For me, it started on Monday with a faint, unmistakable scratch at the back of my throat. It’s that subtle tickle you try to swallow away, drowning it in extra hydration while making a silent, slightly arrogant promise to yourself: Not me. Not this week.

By Tuesday afternoon, any lingering illusion of physical invincibility had completely dissolved into sheer absurdity.

If you had walked into my kitchen last night before dinner, you would have seen a man waging an all-out, frantic war against his own biology. I stood over the blender building a super-smoothie loaded with every conceivable root, powder, supplement, and immunity booster sitting around. I was trying to blend my way out of this terrible cold (still hitting hard and still miserable today). 🫠

Did I believe a single concoction was going to miraculously wipe out a virus mid-flight? Of course not. But I drank it anyway, along with a few other holistic remedies I procured this week. And today I went with DayQuil for the congestion so I could get through a couple of meetings without gasping.

Call it symptom relief, call it a desperate bid for comfort, or call it the psychological grace of the placebo effect… If it offers even a 2% shift in how I feel, I’m taking it.

Where did this biological takeover come from? The exact patient zero is no mystery. A particular, symptom-heavy boy with blond hair whose initials are HHH (IYKYK 🤣). At this stage of boyhood, personal hygiene remains a distant, purely theoretical concept. Consideration for another human’s respiratory airspace simply does not exist. Coughs are launched into the open room with wild abandon, boundary lines are non-existent, and a casual, affectionate interaction with a child is all it takes to sink the ship. I love them unconditionally, but I have also accepted that living with them means paying a perpetual germ tax.

At the beginning of the week, my natural impulse was to negotiate with my own body. Mentally, I pushed against the fog because I had momentum to maintain, calls to conduct, and weekly responsibilities to protect. I tried to optimize my way around a basic human ailment.

Ultimately, reality won. I had to clear a few meetings off the calendar and accept a significantly slowed pace for the week.

It was a stark reminder of a truth we constantly try to outsmart in the name of performance: I do not have control.

We live in an era that sells us the idea that with enough biohacks, rigid routines, and sheer willpower, we can control our physical state at all times. We treat health like a linear equation where the right inputs guarantee a near-flawless, uninterrupted output. But nature doesn’t care about your calendar. It has its own agenda, and sometimes that agenda includes a hard, involuntary timeout.

What we do have (always) is agency.

Control is demanding the cold disappear so we don’t lose a day of productivity. It’s the friction of fighting what is already happening.

Agency, on the other hand, is recognizing the biological reality of where you are and deciding how to respond. It’s accepting that your body is demanding a slower gear, choosing to put down the nonessential load, and leaning into whatever brings comfort, whether that’s an aggressive green smoothie, a dose of decongestant, or simply closing the laptop an hour early.

Having a healthy body, mind, and spirit doesn’t mean you become bulletproof or immune to the messy reality of being human. It means cultivating the self-awareness to stop fighting the pause when it arrives.

Sometimes, the highest level of health practice isn’t pushing through. It’s just pouring a cup of tea, accepting the foggy head, and letting your body do what it knows how to do.

It always started the same way: “I don’t like swimming,” “I hate the water,” or “I’ve never really swum a lap in my life.”

And it’s rarely about the water.

An open water swim isn’t really testing your stroke technique as much as it’s interrogating your mindset. I’ve coached athletes with zero swim background who harbored real, visceral fears yet jumped into training and racing anyway. On the flip side, I’ve spent time around physically gifted people who talked a massive game but never actually put anything on the line, least of all showing up on a race morning.

The divide was rarely about athletic pedigree. It came down to how they framed the dark open water (lake, bay, ocean, reservoir, etc.). Was it a murky, fixed abyss waiting to swallow them whole? Or was it the great wide open, waiting to be explored and experienced?

Carol Dweck spent her career mapping this split.
A fixed mindset treats your abilities as carved in stone, turning every genuine challenge into a referendum on whether you are inherently “good enough.”
A growth mindset treats capabilities as something built through messy effort, turning that same challenge into just another rep to take on.

