Create something you’re proud of with AI

I think everyone is aware of AI slop these days or has at least dealt with it. It is that hot garbage that someone quickly creates that sounds great but really has very little substance or is poor quality.

I personally think it’s great that folks are using AI all over the place. AI is a massive enabler for society. However, what isn’t great is when folks let that ease also let them do things poorly… and then they put their name on it. Your name on poor quality work can seriously damage your personal brand.

This recent article from HBR about AI slop is worth a read; you can sign up for free to get it:

To get right to the bit on just how damaging slop is to your reputation, you can check out the BetterUp survey results that they reference. It is unsurprisingly brutal. If you get caught putting your name on slop, you basically have burned a bridge.

None of that is shocking. If you put your name on something that sucks, especially if it is for work, ya, your coworkers aren’t going to be happy about it. You’ve successfully made your problem their problem. That doesn’t have anything to do with AI. AI just makes it easier.

Your work feeds your brand

I really like Arnold’s Sell, Sell, Sell chapter in his book Be Useful; I love that book, which is why I keep blogging about it. That one talks about more than just managing your personal brand but I think it is relevant here too. He really drives home the point that you have to be actively involved in advocating for things you want others to know about; you can’t just wish it into being. That means developing your personal brand is just part of the work.

A personal brand isn’t limited to your professional life. It is composed of all the things you want people to know about you. So that doesn’t mean everything; just the parts you’re proud of. The other parts are still important but they aren’t necessarily part of what showcases you. You aren’t hiding anything or misleading folks. You’re just not distracting them.

Your brand is one of the most valuable things to build in your career. A solid one is built from what you do consistently. No matter what you say, it does come down to what you have done and what you are doing; it can be anything. What you do and how you are doing it forms the foundation of your brand. That is the substance that your brand stands on.

So when you use AI to create a bunch of slop and stick your name on it… ya, you are doing a number on your brand.

You still have to own the work

Work work work; my favorite chapter. There is no escaping it. If your name is on it, then you own it, especially the quality. There is no outsourcing to AI.

Of course, I think we should all be using AI. It is how you work with it and how you maintain ownership over that work that is key. That does mean when you are using AI, you have to change the ways you normally do that work. It is very common to think about what you need to do as a series of steps, like an assembly line. One step after another, adding more and more to the end product until it is done. Here is where things can go wrong with AI; any step you give AI in that assembly line it will own. When it owns a step, you will have lost some of that ownership in the end product.

To keep ownership over the work, all the steps, you got to give up the assembly line. Go back to the model of being a craftsman and have AI be your workshop assistant. In the craftsman model, it is more than just having ownership over each step; you are focusing on doing each one well, striving to do it better than before. You can work with your AI workshop assistant on each step by converting them into iterative loops where you go over each detail making adjustments until you are happy. In my last article, I talk about these loops that I use in my personal writing.

In a well designed loop, you’re contributing the core content: the thinking; the creative decisions; and the judgment which ultimately pushes the quality. The AI is reviewing, identifying issues, and finding gaps. It is challenging your thinking and recommending possible adjustments and additions.

This is a different way of working because you no longer have a sequential flow. Rather, you are now iterating as you go. AI is helping you think more deeply about what you are creating; helping you obsess over the details. Push the limits.

A return to craftsmanship

I really do believe that AI is the great enabler of our time. I believe in craftsmanship. Whatever it is that you do, you should do it to the best of your abilities; strive to master it. When people are mastering their craft, most of the time it isn’t about speed. It is about quality. It is about hitting a new level; constantly looking to do things better. That is what I find is so valuable about AI. You are able to iterate so much faster with it; going over and over each little detail until you are satisfied.

We are all using AI more and more; at work, at home. It is part of our everyday lives now. Sure, there are lots of times where people will just ask AI to do something because it is easy to get something that is ok. But just how valuable is that thing to you? Are you ok with just ok? When it comes to the things that are truly important to you, when you care a lot about the end result, ok isn’t going to cut it.

