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 good at. Waiting for the feeling to pass.

I was telling myself I was the healthiest guy I knew. I had a decade of endurance training in my bones. I was hitting the boutique fitness classes hard in the city. I had a pretty stellar diet. And I could drone on about sleep architecture.

And yet I was medicating something I hadn’t named yet, in the dark (literally and figuratively), hoping my newish baby boy wouldn’t wake up and need me to be a person.

I’ve been thinking about those heavy nights a lot lately. Because they are the clearest picture I have of what it looks like when your outer life and your inner life stop talking to each other. When the performance gets so dialed in you stop noticing the gap between what you’re saying and what’s actually true.

I called it stress. I called it transition. I called it the price of building something.

What it was, was a lie I’d been telling myself every day, dressed up in the language of hustle and growth. And the harder I worked to manage the outside, the less I was willing to look at what was happening underneath.

That’s where modern life meets us. Right at that gap.

The world we live in right now is exquisitely, almost artistically, designed to keep us there.

Not because anyone decided that was the goal. But because the attention economy runs on one thing: keeping you in a state just agitated enough to keep scrolling, just stimulated enough to never quite land. The people who build the feeds and the algorithms and the infinite scroll understand dopamine better than most therapists do. They know the precise texture of the gap between what you have and what you think you should have, and they fill it, over and over, with content shaped exactly to your anxieties.

You open the app to kill thirty seconds. Forty minutes later you put the phone down feeling vaguely worse about your life without being able to say why.

That’s not an accident. That’s engineering.

What gets eroded, slowly and imperceptibly, is your access to what’s actually true for you. Your wants get replaced by manufactured ones. Your restlessness gets rerouted into consumption. The quiet that might let you hear something real never quite arrives.

So ask yourself honestly. When you reach for your phone, what are you actually hungry for?

Not the answer you’d give someone at a dinner party. The real one.

My guess is it’s not content. Not news. It’s some version of connection. Some evidence that you’re not alone in this, that what you’re feeling makes sense, that someone out there gets it. And the phone, for all its engineering, cannot give you that. It can simulate it. Likes instead of presence. Followers instead of friends. The structure of belonging with none of the weight.

We know this. We keep choosing it anyway. Because the real thing requires showing up, being uncertain, saying something that might not land. The scroll never rejects you. Real connection might.

The body registers that substitution. It keeps a running tab.

I know because I tried to outsmart it.

I spent years wearing biometric trackers on my wrist, watching my numbers like they were a verdict. Green meant I’d done enough. Red meant I needed to adjust. I built a whole system around those readings, tweaking sleep and training and nutrition like I was tuning an engine.

What my devices couldn’t see was what was actually driving the numbers. The ambient dread about money. The story I was telling myself about being behind. The version of myself I was performing at work, and the cost of holding that all day, and where that cost went when I finally got home.

It went somewhere. It always does.

Which is how you end up being impatient about shoes.

Hawk and Henry are eight and ten now, and there are mornings I hear something sharp come out of my mouth about slow breakfast or the volume of just existing as a kid, and I catch it a beat too late. I know in that moment it isn’t really about the shoes. It’s a leak. Something that needed a different exit and didn’t find one. What I actually needed to say was something about pressure, or fear, or the particular weight of building something you’re not sure is working. But I hadn’t said it, reflected it, or processed.

That’s what unexamined misalignment does. It doesn’t stay where you put it. It comes out messy.

This is what I mean when I say truth is a health practice.

Not a philosophical virtue. Not a therapy assignment. A daily, physical practice of closing the distance between what you’re actually experiencing and the story you’re willing to tell about it. To yourself, first. Before the managed version. Before the framing that makes it all look purposeful.

It’s harder than it sounds in an era built to keep that gap open. Where the incentive is always to perform a slightly better version of your life than the one you’re living. Where the tools in your pocket were designed by people whose business model depends on you never quite feeling settled.

But every time I’ve said the true thing instead of the comfortable one, something in my chest loosens.

That exhale is not small.

It might be the whole point.

I loved triathlon. It built me. And then at some point down the road I outgrew it. Or maybe it outgrew me.

However it played out, I’ve been coming back to (again and again, over years) the thing I really loved was never the racing. It was the showing up and connecting.

The early morning. The people. The body in motion. The talk that happens when you’re side by side instead of face to face.

You don’t come out of a decade of endurance training without it being in your cells. When I walk into a room now, I’m still thinking with an endurance athlete’s operating system. Long view, pace yourself, don’t blow up too early, and pay attention to your breathing. The finish line isn’t the point; it’s the way you show up for the next one.

That OS didn’t go away when the racing stopped. It just started running a different program.

What’s genuinely changed, and I didn’t really feel it until a few years ago, is what I want out of my own body.

In my thirties, the target was performance. PRs. How fast. How far. How lean. How strong.

In my forties (and I’m in the later ones now) the target is maintenance. Longevity of capability.

Can I pick up one of my boys? Can I carry four grocery bags in one trip because I don’t feel like making two? Can I squat down and stand back up without bracing on anything? Can I walk for three hours and not have my legs or back make me pay a tax the next day?

In my fifties, I already know the target will be to extend and preserve. Keep what I’ve built. And keep it working.

The ratio will continue to invert as I age. Less intensity, more frequency. Less peak, more floor.

And the floor…the very ordinary, very boring floor is where most of our health actually lives. (our = the public)

What my practice looks like right now is more plain than polished. I’m getting in what I can.

Some days that’s a strength session. Some days it’s a long walk. Some days it’s pacing the yard on a call that doesn’t need a screen, or doing a lap around the block between meetings. Some weeks the rhythm is dialed in and I feel it; other weeks it’s messier and I feel on edge with longer gaps of activity.

What I’m not doing is waiting for the perfect version of my routine to come back before I count it.

The current thing I do show up for every week (that just launched) is on Saturday mornings. I lead a five-mile community-style walk. The Board Walks in Miami. Part of a group that started in Austin and has spread to a handful of cities, and now one of the cities is here because I offered to lead and they gave me the green light. No fee. No funnel. No app. Just feet, willing people, and conversations that happen when people get curious and intentional.

