The most surprising thing I’ve learned about health and fitness this year shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Training plans work. You just have to actually follow them.
Historically, that’s been my problem.
I’ve always been deeply competitive with myself. If I showed up to a session (especially something hard) I felt like I owed it everything. If I went out for a run and wasn’t dying at the end, then what was the point? Had I really done anything at all?
Effort was the point. Exhaustion was the receipt.
What’s changed isn’t my interest in running or fitness - it’s my relationship to restraint. For the first time, I’m following an actual plan. And for the first time, I’m listening when the plan tells me to hold back.
Having recruited ChatGPT as a coach, having it explicitly shame me and say, No — recovery matters. Getting a light run tomorrow is more important than destroying yourself today, has been a genuine game-changer. Not because it’s novel advice, but because I finally stopped negotiating with it.
Restraint, it turns out, is the name of the game.
The cliché is that life is a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve heard it a thousand times, nodded along, and then maybe dialled it back to 95% (for three days). But actually training for a marathon forces the metaphor to become real. You start to understand that pacing isn’t a nice-to-have… it’s everything.
Sure, if you reaching the fine stretch and you’ve still got something in the tank, go for it. That’s earned. But the sensible thing, the thing that actually works, is the negative split - finishing stronger than you started. You don’t prove anything by going out too hard early. You just make the rest of the race harder than it needs to be (and risk exploding along the way).
Once you see that clearly in your body, it starts bleeding into everything else.
I’ve started thinking about my relationship with my wife differently. Not as chapters to grind through or months to survive, but as seasons in a much longer game.
The goal isn’t to “win”.
The goal is to keep playing the game.
Forever.
An infinite game.
The same shift has shown up in my work. I’m learning (slowly and imperfectly) that applying attention in the right places matters far more than overcommitting everywhere. Chipping away, every damn day, at the boring things builds steady progress against the plan. Scatter-shotting in every direction and calling it ambition, does not.
Heroic effort is seductive. Consistency is effective.
We tell our kids the story of the tortoise and the hare, as if it’s some quaint moral fable. Go slow to go fast. Don’t burn out. Be patient. It turns out, the lesson doesn’t get easier with age, ignoring it just gets more expensive.
I don’t have a dramatic conclusion here. No transformation montage. No final boss defeated.
Just this:
The work is the work.
And the work speaks for itself.
If you can put aside the need to empty the tank every day - in training, in relationships, in life - and focus instead on pacing well enough to keep going, everything gets better.
Not all at once. But one day you look back and realize how far you’ve come.