As a craftsperson where you take a lot of pride in your work, look at how you can add iterative loops with AI to help you scrutinize those details. AI isn’t doing the work; you are. It is just helping you collect, organize, and refine your ideas, your thinking. With each loop, you go deeper with those ideas and thoughts. See how deep you can go and if you can hit a new level you haven’t before.

AI gives us the opportunity to abandon our assembly lines and to go back to being craftspeople where we can take pride in our work. Be proud of your craft.

We have to relearn how to write because of AI

Like it or not, we all have to relearn how to write. AI has changed the game. More precisely, it has changed the mental models we have when it comes to writing. The old ways still work, but if you aren’t using AI, you are missing out.

At the bottom of this article, I’m sharing my current AI setup: the agent I use along with my project instructions. It’s taken me about a year and a half of messing around to get here. That’s when I decided to learn how to use AI to help me write by rebooting my blog. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take a year to learn how to use AI. That’s just how long I’ve been using it to write articles and evolving my process along the way.

I like blogging for the sake of blogging. I’m not trying to be an influencer; I refuse to have ads and I hate comment threads. It gives me space to really reflect on things happening in my life and share what I’ve learned. That sharing has always been important to me because I like the idea of passing along knowledge and wisdom. It also sets a bar for my own reflection: it has to be good enough to share, or at least not seem crazy. So I gave myself a goal of publishing one article a month and started working through my stack of ideas sitting in my Apple Notes.

Rebooting my blog also put skin in the game for me. There was no way I was going to let AI slop be attached to my name. No one needs that. More importantly, slop is literally the opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish with AI. Writing helps us think more deeply and communicate that thinking to other people. AI can help with both, but if you use it to bypass that thinking, you’ve bypassed the point. You still have to do the work.

Actually figuring it out with AI

I’m sharing this bit because frankly AI is going to change how we do almost anything that requires us to work on or with information. So seeing how I figured it out for my writing might give you some insights into how you can do it too.

It is important to understand conceptually that AI is an interpretation machine. Just as you use a calculator as an adding machine, you can use AI to interpret things. Once it has interpreted something, you can ask it to take action based on that interpretation. If AI doesn’t understand the pic you gave it, your instructions, or even what you are trying to say, then no matter what, the next thing it does will be wrong.

As for my writing, I am talking about my experiences, my thinking, and my opinions. These are things I have to make sure the AI interprets correctly. Once it has that interpretation right, I can get it to help organize and structure them into something resembling a blog article.

That is why the distinction between AI writing for you and AI helping you write matters. This isn’t specific to blogging. For any document, the content you are trying to communicate is yours, and to use AI effectively, it needs to be helping you communicate it.

My early AI workflow started with a large brain dump that it organized into buckets that I later made into sections and then formed into an article. It was a good start, but it put a lot of emphasis on how good and complete my initial rant was; you really had to get on your soap box with it. Over roughly a year and a half, I’ve continued adapting my workflow and the instructions for AI, all aimed at improving its interpretation of my ideas.

My current process

The AI setup I have with ChatGPT and my instructions models this process. Well, mostly, I am still working out the last bit. Right now I have two phases and each has its own iterative loop.

Phase 1: Brain Vomit

  • Collect
    • Here I am just getting all my thoughts down on paper using the AI. I am not really worried about being super organized about them. I am just putting down the ideas I have, even if they aren’t fully formed. Writing down an idea helps me develop it and work it out by reflecting on things. The AI helps by asking questions about how things are related and whether they are relevant.
  • Organize
    • Once I am done with my brain dump, I work with the AI to group together the related ideas and find the main point I am trying to drive home; it loves to call it the spine. I don’t always agree with how it does things and I definitely iterate with it. It is this iteration that causes me to flesh out those half baked ideas as well as to come up with more. So I go back and forth between collecting and organizing, eventually sharpening the main point I am trying to drive home.

My current instructions combine Collect and Organize into Phase 1. I thought about breaking them up but because I go back and forth between collecting and organizing, I am happy with them being together. What comes out of Phase 1 is the skeleton of my article; my key ideas organized into rough sections.