Same water, same distance, two completely different outcomes waiting on the other side.

I’m sure you’ve noticed this pattern bleed into other areas of life.

I’ve certainly lived it. As an entrepreneur at a scrappy startup early in my career (WAKA) and later when I built a coaching business from scratch (Train Race Inspire PDX). Those ventures represented entirely new open waters for me. They were full of problems I’d never solved, with zero guarantees I’d be any good at any of it.

The people who launch companies aren’t the ones facing lower stakes, no matter how much we like to joke about the startup life. They are the ones who dive into risk and decided (at a fundamental level) that unfamiliar water is a growth problem rather than a fixed trap.

At the end of the day, it isn’t natural talent that gets someone to a start line. It’s a deliberate decision on what the challenge presents.

Growth lives on the other side of the unknown; it isn’t a mirror reflecting what you already are. Progression awaits.

This morning I woke up flat, even after a good night of sleep. I got moving into my morning routine, but still felt the lag. I have work: meetings, follow-ups, and deliverables. But there is a driving force that feels missing most days. I can usually muster enough juice to get through the day with my relationships, personal and professional goals, or routine... but it’s not the same as the magnetic pull of a North Star.

I’ve had two firm ones in my adult life: Triathlon and Primary (the coworking space I cofounded).

With triathlon, I spent a huge amount of my time coordinating and planning workouts…sometimes more than I actually spent training in them. Then came the socializing afterward, grabbing a bite with whoever from the group was around. I’d go to bed genuinely giddy. My weekends were built entirely around training blocks and race logistics. Waking up to train and coach, grabbing a quick breakfast and heading out the door. I was moving and grooving, and it was an easy flow.

With Primary, there was so much momentum in just operating a living, breathing business that I got sucked into every part of it. I’ve never been pulled into anything else quite that way before. A job is certainly a North Star for many people, whether they own the business or not.

But the wild thing about both of these defining pieces of my life is that I didn’t exactly pick them to be my main focus. I decided to help start a business with my then-wife and our friend Danny, and a crazy ride ensued. Both just pulled me in and had a natural life cycle. I could’ve kept going in either case, but there were logical ends to each…or maybe a transition away is a better description.

Over the last five years, I had a great job with Wix and a mix of consulting with different startups and projects, but nothing has been that singular driving force. Mornings like this present plain evidence for me. There hasn’t been a North Star underneath the work, and I don’t know what the next one is going to be; even now, even while I’m actively trying things, including an interesting community health project I keep circling back to.

The “find your passion, find your purpose” advice is abundant, and it’s worth noting that it’s a fairly recent idea. Most people throughout history didn’t ask what their North Star was. They did the work in front of them because it needed doing. The passion framing shows up more in our modern culture, one where our job is supposed to double as our identity and our personal brand. That’s a useful narrative if you’re trying to get people to work harder, or maybe sell a course on finding purpose. It’s less useful if you’re just trying to figure out how to get through a Tuesday.

There is an interesting study around this worth mentioning. Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano used data from MIDUS, a study that followed adults for 14 years, and looked at mortality rates. They measured purpose with a specific survey item: how much people agreed with statements like “some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.” People who scored higher lived longer.

That link held up even after controlling for other measures of well-being, like how positive people generally felt and how good their relationships were. It wasn’t just that purposeful people were happier people in general. It also didn’t matter whether someone was retired, which is notable because a lot of earlier purpose research assumed purpose had to come directly from a traditional job.

What that study actually measured wasn’t “did you pick the right goal.” It was “Are you wandering aimlessly or not?” I really appreciate that distinction since it correlates so closely with my previous experience and my current feeling.

I didn’t pick triathlon or Primary in advance, and I’m not going to pick the next thing out of a hat. I’m trying things out without expecting to know yet which one it’s going to be, or if it’s going to be any of them at all.

What’s your North Star right now, and do you feel like you actually picked it, or did it pull you in?