Two guys showed up to the first one and we went round and round on consciousness and AI and who’s pushed us to be better, and I drove home in a better mood than I’d been in a week.

This is the shape of what I’m building and anchoring around. Irregular on the weekdays (for now), anchored on the weekends with movement, community, and contribution. All of it pointed at a version of me that I want to build well into my grandfather years.

None of this is new.

And almost all of it is backed by a mountain of boring, inconvenient science that, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, nobody is saying loud enough.

Most of the mortality benefit of movement shows up before the first hour of official “exercise” per week. The biggest drop on the whole dose-response curve (by a lot) is from zero to a little. (Arem, 2015, JAMA Internal Medicine)

Three to four minutes a day of brisk, incidental movement: stairs, hills, and carrying heavy bags are associated with a 30 to 40 percent reduction in all-cause mortality in people who otherwise don’t exercise at all. (Stamatakis, 2022, Nature Medicine)

Breaking up prolonged sitting with brief walking breaks meaningfully lowers post-meal glucose and insulin, independent of how much you work out the rest of the week. (Buffey, 2022)

Even the 10,000-step target was never a clinical recommendation. It was a 1960s Japanese pedometer marketing campaign called Manpo-kei, which literally translates to “10,000-step meter.” Most of the mortality benefit plateaus somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 steps, sooner for older adults. (Paluch, 2022, Lancet Public Health)

None of this sells a device. None of it supports a subscription. None of it truly requires a wearable, a coach, or a protocol. Which is a big part of why we don’t talk about it loudly enough, because in a marketplace full of solutions, the most effective intervention is the one that nobody can figure out how to package into an ideal product or business model.

Here’s what I’m trying to do now, and I’m still figuring out the shape of it.

I want to raise the conversation and the game around basic movement.

Not CrossFit. Not Zone 2 dogma. Not VO2-max obsession. Not biohacking. Not protocols. Not peptides. Not cold-plunge discourse. Not whatever the next influencer is selling on Tuesday.

Basic. Movement. The kind that sets a baseline of your health.

Walking. Standing. Climbing some stairs. Squatting down to play on the floor with kids and standing back up without using your hands. Carrying groceries. Taking the long way. Doing a lap around the house or block instead of sitting back down. Getting off one stop early. Parking at the far end of the lot on purpose. Walking the dog, maybe twice in a day. Walking with a friend or a group of friends.

I want schools to talk about movement the way they talk about reading.

I want doctors to prescribe, and I want insurance to readily pay for it. 🤯

I want to see more of us on foot, more often, more of the time, and ideally together.

I spent a decade helping a small number of people do something extraordinary.

I think I want to spend the next decades helping a much larger number of people do something ordinary.

Every day. Forever.

Hawk is eight. Henry is ten. They watch me.

They see a dad who gets up and goes and moves his body and talks to strangers about moving. I hope they also see a dad who slows down, who’s in the kitchen without a screen, who plays on the floor and gets back up. A dad whose relationship to his body isn’t about how it performs in athletics but about how it shows up in everyday life.

I’m not doing this because it looks good. I’m doing this because I want to still be rocking and rolling when they have kids, and I want to be able to pick those kids up too and squat down on the floor and get back up and walk with them and not fall behind.

If you’re in Miami and you want to walk with me on a Saturday, the invitation is open. If you can’t do Saturdays, let me know. I’m always up for exploring more options to get people together for intentional movement and communing.

And if you’re reading this and can’t remember the last time you moved your body with consistent purpose, start tomorrow. Not an hour. Not a program. Aim for fourteen minutes. That’s one percent of your day. Even if you make it five, it counts!

Start where you are.

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 you want to become.

Not a result. Not a goal. A vote.

It’s not about the run. It’s about becoming someone who runs.

This piece of the puzzle often gets left out around health advice. We talk about systems and triggers and streaks (and those things matter) but underneath all of it is a better question. Who am I being when I do this?

Because when the habit isn’t attached to an identity, it’s attached to willpower. And willpower is a finite resource. Ask anyone who’s flamed out on their new gym membership by February.

I’ve watched this identify piece play out with my kids.

Hawk and Henry are readers. Not because I set a screen time limit or built a reward chart or made them. It just settled into them somewhere along the way and became who they are.

They read in the car on the way to school. They read when they wake up before anyone else is moving. They read themselves to sleep at night.

Nobody asks them to. Nobody has to.

Because somewhere along the way, the question stopped being do I feel like reading? and became this is what I do. The book is just the next natural thing.

That’s the shift. From rule to identity.

And I find myself thinking about it every time someone tells me they’re “trying to build a workout habit” or “getting back into eating well.” Because the word trying is a tell. It means the behavior hasn’t found its home yet. It’s still sitting outside the self, waiting to be invited in.

Clear calls this identity-based habits. Instead of deciding what outcome you want, you decide what kind of person you want to be. Then you ask what that person would do.

It sounds simple. It’s not.

Because most of us have identities we inherited rather than chose. We were the kid who didn’t like vegetables. The person who’s not a morning person. The one who used to be in shape.

Those stories are sticky. Stickier than any habit we try to paste on top of them.

The research backs this up in ways that go beyond habit formation.

When people shift their internal narrative (when they say I don’t eat that instead of I can’t eat that) compliance rates go up. Dramatically. One study found that identity-based language increased follow-through by over 50%.

Because I can’t implies deprivation. I don’t implies a standard.

One is a wall. The other is a value.

Here’s where I think most health conversations go sideways.

We optimize for the habit, not the person.

We obsess over the right morning routine, the perfect macro split, the ideal sleep protocol; and we skip the foundational question: what kind of person am I building toward?

And that’s not an easy question always. But it’s the most practical one there is.

Because when you’re clear on who you’re becoming, the habits aren’t maintenance. They’re expression.

I’m in the gym three or four times a week. Not because I have something to prove or a race to train for. Because I’m someone who shows up for his body. Consistently. Quietly. Even when it’s inconvenient.

