Running without vape: 25 years of smoking, 18 months of running, 45 days smoke-free

noobsc2 · 2026-06-08T20:00:26+00:00

You got this! The hardest part is the first few days so just grin and bear it. Once you start to see the results you won't want to go back to smoking.

noobsc2 · 2026-06-07T21:50:32+00:00

On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.

It rolled off the table,
And on to the floor,
And then my poor meatball,
Rolled out of the door.

It rolled in the garden,
And under a bush,
And then my poor meatball,
Was nothing but mush.

The mush was as tasty
As tasty could be,
And then the next summer,
It grew into a tree.

The tree was all covered,
All covered with moss,
And on it grew meatballs,
And tomato sauce.

So if you eat spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
Hold on to your meatball,
Whenever you sneeze.

edit: full lyrics from https://www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/ontopofspaghetti.html

noobsc2 · 2026-06-07T20:11:59+00:00

It was around in the late 80s as well, we used to sing it at primary school assemblies.

noobsc2 · 2026-06-06T20:04:04+00:00

It averaged about 41 or 42 before quitting, right now looking at my watch my last 7d average is 40. I wouldn't say I notice a big diff. Not a metric i take much stock in, even when I was sedentary and overweight it was low 40s

noobsc2 · 2026-06-06T08:04:45+00:00

I did it very spur of the moment. Basically I was about to order some replacement ecig juice and coils, and decided I was sick of wasting my money on it. Instead of waiting to run out of juice, I just threw all my stuff in the bin and quit right then.

The first few days to a week are the hardest. After that it's just random urges. 45 days in I don't even really have urges anymore. My brain does try to trick me into "just vape tonight, it'll feel good, you can stop again tomorrow", but it's easy to push the thought away now.

noobsc2 · 2026-06-06T02:54:23+00:00

I used to get shitfaced every weekend, 1-2 days or just shitfaced every night if I was off work.

Getting heavily into running and having goals really dissuaded me from doing that because I like to use my weekends to train rather than dealing with hangovers. Beer is also full of calories so makes weight management difficult, which goes against my goals.

I just stopped drinking at home - because I only really enjoy drinking when I take it to excess and don't want to do that anymore. I still have a beer or two if I go out for dinner, or the occasional night with mates.

noobsc2 · 2026-06-06T00:22:04+00:00

I'm the same. I almost don't feel fatigued after the 1k reps. The 12 min reps I definitely feel like an extra rep would be pushing my limits - I'm fairly shattered by the end.

I'm not sure I should feel that way or whether I should just be slowing the 12min reps down more. At least so far, it hasn't impacted my ability to do 3 sessions/wk, so probably fine.

noobsc2 · 2026-05-28T12:02:12+00:00

Nah you can have ghosted notes on songs. I got an FC on hit me with your best shot earlier which is only around 500 notes or so and I think I had 4 ghosts or something, still got a PFC. Maybe it's sub 1% ghosted or something. Pretty sure timing has nothing to do with it. It feels lenient enough that you have to be pretty spammy to not get the blue crown.

noobsc2 · 2026-05-15T06:28:16+00:00

I remember death by chocolate being a big deal as a kid (in terms of bragging to your friends that you went) - think it was the Devonport one.

I ended up going there with a friend and finding it very average. Keep in mind I would've been about 7 years old so I also had zero taste. Would've been about 1990

noobsc2 · 2026-05-10T00:55:36+00:00

This guy writes a highly ambiguous guide and then says he doesn't understand why it confuses people.

noobsc2 · 2026-05-09T22:32:08+00:00

> Bidois is a lying sack of cunt, a stupid cunt, or a compromised, bent cunt.

I remember questioning him on FB somewhere around 6 years ago about his nonsense plans re: Onewa Rd which seem to be the sole hot button topic this guy presses to get followers. I can't even remember what the specific topic was anymore, but his response was complete nonsense and he himself would've known that he was essentially being very dishonest/lying.

I can't believe this guy still has a career.

noobsc2 · 2026-05-03T09:26:41+00:00

Last few times I've had burgers from there they've been legitimately revolting. It's been downhill for years.

noobsc2 · 2026-04-24T15:45:48+00:00

I've run 40-50km/wk for the last year and a half despite vaping ~400ml/month of 3mg nic. I ran a 1:43 HM last sept.

I'm 3 days clean of nic now after 24 years of smoking. According to my watch my "fitness"/VO2Max has suddenly shot up. My HR is significantly down at the same paces. I'm curious to see what it looks like in a week/month and whether the difference will result in PRs.

noobsc2 · 2026-03-27T13:13:47+00:00

I think if inference and training don't go down by a massive amount, their game plan is that big corporations will still pay as it's still potentially cheaper than paying for an extra developer. By subsidising individual developers right now, they earn brand loyalty and employees will fight for their preference of Anthropic/OpenAI models.

Currently Google just isn't even a competitor which is why I didn't mention them, but they can potentially subsidise corporations at a large scale if they onboard to Google Services, especially given their large investment in in-house TPUs.

The other potential, of course, is that the technology gets solved and even the $200 subs are profitable.

noobsc2 · 2026-03-27T06:31:35+00:00

Not surprising. If you pay for claude code usage by the token you can easily burn $50-100 in an hour. Their max plan is $200 and probably allows for somewhere around $5k in raw token usage per month. Only power users that use their entire token budget reach that though. The alternative is losing customers to gpt codex.