Not naively. I’d coached long enough to know that the fastest person on the course isn’t always the most whole. But I kept believing, under everything, that if you built the right body and tracked the right numbers, the rest of life would organize itself around that center.

I spent a decade in the triathlon world. Coaching athletes, building programs, running teams. Close to a thousand people over those years. And what I watched, over and over, was that the people who hit their goals most often weren’t the ones nailing the training plans. They were the ones embedded in a group. Showing up on a cold, wet Sunday morning, parking lots still dark, nobody particularly wanting to be grueling through it, but because someone was expecting them. The plan got them fit. The community got them pushing beyond what they thought was possible.

I knew this. I’d seen it hundreds of times.

And then I left that world, moved to New York for a different life, and immediately felt the void.

New York had community of course. I was working around the startup world, surrounded by smart, driven people moving fast toward things that mattered to them. Collaborative meetings, networking events, and late-night working dinners where the conversation was lively and the energy was tangible. There was genuine warmth at times in it. But it was community organized around what you were building, what round you were raising, and where you were headed next. The relationships were real. They just didn’t reach the part of you beyond your utility in the marketplace.

I didn’t have language for that distinction then. I just felt it. A low-grade hum of something missing underneath all the action.

What I understand now is that what was missing had a name. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson spent decades studying what separates groups that perform from groups that merely function, and the variable that mattered most wasn’t talent or incentive or leadership style. It was psychological safety: the condition where people believe they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking honestly, asking questions, or showing the parts of themselves that aren’t polished. Most social environments, and nearly every professional one, are psychologically unsafe in ways so subtle we’ve stopped noticing them. We perform. We edit. We offer the version of ourselves that fits the room and wonder why we leave feeling vaguely empty.

The startup world I was living in was full of brilliant, driven, caring people. It was also, structurally, a place where honesty about struggle was expensive. Showing weakness had a cost. So people didn’t. And neither did I.

A few years in I joined a men’s circle modeled on the work of Owen Marcus and Evyman. Marcus started the original concept in northern Idaho with a simple intention: not performance, not bravado, not therapy. Just men learning how to connect with each other more meaningfully. That deceptively simple idea was the whole thing.

A handful of us met weekly in Nathan’s apartment. Comfortable tucked across his living room. No alcohol, no phones, no agenda beyond showing up and being honest. Advice was discouraged. You weren’t there to fix anyone or be fixed. You were there to be present and to speak and to be heard without someone immediately trying to solve your problems.

What we had built, I realized later, was a designed psychological safety container. Every structural choice, the small group, the prohibition on advice-giving, and the absence of an exit ramp into problem-solving were in service of one thing: making it safe enough to be true to oneself. And when it’s safe enough to be honest, something happens that almost nothing else in modern life produces: real connection.

I hadn’t realized until I reflected on those moments how rarely that happens. How much energy we spend making sure we don’t make other people uncomfortable with the actual weight of our lives. How practiced we become at editing ourselves down to the version that fits the room.

It was the first time since my triathlon days that I’d felt genuinely held by a group. And what still is striking is how rare that is. How long I’d gone without it. How many people around me, accomplished and connected by every conventional measure, were and are probably going without it too.

There are more layers to it than the container I’ve described. Mostly, what we had was a return to something the nervous system already knows: that we’re wired to regulate through each other before we regulate alone. Researchers call this co-regulation. A baby calms in its mother’s arms before it can self-soothe because proximity to a trusted person is the nervous system’s first language. We don’t calm down and then connect. We connect, and that’s what allows us to calm down.

We’ve had this backwards.

John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago neuroscientist who spent his career studying loneliness, found that feeling chronically disconnected triggers the same threat response in the brain as physical danger. The WHO corroborated it from a public health angle, linking low social connection to a 30% higher risk of early death. Two different institutions, different methodologies, arriving at the same place.

