Podcast Episode: Running, Retail, And Mishaps

Pip: Blender Fox has been having a week — possibly two — that involves running through illness, frozen food that isn't frozen, and a plane doing things planes should not do.

Mara: That covers it. There's training progress, a refrigeration cyberattack with a local twist, and a mix of personal illness and a striking aviation accident. Let's start with the running.

Getting Miles In While Fighting a Flu

Pip: The question here is what it looks like to stick to a training plan when your body isn't fully cooperating.

Mara: The Running post puts it plainly: "I think I might have pushed myself a bit more than I should have on the conversational pace intervals. It didn't help I'm still fighting this flu thing that I've been carrying around since last weekend and it's not been getting any better."

Pip: So the plan is being followed, but the margin for error is thinner than usual — running intervals while already under the weather is a different workout than running them healthy.

Mara: The structure that week was six reps of two minutes running at conversational pace, each followed by a minute of walking, bookended by warm-up and cooldown walks. The Training post from the following day shows a lighter session — three sets of four minutes at conversational pace with ninety seconds of walking — and the note there is simply "felt good today, nothing too strenuous." A deliberate step back, it seems.

Pip: Pulling the effort back after admitting you overdid it is exactly the right call — even if it takes a day to get there.

Mara: And the flu thread carries into the next segment, because the outside world was also having infrastructure problems of its own.

When Supermarket Freezers Become a Security Story

Pip: This one starts with a closed Sainsbury's and ends somewhere considerably more alarming.

Mara: The post on the European incident sets the scene: "Overnight into Monday 2 November, someone went into the refrigeration controls of supermarkets across Europe and turned the cold off. Stores in Belgium, Sweden, Estonia and several other countries were hit, with individual chains reporting anything from a single site to several dozen."

Pip: Remote access to refrigeration systems, across multiple countries, in a single night — that's a supply chain attack with a very tangible, very perishable consequence.

Mara: The local follow-up, Fridges, closes the loop: the Sainsbury's near work turned out not to be related after all — it was new self-serve tills being rolled out. A near-miss on the conspiracy theory, but the underlying story remains real.

Pip: The flu and the freezers share a theme — things quietly going wrong before anyone notices.

A Cold and a Crash Worth Paying Attention To

Pip: The flu that showed up in the running posts has its own origin story, and the same week brought something much heavier.

Mara: The Flu post traces the uncertainty directly: "Not sure if it's from work, from the commute home, or from my sister who is currently coughing and spluttering worse than me." No diagnosis, just the familiar process of elimination.

Pip: That post lands quietly, but it gives context to everything else in the week — the pulled-back training session, the cautious tone.

Mara: The LearJet post is a different register entirely. It covers a crash where the plane struck the ground at twenty thousand feet per minute, and flags two VASAviation reconstructions — one of the final minutes, one of the same aircraft landing in severe turbulence months earlier — alongside an NTSB podcast episode. The note before linking is direct: it contains the pilot's last words, and it makes for uncomfortable watching.

Pip: That's a week with a lot of weight in it — small personal struggles and something genuinely hard to sit with.


Mara: Running through illness, infrastructure quietly failing, and a crash that stays with you — it's a lot of ground for one week.

Pip: Next time, maybe the freezers stay on and the flu stays home.

Training

Second run of the second week

  • 5 min walking warm-up
  • 3 sets if
    – 4 minutes at conversational pace
    – 90 minutes walking
  • 5 min walking cooldown

Felt good today. Nothing too strenuous.

Running

Onto the second week of running this Runnah plan

Today was:
* 5 minutes walking warm up
* 6 reps of:
– 2 minutes running at conversational pace
– 1 minute walking
* 5 minutes walking cool down

Felt fine, but I think I might have pushed myself a bit more than I should have on the conversational pace intervals.

It didn’t help I’m still fighting this flu thing that I’ve been carrying around since last weekend and it’s not been getting any better.

Someone Turned Europe’s Supermarket Freezers Up to 50°C

Overnight into Monday 2 November, someone went into the refrigeration controls of supermarkets across Europe and turned the cold off. Stores in Belgium, Sweden, Estonia and several other countries were hit, with individual chains reporting anything from a single site to several dozen. Some pulled chilled and frozen stock from shelves; others threw it away.

This morning on the way into work, the Sainsbury’s in the station near where I work had its doors closed and a sign saying “due to technical issues we will be open at 07:30”. I wonder whether it is related to this.

Source: The Hacker News — New Wave of Refrigeration Cyberattacks Hits Supermarkets Across Europe.

Flu

Gah, I think I’ve picked up something in the past couple of days. Not sure if it’s from work, from the commute home, or from my sister who is currently coughing and spluttering worse than me.

