This weekend I went to Wembley to watch an NFL game. It was a great to celebrate the end of the season with one of my athletes who, in his first season of Ironman completed three Ironman races and a 50 mile run race ! There was no shortage of razzamatazz and over the top consumption. Whilst watching the game and felt I had some clarity come to my thinking.

Firstly it became clear that Ironman UK next year is probably the right move. It may be only 2 weeks after Roth but more importantly it’s 1 week before the Olympics. It means I’ll be ideally placed to watch all of the Olympics and it should guarantee me doing recovery.

Secondly I realised that I’m between the anger and acceptance stages of grief. I still find myself very angry indeed when I think of the time that the evidence has been there that we are heading to collapse but our leaders (both political and business) just continue to be insanely greedy. The continue to push growth as the answer, to support a system that has implicit in it the need for growth (greed ?) and a system that ensures that from a young age we are all indoctrinated in to this system of greed so we can hardly even question it when we get older. I will blog on this more in the next few weeks.

More of the time I am closer to acceptance as I find myself observing the world in quite a different light and sometimes it almost makes me laugh. It feels so blindingly obvious that this is not sustainable that I can’t believe everyone doesn’t see it. More or less anything you look at in a major city is completely unsustainable.

Take this Sunday – I watch the World Cup Final in the morning and the American Football in the evening. In both cases you see the sheer number of support staff that travel with the teams. I look and wonder how long that will last. It shows how cheap energy still is that all these people can be transported around for pretty menial tasks. It also shows how great specialisation takes hold  more and more – another symptom of the coming collapse. The talk is of a NFL team in London. I smile say “cool” but am thinking if it happens it won’t last. Implicit in that is the view that long term it will be affordable to transport huge numbers of people across the atlantic – it won’t be.

I look around the stadium which is damn impressive. What is going to happen with the stadium long term. Could I imagine cranes powered by solar panels lifting the pieces in place for maintenance or building a new stadium. Perhaps the monster cranes would just plug in to the grid ? How would the grid cope ? Perhaps it will be powered from Ethanol (assuming it’s developed so there’s no need to mix it with gasoline) and we will somehow have found enough land to grow it on without us going without food (perhaps a massive die off has opened up the land). Of course that would assume we’ve also worked out how to grow, fertilise, harvest, process and transport this using only more ethanol or wind / solar and we built the infrastructure to distribute it and built the pumps and replaced all the engines…. OK seems very unlikely indeed.

I smiled, soaked up the atmosphere and tried to convince myself that I am in a lucky generation that gets to see structures like this hosting big sporting events as there can’t be many more generations that will. I don’t feel convinced.