To add another layer, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar spent years studying the cognitive limits of human social connection and found that we can maintain roughly 150 stable relationships…but our inner ring, the people we genuinely trust, feel close to, and would call in a crisis, caps at around five. That number hasn’t changed across cultures or centuries. What has changed is how easy modern life makes it to let that inner ring quietly hollow out while accumulating hundreds of ambient connections. LinkedIn followers. Slack channels. Group chats. The quantity goes up. The depth collapses. And you can feel profoundly lonely with a completely full calendar, which is maybe the most disorienting version of it: the loneliness that doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside.

We are not under-meditated. We are not under-supplemented. We are disconnected from each other.

In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring loneliness a national public health epidemic, placing it in the same category as tobacco and the opioid crisis. His message was direct: loneliness is far more than a bad feeling. It’s a serious public health risk. And the scale of it was already staggering before COVID made it visible. About half of American adults reported experiencing loneliness even before the pandemic hit.

And this didn’t happen overnight. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam spent years documenting the slow unraveling in his book Bowling Alone. He found that participation in civic organizations, informal social connectedness, and interpersonal trust had been declining in America since the 1960s and 70s, with a sharp acceleration through the 80s and 90s.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg was watching the same erosion from a different angle. He called them third places: the public spaces beyond home and work that host the regular, voluntary, informal gatherings that hold communities together. The coffee shop. The barbershop. The church hall. Places where you bumped into people without planning to, where community happened as a byproduct of just showing up. Oldenburg was clear that no digital version replaces this: “Third places are face-to-face phenomena.”

What Putnam and Oldenburg were both describing was the same loss. The slow disappearance of the structures that made connection automatic rather than effortful. We used to stumble into community. Now we have to schedule it. And scheduling it means it’s one of the first things to fall off when life gets full.

But there’s something worth naming about why so many attempts to rebuild community fail, because they do fail, often, and in predictable ways.

Most gatherings are too transactional. People arrive as consumers, scanning for what they can get, and when the returns feel thin, they stop coming back. Community built on extraction doesn’t hold. The ones that hold are built on contribution, on people showing up not just for themselves but because the group has begun to feel like something worth protecting.

Most gatherings lack consistent rhythm. Community isn’t an event. It’s a practice. A quarterly mixer, a one-time retreat, even a monthly dinner rarely builds the kind of trust that makes people honest with each other. Frequency matters more than intensity. What the men’s circle gave me wasn’t a single profound experience. It was a regular low-key Monday night that slowly built something I didn’t know I was building.

Most gatherings are too big. Groups beyond a certain size default to performance. People play to the room rather than speaking with each other. Dunbar’s research suggests that genuine intimacy lives in groups of roughly five to fifteen. Beyond that, something shifts. You start managing your impression instead of sharing your experience.

And most gatherings are designed around comfort rather than honesty. Research on deep bonding, across combat veterans, sports teams, disaster survivors, consistently shows that shared vulnerability creates faster and more durable trust than shared success. Events built purely around positivity and connection stay shallow, not because the people aren’t capable of depth, but because nothing in the structure asked for it.

This is what Owen Marcus understood when he designed those rules for the circle. No advice. No cross-talk. No fixing. He wasn’t being precious. He was removing every structural escape hatch that allows people to stay on the surface and call it community.

I moved to Miami in 2021. New city, new job, life suddenly full in a different way. Two boys entering early elementary school and orienting to a whole new dynamic. The kind of community I’d found in that circle in New York kept getting deferred. Just casually moving it to later until recently.

This past April I started hosting Board Walks on Saturday mornings. The idea was simple: meet at a regular spot, walk together for a couple of hours, and talk about something meaningful in your world. No agenda, no cost, no optimization.

Research on conversation and connection has found that face-to-face contact activates social performance anxiety in ways we’re barely aware of. We track each other’s micro-expressions constantly, monitoring for judgment, adjusting our presentation in real time. Side-by-side contact during movement reduces that vigilance. Soldiers debrief while walking. Therapists run walk-and-talk sessions. Parents reliably get their most honest conversations with teenagers in the car, not at the dinner table. When you’re moving, when you’re looking forward instead of at each other, something in the nervous system relaxes its guard.

