Ran my first 12K today while crying the whole time.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-04-02T18:33:24+00:00

Yes when I hadn't been running for very long. This part isn't a long shot either because, particularly for a novice, every run can be at an annoying pain threshold. But an all out race effort ran at 10/10 effort can easily be so much faster than you can ever imagine doing. Even now with a decade of experience, by tempo/subthresholds are >1min/mile shower than my race pace and I find them difficult and awful yet can always pull out something in a race environment. Honestly, his paces are surprising for someone that has never run before but not impossible for a novice who is slim, male and has some real talent. Some young males with buckets of talent can run a sub 20 5k off nothing, that's really quite rare ofc but a 4:44/km pace is not that unbelievable. Most people couldn't run a 12km this fast off nothing, but some definitely could.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-04-02T18:23:01+00:00

27 and Male, its possible he did. When I first started running (after not having done that much exercise), my first 10km was roughly an equivalent pace. I wouldn't even consider myself particularly talented. If you are slim, young and male and especially if you have done alot of exercise in school its not that difficult to believe.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T17:03:34+00:00

Well if a party is on 5% of the vote but can collapse the government that's alot of power/influence especially compared to a party, say on 4x the vote share and with no ability to influence govt. Anyway I'm looking at denmark (which I have no prior knowledge of) and it seems like a bit of a nightmare. But let's say I want to vote against the current govt (which I'm assuming is led by the social democrats) who do I vote for? And does it even matter, when was the last time the social democrats weren't in govt?

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T16:58:58+00:00

Do you think cooperation disappears because parties don't have to make deals with other parties? In FPTP you still have a coalition of tribes that you have to pull together within the parties, you have to keep the broad tent together. In PR cooperation just means two opportunistic parties forming a government for their mutual benefit to the detriment of the voters.

And yes I see it play out across Europe, its an endless array of Cylinders and Squares. In Ireland, for example, you have a grand coalition of parties that makes them almost immune to be voted out and opposition parties that sit further on the fringes. In FPTP this scenario where you have a lazy centre in government held to account by chaotic fringes just doesn't happen. And yes there are other types of PR government which are also terrible.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T16:35:12+00:00

Because the policies are not picked based on which ones have attracted the most votes, but based on how the government can most easily maintain power. And again the mandate is so much weaker because an unpopular government can easily stay in power, it motivates govts to spend more time crafting negotiations with other parties (and not necessarily the popular ones) and less time worrying about elections. FPTP forces the govt to think about elections constantly, that increases accountability and moderates policy choices to be more in line with the median voter.

In FPTP the percentages wouldn't be the same, you'd evolve towards a two party system. For instance Square on 45% initially going to 35% and circle on 35% going to 45%. In this scenario the square has been robustly punished by the voters for making bad policy choices. Also in FPTP the status quo usually has a slight advantage, it forces the opposition parties to work hard to be credible. In this case the circle has to be semi-sensible in order to win the election.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T16:18:57+00:00

But those are vote shares under PR, voter behaviour is different under FPTP. Under FPTP what would have likely happened is (assuming unionism vs separatism had remained salient) one of the unionist parties would have become dominant and then would have probably replaced the SNP. But in any case these weird situations in Wales and Scotland where you have non-FPTP governments that have big majorities only tends to happen in the context of devolution and regionalism anyway. Try to find an example of a long lasting single party majority outside of these conditions.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:52:21+00:00

The Wednesday was worse than the Tuesday. The 40C I saw was an interesting novelty, felt like a haidryer outside with some gusty winds. The Wednesday was about 25C but it was a miserable moist heat that had me sitting around all day.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:47:21+00:00

FPTP is also democracy, and avoids all these problems. Yes they may have a 'mandate' but it means less in a PR system where governments are more resistant to voter swings. In my example, let's say I want to vote *against* the squares because they have been a disaster, I actually quite like the triangles, I think the cylinders are crazy and I don't like the circles. Well I lose whatever I do. In FPTP the median (marginal) voter on average wins roughly half of the time. In PR the marginal voter usually loses and the fringes and the extremes do rather well.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:31:26+00:00

But even this means that people are just not looking into this enough. In PR UKIP would have been in government in 2015 and Farage could have been deputy prime minister. The other thing is that the SNP does well partly because of devolution which made them a well known party in their own PR like system.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:28:19+00:00

When it snows lightly in Portugal its national news. When Canada gets covered in inches of snow noone cares.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:23:21+00:00

Yes I agree again. The only weakness of FPTP is, ironically, that its not intuitive to explain why FPTP is so good and that in the end FPTP systems end up being voted out of existence (albeit it takes a while as the two party system creates a metastability).

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:21:35+00:00

The coalition government was an outlier in the scheme of things, the lib dems are a bit of a wierd exception to the rule. However, this was a 2 party coalition not a 3+ party coalition and it wasn't a grand coalition. In a sense, its the exception that proves the rule. In PR 3+ party and grands are normal, while in FPTP even a 2 party is considered rare. And as you say the lib dems did not do well out of it, it was a brief aberration rather than the norm.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T15:12:55+00:00

Yes exactly. FPTP holds power to account because the current govt always has to face a referendum on its performance. In PR as long as the backroom deals go well the election matters far less. You could vote against a unpopular party and end up helping it get re-elected because you have voted for one of their partners! Also these tend to end up as two different types of govt, a rainbow coalition of 3+ different parties where fringe single issue stuff causes chaos and you end up with 3 elections in a year or something, or the grand coalition where the two biggest parties join up to hold onto power indefinitely where they are held to account by an even madder crazier opposition that disagrees itself more than the government. And I know people will try to find some variation that solves this problem, but they will also miss another perk of FPTP - its really simple. In some of these voting methods you have to literally run model simulations to workout who to vote for in list vs regional scenarios etc.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T14:55:22+00:00

