Tag Archives: poems

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.