The cover of “Bard” - the novel written by Australian author Keith Taylor that inspired me for years to want to be a bard. No job openings in that field lately.
Day 2 - Hold Your Breath
The Quest: Figure out how long you can hold your breath
The world’s record for holding one’s breath is 19 minutes and 22 seconds, held by a Swiss freediver named Peter Colat. Before that David Blaine did his thing for 17 minutes and 4 seconds. Of course, both these records were set using a variety of techniques that aren’t quite useful in a day-to-day context such as sucking in pure oxygen (I always forget my pure oxygen tank when traveling.)
Apparently, the average regular person can hold their breath for 2 minutes. I tried it and found I can only hold my breath for about 1 minute.
There are a range of techniques to increase this time, so that’ll be something for another day. In the meantime, I’ll just have to restrict the time I spend in outer space without a space suit to sixty seconds, ‘cause, you know, the big problem there will be lack of oxygen.
Day 1 - Midnight Run
The Quest: Go for a run at midnight and find five things that surprise you.
I’ve lived in Kitsilano (Vancouver, BC) for about eleven years and I’m pretty sure I’ve run the length of the beach down towards the University of British Columbia well over 500 times. Still, running there at midnight it was remarkable both how hard it was mentally to remember where the path was and yet how well my feet remembered where all the curves and potholes are. Muscle memory trumps visual memory on this one.
Here are a few things I noticed:
- All the weird, expensive houses people build along Point Grey really come alive at night. Each house in the strip looks like it belongs in a different part of the world.
- This city has a lot of skunks and midnight is when they get out to party.
- Streets where rich people live have remarkable lighting. Even in the middle of the night everything has an oddly consistent glow from the combination of street lamps, well manicured trees, and house lights.
- The only people who hang around the beach at midnight are teenagers. Boy do they seem emotional.
- Saw a guy practicing his fighting moves in the park in the dark. His kung fu was stronger than my kung fu.
It’s a little scary at points to be running down at the beach in the middle of the night. But it has some really nice peaceful moments too. My wife was right when she told me not to listen to music while running at night.
Day 0 - Starting Out
The point of this blog is simple: force myself to document (and therefore do) one interesting/cool/meaningful experience every day. It’s part of taking responsibility for living a meaningful life.