When I miss a stretch of days, I feel the drift...not as guilt, but as a kind of distance from myself. Like I’ve been neglecting a relationship.

That’s what identity-rooted habits feel like from the inside.

Not discipline. Recognition.

Clear says the goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. The marathon is just the proof.

I’d take that one step further.

The goal isn’t even the runner. It’s becoming someone you actually like spending time inside of. A self that feels familiar. Earned. One you’d choose again if you had the choice.

Every workout, every early bedtime, every meal that actually nourishes; they’re not just habits.

They’re votes.

Cast enough of them, and the person you were trying to become is just who you are.

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 couch.

Months of overtraining catching up all at once (aka cumulative fatigue), the kind of rest your body forces when you’ve ignored every signal. I didn’t have a label for what happened. I just knew something was broken.

Starting over slowly was humbling.

What I found on the other side of that breakdown was simple. Almost embarrassingly easy.

Zone-based training. The principles of periodization. Letting the easy days be EASY. Trusting that the adaptation happens in the rest, not just the hard work.

Within a few months, I was healthier, more consistent, and performing better than I ever had while grinding through everything. The feedback was immediate and undeniable.

And here’s the best part that stayed with me:

After a couple of years of training with a heart rate monitor to measure (and control) effort, I didn’t need it anymore. I could feel my aerobic threshold. I could feel the shift into the burn (anaerobic). The data had taught me something tangible that I could sense. The instrument became internal.

I still have that ability today. Decades later. It’s nuanced but accessible. I can even spot-check myself with a slow number count to see what I get up to before grasping for the next breath. IFYKYK 😉

I think about that hard-won internal compass every time a new ‘optimization’ trend hits my feed. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery, recently pulled the curtain back on the $8 trillion longevity industry in The Atlantic. His argument is a cold splash of water: most of what’s being sold in the expensive supplements and the unproven hacks lacks any meaningful human trials.

Reading his critique, I realized the industry isn’t just selling health; it’s selling the right to be an uncompensated test subject. We aren’t just consumers anymore; we’re paying for the privilege of being the experiment.

I find it curious. We are sitting somewhere between genuine opportunity and elaborate marketing.

I’ve tried plenty of it. I’ve done supplement stacks. I use a red light panel. I dialed in intermittent fasting. I still have my blue light blockers.

And most notably, I wore a Whoop for a while. It was a useful mirror at first. But eventually, I hit the wall Metzl warns about: the point where the data stops being a teacher and starts being a master.

I found myself in a loop of ‘biometric obsession,’ checking a screen to see if I was recovered instead of just standing up and feeling my legs. There’s a quiet anxiety that takes root when you outsource your self-knowledge to an algorithm. You start to wonder: If the device doesn’t say I’m rested, am I allowed to feel good? This is the ‘longevity scam’ at its most personal level: the trade-off of our biological intuition for a subscription fee.

That line between a tool that teaches you and a tool that replaces your own knowing is worth paying close attention to.

One of the things that’s worked best for me isn’t new. It’s a sauna.

Ancient technology. No app. No algorithm. Just heat, time, and the particular clarity that comes after. The research on saunas is legitimately strong. The cardiovascular benefits, recovery, and longevity markers. But I didn’t start using it because of the research. I started because of how it made me feel.

That’s typically how the real things show up and stick.

The morning sunlight. A brisk walk. A tall glass of water first thing in your body. Some stillness before the noise of the day. These aren’t hacks. They’re not optimizations. They’re just conditions under which a human being tends to feel like themselves.

The Blue Zones research, Dan Buettner’s deep dive into the world’s longest-lived communities, corroborates exactly what Metzl is pointing out. The people living to 100 aren’t using red-light masks or $200-a-month longevity stacks. They are moving because their lives require it, eating with people they love, and waking up with a reason to be there.

It’s the $0 protocol hiding in plain sight. As Metzl notes, the industry can’t bottle the fundamentals, so they try to sell us a more complicated version of them. But the truth is unglamorous: sleep, sunlight, and sweat don’t need a venture-backed marketing campaign to work.

None of it can be bottled.

I’m not against advancing healthy technology. I love trying it out, in fact.

What I’m against is the anxiety that comes from outsourcing your self-knowledge to a device, a trend, or an industry that profits from you feeling like you’re always one purchase away from optimal.

Twenty-four-year-old me thought I could power through everything. I couldn’t. What I needed (what actually worked) was learning to listen. Slowly. Consistently. Over years.

That’s still the work.

Not adding more. Not optimizing harder. Just building the sensitivity to know what my body is asking for…and having the discipline to give it that, even when it’s unglamorous.

The fundamentals don’t get old because they were never a trend.

DC was first. 2003. I was twenty-four, out of Texas for the first time, and I had no plan beyond not there anymore.

I found triathlon. More so the people around it, than the sport itself. Early morning trainings where nobody talked about their job for the most part. You suffered through the same interval of 10 x 100 freestyle at 5:30 AM, and sometimes the only thing you knew about the person next to you was that they showed up. That was enough.

I had work friends too. My job was social by design: happy hours, group texts, people who knew your weekend plans because you’d made them together on a Thursday. I didn’t think about why it worked. I didn’t have to.

I guess in your twenties community finds you. You just have to not say no.

Austin was a return. College friends still lived there. I had roots, or the memory of them.

But what surprised me was the dogs.

It was the first time I’d had dogs. Suddenly I had a neighborhood. People whose names I didn’t know but whose dogs I could spot from a block away. Morning walks that became standing conversations. A parallel social world built entirely on the fact that we all needed the same patch of grass at the same time.

Not deep. But consistent. And I didn’t notice what it gave me until I left.

Portland was endurance again.

That city breathes it. Active life is woven into the culture in a way I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Triathlon pulled me into a broader set of people who built their lives around hard physical things. Coffee shop regulars who also raced. Trail runners at the same Saturday loop. A quiet nod from someone who recognized you trying on shoes at the running store.

Portland didn’t require me to build anything (even though I did). I kept showing up to what I already loved. The people were there.

New York was different.

