Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

I’m not sure who first said “Comparison is the thief of joy” and it doesn’t really matter. It’s a pretty good adage. Often times friends of mine who run will seek to diminish their own achievements by comparing themselves with more accomplished, even elite, runners. And I will wheel out this quote for them because my running friends are all pretty awesome folks who smash their goals.

Last year I was at a parkrun event that had 700 finish tokens and (it turned out) 694 finishers. Volunteers were frantically sorting finish tokens as I crossed the line, not knowing whether they’d have enough to get them through to the Tail Walker. Happily, I had a set of tokens in the boot of the car and lent them a batch (I may get them back someday).

I’ve updated this website to use Atkinson Hyperlegible as the default typeface, with Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono for code blocks. This change was inspired by reading the most recent Better Allies newsletter, which highlighted this free typeface from the Braille Institute.

Last Sunday I ran my seventh Melbourne Marathon and my tenth official marathon. It wasn’t my fastest 42.2 km run, but it wasn’t my slowest. I had plenty of time to think about social media influence as I saw smartphones snapping photos of my fellow marathoners. So what did running ten marathons teach me about being a social media influencer?

I’ve been playing Summle for quite some time. It’s one of those daily puzzles where you share your results with your friends, and it takes the form of the numbers game from Countdown (or Letters and Numbers, if you prefer). For the unfamiliar, you’re given a three-digit target number and six smaller numbers from which to make it using only positive integer arithmetic.

Inspired and encouraged by my good friend Ross, I have signed up for the 2025 Great Cycle Challenge and will be riding this October to fight kids’ cancer! In the same month as running Melbourne Marathon, because I don’t like to do things by halves.

Despite the title, I am not going to moan about the user interface, but rather share how I get around the strange font choices and line breaks that happen when I edit my email signature using iOS’s native Mail application. It being Better to Light a Candle Than to Curse the Darkness.

Having being contemplating a career break for a little over six months, it feels rather strange that today is my last day at work for a year. I’m keen to keep in touch, while not thinking about the day-to-day of work, so this will be my mechanism for broadcasting what I’m doing and sharing my contact details.

Five years ago this week I experienced a sudden cardiac arrest after being out for a 5 km run with the kids during Victoria’s COVID lockdowns. It’s surreal to think that half a decade has passed since that moment.