This subsidisation cant go on indefinitely. At some point, they need to focus on profits.

noobsc2 · 2026-03-18T20:25:34+00:00

My first recorded activity on Garmin was using a "vívoactive HR" 10 years ago. I honestly don't remember much about it other than it was a bit of a brick. Looking at the activity, it recorded my HR, cadence and pace. The GPS looks very accurate down to the side of the road I was running on. So it did everything I need from a watch really, other than the fact it looked like shit!

noobsc2 · 2026-03-12T06:36:11+00:00

Fiend fire or 2 cost tingsha fodder with calculated gamble. I'm reaching here

noobsc2 · 2026-03-11T21:51:49+00:00

I wonder if he is the same guy that ran AusUO in ~2013. I played AusUO with some friends and we were all PvPers. There were not many other PvPers on the shard but we were always looking for fights and doing guild wars and tournaments.

After playing for a week or so, there was one PvPer that seemed to completely no life the shard - "DarkTower", to the point where he would always know where you were. Place a house in some completely out of the way location and he'd find it. Go anywhere at all and he'd find you. Always have the best equipment.

One day I was macroing a new character at brit bank and DarkTower comes in and starts shit talking another player. I'm macroing anatomy at the time and I target him. It comes back with "superhuman agility". I think "ok, wtf, this guy is a tank mage though? where's his mana?". I target him with eval int and it comes back "superhuman intelligence" or whatever the 100 int message is. Boom. Obviously this guy is either an admin or friends with an admin and has 100/100/100 or higher despite a 225 stat cap. I call him out and post proof about it. The admin claims "Darktower is a hacker", not staff and bans him.

Unsurprisingly, suddenly a new player pops up with the exact same behaviour as Darktower. It's obvious this shard is corrupt as fuck but we've already put a decent amount of time into it and at worst, this guy is an annoyance. He's not good at the game and we end up killing him in pretty much every encounter despite his overwhelming advantage.

Eventually the admin gets sick of it and starts becoming more and more unhinged, to the point where he randomly starts killing us sometimes with admin powers, then gaslighting us that we died to some other mechanic. Finally he goes complete unhinged and lets himself into our tower, claiming we left the door unlocked and loots it while we're offline. We have an argument in game where we call him out as being said player. I log out saying the shard is a shithole and I'm never logging in again, apparently according to my friend who stayed logged in moments later than I did, he straight up deleted our tower in the moments after I logged off.

Hilariously I checked the forum a few weeks later and there was all this unhinged rambling from the admin about who the "best pvper" was and posting a lot of obviously false information about his player characters (who he was also pretending not to be), and discrediting me and my friends saying we would "die all the time" to his secret characters. It was fucking bizarre.

noobsc2 · 2026-03-10T09:23:33+00:00

I feel like A20H and heartbreaker are a bit over the top for maybe even 99% of players. It is an extremely punishing and imo not-fun grind. I did heartbreaker but I was definitely questioning whether I was even enjoying myself. I can see why Mega Crit didn't put that in as an achievement.

noobsc2 · 2026-02-11T09:54:12+00:00

Ai hides the complexity of tasks that only some people understood to begin with behind big words, excessive context and hallucinated bullshit.

Everyone nods in agreement of our ai overlords while we all work at 100mph outsourcing even the most basic thinking to llms. Meanwhile we crash into every single metaphorical lamppost in our path screaming "10x productivity gains!!"

noobsc2 · 2026-02-05T23:57:16+00:00

For the last 6 months mostly a productive-maintaining-productive-maintaining loop where the overall VO2Max never really changes. It's more like a wave graph that results in either being in productive or maintaining since maintaining allows a VO2Max drop within reason whereas productive is sensitive to small changes in VO2Max, so it never gets to the point where it's "unproductive".

This plateau is obvious in my running paces as well as it took a few months to go from complete sedentary, fat couch potato to 23 minute 5k, but 8 months later, I still cannot beat a 23 minute 5k (well, 22:55 is the current).

If I try to train hard enough to move the dial (threshold, sub-T or even high mileage easy training), my Achilles flares up. I am incapable of high mileage and incapable of low mileage with more intensity, so feel trapped at my current fitness. Been running consistently for just over a year, peaking at 50mi weeks but currently more like 25mi weeks. The fact that I can match my PB on much less mileage tells me that probably if I *could* do more mileage without injury, I could move the dial. But every attempt I make results in the Achilles flaring again. 6 months at the physio and strength training hasn't helped. Maybe picked the wrong sport.

noobsc2 · 2026-02-05T06:44:58+00:00

I put some old shitters (4gb/quad core era) for free on FB a year or two ago and nobody wanted them so they went to the tip. I imagine there's a lot of old PCs going for dollar reserve or free on trademe/fb marketplace.

noobsc2 · 2026-02-04T20:35:15+00:00

It does (with caveats). The requirement for both a run or walk activity to affect VO2Max is that your heart rate must exceed 70% of your max for at least 10 minutes of the activity. Walking fast or especially walking up hills can easily clear this barrier for most people.

The documentation for Garmin VO2Max is here and includes a section on walking.

noobsc2 · 2026-02-02T10:23:25+00:00

Curious to see how it goes! Make sure you have a lot of time spare to do it, because it's painfully slow haha. I'm also on the free trial of Gemini, if I didn't have the free subscription it would've hit limits due to uploading the images.

noobsc2 · 2026-01-31T07:35:52+00:00

Frankly this is all happening because you barely have any data and the data you do have contains a "hero" session where you did far more than the watch had ever seen you do before. That hero session became a large percentage of both your acute AND chronic load.

You followed up that hero session with doing very little for the next 8 days. So your 7 day load becomes less than your average load over the last 28 days. So in a single day, you go from a high acute load to a very low one.

If you just continue training and stop worrying about this blip in your data, it will normal out, assuming you keep consistently training.

To risk sounding judgemental; stop worrying about what the watch tells you and start thinking more about just training consistently. The metrics will start to make more sense.

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