Alex Reuneker

Last Friday, my wife and I took our son to Leiden to run the Singelloop – a very family friendly running event. It was fun, although I was used to starting and running in front. Pushing a stroller, I though I shouldn't start in front this year, because that should be reserved for people actually racing. It took around 2 kilometers to get used to running really slow and just enjoying the run as a family activity instead of a running activity.

Stroller-running at the Singelloop 2025

The biggest challenge was to maneuver the stroller around and past other runners, but I kept in mind that I was the 'exception' here and I should watch out, not others. What definitely helped, were all the positive reactions and cheers by other participants and the massive amount of supporters along the route. Thanks, Leiden!

Last Friday, 11 April 2025, around 20 linguists from LUCL – the 'LUCL Runners' – ran the Leiden Singelloop. All running linguists completed the +/- 6.5km course along the ‘singels van Leiden’. Afterwards, we enjoyed each other's company during the annual post-run party at Olga van Marion and Ton van der Wouden’s house along the route. Thanks to LUCL for sponsoring and all colleagues who supported us during the run!

The LUCL team of 2025

It was a bit of a challenge to run with our son in his stroller along parts the small, crowded route, but it was fun!

Again, an update to the metronome tool, but this was a rather large one, especially 'behind the scenes'. The update was done because of a couple of mails I received from swimmers. I didn't really know swimmers used metronomes, but it does make sense. Their needs are different from runner's, however - BPM's as low as 30 are not something I ever thought of as a runner. One of the swimmers also mentioned that it would be really helpful to generate metronomes in steps of 1 BPM in stead of the 5 BPM the previous version of the tool offered.

The new version of the metronome tool, with 1 BPM increments

Offering metronomes by increments of 1 BPM meant either much manual work (for every frequency I had to manually generate a 1 minute click track in Audacity, resulting in almost 200 manually created and converted files), or radically changing the way I generated the 1 minute tracks. I opted for the latter, as it meant both a (small but fun) programming challenge, and it would be more lasting solution. From this version on, I am using a Python script I wrote to produce sinewaves in NumPy.

You can start using the new version of the metronome tool right away at https://www.reuneker.nl/files/metronome. Happy swimming and running!