LearJet

Wow, didn’t think I’d see this. A plane crashes into the ground like a missile, doing 20,000 feet per minute speed.

Word of warning before watching, it contains the last words of the pilot on the plane. It makes for uncomfortable watching (and listening)

VASAviation who do animations overlaid with ATC audio pieced together the final minutes of this crash and you can see how quickly things changed.

A podcast episode from the NTSB News Talk podcast was also released:

EDIT: 2nd Nov. VASAviation put another video up showing the same plane in May landing at Teterboro in Severe Turbulence

Podcast Episode: Running Plans And Cloud Outages

Pip: Blender Fox has been busy — lacing up running shoes, watching cloud infrastructure catch fire, and apparently doing both in the same week.

Mara: Today we're covering two distinct territories: a return to a running habit and what those early sessions actually look like, and a Google Cloud outage that took down a GKE cluster and a MongoDB node at the same time. Let's start with the running.

Returning to the Road

Pip: The central tension here is a familiar one — you used to run, then you stopped, and now the apps you relied on have either died or drifted into something unrecognizable. So how do you actually structure a return?

Mara: The post frames it plainly: "It's been a long time, but I'm going to try to get back into running. Most of my old apps have died or no longer serve the original purpose they had."

Pip: That's the infrastructure problem of fitness habits — the scaffolding you built last time doesn't survive a long gap. You come back and have to rebuild from scratch, tooling included.

Mara: The practical answer here is Runnah, a new app, approached with deliberate caution — trial first, then monthly, then annual only if the habit proves it'll stick. The app also surfaces strength workouts, which fits the situation: a barbell and dumbbell set already on hand.

Pip: Choosing a beginner plan when you're not a beginner is one of the smarter calls in fitness.

Mara: The post flags that directly — not new to running, but far enough out that a slow re-entry makes more sense than picking up where things left off. The first session reflects that: five minutes walking warm-up, three sets of three minutes running at conversational pace with two minutes walking between, then a five-minute cooldown.

Pip: The second run, covered in the follow-up Training post, adjusts the intervals — ninety seconds at conversational pace, ninety seconds walking, then a four-minute conversational pace block, two minutes walking, same warm-up and cooldown bookends.

Mara: And it landed well. The post puts it simply: "Today's run was nice. Comfortable, with some harder uphills in the middle." The structure is doing what it's supposed to — accumulating time on feet without blowing up the effort level.

Pip: Two runs in, a new app on trial, a plan that's working. The question now is just consistency.

Mara: Which is exactly where these plans either hold or don't. Speaking of things that don't hold — let's talk cloud outages.

When the Cloud Has an Off Day

Pip: Sometimes your infrastructure just decides it's done for the afternoon, and there's genuinely nothing you can do about it.

Mara: The post describes a GCP regional failure in London that took down part of a GKE cluster and degraded live services. A MongoDB Atlas node — running on GCP but outside the main account — also went down. Atlas's own message made the situation clear: "The Cloud Provider you've chosen is out of capacity for the selected database deployment configuration. We will continue to try and deploy on the chosen Cloud Provider."

Pip: So the recommended fix is to pick a different provider or region — except you can't action that mid-incident when the provider is the problem.

Mara: The saving detail is that the affected Mongo node was an analytics node, not serving live traffic. Most services were back up by the time the post was written, though GCP's own status page didn't flag any issues until around two hours after problems first appeared.


Pip: A slow return to running and a cloud region that needed a lie-down — not a bad week's worth of material.

Mara: The running story is still early. Next sessions will show whether the plan holds.

Training

So, second run today of the new plan:

  • 5 min walking warm-up
  • 2 sets of 90s at conversational pace, 90s walking, 4min conversational pace, 2min walking
  • 5 min walking cooldown

Today’s run was nice. Comfortable, with some harder uphills in the middle

Training

It’s been a long time, but I’m going to try to get back into running. Most of my old apps have died or no longer serve the original purpose they had.

Currently trying Runnah. Seems okay so far. It does also give strength workouts which helps since I have a barbell and dumbbell sets lying around.

I might trial them first then maybe do monthly subscription for a bit to see how it plays out before considering an annual subscription.

First run since I haven’t run seriously for a while was relatively simple, I’m going a “new to running” plan, even though I’m not exactly new to running, I’ve been out of running a lot so going to slowly get back into it via the plan proposed.

First run today was:

  • 5 min walking warm-up
  • 3 sets of 3 min running at a conversational pace, then 2 minutes of walking
  • 5 min walking cooldown

Generally felt okay for this run. Got another run tomorrow, so we’ll see how that one goes.