No endurance community waiting for me. I moved there to start a co-working business with Lisa, my ex-wife, and to start our family. Community came through the business, through Lisa’s world, and through the slow work of making friends as a grown man in a city of eight million.

The connections that mattered most came from a direction I wouldn’t have guessed. Men trying to be better. Men trying to grow (aka heal). Conversations that only happen when the veil drops and you say out loud that you don’t have it figured out. That scared me. It also kept me upright.

Then COVID hit and everything went virtual. You can maintain a relationship on a screen. It’s harder to build one.

Miami hasn’t provided ‘the’ community opportunity that seemed so easy in my previous stops.

I’ve been here long enough to know the neighborhoods. I have a gym. Routes I ride without thinking about direction. A routine that generally moves smoothly through a week.

But routine and community are different animals.

One keeps you moving. The other makes you feel like you’re somewhere that knows your name.

I leaned into my small work community at Wix. Found a few friends. Tried to start a men’s group; a semblance of a version of that had meant so much in New York. Never got beyond a handful of half interested guys.

For a while, I waited. For Miami to do what the other cities did. For a doorway to appear. For a group to form around me.

I thought community just happened to you.

I’ve started looking for more ways to make it happen for me. Recently, a friend dropped an idea: something called The Board Walks.

Before you show up, you bring a topic. A question you’ve been sitting with. Something you can’t stop turning over. A nagging question you want to drag into the light and see what other people do with it.

That’s your ticket. Not a fitness goal. Not a neighborhood. Not a mutual follow.

A thought.

You walk. You talk. You listen to someone else carry their question alongside yours. Somewhere in the motion and the exchange, something loosens.

I read about it and felt something I hadn’t felt in a while about this city. Possibility.

Robert Waldinger has been running the longest study on adult happiness ever conducted. Eighty-plus years of data out of Harvard. The finding he keeps returning to is almost too simple to publish:

It’s the quality of connection that shapes how we feel about our lives. Not the frequency.

Not how many people you know. The depth. Whether the person next to you is oriented toward something real. Whether the conversation actually goes somewhere.

Porges would call it co-regulation. Two nervous systems finding safety in each other’s presence. Your heart rate shifts. Your breathing slows. Your body decides, without your input, that it can stop scanning the room.

A walk with a question in your pocket does that. It changes how you listen.

I’m hosting The Board Walks in Miami starting in April.

I don’t know what it will become. I don’t know who shows up or what questions they carry. I suspect the first one will be awkward.

That used to make me hesitate.

But I’ve lived in enough cities to see the pattern. I showed up to a thing before I knew what it would become. The early swim. The walk with the dogs. The uncomfortable circle of men who didn’t really know each other yet.

I didn’t always notice the reaching. But it was always there.

Miami is the city that’s making me notice.

You bring the question. You show up. You see what grows.

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 entire happiness cycle.

Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation, the remarkably consistent human ability to return to baseline happiness no matter what happens to us. Lottery winners. Accident survivors. Promotion earners. Within months, sometimes weeks, they all drift back to approximately where they started.

The science is almost comical. We climb. We arrive. We recalibrate. We climb again. Repeat.

I’ve spent years on a professional version of this treadmill.

The number I needed was always somewhere ahead of me: a salary, a title, an accomplishment that would finally feel like enough. And there were real, genuine moments of joy when those things arrived. I’m not dismissing them.

But a few months later, I was budgeting for more. And a new number had become the new finish line.

Arthur Brooks, the Harvard happiness researcher, calls this the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that once we reach a milestone, we’ll finally feel settled. His research suggests we’re not bad at wanting things. We’re just terrible at predicting how quickly the feeling expires.

Which isn’t a character flaw. It’s a feature from our evolutionary operating system.

Our ancestors survived because they were never fully satisfied. A contented hunter-gatherer stopped hunting. A satisfied farmer stopped preparing for winter.

The treadmill kept us alive for 200,000 years. Now it keeps us scrolling at 11 pm, comparing our Tuesday morning to someone else’s highlight reel vacation.

Same wiring. Completely different world.

What makes it worse, and this is the part I think about with my kids, is the math.

There’s a simple equation researchers use to think about perceived happiness:

H = S − E

Happiness equals your actual situation minus your expectations.

If your life improves and your expectations improve at the same rate, the number stays at zero.

You can keep running and go nowhere.

The only real lever you have isn’t acquiring more. It’s learning to manage the expectation side of that equation, which is harder, less visible, and nobody is trying to sell it to you.

The Stoics had an interesting practice for this.

Premeditatio malorum. Negative visualization.

Before you chase the next thing, spend a moment imagining you’ve lost what you already have. The job. The house. The morning run. The kid who still wants to tell you about his video game. It sounds morbid, but it actually works.

It resets the baseline. Makes the current pursuit feel like the win.

There are a few other practices that work on the same mechanism.

Specific gratitude. Not “I’m grateful for my family” that habituates fast. But “I’m grateful that my son still wants to tell me about his video game.” Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky found that specificity is what makes gratitude work long-term. The more concrete and vivid the detail, the slower the adaptation.

Set your “enough” threshold before you start. Before you chase the next goal, write down what it would feel like to hit it and decide in advance that’s enough. Barry Schwartz calls this satisficing: locking in your satisfaction point before the goalposts have a chance to move. It’s harder than it sounds, but so is running forever.

Savor deliberately. After something good happens, sit with it for two or three minutes. Don’t move on, don’t check the phone, don’t start planning the next thing. Psychologist Fred Bryant at Loyola spent decades studying savoring as a learnable skill. It’s one of the few ways to slow the adaptation clock rather than just reset it.

I’m not trying to talk myself (or anyone) into settling. I’m not anti-ambition. I’m just noticing that the treadmill has a speed setting nobody tells you about when you step on.

The view from the middle of the belt is actually pretty good, right now. Two loud boys. A blended house in a city I'm still learning. Work that feels like it matters. That's enough for now.

The next mile will come. It always does.

The treadmill doesn’t have an off switch. But you can choose how fast it runs.

