Runners in Singapore do pretty crazy stuff to get their altitude meters in. Be it for general training, be it in preparation for a particular race with lots of positive and negative altitude (and those are on the rise). Continue reading
A mash of two posts on my previous blog.
Some art finds, all about colour, as different as they come, and still to me intimately connected through their cityscape focus. Continue reading
I’ve rambled quite a lot about urban environments as natural habitats, ecosystems, cityscapes, and on it goes, but high-fly verbiage is a poor tool for helping anyone see. Australian photographer Ben Thomas, of Tiny Tokyo fame, has much better tools: Continue reading
An earlier version of this post was published on October 27, 2016 on my previous blog
One may argue that the most difficult aspect to notice is that which is all and ever present (the fish and water argument). Luckily, I’ve been living in big cities not long enough to run a risk of taking them that much for granted. Given my small town, small country background, the opposite argument (that, wiped clean by the excitement of novelty, my doors of perception let more rather than less big cityscape information in) makes more sense. At least to me because I constantly come across narratives about cities. How much of that is based on the urban as a growing focus of attention in social science, art, media, etc., generally, and how much is due to that unavoidable personal process which turns temporarily paying more attention into a more permanent attentional echo chamber of information consumption, is difficult to say. I would intuit a combination of both. Anyways, I hope that echo chamber serves my fancy well and is not too much of a perspectival monocle. Again I cannot say, but the below random selection of what I recently came across seems diverse enough. Continue reading
The title of this post pays homage to the writer and photographer, Teju Cole, whom I came across in my daily grazing of the digital pastures I use to hook up with the rest of the world. His talk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, called The City as Palimpsest, is a treasure trove of insights and apt descriptions, and palimpsest is such a great metaphor for what fascinates me in landscapes and cities, that I am truly delighted to have hit upon this great artist.
I adopted the pedestrianism label for my approach to running. Now I’m ready to advertise myself as a running guide for exploring Singapore I’m wondering. Continue reading
November 23, 2013 a ‘should one run a 100k race unprepared?’ on my previous blog
Whatever the answer, I did, would do it again, and do not see anything wrong with it. I have to warn you though: unless you are comfortable with the following two mirror image statements of the sentiment that underlies this, the rest of my argument will not make much sense to you.
With plenty of time on my hands, and an unhealthy eagerness for information, I find it difficult to avoid a regular and tedious feeling of deja vu. Let me illustrate with a subject matter that I follow on a permanent basis: mountain and trailrunning news. Very quickly, my categorizing mind starts pigeonholing stories and, lo and behold, the universe of topics/perspectives taken is quite limited and soon, I cannot stomach yet another story about suffering/flow/camaraderie/grit/….or nutrition/training/mental prep/gear/…. Continue reading
Originally posted on 13 March 2014 on my previous blog
Fuzzy categories offer an endless source of fascination. Take the relatively new concept of running trails. Let’s not start in prehistory, but just go back half a century. when running – as a sport – could reasonably be classified into three kinds, by way of the ‘surfaces’ it is done on: track, road and cross-country. Continue reading
Pedestrian Singapore 