Endurance record?

My dear younglings, you will probably find this not only remarkable, but an unbelievable record of endurance, one that only someone of some age could achieve, and by no means all of us.  Yes, so here it is.  On my daily walk to and from work, the Phactor goes without any musical input, telephone or internet access for 20 minutes!  As best can be determined, this is longer than anyone under 30 has gone in over a decade by at least a factor of 10.  What deprivation!  What endurance!  Why nothing whatever to do but think, alone with your own thoughts, an experience without precedent among students of my acquaintance.  But there you have it; a record nonetheless.

Jogging - a way to get creative idea? Nah!

An article on jogging (which has since been lost) made the claim that, wow, every now and then a runner gets a nifty idea while running, a flash, while the brain is being repeatedly jarred against skull. Now this is something about which the Phactor, as an intellectual athlete, knows a great deal, not about running, because the only two reasons for that are if you are being chased, by someone much bigger or really scary, or chasing someone, much smaller and about to get the butt kicked, about this type of blank mind creativity. It takes practice to learn how to allow your brain to creatively drift along such that interesting ideas that your subconscious has been working on can wash ashore onto the beach of your conscious mind like the bit of creative flotsam that they are. Here like a beach-comber of the brain, you must grab these ideas and make an effort to remember them before they wash back out to sea. The key is to avoid distractions, intrusions upon your consciousness that prevent you from noticing new ideas as the bob there at the edge of the tide. Walking to work is good time to beach-comb for new ideas, solutions to problems, and other creative thoughts, because after a long night of working on it your subconscious mind has the most to offer, if you are properly prepared to accept them. Another time is when you relax in your garden with a decent drink, and just watch things grow, the butterflies dance, and the comings and goings of your little bit of nature, quiet except for the sounds of nature; no i-anything within reach, no distractions, and zounds, there it is, an idea. Such ideas are cheap really, once you learn how to get them reasonably frequently, many prove flawed, unrealistic, or impractical, but not all, and after you offer up these bits for a few years, you get a certain reputation for being a creative thinker. And then someone makes a news story out of a couple of runners who have noticed that every now and then this happens while they are running, and that’s news? Ah, perhaps it’s a novelty piece, a runner gets an idea, how quaint, how unusual, how unexpected. How unusual that some part of your mind survives after being numbed into insensitivity by a really boring form of exercise. One wonders how much more often these people would get new ideas if rather than jogging along distracted by the task of avoiding uneven slabs of concrete, tree roots, and dog doo, these runners sat in a garden, in full margarita induced musing mode, and actually practiced thinking?