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 dead.” “Napping is for toddlers.” And I’d just smile and say, okay. And whisper to myself. Eventually, you’ll see it.

Your brain runs on a chemical called adenosine. Every hour you’re awake, it builds up. The longer you go, the foggier you get. That’s not a weakness. That’s just biology doing its thing. Sleep clears it: like a drain opening. Even a 10-20 minute nap starts flushing it out and resetting your baseline.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

NASA studied pilots on long-haul flights and found that a 26-minute nap improved alertness by 34% and job performance by 16%. They liked the results so much they literally named it the “NASA nap.” Meanwhile, Harvard researchers found that people who napped regularly were 37% less likely to die from heart disease. Your heart rate drops, your blood pressure drops, and cortisol (your stress hormone) drops. Your nervous system doesn’t just pause. It actually resets.

And while all of that is happening, your hippocampus is replaying the morning’s learning and transferring it into long-term memory. You’re not checked out. Your brain is filing. Organizing. Consolidating. You wake up sharper than when you lay down; not because you’re rested, but because your brain literally did work while you slept.

The world’s sharpest minds figured this out long before the research caught up.

Leonardo da Vinci slept in 20-minute bursts throughout the day. Einstein napped regularly, reportedly with a spoon in his hand so he’d wake the moment he drifted too deep. Churchill napped every single day, including during the Blitz, and credited it with doubling his productive output. LeBron sleeps 12 hours a day and calls it his most important performance tool!

(If it’s good enough for a wartime prime minister AND one of the greatest athletes alive, I’m not taking productivity advice from anyone who skips it. 😉)

Here’s what I told every athlete I coached when napping came up: the nap isn’t lazy. It’s a performance tool. And skipping it isn’t discipline, it’s just a debt to your training.

I still nap when I can. Not as much pre-fatherhood. And it’s not because I’m tired, but because I know exactly what happens to my output, my patience, my creativity, and my energy when I get it in. Our hustle culture tells us that busy equals productive, grinding equals winning, and rest equals weakness. Don’t fall for that trap!

Today is the day our internet culture gives you permission. Set a timer for 26 minutes. Find a couch. Horizontal beats a chair, dark beats light, cool beats warm. And when you wake up, you’ll feel it immediately.

Your boss can argue with NASA, Harvard, Churchill, and LeBron.

Are you a napper or a grinder who’s secretly jealous of nappers? Drop me a note or comment👇

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 for life.

The most resonant experiences of my life haven’t come from the highest highs. They’ve come when everything gets stripped back.

Crossing the finish line of my first Ironman, I felt cracked open. It was a true victory, and the dominant feeling was bittersweet. I suffered, I met my goal, and the experience was over.

We celebrated for the next 24 hours. I felt alive, capable. And at one point, I sat down on the porch and cried in a way I never had before.

I thought I had arrived. I thought the doorway was a one-time exit from the struggle.

I didn’t realize the Ironman only unlocked the door. New York was the city that forced me to walk through it.

I moved to NYC with ambition, a vision, and Henry on the way. We were building a family and a business at the same time, in a city that can completely knock you on your ass. The stress was constant. The stakes felt enormous.

I wasn’t racing. I was just trying to survive the week.

And I started to see it again. That pressure, real pressure, the kind that squeezes you hard, has a way of showing you what’s underneath. Who you actually are when comfort isn’t available.

In those early years, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I was reacting with a desperate, frantic energy. Snapping at the people I loved. Chasing wins that didn’t matter. Trying to outrun a feeling of unworthiness that followed me from the office to the home.

I didn’t want to feel those feelings. So I did whatever I could to push them away. And inevitably, they came back.

Eventually, after enough mistakes, tears, and honest desperation, I started to look more clearly at what it truly means to be healthy. Not just athletic. Intimately self-aware.

I’ve come to see that my health is a vehicle for clarity. Or, put another way, a lack of health contributes directly to being unclear. Disconnected. Unsure. Misguided.

When my body is regulated, when I’ve slept, moved, breathed, recovered, I can feel more. More present with my kids. More honest in hard conversations. More patient when things fall apart. More alive when things go right.

When I’m depleted, I’m just surviving. Managing. Getting through.

Which brings me to the last question of this 28-day experiment.

What is worth it?

Here’s where I land.

Not the goal itself. The goal is just a direction. What’s worth it is the capacity you build to feel your life fully.

The yoga class that grounds me. The early morning walks with the dogs. The difficult conversations that make connection feel real. The failures that make the wins feel earned. The moments with your kids when you’re actually there because you did the work to show up.

Health isn’t the destination. It’s the requirement.

And somewhere past the point where the plan dissolves, that’s where you find out what you’re made of.

That’s worth it.

That’s how an interesting conversation started. Three people on a Zoom call, talking about referral partners and positioning, and the right language to describe what we do.

Normal work stuff. Productive, even. Then we steered it to the latest news on layoffs.

And the conversation became something else, fast.

My colleague said:

“You can’t just swap out leadership for an algorithm. At the end of the day, you still need people who have the judgment to make the hard calls and the skill to actually steer the AI.”

I pondered the idea for the following 15 minutes. It sounds right, comforting, even until you start looking at the space underneath it.

What about everyone else? What about the people in the middle who did everything “right,” only to find the bridge they were building has been dismantled by a change in the math? Block laid off a significant chunk of its workforce this week (4k), and it wasn’t due to performance. It was a shift in the equation.

The proximity of that conversation to the “growth document” we were building felt uncomfortable. But I’m learning to stay with that kind of discomfort rather than move through it. I’m looking up at the base of a much bigger question about what we are normalizing, what we are accepting, and where we are choosing to remain numb because it’s easier than being present.

I don’t have a clean answer yet. I just have the practice. Staying engaged when the ground shifts, and finding words my boys can actually hold onto when the world feels abstract.

Day 26: Where am I quietly accepting a “change in the math” because of my privilege?

Day 27: What is one honest action I can take today (not someday) to choose presence over the comfort of numbness?

Sometimes awareness is a heavy thing to carry, but it’s also what keeps us real. Thank you for being in this space with me as I try to figure out what it looks like to be truly present in a world that is constantly offering us a way to check out.

