Wrote a bit about running in the heat, over at The Soft Run:
We’re human, and we’re squishy (sometimes soggy). We’re made of red blood cells, not slabs of steel that arrange nicely on a blue-print.
Check it out here.
Month: June 2021
Not All Runs Will Be Blissful
New piece for The Soft Run:
A good run is like a good day; it’s not pure bliss, but a bunch of good moments all added together.
Check out the full piece here.
As much as I want a run to wash away all my problems, and be this big glowing orb of joy in a world filled with grimness, it’s just usually not the case. Not the entire run, of course. There’s usually a mile, or a section, or a hill, or a stretch, where the run feels great, effortless, and without bounds.
It comes, it goes.
I’ve had one run that I can remember, a small local 5K, where it all came together. Came in second overall. It was nuts. But that one run is a needle in a haystack of 1000s of runs since 2016.
And the wild part is this – it’s still worth it. I moved from third to second in like, that last 500′ or so. It was wild.
It took a whole lot of ugly, bad, gross runs to get there. I guess I’ll keep going.
BLE-EP_Meat Beat Manifesto_Bo Bots
Random Bandcamp discovery while searching for some beats to zone out to while working. Dirty drum loop, shaky percussion, and lots of random samples that sing together like a choir. Love this.
Yeah, Whoop Changed My Life
From my recent newsletter:
“The runs got so soft in the past few months that they stopped. They all felt hard. I ran all winter, but every effort started to feel like I’d taken the last three months off.”
Turned out I wasn’t sleeping great. After I got my Whoop band in April, I was sort of shocked at my sleep scores. Like, hmmm… maybe it’s wrong. But then I tried a sleep mask, and seriously, my sleep has been fantastic ever since (see how dramatic the change was here).
I’m paying more attention to the timing of my runs or bike rides, as they relate to dinner, as it relates to bed time; the shower, doing dishes, winding down.
SLEEP.
If we don’t recover, we don’t build. We don’t get stronger, wiser, smarter. Our brains need the rest, our muscles need to rebuild.
I mean, maybe the Whoop changed my life.
I was demoralized, bummed… the thing I enjoy so much (running) was now dragging me down back in April. Now here we are, early June, and I just had my first 20 mile week since mid March!
I tried out Whoop from a friend’s recommendation on Twitter. It was a free month, with a six month commitment (at $30/mo). If you want to try it out, use my referral code: https://join.whoop.com/#/B37605
You can also sign up for my Substack newsletter, The Soft Run, here.
Any questions – get in touch!
Too Soon
Everything just feels rushed right now. It’s not the opening of “everything” that scares me, but the whole “get back to normal.”
A client mentioned that it’d be great to get a week or so ahead of schedule, and I agree! But… there’s this haze of 27,000 people that died from COVID in PA alone. The haze of loved ones choosing not to get vaccinated. The fog of the insurrection that’s just been swept under the rug. The strain of mass shootings, police brutality, and the multiple laws being passed in the name of “election security.”
Like, it took us a minute to recover from 9/11. But all of the above? Take an hour to grieve, ponder, reflect – we got a Zoom call presentation to deliver tomorrow!
The mass death, the ambient doom, the ever present MEHHHH… but hey, let’s talk about getting back to the office, right? Raise the minimum wage? Nah, but hey, why should my latte take more than five minutes to make!