The Paths Through This Blog

Eighteen years of mountains, memory, books, science, stories, and the systems that shape our lives.

A race report, a remembrance of a father, a note on Proust, a joke about European summits, an essay about black holes, a story about an automated emergency network: placed beside one another, these can look like the contents of several different blogs. Here they occupy the same space.

dorsal1967 began in February 2008 and now holds about five hundred and fifty posts, in Portuguese and in English. Its balance has shifted more than once. The first years were a notebook of links and opinions about work, organisations, and the financial crisis. From the end of 2010 running took over, and for almost a decade most posts were training cycles and race reports. Around 2018 the writing turned more personal and more literary. In 2024 came a long run of notes on books, films, physics, and the brain. Since 2026 the blog has been dominated by long essays and series: the history of Portuguese trail running, climate, mathematics, work and money, and artificial intelligence.

Looking back through all of it, I can see recurring themes beneath that variety. This post offers a few paths through the landscape. They overlap, as the posts themselves do.

Where it began: a notebook

The first posts were short and mostly about work. As organizações e os desafios do século XXI looked at restructuring as a permanent condition of companies; others dealt with outsourcing, time management, and call centres, the last usually through comedy. O que conta mesmo é o que se aprende no mundo real answered an MBA's lessons on teamwork with a crossing in a seven-metre sailing boat.

The financial crisis arrived early: A «crise do subprime» in February 2008, Portuguese public debt in 2010, and Os pobres que paguem a crise on who was asked to carry the cost. Alongside them were TED talks on flow, on a neuroscientist's own stroke, and on how statistics fool juries, and early posts on social networks and what they might do to sharing.

Much of what the blog writes about today was already there in small form: work and its organisation, the economy and who pays for it, the brain, and a taste for the absurd. An Economist piece on the joys and heartaches of European Council meetings was posted in 2008, again in 2019, and again in 2022.

The body on a long road

Running has the largest presence in the archive, by far. About a hundred and sixty posts carry the label Trail and well over a hundred Ultratrail. It started on the road, with the S. Silvestre de Lisboa in 2010, marathons in Porto, Lisbon, and Seville, and the first trail ultras, remembered later in A minha primeira vez.

Then the distances grew. The Ehunmilak in 2012, 168 km in the Basque mountains, was prepared in public, mesocycle by mesocycle, and told in several parts; the epilogue opens with Camões. After it came the Grand Raid des Pyrénées, the Volta Cerdanya UltraFons, the Madeira races, and in 2015 the UTMB, told in six parts as Uma odisseia entre Mercúrio e Plutão and later published as a book. The Ronda dels Cims in Andorra got the longest treatment of all: a "season" of eleven episodes of preparation in 2018 and 2019, then the race told day by day and night by night, from the prologue to a palimpsest and a page of statistics. The Tor des Géants runs through the archive for years as a goal, through lotteries and postponements.

Not every story ends at the finish line. Estrela Grande Trail 2017 ou a Crónica de um DNF is about not finishing. Trans Peneda-Gerês 2021 is about a victory that cost more than any defeat. Insanidade nos Tempos de Covid follows a 180 km race in the Serra da Estrela run in the middle of a pandemic.

The race reports always carried other things: quotations from Mann, Camus, Pessoa, and the Psalms, reflections on fatigue and the mind, and the question of Porque corro?. 11 Lições que a Corrida me ensinou em outras tantas Provas draws lessons from particular races. There is practical advice too, on gear for a hundred miles or on how the ITRA index works, and admiration for other people's madness in the series Provas Insanas, in the Backyard Ultra, and in an 85-year-old pole vaulter.

The body also changes. O silêncio dos trilhos e a dúvida que fica brings injury and uncertainty into a space usually occupied by preparation and ambition. In 2026 the running years were looked at again from a distance, in a personal chronology from a sub-3 marathon to 57 hours at the Ronda and in what the training data says about preparing for ultras.

The people who make the trail possible

Running was never only individual. The club RUN 4 FUN appears in the archive from the early training posts to the 2020s. The national association, the ATRP, appears too, from the inside: a training camp of the national trail team in 2015, and a humorous account of being an athlete and a board member at the same time.

In 2026 that inside knowledge became a history. The series on Portuguese trail running, around sixty texts with a guide to reading them, follows races, clubs, athletes, associations, calendars, and the people who built the sport. This is a shift in scale. A race report asks what happened to a runner. A history asks how the race came to exist, who sustained it, and what the surviving record leaves out.

Os voluntários turns to the people marking routes and running aid stations. As mulheres no trail português looks past the results tables. Other dossiers deal with money, social class, safety and doping, tourism and local development, and the fires of 2017. The mountains are inhabited places, and their story includes villages, roads, unpaid work, and competing uses of the land.

