Chris Worfolk's Blog

Paul Hollywood suggested shaping left-over pastry into a leaf and putting that on the top of the pie. My artwork is not fancy enough for that, so I spelt out the word pie in pastry.

Whaling, the practice of hunting and killing whales, is a controversial one. it is banned in many countries but others continue the practice. Notably Japan, Iceland and Norway. During my recent trip to Iceland I came face to face with the issue. Specifically, I want to look at the issue of hunting whales for food.

My initial reaction was to agree with the anti-whaling campaign. Whales are very cool. If you had asked me where they are on the endangered status, I would have probably said somewhere in the middle.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the answer was obviously no. I am a pretty poor vegetarian, regularly eating meat. The animals I allow to be killed so that I can eat them include cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, fish, crabs, well, to be honest, the list just keeps going. Surely one should decide not to allow animals to be killed for food, or decide that it is okay? Why should whales receive special treatment?

Endangered status

One reason could be that we could seriously damage whale stocks. We do this with most fish already of course. However, since commercial whaling was banned in 1986, whale populations have been doing okay. The most common type of whale you find in Iceland, the minke whale, has never been considered endangered and continues to have a strong population.

Thanks to the low levels of hunting, it is now done at a very sustainable level. This would change if all countries started commercial whaling operations again, but for the moment there is no issue with the current level.

Hunting methods

It’s true that whale hunting has traditionally been unpleasant. They are harpooned. Japan now uses exploding harpoons that attempt to instantly kill the whale. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

However, there is also a flip side. All whales are wild, freely roaming the sea until they are hunted. This could be preferable to the way we often factory-farm cows and chickens, kept in pens and cages for the sole purpose of our slaughter?

Intelligence

Some species of whales are very intelligent. This is less true of some of the more actively hunted species. However, it is also worth us taking another look at our current dietary choices. If we are going to say no minke whale, we also need to say no pig, because they too are an intelligent group of mammals.

Other dangers

Hunting is not the only danger that whales face. In fact, other issues are putting them under more threat than hunting. These include:

• Pollution. There is so much crap in the ocean that whales are eating debris, finding it indigestible, and starving to death with a full stomach. A number of dead whales in Germany were found to have their stomachs full of plastic.
• Reduced habitat. Some whales can only live in cold water. As sea level temperatures rise, their habitat becomes smaller and smaller. Changes to the acid levels also have an effect.
• Change in eco-system. The changes in temperature also affect other critical parts of the ecosystem. Food sources may adopt different migration patterns and other predators may encroach into the whales’ territory.
• Over-fishing. Whales eat fish, so when we take all the fish out of the sea, there is nothing for them to eat.

Conclusion

Should we kill whales for food? Probably not. But then, we should not be killing any other animals for food either. If we are going to continue to do that, then there does not seem to be a good reason why whales should be granted a special exemption. Currently whaling levels are sustainable, which is far less true of much of the fishing industry.

We should protect whales. However, the real threats to them are pollution, climate change and over-fishing. These are the most pressing issues for us to tackle.

Given my recent slip into bad BMI I’ve been working on losing some weight. So I have been playing around with some tools to help me.

Apple Health

Health is one of the apps that Apple forces on you. I had never actually used it. However, when I opened it, it turned out that it had spent the last year counting every step I make. That is both horribly invasive and rather interesting. I am averaging 7,500 steps per day.

You can record body metrics such as weight and then have them plotted on a graph. This makes sense. Why I would need to regularly record my height and plot that on a graph though is unclear. Perhaps it is aimed at children and the shrinking elderly?

MyFitnessPal

I am using this to record my diet. Yep, I have become one of those calorie counting wankers. You put in your weight, target weight and target period to lose said weight, and it gives you the number of calories you need to restrict yourself to per day. This goes up and down as you exercise and eat, giving you a number of calories left for each day: I have 785 spare so far, which I could spend on two chocolate chip muffins…

I can also record exercise on it. This will be useful when I exercise without my phone, such as American football training. For running, I use the app below.

MapMyRun

I have used MapMyWalk for years but now I am upping the ante by using the run version. It is actually the exact same app. When you log a work out in one it immediately appears in the other. Also, once you have synced one with MyFitnessPal, they are all synced. They are all Under Armour apps, so you would expect them to work pretty well together and so far they do.

