunch of people riding around for hours before sprinting towards the finish line at the very end. And, to a large extent, it is that. It is much easier to ride together in a peloton, so that is what happens, especially on the flat stages.

But it becomes more complicated than that. Riders can “attack”, which means they cycle off up the road and the peloton has to decide between chasing them down or letting them go. Cycling by yourself or in a small group is tiring, so it then becomes a competition to see if they can build up a big enough lead to hold off the peloton when they speed up towards the end.

Tour de France has four different jerseys:

So, lots going on. And because different riders are aiming for different jerseys, tactics change a lot. It’s a team sport. If you want to win a sprint, for example, it is easiest if you have a line of team-mates to get you in the perfect position.

Or, if you are competing for the yellow jersey, it makes sense have some of your team mates attack. That way, the yellow jersey is forced to either chase them down, tiring himself out so you can pass him at the end, or leave the attackers to the stage, taking valuable time out of his lead.

Grand Depart in Leeds

There are four big races in cycling, known as the grand tours. These are the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Vuelta a España and Tour de Yorkshire. Some people dispute whether the latter is really a grand tour.

But Yorkshire is certainly a hub for cycling. In 2014, the Tour de France started here, with the Grand Depart starting on The Headrow in Leeds. I was there.

This year’s tour

Chris Froome took the win in relatively easy fashion. While his winning time was narrower than his previous victories, and he briefly lost the yellow jersey at one point, it never really looked in that much danger given how dominant Team Sky was.

The real outrage of the tour was that Warren Barguil was awarded the combativity prize. He rode an excellent race and won the King of the Mountains jersey fair and square. But how anyone other than Thomas De Gendt, who spend over 1,000km in breakaway groups (mostly leading them), could be awarded the combativity jersey is a mystery to a novice cycling-watcher such as myself.

Image courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Even the knowledge that this was a Hilary Duff film was insufficient to set my expectations low enough.

This supposed exploration of the mind of a troubled young girl is dull, predictable and uninsightful. I did not even make it to the end. It’s only one redeeming feature is that some bits of it are so embarrassing that it may be an incredibly clever parody that only the writer was in on.

In Finland, things are simple: you throw your baby in a lake and either they swim, or they sink. Elina has become soft while over here though and wanted to give Venla a gentler introduction to swimming.

Our first trip was to Kirkstall Leisure Centre. Here is what I thought of it.

They have a 25-metre pool and learner pool. Unfortunately, when we turned up, the learner pool was closed. We did get a discount because of it, though.

The 25-metre pool is almost a learner pool in itself. It starts at 0.8 metres deep and only goes up to 1.6 metres deep, meaning both Elina and I could stand in the so-called deep end.

The water was warmer than I expected. We went at 10 am on Sunday morning, and it was quite busy.

They had a section of the pool roped off for lane swimming, and it was a generously wide lane, meaning that you could go around without kicking people coming the other way. It did mean you would get stuck behind slower traffic, though.

The changing rooms were okay. They were clean, and the showers were a reasonable temperature. No complimentary shower gel, but then I was not expecting any at a public pool. The lack of power sockets was a real problem, though: there was nowhere to plug my hair dryer in.

The locker keys were good: a solid rubber strap with a key that folds in. Difficult to operate with one hand, though.

Today, we’re launching the first Anxiety Leeds impact report.

We regularly take feedback from our group members and survey them to see what is working and what is not. However, this is the first time we have systematically reviewed the results and published a report about it.

Here are the headline figures:

• We support a wide range of ages across both genders
• We support a broad range of anxiety conditions, often compounded by depression and physical health issues
• 71% feel less alone after attending our meetings
• 29% feel a lot more positive about life
• 40% even see a reduction in day-to-day anxiety, despite us not being a treatment group

This is set on a background of us working with people who have anxiety, and therefore have a negative outlook on the world, compounded by also suffering from depression, which is the case of 62% of our members.

Here is the headline graph:

It is clear that not everyone sees a benefit in attending our group. This is consistent with other mental health programmes, all of which typically experience high drop-out rates.