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 endurance racing, when your body or your gear breaks down at mile 40, you don’t have the luxury of blame. There is no one else in the woods to point at. You either take full ownership of the “mess,” or you don’t make it to the finish line.

Leadership is no different, yet we’re often taught the opposite. We’re told leadership is about projected confidence, being right, or remaining “seamless.” But the most transformative lessons I’ve learned didn’t come from the wins; they came from the moments I dropped the ball and had to find the floor.

It was a game-changer for me when I realized that true authority starts with the courage to say: “I f-ed this up. I am responsible. Here is how I’m going to fix it.”

Repairing a connection is always harder than building a new one from scratch. It requires you to sit in the cold discomfort of the break without rushing to find an excuse. It’s an athletic feat of the ego. But in my experience, the payoff (the trust built through the repair) is always worth the friction.

What is currently “broken” in your world? Is there a project, a relationship, or a habit waiting for you to stop explaining the crack and start leading the repair?

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 know” more often…and leave it there.

I’d stop performing productivity. Stop curating the version of my day that sounds impressive. I’d let the messy middle stay messy, without rushing to tie it up in a lesson.

I’d trust that the things I care about don’t need justification. That rest isn’t something I have to earn. That being unimpressive for a stretch doesn’t mean I’m falling behind.

The truth is, most of the pressure I feel isn’t coming from anyone else. It’s coming from the version of me I think I’m supposed to be. The one who’s always building, always optimizing, always three steps ahead.

But when no one’s watching? I don’t want to be three steps ahead. I just want to be here.

What about you, what would shift if the audience disappeared?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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 form. Client meeting, website review, then my section: 30 days in, eyes toward 90. The data I’d pulled together last night told a clear story. Headed in the right direction. A few edges to refine. Nothing major.

By late afternoon strategy softened into happy hour. Conversation drifted to modern dating, swiping through strangers, the algorithmic search for chemistry. We laughed. Swapped stories. The kind of afternoon where the work fades and you remember these are just people in a room, enjoying each other.

But the thread all day was simpler: connection. Relationships. What it means to offer something high-stakes and high-trust. You don’t build that with tactics. You build it by showing up, again and again, until people know who you are.

Day 23: Where am I overcomplicating what’s simple?

I tend to build systems before I need them. Optimize before I’ve started. Map out twelve steps when the next one is obvious.

The review confirmed what I suspected: the work is working. The direction is right. The refinements are small. So why does my brain keep reaching for complexity?

Maybe because simple feels too easy. Maybe because I’ve spent years in roles where the answer was often more. More process, more tracking, more infrastructure.

But most of what I need to do isn’t complicated. It’s just consistent. Show up. Follow up. Stay in the conversation. Trust that relationships compound.

What’s something you’re overcomplicating right now? And what would it look like to just do the obvious next thing?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Yesterday, I was up in the air, writing about the “intimate zones” of airplanes and musing on the wild world of air travel. Now, I’m back in the humidity, the jet lag is hitting with a tough right hook, and that “vacation version” of myself feels like a guy I met once and barely remember.

It’s funny how fast the “real world” swallowed me up today. I spent a week working my way to slow, and within twelve hours of touching down, I’m clenching just to get through this analysis before 10 am tomorrow.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion hitting my body, thinking it’s 4:00 PM in Sonoma while it’s actually dinner time. My brain feels like it’s constantly buffering today. I’m realizing that the “noise” I was worried about on the plane isn’t just external. It’s the internal pressure to perform at 100% the second my feet hit the tarmac.

Day 22: Is the "noise" coming from the world, or from me?

The work is here, sure. The meeting tomorrow is real. But the frantic pace, the feeling that I have to solve everything tonight while running on little sleep, that’s a choice I’m making. And frankly, not sure how to interrupt it right now.

Maybe the real “landing” isn’t about getting the work done; it’s about giving myself permission to be tired. It’s about realizing that the world won’t fall apart if I’m not at full speed by Monday morning.

I’m calling it for tonight, making a hard stop. The content is good enough. The best thing I can do for tomorrow’s meeting is to actually sleep.

Where are you creating the noise?

My body is still in California. My mind is already in Miami, running through Monday’s meeting, the boys tomorrow, the pile of emails to follow up on. I can feel myself holding the weight before I’ve even landed.

And there’s something so off the wall about flying. We don’t talk about it much because it’s become routine, but it’s one of the oddest social rituals we’ve normalized.

You remove your shoes. You surrender your liquids over 3 oz. You remove your computers and tablets (but not your phones) from bags to run through the advanced detection. And of course, you shuffle through a security maze like ants.

Then you board a metal tube with a couple of hundred strangers and sit inches apart for hours. No one makes eye contact unless you are under the age of 5. The armrest becomes contested territory (it’s the middle seat’s God-given right). The recline button becomes a moral dilemma of timing.

It’s truly wacko.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall spent decades studying how humans use physical space, mapping what he called our “proxemic zones” in his 1966 book The Hidden Dimension. The intimate zone (zero to eighteen inches) is reserved for lovers, children, and close family. We let almost no one else that close. Yet here we are, shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers for hours, our intimate zones completely collapsed. So we adapt. We stare at screens. We build invisible walls. We pretend the person three inches away barely exists…unless of course you’re feeling the call to connect and share.

That’s where the proximity does something else. Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small found that people often share deeply personal concerns with weak ties: acquaintances and strangers rather than close friends. On a plane, you’re already bumping shoulders with someone you’ll never see again. The forced closeness tricks the nervous system into a kind of false intimacy. Psychologist Zick Rubin called this the “passing stranger effect”. We reveal more precisely because there are no consequences. The seatmate becomes a confessional booth with beverage service. Share your divorce story, your complicated parents, your fear of what comes next. You’ll both deplane and disappear.