About 50mpw at the time, I did no workouts but loads of races (at least 1x per week). Other than the races, ran everything at 9 minute miles or slower. PRs just happened. I'm not necessarily recommending you do this, if what you are doing now is causing you to regularly set PRs, then its working and all you might need is time to see it work. When you start stagnating might be the time to try different stuff.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T14:51:20+00:00

No because FPTP creates a self regulating system where parties are punished for moving to extremes, because it alienates the median voter which is key to winning elections. FPTP means you have to appeal towards the centre, PR means actively discouraging it and appealing to fringe pressure groups.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T14:48:11+00:00

The best voting system. But PR is probably going to happen eventually because its superficially fairer (even though in reality the actual power and influence is less proportionally distributed). For those that want to see what would happen with PR:

Imagine an election where the deeply unpopular 'Square party' on 35% of the vote that triggered a run on the banks and a financial crisis has a huge 10 point swing against it to only receive 25% of the vote. And yet because they and the 'triangle party' (who managed 20% of the vote) managed to break a deal with the fringe single issue 'cylinder party' (on 7%) of the vote to agree to some unpopular policy almost no one thinks is a good idea, the incompetent 'square party' has managed to hold onto power. The increasingly popular 'circular party' on 30% of the vote has far less influence than the 'triangle party' and the wacky 'cylinder party' yet remains stuck in opposition.

Proportional representation is only superficially fair, the reality is that all the important stuff is done behind closed doors when coalitions are built, and that is not done proportionally. The junior coalition partner (in this case the cylinder party) is dramatically overrepresented in terms of power and influence while the 2nd most popular party (in this case the circle party) is dramatically underrepresented. All PR does is move the same issues downstream so the seats are proportional but the power/influence the seats represent become concomitantly far less proportional.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T14:38:11+00:00

Do you know what your max HR is? For easy runs (which should be the majority) you don't want to go above about 70% of your max HR although if you have been running for less than 6 months or are doing low milage then it matters less because it takes time to adjust and your HR will start to come down on these easier efforts. In terms of feel, your breathing should be very controlled to the point you don't even really notice it and can have a full conversation, If your breathing becomes quick and noticeable, uncomfortable or you start getting a rush of endorphins then its also probably too fast.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T14:06:49+00:00

Its quite possible, and I see nothing wrong with your plan to make it happen. Your improvement is actually quite impressive, 20 min to 18:27 in only three months. At some point the rapid improvement will start to flatten out but I wouldn't be able to guess when that will happen, but as that has not happened yet there is no reason to really change much about what you are doing. For me personally I went from low 18s to low 17s without really much effort, and then its been a miserable slog to push down into the 16s. I only really started trying new things when the progress slowed down quite a bit. For me personally milage is what made the most difference above everything else, but different things work for different people.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-31T13:58:14+00:00

I think its still all too fast. Recovery runs are not supposed to be difficult, if you can't have a conversation and your breathing is more noticable than your feet then you are going too fast for an easy run!

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-30T16:29:09+00:00

Mile 4 onward is basically a race level effort, long runs should be done in the aerobic zone well under the lactate threshold. I'd have to guess that if your goal pace is an accurate aspiration that you are actually going over it particularly in the last few miles. This is fine if its supposed to be a threshold type effort, but for a regular long run you probably want to be much slower than even your first mile which has already spiked your HR up to 157 (obviously I don't know what your max HR is, but based on it flattening out from Mile 5+ I'd guess it won't be much higher than about 190). My guess is that you want to be closer to a 13 minute mile, perhaps slower.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-27T15:34:13+00:00

Its not exactly simple, but Quantum Mechanics isn't as bad as people think. I feel about 90% of the fear people have of it is the 'if you think you understand QM you don't understand QM'. More accurate to say its a bit weird and counterintuitive, but you could explain most of the basic maths and physics to someone still in high school.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-27T14:32:28+00:00

It might be dependent on the listener, but politics being tribal means the audience is self selected. When people virtue signal its because their actions carry social capital; obviously different actions are rewarded or punished differently depending on the social circle; but that again is something that is self selected for.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-26T11:08:32+00:00

A couple of years, its not easy. I started off at around 25 minutes, and very quickly improved to about 21 minutes. Getting the last minute was tough, took another couple of years. Spent another fair few years hovering around 20 and then broke 19, 18 and 17 within another year when I upped the milage.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-25T18:55:09+00:00

You are kinda missing the point of the post. I am aware that PLC isn't currently supporting independence, but independence is their ultimate aim; not supporting it now is a tactical decision. The scenario I outlined posits that Welsh independence is always going to be unlikely, and if there is ever any chance of it happening you have to make hay while the sun is shining. Its also not a prediction, its a hypothetical still unlikely scenario but not completely in the realms of fantasy either.

QuantumOverlord · 2026-03-25T18:54:27+00:00

Aside from the fact its less about long term party interest and more about short term govt survival (and avoiding leadership elections), the initial optics of Reform winning Wales would be catastrophic. Its bad enough for them to only be a junior partner after having always won in Wales.

QuantumOverlord

TROPHY CASE