The majority of people who do attend do see a benefit. This benefit increases the more they attend. This result should be viewed with caution: although it is highly plausible that there is a causative effect here, it is not direct evidence of one.

We’re also delivering an internal plan to group members on how we can continue to improve the group as we go forward.

You can download the full report here.

Why does Lord’s have a Deathly Hallows weather vane on the top?

In May, Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) and Young Health Movement published a report on the impact of social media on mental health. We wrote about it extensively on Worfolk Anxiety and you can read the full write-up over there.

The infographic was too good not to re-post, though. The TL;DR is that yes, social media can be harmful. But it also has its uses, so when used in moderation, like most things in life, can be a useful tool.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mindfulness is a powerful tool for reducing anxiety and increasing our enjoyment of life. Practising it allows us to re-train our minds to focus on the present, rather than wandering off into worry-land.

Which is why during the 30-Day Challenge I ran in April, we did two mindfulness meditations.

They were really popular. So, I have expanded them out into a full course. It’s called 5-Day Mindfulness for Anxiety and provides you with an introduction to what mindfulness is and how it works, before giving you five guided meditations, one for each day.

Best of all, it’s free. It’s hosted by Udemy, and you can preview the course here.

It has already proved a hit with the Udemy community. Nearly 500 people have enrolled and it has an average star rating of 4.8/5.

That slightly beats out the 30-Day Challenge, also available on Udemy, which has an average rating of 4.6/5. Though the challenge has over 1,500 students enrolled.

They’re both awesome. Give them a go.

Since finally giving in and watching MasterChef, I’ve been busy trying to up my game. Poaching pears, for example. And trying to make everything I put on a plate look a little prettier.

Results have been mixed.

This is pigeon breast, served with a sweet potato mash, with croutons, milk gel and chanterelles served two ways: fried and powered. The same ones we picked up in mushroom town, for reference.

Here I have served duck with the skin cooked separately, on mash with an orange gel, fondant potatoes, cranberry foam and a dressing of parsley. There are definitely issues with this dish:

• My fondant potatoes are rather jagged. Do people use a cookie cutter to get perfectly round potatoes?
• The duck skin curled up while cooking. I scored it previous to this to try and prevent that, but without success.
• The cranberry foam was still quite liquidy, which rolled around the plate.

Confit duck on a bed of apple purée served with Asian roast potatoes, coriander and chilli jam.

Lamb leg with parsley, fried potato slices and peas. I like this one because it is simple: plain ingredients, not overcrowded or covered in fancy nonsense, but it still tastes good.

There are some weird combinations going on here. It’s fish and chips, with an added scallop, and some strawberries mixed in with the parsley. I served the chips in a separate bowl to avoid having to cram everything on to the plate.

Conclusion

A lot of the stuff just needs practice: mastering the different techniques, for example, is something I need to work on. But the big takeaway for me is to put less stuff on the plate. It is impossible to be elegant when you are trying to ram too much food on there.

Chocolate by Molly Bakes is a cookbook for chocolatey things, surprisingly.

It starts with an introduction to the different kinds of cocoa beans there are, and some useful advice for working with chocolate. This is fine, but once you know the difference between Forastero, Criollo, and Trinitario, you want the more expensive ones.

The core content of the recipes is how to make hand-rolled truffles.

They’re very good. You make a ganache filling and a chocolate casing, and carefully assemble them in stages.

There are also recipes for a variety of other fun things. Chocolate bowls, for example:

And tray bakes, too.

If you like chocolate, this is an excellent book. It teaches you how to produce incredibly rich truffles and desserts, predominantly free from the distractions of other ingredients.

Summer means time for the Finns in Leeds to get together and enjoy the shade. We were lucky with the weather again this year, enjoying a sunny day throughout.

It was Venla’s first Finnish picnic. Though she is otherwise a bit of a veteran of them already.

This year’s event was a little sparsely attended. There were six of us in total. This had the advantage of massively improving my odds in the wife carrying competition, but, alas, Elina opted out.

Other results were mixed: I picked up gold in the welly throwing competition, but my mölkky performance was mediocre. I came last in the first game, before picking up a second place in the second game. Like last year, I was pipped by Martin.