And finally, the cabin itself provides an absurd environment. At cruising altitude, the pressurized air simulates roughly 6,000 to 8,000 feet of elevation, a mild hypoxia that research in Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine links to increased fatigue and reduced vigor. Add the low humidity, the engine drone, the complete surrender of control. You can’t leave, and you can’t change your mind. You sit there suspended, perhaps watching a movie you’d never choose on the ground, sipping a liquid treat like it’s the panacea to all airplane ailments.

And somehow, we all just welcome it as the price for the modern convenience of air travel. And frankly, it’s quite convenient!

Day 21: How do I protect what I found before it fades?

Before I land, I know what’s coming next. The noise. The logistics. The inbox. The return of all the roles I stepped away from.

I also know that vacation benefits fade fast. The Journal of Happiness Studies puts it bluntly: most people return to baseline within a week of coming home. The calm dissolves. The clarity clouds over. The pace you swore you’d keep? Gone by Wednesday.

So the question isn’t just, "How do I hold onto this feeling?" It’s what am I actually trying to protect?

Maybe it’s the pace of Sonoma, the morning blending into afternoon without abrupt transitions. Maybe it’s the way Lauren and I moved through the days, unhurried, connected, laughing at nothing. Maybe it’s the space to breathe, think, and play.

And I’m not home yet. I still have a couple of hours in this strange suspended state.

I’m going to use it. Write a few more things down. Let the landing come when it comes.

And tomorrow, when I pick up the boys and my world gets noisy again, I’ll try to remember: I don’t have to lose everything I found. I just have to protect some of those practices that got me settled into this vacation.

We did a bike tour. Fourteen miles through residential neighborhoods, vineyards, and sunshine. E-bikes, so the hills didn’t bite. We were just strolling. Taking it in the last day.

The best part might have been Dave. Our guide. Seventy years old, running bike tours for the last 18 years. He was down-to-earth with fun stories and an easy way of talking. We volleyed back and forth some short tales of life. Made the riding fly by.

We stopped a few times to learn about Sonoma's history and the wineries. And capped the riding with a full wine tour of the oldest winery in Sonoma, Buena Vista. An intriguing history to keep everyone entertained, and drinking. We kept it light—just a few sips before getting back on the bikes for the last stretch.

The day felt good being back on a bike. The sun on my face. The easy rhythm of pedaling and yammering. The kind of ride where you’re not tracking anything—just moving.

The morning blended into the afternoon. No rushing. Just flow.

Day 20: Why does it take until the end to settle in?

We are leaving CA tomorrow to come back home. And I’m just now getting comfortable.

That’s the thing about trips. About vacations. About any break from the routine. It takes days to stop carrying the weight you packed. To stop checking the invisible list. To actually arrive.

And then, right when you’ve found the rhythm, it’s time to go home.

There’s science behind this. Researchers in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that vacation happiness doesn’t climb steadily from the moment you leave. It peaks around day eight.

In the first few days, your brain is still catching up. Still scanning. Still bracing. The “core phase” of relaxation occurs in the middle 70% of the trip. Which means a five-day getaway might only give you one or two days of real rest.

Your nervous system doesn’t flip a switch. It takes time to shift from sympathetic activation (the fight-or-flight hum of daily life )into ventral vagal calm, the state where you can actually settle and connect. If you’ve been running hot for weeks and months, your body doesn’t trust the quiet right away.

Here’s what I find interesting: people with higher vagal flexibility (a well-tuned nervous system) transition into relaxation faster and recover from stress more efficiently. They move between these states with less friction. Less lag.

And vagal tone is trainable. Breathwork. Cold exposure. Movement. Co-regulation with safe people. Daily practices like the gym, a walk outside, a sauna, cold exposure, even morning quiet or time with loved ones aren’t just habits; they are pillars of an infrastructure to a healthy life. They can help land us somewhere new and actually be there sooner.

So I’m asking again: Why does it take until the end to settle in?

And also: What would it look like to arrive faster next time?

Maybe it’s about trusting that the work can wait. Maybe it’s about building the kind of infrastructure that makes transitions smoother—not just on vacation, but everywhere.

I’m going to remind myself of this pace back in Miami. Methodical. Intentional. The memory of how it felt to just flow. I’ll write about it in my journal, and I’ll leave it mentioned here for safe measures, too.

We’ll see how long it lasts. But at least now I know what I’m reaching for.

Then out to Jack London State Park. I knew his books: Call of the Wild, White Fang, but not much else. Turns out the man was obsessed with farming. Built a whole life out here in Sonoma. Died young, at 40, still building.

The land felt gritty. Not polished or preserved for tourists. Just honest. We hiked two and a half miles to London Lake around his old cottage and farmland, imagining what it took to carve something out of this soil a hundred years ago.

After that, an olive oil tasting. Educational and interesting. I was hoping for a bit more on the history and science of farming olives. It was more about the industry as a whole and the individual olive farm. Then we hit lunch at El Molino; authentic, unhurried. The Dungeness crab tostada was the treat. The kind of dish you close your eyes for.

We had a choice to make for the afternoon. The hotel spa or the longer hike we’d skipped that morning. I checked out the spa. Nothing special. And we probably weren’t coming back to this park again.

So we chose the hike. Three and a half miles to an Ancient Redwood tucked away at the end of the trail.

The tree was 2,000 years old. Easily one of the most magical things I’ve ever seen. The size. The shape. The way the branches swallowed the sky. We couldn’t even see the top. Just stood there looking up, necks craned, trying to take in something that doesn’t fit inside a frame.

Day 19: What’s worth going out of the way for?

We could have done the spa. It was easier. Closer. Already paid for. But we would have missed the tree.

I think about this a lot. The things I almost skip because they take more effort. The detours I talk myself out of because the default is simpler.

But the default rarely leaves me standing in front of something 2,000 years old, wondering how many people have stood in that tree’s shadow, feeling small in the best possible way.

Some things are worth the extra miles. The longer route. The choice that doesn’t make sense on paper but makes perfect sense in your chest.

For you, what’s worth going out of the way for?

Not everything is. That’s the point. But some things are. And the only way to find them is to leave the easy path once in a while.

What are you almost skipping that might be the thing you remember?

We’re back at the hotel now. Epsom salt bath. Wine. Snacks. The good trip continues.

