Finished reading: Hostages to Fortune by Peter C Newman really helped me better appreciate the role that the Loyalists had in shaping Canada. Much more extensive than I recall from my history lessons in school 📚

Andrew MacDougall: Lessons from D-Day, 82 years later:

Looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses is usually a waste of time. We’re never going to be the country we were when it served up the “Greatest Generation.” But we do need a renewed sense of nationhood. We need to become a place that can once again pull together to do big things when called upon by the world. Different things, surely, but big just the same. What we shouldn’t be in a rush to do, especially in the face of Trumpian disorder, is to further weaken ourselves, whether by continuing our economic and military stagnation, or carving up the country via referendum.

🚴 Glad to get out for my first proper long ride of the season. The nasty headwind on the way up became a glorious tailwind coming back.

A cycling route covering 90.10 km is overlaid on a map of the Toronto area, showing elevation gain of 532 meters and a duration of 3 hours 27 minutes.

🇨🇦 Gander is an interesting experiment: a “Canada first” social network, built on the AT Protocol. I’m trying out the beta and it works well. As usual, though, the challenge is getting enough people on the network to make it compelling.

Friday before a long weekend and a wave of meetings have been getting cancelled throughout the day. Now there’s just one left at 3pm, taunting me.

🔗 Jonathan English makes a useful distinction in Engineering Problems and Phone Call Problems

There is a distinction that the infrastructure planning world doesn’t tend to make explicitly, but that explains an enormous amount of why large projects cost what they cost. It’s the distinction between engineering problems and what I like to call “phone call problems.”

Phone call problems lead to increased costs, schedule delay, and significant uncertainty.

🔗 The morning shakeout by Mario Fraioli

As a coach, I use various tools and data to track trends over time and initiate deeper discussions with my athletes about where we’re heading and why. But there’s a big difference between a tool and a crutch. Data should be used to inform your decisions but outsourcing your decisions to a data point is a fool’s errand. I worry that in our rush to optimize every aspect of our training and racing that we’re losing touch with the parts of this pursuit that can’t be measured and why most of us started running in the first place.