What Turning 50 Actually Taught Me
Somewhere in my forties I noticed that the reference point for most of my decisions had always been outside me. Status, what other people thought, what I assumed they expected from me. Turning fifty didn’t suddenly change that, but it made the direction obvious....
Sleep Debt and Presence: The Real Connection
Presence sounds like a parenting topic, or a relationship one. It’s really a sleep topic — and a predictable one, once you know what to look for. I only found the sleep debt and presence connection by tracing my worst moments backward, not by planning to look...
Time in Bed Versus Sleep: What 9 Years Taught Me
About nine years ago I decided it was time to take quadrathlon seriously, and up to that point just finishing had already felt like success — but I knew my competitors were training fifteen-plus hours a week while I was under ten, and with a baby son at home and a...
Mental Load and Recovery: What My Training Partner Taught Me
A few years ago I was looking for somewhere to kayak indoors in Budapest over winter. Some kayak clubs have these pools built to mimic real paddling, and at one of them, talking to the manager, I found out a dragonboat team from my own village trained there twice a...
I Was Just Too Tired to Show It
I try to keep my training load fairly consistent, whatever the number happens to be that year. Some years it’s close to ten hours a week, in quieter years six to eight, and in the more motivated ones fourteen or more. The number itself isn’t particularly...
I Forgot Why I Was Racing. The Race Reminded Me.
It’s never one thing. A warm night that bites into my sleep can already knock down my motivation for the next day. A hard training session where the effort felt bigger than it should have. A video or article I put out that gets almost no reaction. An argument...
I Lied to My Watch, and It Cost Me the Run
I was exhausted that day. Training had been a bit harder than usual, my appetite was bigger, and instead of doing the one piece of work that actually mattered, I scrolled reels for an hour, half-dreaming about other people’s excitement instead of getting on with...
I Didn’t Choose Recovery. Circumstances Chose It for Me.
Early spring 2020, I was in Italy for an ice-dragon boat championship, racing on a frozen lake in the mountains with teams from across Europe — a strange sport, dragonboats modified with blades, paddled with a rubber tool that looks more like a toilet plunger than an...