Results

After three months I had managed to drop 8kg. This was working off net 1500 kcals per day, which I hit almost every day. A few days I was a few hundred kcals over the limit, but on others I was up to 1,000 below the limit (due to large amounts of exercise) so I was definitely below the limit on average.

However, I then spent a week on my honeymoon and put 2kg back on.

Conclusion

I have a new found respect for anyone trying to lose weight. It is really difficult. At net 1500 kcals per day, which is the maximum my app allows, you can just about fit three meals in, but no snacks or beer in. After all of this, I was only losing 0.5kg per week. Then just a single week off ruined a month of work.

Of course, it could be that if you are significantly overweight it is easier to shift the first lot of kilos. However, it really is hard work and difficult to find the motivation when it piles back on so easily.

When you run a 10k, there are often people taking photos of you on the way round. I usually ignore them because I look awful in the photos, but the ones from this year’s Run For All Leeds 10k look better than normal.

The thumbnails are all square, and therefore chop my head off, but if you click them I do have a head somewhere.

In my post about the weather I shared this photo of my sunburn:

It looks worse in the photo than it actually was. It was noticeably red, but it wasn’t that burnt. It was a little sore but some after sun that we found at 1011 (an Icelandic supermarket chain) did the trick. You have to give the store credit: they really do have “everything you need and more…”.

This happened on Monday, and it started looking better the next day and continued to improve the day after. By this point, we’re on Wednesday and heading home. Then, on the Wednesday afternoon, it started itching.

Oh my did it itch!

It was horrendous. It wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep because I was involuntarily twitching every twenty seconds. Every hour, on the hour I would go to bed and spend 15 minutes twitching, before getting up, watching some TV and repeating the cycle.

Somewhere between 3-4am I gave up on making it into work the next day and sent a message in to say I would not be in. At 6am I finally managed to drift off: only to be woken up by Elina’s alarm at 6:10am. I spent some more time trying to sleep, then set off for Boots to clean them out of itch cream.

Nothing worked. I tried after sun, anti-itch cream, even antihistamines. But none of it provided relief.

Luckily, by this point, it was starting to subside. The itching continued for several days, but it didn’t stop me going to work on Friday, nor sleeping on the Friday night.

When I looked it up on the internet (which was a mistake) they talked about “hell’s itch” or “hell itch”, with people telling stories about it causing sleep deprivation, depression and torture. I don’t think what I went though is was as bad as being tortured, but I can see why people would make big claims about it. It was not a pleasant experience.

Given that I am from The North and Elina is from Finland, we are not hot weather people. Twenty degrees is fine. Twenty-five is roasting. This is the reason that when are looking for holiday destinations, we usually head north.

But it doesn’t work. Everywhere we got turns into a tropical paradise.

This is a photo I took on the Summer Isles…

They’re a small series of islands in Wester Ross, Scottish Highlands. On the west coast. The place where it rains every day. This was in September. It was exhausting climbing to the top of the hill because it was so warm.

Then here is us in Finland. The country where it regularly goes to minus twenty degrees celsius in the winter…

This is just after we had been swimming in the sea. The baltic sea. The one that spends half the year frozen. The day after we went swimming in a few lakes and that was even warmer. We went lake-swimming on our last trip too.

Finally, here is us in Iceland…

Iceland. The country of ice. The clue is in the name! On the right, we’re at the pool in our hotel. It was too warm to sit in for long, so we sat on the decking, that even in the shade was warm enough to sit outside. On the left, the blue lagoon, from which I came home from sunburnt.

Every time we pick a colder and colder country to visit, and every time it ends up being super warm. How does this keep happening?

I ran my first Run For All Leeds 10k in 2014, achieving a time of 1:06:14. Despite it being a hot day this was faster than both my subsequent Abbey Dash times and remained my personal best 10k race time. This year’s Leeds 10k was also warm (19 degrees) but cloudy (and still cooler than the half marathon!).

I have been running better than ever before in training so I was hoping to knock a significant block off my personal best, and for a stretch target try and run a sub-60 time.

Unfortunately, things were off to a poor start. The 60-minute pacer was right at the front of the green group (athletes predicted to run 60+, I think) so I couldn’t get close to her. By the time I had crossed the starting line she was out of sight. I only saw her at the turnaround point, at which time she was way head of me.

