Straights & Curves: Get Planning
10 things to start your week: Berkeley bouldering • Essential bike gear • Bulldozing People's Park
Hi there, welcome back to Breakfast Club, a newsletter for thoughtful movers. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day to those in the United States! Here are ten stories to start your week.
1. Rocky history (Berkeleyside)
Enjoy this two-part story from Ally Markovich about the history of human interaction with Indian and Mortar Rocks. The famous boulders, the result of an eruption of volcanic rhyolite ten million years ago in present-day Berkeley, California, have shaped the history of rock climbing.
Part one explores the history of the Ohlone peoples’ relationships with the rocks, where you can find depressions from their use of the bedrock mortars as grinding stones. This indigenous history was largely erased with the settler development of Berkeley in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The second installment explores how the rocks came to anchor the East Bay climbing community, starting in the 1930s when the rocks became a training ground for adventures in the High Sierra. Well-researched and deeply considered, the piece features the climbers who defined the rocks over the decades.
2. Fitness trends, uploaded (Strava)
Strava published a readout of user data from 2023, along with the results of a global survey of 6,990 people (press release). Some interesting tidbits:
It’s a foam world: Hoka Cliftons were the top running shoes globally
Lance effect lingers: Trek remains the top bike brand in the world and US
Give em’ a dish rag: Men are 13% more likely than women to cite household responsibilities as an obstacle to exercise
Creatures of habit: 43% of Gen Xer’s say they’ve been listening to the same workout music for years
Like a fine wine: Boomers averaged the fastest and longest bike rides across generations
3. Year of the amateur (Tracksmith)
Need little new-year motivation? Check out this fun video from Tracksmith.
4. History of the daily planner (Noted)
The new year is a time for planning, whether it’s training plans for a competitive event or development goals for work. As such, it’s a bumper month for the cottage industry of daily planners.
explores how people used daily planners in the past, including George Washington and Susan B. Anthony.5. On not getting faster (Inner Workings)
If you read one thing, let it be this short essay about running from
on not trying to optimize every activity:But as I get older, I increasingly see the value in not trying to become a faster runner (or a runner at all, you might say). It is tempting to imagine that I could be always improving at everything, but delusional. There are so few times when I allow myself to just… not try to improve. And there is something about it that feels so healthy.
Quick splits:
Banger British pies. Goodness, I could really use a post-workout pie like this one described by
.People’s Park is finally bulldozed.
on the 1-blockparkblight and the messy inheritance of hippie libertinism:“What this will mean, I suspect, is an America that’s less wild and free than the one I grew up in—but one that’s also more orderly, more communal, and perhaps more rational. I confess to being ambivalent about that.”
- on the one piece of gear you need for your bike: a basket.
Why are so many more pedestrians being killed by cars in the United States?
The case for a maintenance mindset with Stewart Brand.
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with some hills
For updates, email Katie Klymko at katieklymko at gmail.com to join Breakfast Club’s WhatsApp chat. More info
For more local events, join our Strava club, East Bay Strava Runners
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“Did I get married? No, I went climbing. Did I have kids? No, I went climbing.”
— Scott Frye
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. Follow me on Notes, Strava, and what’s left of Twitter.
...conflicted on people's park but reminiscent in so many ways of what happened to the albany bulb so many years back [which glory be told was a major change for the better - no more random needle puncture wounds!]...hate to see communal spaces home to the already diminished and abused dwindle to student housing but understand the university's play and need here...if they people want a park they are just going to have to choose another...
A banger of a newsletter as always, Sam. I loved this part from the maintenance mindset article,
“Somebody once asked Norman Mailer if he considered himself a professional writer. He said, “Yeah, I can work on a bad day.””
I would like to get to that level where I don’t let a bad day keep me from doing what I want/need to do.
Thanks for sharing! ✌️