Memory, family, and the passage of time

Alongside the public record is a more intimate archive. Some of it is autobiography, told in pieces and out of order: a first year studying Biologia in 1985 that went badly, a summer working in construction in the United States, an exchange year in an American high school, Interrail and summer courses in the early 1990s, an attempted PhD in physics at Penn State, a sailing trip to the Azores, and twenty-one years in network operations before a change of role.

Some journeys are told more than once. The month in India in 1993 appears in the very first weeks of the blog, as India Trip, "both the worst and the best trip I have ever taken", and again sixteen years later in A Passage to India.

Family has its own posts. Pai and a training run in homage to my parents on the Serra de Montejunto are about loss. Os Filhos is a poem about what children do to the people who love them. The pandemic left a diary, starting with day 31 of social distancing.

Writing gives those experiences a place to remain. It also makes them available to the person looking back, who may understand them differently from the person who first lived them. A training log preserves what the body once did; a race report preserves who was there; a family memory preserves details that no official archive would think to collect.

Books, films, poems, and jokes

The label Letras is one of the oldest and most constant in the blog. In January 2024 alone there were short notes on Moby Dick, Memorial do Convento, the Iliad, Proust, Primo Levi, Borges, García Márquez, and Calvino, and on films by Leone, Fellini, Kusturica, Jarmusch, Moretti, and Wenders. Book reviews range from Catch-22 and Neuromancer to The Black Swan and Sapolsky's Behave. There is music too: Nick Cave, Rodrigo Leão.

There is poetry, some of it borrowed (Drummond, Pessoa) and some of it original, from Poesia coxa to the self-mocking Versos Programados. And there is a great deal of humour: Woody Allen, Yiddish folk tales, newly discovered penguins, and a revolutionary device called the Book.

Fiction came later and grew. Um mundo de histórias que começam e não acabam offers six possible beginnings, after Calvino. The Ministry of Doubt, a dystopian novel in Portuguese and English, imagines a society where certainty is not banned but buried under noise. The People Still Waiting imagines people living with an emergency system whose reports of success diverge from their needs. The essays explain mechanisms; the stories let us spend time with the people affected by them.

Science and the limits of understanding

The scientific thread is older than it looks. One of the very first posts was about the stream of consciousness and William James; in 2010 there was George Church and the Personal Genome Project; in 2018, World without Time. In 2024 physics came back, perhaps because the Penn State memories had come back too: Loops of Space, loop quantum gravity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the idea that the brain constructs the reality we perceive.

The recent essays are longer and go further. Why Going to the Moon Is Mostly a Problem of Falling Correctly explains orbital mechanics. The Second Derivative asks whether climate change is speeding up, over five parts. The Complete Parts List asks what biology knows and what it can predict. The Limits of the Rules opens a series on mathematics, proof, and where number comes from. Penrose: When the Future Points Inward is about gravitational collapse.

The scientific writing pays attention to distinctions: an observation and its interpretation, a theorem and its assumptions, a useful image and the point where it becomes misleading. That curiosity can be demanding. Entre a pedrinha e o caminho describes the tension between stopping to understand a detail and moving forward with a life.

Work, machines, and who pays

The early posts on organisations never quite went away. They came back in notes on agile and Scrum in 2018 and 2023, and then as a serious question in Is Agile the new workplace totalitarianism? Bullshit jobs asks what to make of work its own workers think unnecessary. The Fifteen-Hour Week starts from Keynes's prediction and grew into a long series on productivity, hours, pensions, housing, taxes, and growth, summed up in What We Found.

Technology follows a similar curve. Social networks were new in 2009. In 2023 ChatGPT was the new kid on the block; in 2024 it knew I existed. Stories such as Hacking People imagined people, not machines, as the system to break. In 2026 that interest became a series on AI agents and security, from The Warning Shot and How an AI Agent Works to Grown, Not Built and When the Score Becomes the Goal.

The wider social writing also has a long line, from the subprime crisis in 2008 through Agnotology, on how ignorance is manufactured, to a timeline of major world crises since 1945 and, most recently, Not Quite a Nobility. There is a connection here with the trail histories. In both settings, asking who benefits leads to asking who pays, who works, who gains access, and who remains outside the picture.

A place to return to

These themes do not form a fixed programme. Their balance changes, and some posts belong to several at once. A mountain race becomes a family memory. A book leads into biology or politics. An old joke about meetings becomes an essay about work.

What gives the archive its continuity is the repeated movement between experience and inquiry: doing something, trying to understand it, preserving what happened, and finding that it connects to a larger question.

A reader can enter through a race, a memory, a poem, or an explanation. A minha história lists every post, and Montanhas, Livros e o Resto do Mundo is another way in. The next post may take the reader somewhere unexpected. Over eighteen years, those crossings have become part of what this blog is: a record of paths followed, questions pursued, and people worth remembering.