We stayed in bed late. Breakfast came to us. No alarms. No agenda. Just coffee and covers and the slow unfolding of a morning with nowhere to be.

Eventually we made our way out. A trail up to the Sonoma Valley Overlook. Beautiful weather. The kind of hike where you stop talking for a while and just walk. The valley stretched out below us, vineyards stitched into the hills, the sky finally clear after days of gray.

We came back into town for lunch. Then back to the hotel so Lauren could have a massage. I used the time to catch up on emails; batch handling the things that had been piling up. A nice window to clear the deck.

Afterwards we slipped into the hot tub together. Steam rising. The day stretched with ease.

Now we’re back in the room. Getting ready slowly. The highlight dinner still ahead.

Day 18: What’s the difference between being there and being present?

I’d love to tell you I was fully present every moment today. That my mind never wandered. That I didn’t check my phone or drift into a thought about work or home.

But I’m human. I still get distracted. I still catch myself somewhere else even when I want to be here.

The difference isn’t perfection. It’s noticing. It’s coming back.

Being there is showing up. Being present is returning (again and again) when your attention slips.

Today I did both. Showed up. Drifted. Came back. Stayed longer than I left.

So I’m asking: What’s the difference between being there and being present?

It’s not about never getting distracted. It’s about what you do when you notice you’re gone.

When was the last time you caught yourself drifting and actually came back? Not perfectly. Just honestly.

Heading out to enjoy dinner now.

Tuesday I’m in Sonoma, biting into a tart with caviar on top, and my whole body is saying yes for the first time in days.

I don’t know exactly when I turned the corner. Sometime between the probiotics and the first tasting today, my stomach decided to cooperate. A few unglamorous releases along the way. And then, relief. The actual thing. Appetite back. Energy back. The ability to be present without monitoring every sensation.

We did two wine tours today. Intimate. The kind where you learn about soil and fermentation and the families who’ve been doing this for generations, and somehow all that knowing makes the wine taste different.

Lauren and I moved through the day the way you do when there’s nothing to manage. Inside jokes. Shared looks. The shorthand you build over years that doesn’t translate to anyone else. It was a really enjoyable day.

Day 17: What does relief feel like?

It’s not just the bad thing ending. It’s what comes back when the bad thing ends.

Today it was flavor. Laughter. Ease. The ability to be with Lauren instead of beside her while managing something.

I’ve been waiting for this feeling since we landed. And today it finally arrived.

How about you? What does relief feel like in your body, not in your head?

When was the last time something lifted and you actually felt the shift? Not just knew it. Felt it.

I’m in wine country. Stomach settled. Heart full. Finally here.

I had a picture of this trip. Fully recovered. Full appetite. Full energy. Ready to eat my way through wine country, be present for every tasting, and show up as the best version of myself for Lauren’s 40th.

I do this a lot. Build an ideal state in my head before I arrive anywhere. The perfect workout. The perfect meal. The perfect way to show up for the people I love. And when reality doesn’t match the picture, there’s a voice that whispers: you’re falling short.

It’s exhausting, if I’m honest. Measuring the distance between what is and what I thought should be.

Sunday. The drive out of San Francisco took about an hour. Easy. Quiet. Light rain on the windshield the whole way.

We stopped once for the vista lookout on the north side of the Golden Gate. Damp and cool, the bridge disappearing into fog behind us, wine country waiting ahead. It felt like a threshold.

I was relieved to leave. Not because San Francisco wasn’t good, it was. But my body has been fighting me for days, and I was anxious to feel better for this part of the trip. The part I’d been looking forward to most.

We came straight to the hotel, then killed time with lunch and a wander around Sonoma Square. Warm and charming with a little touristy splash. Historic buildings. Small shops. The kind of place that doesn’t ask much of you.

And now, we’re back at the hotel, slipping into the hot tub before dinner. Rain still falling lightly outside. Steam rising off the water. Lauren next to me. Her 40th birthday weekend is unfolding exactly as it should, even if I’m only at 70 percent.

Day 16: What if good enough is actually good enough?

What if I don’t need to reach the ideal state to be present? To enjoy? To show up?

What if this version: tired, tender, still recovering, is enough?

Where are you holding out for the ideal? What would shift if you let go of the picture and showed up with what you actually have?

I’m in the hot tub, holding steady with less than a full tank. And that's enough for today.

That’s been true since I was young. It’s part of how I see myself, like a fact I don’t question.

Then a stomach bug humbles me, and I remember I'm not invincible.

I’d been looking forward to eating my way through this city. San Francisco is in the top three for me when it comes to food. I’d already picked our dinner spots before we left. Breakfast at El Mil Amores (highly recommended) set the tone this morning: amazing flavors, authentic cuisine, and Bad Bunny humming from the kitchen. Everything I’d hoped for.

Then we walked. Seven miles through the city. Early on, the sun kept playing peek-a-boo with the clouds. Jacket on. Jacket off. On again. We made our way to the top of Lombard Street—the crooked part with all the switchbacks—and looked out over the city. By late lunch, the sky had made up its mind. Grayer. Wetter. Colder. We switched from walking to driving.

I wanted to feel like myself. But my stomach had other plans. Not terrible, just off. A low murmur that wouldn’t quit. And when my body won’t cooperate in a food city, it stings a little extra.

Day 15: Who am I when my body doesn’t cooperate?

Here’s what I’m realizing: I’ve built a lot of who I am around being strong and healthy. It’s how I show up as a dad. As a partner. As someone who helps other people with their bodies.

So when that thing stops working—even for a few days—it shakes me more than it probably should.

So I’m asking: Who am I when my body doesn’t cooperate?

And maybe bigger than that: Who am I without the story I’ve always told about myself?

We all have these stories. The smart one. The funny one. The reliable one. The strong one. They’re useful until life reminds us we’re more than one thing.

Check in. What’s a story you tell about yourself? And what happens when it gets challenged?

I'm doing my best. Taking it carefully. Probiotics. Hydrating well. Trusting the process even when my body is taking its time.

Maybe that’s enough for today.