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​Friday Inspiration 468​

I’m not a road cyclist, and haven’t gone on a proper group ride for years, but damn if this video didn’t make me happy, and also make me subscribe to this guy’s YouTube channel immediately. (video)

I love Anne Kadet’s Substack because of her combination of curiosity and her willingness to investigate that curiosity, in New York—for example, her latest post in which she asked people on the subway what they were looking at on their phones(kind of surprising results too).

I have read quite a bit about the benefits of positive self-talk during physical exertion (you're doing great!), but I hadn’t thought that much about “self-deception” as a motivational strategy until I read this piece by Sabrina Little (who is a many-time national champion and record-holding runner, in addition to having a PhD in philosophy): Are We All Just Liars?​

This might sound ridiculous to you, but for almost my entire ultrarunning career, I had kind of thought "carb loading" wasn't something runners did anymore, like giant spaghetti dinners the night before a meet were sort of an old-school tactic that the cross-country team at my high school did. Imagine my delight when I got to draw an illustration (included below) about carb loading for the folks at Precision Fuel and Hydration a while back, which gave me the opportunity to educate myself by reading articles about carb loading on their website, like this one: "How to carb load before your next race." It's a thing that people do! Here's this week's link to get 15% off your first order from the PFH website, if you so choose (the link to the carb loading article will also get you 15% off).

I have been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, after reading about a study that showed we all basically think the best everything happened when we were approximately 10 years old. So of course I clicked on this piece, “Your brain is lying to you about ‘the good old days,’” and the science behind why we think things were better in the past. And it applies to how we think about progress, and improving society, but I think also, specifically this passage, how we remember things like mountaineering, endurance events, and all things “Type 2 Fun”:
“Thanks to ‘selective memory,’ humans have a tendency to forget negative events from the past and reinforce positive memories. It’s one reason why our feelings and memories about the past can be so inaccurate — we literally forget the bad things and give the good things a nice, pleasant glow. The further back the memory goes, the stronger that tendency can be.”

I don’t know who both needs this, but if you’d like to follow a Bluesky account that picks a random restaurant from around the world and shows you photos of that restaurant and its food, please allow me to recommend: Random Restaurant Bot.

Perhaps you, like me, have spent some serious time with Goodnight Moon, and would be interested that the USPS will soon be making Goodnight Moon stamps?(!)

Maybe you read this newsletter because it often contains recommendations of articles or videos that make you think, or make you more interesting to talk to at dinner parties. Well, this 16-second video of a woman making a custom stuffed animal with a recording of her own laughter in it is not one of those things, but I hope it makes you laugh as much as it made me laugh, but as the OP wrote in the title, I’m laughing at her laughing at her laughing.

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