It’s early. I’m still learning what it wants to be. But the people who come back every week are telling me something without saying it directly. They aren’t coming for the step count.

Dan Buettner found the same pattern studying Blue Zones, the pockets of the world where people live longest. The defining characteristic isn’t diet or exercise. It’s stable social structures. In Okinawa, they call it moai: small groups of lifelong friends moving through decades together, sharing resources and accountability. Belonging isn’t something they schedule. It’s the medium they move through.

The container matters as much as what’s inside it.

Modern wellness culture is very good at optimizing the individual. It’s very bad at accounting for the environment that individual is trying to survive in.

You can have the perfect morning routine and still feel unmoored if no one knows your name in the places you spend time. The consistency that comes from belonging operates differently than the consistency that comes from willpower. One is you pushing against your own resistance, day after day. The other is you being pulled forward by people who notice when you don’t show up, by a story that’s bigger than your own discipline.

One runs out.

The other holds people through finish lines they didn’t think they had in them.

I watched it happen on training courses for a decade. I watched it happen in a living room in New York where a group of people decided to just tell the truth about how they were doing. I’m watching it begin to happen on Saturday mornings in Miami, tentatively, hopefully, with people still finding their way to each other.

The research confirms what the oldest communities already knew. I (and we) just need the reminder.

Community isn’t a luxury you add once the real work is done. It isn’t a nice-to-have sitting at the bottom of your wellness list beneath sleep, nutrition, and exercise. It is the structure inside which all of that becomes sustainable. Without it, you’re optimizing in isolation. And isolation, it turns out, has a cost that no protocol can offset.

The good news is that community doesn’t require a movement or a perfect program. It requires intention. A decision to stop waiting for it to happen and start building it deliberately. A weekly walk. A circle of people who tell the truth. A standing dinner. A group chat that actually goes somewhere. The form matters less than the commitment to show up for each other, consistently, over time.

But the structure matters too. Make it small enough that people can’t hide. Make it frequent enough that trust has time to build. Remove the escape hatches that let everyone stay comfortable and call it connection. Ask something of people. Not performance. Presence.

We were never meant to figure this out alone. The science keeps saying it. History keeps saying it. Our bodies have always known it.

The question isn’t whether you need community. The question is what you’re going to do to bring it into your life.

How are you accessing community?

No room for the ego, no room for the fear. Just the rhythm of swinging the static out.

And then there is road: a long, grey line. The breath becomes steady, the mind turns clear.

No need for the “new,” no need for a sign. Only the work that remains when the noise disappears.

Sixty feet or sixty miles, there is a lesson.

It’s not what you chase, but the way you work for it.

So at twenty, playing basketball at my fraternity house in Austin, I figured out a workaround. There was a brick wall behind the court, and if you got a running start and jumped off it at the right angle, you could come back over and around and actually get up there. I did it three or four times out of maybe two dozen attempts. The first time felt genuinely glorious. By the 20th, the luster had worn off, and I had established to my own satisfaction that I had, technically, dunked a basketball, which is all I ever really needed.

What I’ve left out of this story is that I’d been doing many of those jumps after I badly hurt my ankle and had a walking boot. After enough close calls on the landing, I finally concluded that it was probably a bit much.

A few months earlier, I’d torn all the ligaments in my right ankle sliding into a base during an intramural softball game. One of my good friends’ fathers was an orthopedic surgeon, and he was kind enough to explain that soft tissue heals properly or improperly based almost entirely on how seriously you treat it in the early weeks. I took the improper route. Wore the boot only when I absolutely had to and went about my merry life. I was a kid who had stitches eight times before I was eleven, more sprains and strains than I’d bothered keeping track of, and a working theory that I was more or less invincible. Nothing in my history to that point had been damaging enough to seriously revise my theory, so I didn’t.