My GPS said that I was running a sub-60 time. However, it kept reporting I was ahead in distance: it would give me my kilometre split before I reached the official marker points and clocked my total 10k distance at 10.26km. When I clocked my final time via GPS I was at 1:00:10. 10 seconds over the hour!

I had given it my all, and come up short.

Run For All usually text you your official time straight however. Mine never arrived, so I faced a nail-biting wait in the pub while waiting for the official times to be posted.

Finally, it arrived.

My time was 0:59:59. The slowest possible time you can run while still being under an hour. But it was under an hour. I had taken 6:15 off my personal best. An incredibly fortunate ending.

I really like the way Run For All run their events. My race pack and race number arrived on time. They have markers at every kilometre, plenty of water, pacers every five minutes and even though my my text never arrived, the results were available online within a few hours.

I have written a lot of posts about Iceland over the past month. In this final post, I wanted to discuss our trip in general and share some of the photos I have not had chance to yet.

When we first arrived, the weather was very British. The area around the airport is not very interesting. Therefore it seems odd that the airport is 45 minutes away from Reykjavik, and why the car rental station is a mile away from the airport. As soon as we put some distance between outselves and Keflavik, the weather improved, as did the view.

Þingvallavatn

When we arrived we drove to our first hotel, Ion Hotel, located near lake Þingvallavatn, at the bottom of Þingvellir national park. We drove round the lake to get to Gullfoss and Geysir. Click the photo for a larger version.

After we checked out of Ion we headed north to Þingvellir.

Þingvellir

We stopped off at the Þingvellir visitor’s centre to take a look at the location of the historical Icelandic parliament.

After Þingvellir we drove north on what Iceland calls a road, but what anyone else would call a gravel track. They are not big on health and safety: we often found ourselves on step hills and twisty rosds with large drops just a foot off the track, with no safety barrier in sight.

This left the care filthy, which I was quite proud of. At the end of our stay, people were returning clean 4x4s. What’s the point? When we took our car back, they had to wash it before they could inspect it to see if there was any damage.

Snæfellsnes

We drove to the Snæfellsnes peninsula where we stayed at Hótel Búðir. I have covered this in those posts, but I love this photo of the petrol station in Borgarnes. Certainly beats the view ay my local station.

Reykjavik

To finish the trip, we drove to Reykjavik to spend a few days there. We went whale watching, visited the penis museum, Blue Lagoon and had a general wander round. We ate at a lot of fine restaurants too, as well as the Chuck Norris Grill.

Conclusion

Iceland is a cool place. The scenery is absolutely beautiful. It’s very Nordic; you could describe it as the Scottish Highlands on a much bigger scale.

The weather is good. There is a saying in Iceland, “if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes”. I’m British, so this is lost on me. Their weather can be unpredictable, but in the week we were there, it was nothing compared to ours. It was fairly consistant while we were there, and very warm away from Reykjavik.

It is expensive. My god it is expensive. We were on our honeymoon, so we were not doing things on the cheap. This perhaps adds some bias to our spending. However, I found it significantly more expensive than Finland, which is not a cheap place either.

While in Reykjavik we went whale watching. There are a number of companies doing the tours: Elding and Special Tours do big-boats while another company offers inflatable rib boats. The latter allows you to get closer, but you don’t get the luxury of a nice big boat you can go inside, and it is twice the price.

We went dolphin watching while in the Highlands and that was amazing as the dolphins come and swim alongside the boat, jumping out of the water.

Whales are not like that. They come up to take a few breaths and then go for a dive. You see a fin maybe as they sit below the surface and then the tail as they dive down, but that is about it. Generally, this is from quite a distance. You see a whale of course, which is cool, but you don’t physically see much.

The photos are taken with my 200mm lens and were clearer than you could see with the eye.

When you get on the boat, they offer you a seat of warm overalls to put on. I would recommend taking them up on this. Elina and I came prepared: Finnish woolly socks, fleeces and my new extra-warm coat and it was still a bit chilly.

Overall, I think I was disappointed with the whale watching. I think it was around £50 each, so that’s £100 for the two of us, and you just don’t see much. You could get closer by taking the rib boat, but then that is around £200 for a couple.

I do not advice messing with the Icelandic coastguard. They have battle ships.