Training Log Archive: Craney

Never any intention of running today. A few aches, but seem to have pulled through yesterday pretty well.

Longest run of my life :) Pretty hot competition at the Canberra Metrogaine around Gungahlin - Marty, Rob and Paul all also running solo. Picked a route that would take in all the controls and measured it at about 45km - the others said their routes were about 55km though, so figured it was probably more mis-measurement on my part than finding some sneaky way of saving 10km. Meh.

First ~20km around Nicholls and the Gungaderra grasslands. That was quite pleasant scenery with some nice bits of bush, some new trig points and some housing estates with actually quite nice houses to look at. Felt really comfortable at 5mpks. Then 10km through the town centre and onto Mulligans Flat. Again, fairly interesting surroundings and 5mpks felt fairly comfortable - although noticed stiffness in the hamstrings setting in.

30-40kms took me through Forde, Bonner and Amaroo - McMansion plastic housing tastic. It was here that the stiffness escalated to slowing me down. In fact I stopped to sit down and stretch a couple of times, which helped a bit. Slowed to 6mpks.

40-50kms was mainly through Moncrieff - a big muddy flattened piece of land full of bogans building their dreams. The depressing surroudings didn't really help the fatigue joining my stiffness. Still, I was able to sustain a ~7mpk shuffle without too much trouble. Then 5km more at the 7mpk-shuffle pace through Casey and Ngunnawal, which was ok because I knew I was going to finish and I was in unchartered running distance territory.

Ended up only about 10mins behind Rob but something crazy like 40mins behind Marty. But very pleased to pretty much run the whole way. In hindsight, my pacing may not have been tactically astute, but still it was satisfying to cover 30kms at 5mpks and then settle into a shuffle that felt like it could have carried on for a little longer.

All being well this will only remain my longest run for a couple of weeks...

C • Phew 2

I've been thinking about why democracy is failing when we get these outcomes that less than 50% of people want, and where probably >50% of those who vote in favour would probably prefer a less extreme outcome than the one they voted for.

I think it might be because the options presented are often not really different enough for the average person to have a strong opinion on. I think this happens for two reason. A: there's a bell curve of opinion from extreme left to extreme right, with the vast majority somewhere near either side of the middle. This means when most debates between people occur, it's between someone slightly to one side of the other (rather than far away from the other), and so discussion/debate is focussed around relatively insignificant differences of opinion (e.g. negative gearing or no negative gearing, correct rate of company tax, sell national park for logging or not) rather than significant ones (ban all Muslims or have an open door policy). As a result popular and opposing political parties form where there are clusters of like opinions, and because they need to be different/opposing by definition, the sensible position for these is where the average debate is, which is either side of the centre. B: in the absence of extreme circumstances, opinion is centralised and debate is forced to become focussed on more trivial issues near to the centre--on the other hand, in a war there could be a shift to the right, or in a country with vast inequality and poor standards of living there might be shift to the left (maybe? information asymmetries prevent this in reality).

However, one of these sides must win, so that side is forced to seek additional support from parties/points of view further towards its extreme. This results in power/good outcomes for people with more extreme views than the majority, and the average policy of the winning side becomes more extreme than the average opinion of the people that voted for it. And of course there's almost 50% of people who are very unhappy with the outcome.

In the long run, this evens out but that doesn't make it ok because a) irreversible decisions are made by the party of the day, b) there are inefficiencies of changing government fairly frequently and c) proposed policies that are off to the side of centre are not easily implemented because of the amount of disagreement.

If the focus in A wasn't so much on winning the minor discussions/debates and forming a party to support those views, but instead on calling them for what they were--minor issues to work through--and forming a party that thinks about those issues but is firmly against extreme views on both sides, you'd end up with a central party with just as much credibility (or support) as one either side of it. In the situation of B you could then get something like 70% of the votes, your average policy would match the average point of view of the people that voted for you, all the extreme views on both sides wouldn't get a look in, and you could decide internally which policies to proceed with. So democracy would work better.

Ok, this morphed into the Australian situation but I think the same is probably true of the UK and the EU and all that. And I've kind of made this up without any data. And importantly, even if that did make democracy work better it would still only better reflect what people want, which is typically short-term and not in the long-term interest of the human race let alone the planet. Hmm.

C • Training log hacked? 7

HFW - listening to old series of the Infinite Monkey Cage on the ipod (cheers for the heads-up Shep). Never realised Brian Cox used to be in D Ream.

HFW