Fast forward to 2007. I’m training for my second Ironman in two years, living the kind of life where a hundred-mile training ride is just a Saturday, and the reasonable next move is driving straight to Baltimore for my cousin Julie’s wedding and dancing until the venue closes. I woke up that next morning, and my ankle looked like a grapefruit. It was purple, swollen to a size I hadn’t seen since the original injury, and I had no explanation for it whatsoever, because nothing had happened. No misstep, no acute event, nothing I could point to and say…there, that’s what I did to it.

Except, of course, it had been going wrong for years.

What an x-ray eventually confirmed was a long accumulation of pickup basketball on a joint that never fully healed and years of building a life of endurance on a compromised foundation. I had heavy mileage and cumulative impact until the bone chips and fragments that had been secretly collecting in the joint space finally ran out of room. My only choice was to get my ankle scoped and start a proper repair process.

I had a choice to make: have the surgery before the race and not go, or after and walk it. I had spent too much effort alongside people I loved not to show up at the start line. My team was there. My community was there. So on race day I walked twenty-five to protect the joint (ran the last 1.2), crossed the finish line, and had surgery the following week.

Lying in recovery, I did something I hadn’t really done before, which was take a clear-eyed inventory of what I’d actually been doing. And the honest version was that I had been ignoring my foundation (with known structural problems) and stacking Ironman training loads, while somehow managing not to connect those two facts into a single coherent thought.

What happened after the surgery ended up mattering more than the surgery itself.

I leaned on the right people in my endurance community, in particular a physical therapist named Kerri, who, when she saw my x-ray for the first time, cried. Not me. Her. She was more upset about what she was looking at than I was, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how bad it actually was and also about how I’d been operating up until that point.

Kerri did a lot of physical manipulation on the joint to get me back to health, and she took her work seriously in a way that made me take it seriously too.

The exercises themselves were, in the best possible way, almost embarrassingly small. Towel grabs with my toes (spreading and scrunching a hand towel across the floor to rebuild the intrinsic foot strength). Single-leg calf raises off the edge of a step (slow down, full up) for the eccentric loading that actually rebuilds tendon integrity over time. Ankle dorsiflexion against a wall, just pressing the knee forward over the foot, reclaiming range of motion that years of compensation had lost. Banded lateral walks for the hips and glutes for the upstream work that protects everything in the lower chain, which you’d never think to connect to an ankle injury until someone shows you why. Dead bugs on the floor, slow and controlled, building the core stability that protects force transfer and continues the upstream protection.

None of it looked sexy. It existed entirely in service of the bigger picture. More on that below.

There was no single revelation, no moment when something was said that reorganized how I understood my physical health. What actually shifted was more gradual than that. I had a collective experience of breaking down over years, watching athletes I competed alongside and eventually coached cycle through the same patterns, the same imbalances, the same injuries, and the same surprised expressions when something gave way that had been slowly giving way for a long time. I didn’t want that cycle. I wanted something more structurally sound. I wanted a body that holds together because the whole thing is ready for battle (aka life), not just the parts you train.

Nineteen years later, most of what I learned in the rehab of my ankle is still woven into how I move. I foam roll consistently. I use a Theragun on the tissue that needs it and lacrosse balls and yoga balls for the spots that are too small or too deep for anything else. Contrast therapy, which I’ve written about at length here and believe in as much as anything in my toolkit. The single-leg balance work, the range of motion maintenance, and the upstream hip stability. I treat all of it as seriously as any substantial training itself. I get weird looks in the gym sometimes with band work off the bosu, and I love it. To me, it’s a signal that I’m doing the invisible work that matters. And I know it works because I’ve been injured along the way, more than once, and almost every time, what the foundation gave me wasn’t immunity from getting hurt. It was the ability to understand exactly what functionality was missing and how to slowly, patiently put it back in place. Not with a new program and not a specialist search. I know what functional integrity feels like in my body, which means I know when it’s missing and what it takes to slowly rebuild it. Patience. Intentional work. The same unglamorous exercises, applied with more care than last time.

What I’ve arrived at, after enough miles and enough recoveries and enough watching other people’s bodies tell the same stories mine used to, is something I’d call holistic physical integrity. It’s not a program or a framework with a name on it. More like a question: Am I maintaining the full range of what this body can do?

It’s not strength in isolation, or flexibility, or endurance detached from everything that supports it. It is an integrated whole: the way strength and range and capability either compound each other over time or subtly cannibalize each other, depending on how sincerely you attend to them. My ankle story was a cannibalizing story. Volume without recovery. Forward load without the lateral stability. I trained one kind of output at the expense of everything around it for years, and the surroundings eventually had something to say about it.

The goal isn’t to be unbreakable. It’s to build something durable enough to last and sustainable enough to actually do.

That distinction sounds small. It isn’t to me.

I have two boys, Hawk and Henry, who are ten and eight and at the age where physical life is mostly unselfconscious. They just play and move with the joy of what a body can do. I can still keep up with that, and keeping up with that is one of the better things about my life right now. And I’m also thinking about the years further out, when they’re discovering their own versions of an active life, learning what their bodies are truly capable of, and I want to still be in it with them then. Not watching. Not the dad who used to play and now offers commentary. Present, capable, useful. That’s what the foam rolling and the towel grabs and the years of simple, unglamorous maintenance have always been for.

I got wheeled out of that office in 2007 having lost almost nothing except the comfortable illusion that I’d been managing a healthy body. I hadn’t. I’d just been lucky the bill hadn’t come due yet.

Luck isn’t a foundation.

I looked healthy from the outside. A decade of endurance training, mostly clean eating, good sleep habits, and great community around me.

Early in 2019, I accepted an invitation to join a new friend’s yoga studio program built around breathwork, hot yoga, clean eating, guided meditation, and immers…

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It knows when it’s hungry. It knows when it’s been sitting too long. It knows when it needs sunlight, water, movement, rest, touch, quiet, and other humans.

It has known these things for 200,000 years. So why does it now require a $200+ device to confirm any of it?

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Henry was maybe eight months old and fast asleep. I had somewhere around 2-3 drinks in me, which had become my reasonable way to end a Tuesday.

The city was doing what the city does at that hour, a steady buzz outside the window. And I was doing what I had gotten…

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Drink plenty of water. Move our body. Sleep eight hours. Eat less of the thing that makes us feel like garbage.

We don’t have an information problem. We have an identity problem.

James Clear has a line in Atomic Habits that I keep returning to. He says every habit is a vote for the type of person …

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When I started with triathlon training, I went all out. By ‘all out’ I mean playing pickup basketball for a couple of hours after each training session. Zone 2? I didn’t need conversational pacing. Aerobic pacing was for people who didn’t have my engine or ego. 🫠

And then I couldn’t get off the couc…

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They played with it for two hours straight the day it arrived. By the end of the day, they were asking about getting another new game or toy.

Within a single afternoon, they had run the…

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When I was coaching athletes, I had one rule that surprised people more than any training protocol.

Sleep is part of training. Not rest. Not recovery. Training.

Many pushed back hard with the usual quips. “I’ll sleep when I’m …

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Mile 18 of a long run. Hour 8 to 9 of an Ironman. Somewhere past the point of plans dissolving, raw instinct takes over.

I’ve been there enough times to know what waits on the other side of that wall. Not the podium. Not a finish line medal.

A deep feeling fo…

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I spent some time on a podcast today looking back at the map of my career. We traced the non-linear path, the pivots from early professional hurdles to the lessons of endurance racing, and finally, to modern leadership.

As we talked, one word kept surfacing: responsibility.

In enduran…

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Day 24: What would I do differently if no one was watching?

I’d probably move more methodically. Talk less. Stop explaining myself so much. Be more deliberate with my time.

I’d let more silences sit without filling them. I’d take the nap instead of pushing through. I’d say “I don’t …

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Morning light through the conference room windows. Coffee going cold because the conversation kept pulling us forward. Last week in review. The week ahead taking fo…

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