Phase 2: Wax On Wax Off

Now I go section by section and put some words to those ideas. I end up in another iterative loop that looks like this:

  • Write
    • I look at the ideas I have in the section and in a single pass I just write out what I mean by them. That means not all the ideas stay and the ones that do I extend, putting down exactly what I mean and anchoring them with personal experiences; I rarely offer opinions that aren’t based on some experience I’ve had. Data driven til the end.
  • Polish
    • Now I get the AI to look at my ravings and see if what I put down makes sense given the ideas I originally had and if I am still sticking with the original point of the article. It tightens up the section, not just grammatically, but by checking whether I am being too ranty or not providing enough detail. I don’t just accept what it comes back with, but I do acknowledge where the quality of my section is poor due to a lack of focus. I end up writing more and it keeps polishing.
    • In the cases where I end up having another main point I am trying to make but it just doesn’t fit, I am able to set it aside for a future article.

Once I have the sections done, then I go into the last step of the process:

  • Flow
    • Now I have to make sure the sections logically flow together to make a sensible article. I’m currently working on getting better at this step. Even when I have good sections, I still might have too many ideas and I am trying to figure out what to pare down while still smoothing things out. This is hard for me because cutting ideas I really like is painful.

It’s pretty likely that I will end up separating Flow out of Phase 2 into a phase of its own, but I don’t quite have the process locked down yet.

Give my writing harness a go

I have been using ChatGPT on the Plus plan so I can connect it to Google Drive. That lets me create Google Docs that ChatGPT can write to. These are my instructions that you can copy and paste into your own project. In theory they should work with Claude, but I haven’t tested it with its models.

# Objective
My blog is about mentorship and personal growth. I will also write about marathon running and playing musical instruments as forms of personal achievement that parallel my career as a software engineer.
I want my articles to be useful to people who find them inspiring, including people who may not already agree with my perspective. Articles should not simply describe my thoughts and opinions.
Each article should leave the reader with something meaningful they can apply themselves. The final section should include one or two concrete actions the reader can take.
# Core tenets
## Authorial control
I am the author of these articles. I control the content, ideas, arguments, experiences, conclusions, and tone.
ChatGPT's role is to act as an editor, organizer, and thinking partner. It should not replace my voice or independently author the article.
* Preserve my meaning and tone
* Help organize my points so they logically flow
* Identify gaps, repetition, unnecessary verbosity, and awkward transitions
* Do not substantially rewrite my ideas or change my argument without discussing it with me
* When editing my writing, make the smallest changes necessary to improve clarity, concision, and flow
* When there is a choice between making something sound more polished and preserving how I naturally communicate, preserve my voice
## Ask rather than fill
If an argument, transition, example, motivation, or conclusion seems to be missing, ask me about it rather than inventing it.
Questions should help me discover and articulate what I actually think.
ChatGPT may suggest complementary ideas, perspectives, connections, or questions that could strengthen the article, but those suggestions must remain clearly separate from my own ideas until I decide to incorporate them.
Do not silently fill gaps with ideas that I did not provide.
## Do not race ahead
Work on the current stage of the article and do not move ahead without my approval.
If we are organizing ideas, do not start drafting prose.
If we are working on one section, do not start rewriting later sections.
If a potentially useful change belongs to a later stage, point it out rather than making the change.
I should remain in control of when we move from organizing to writing and when we move from one section to another.
# Article workflow
## Start with the Google Doc
Each article will be written in a Google Doc that I create.
At the beginning of a new article, first ask me for the Google Doc link.
Once I provide it, use the document as the canonical version of the article and understand what is already there before proposing changes.
## Phase 1: Organize the ideas
Before drafting prose, help me determine what I am trying to say and how my ideas should be organized.
Start with the ideas, experiences, arguments, observations, and rough notes I provide.
During this phase:
* Capture my points without turning them into polished prose
* Determine which ideas belong together
* Propose which section each idea belongs in
* Look for the logical progression between sections
* Identify repetition between ideas
* Identify gaps or connections that I may want to explore
* Identify ideas that may deserve more or less emphasis
* Ask questions when additional thinking from me would strengthen the article
* Suggest complementary ideas or perspectives when useful, while clearly identifying them as suggestions rather than my ideas
The goal of this phase is an organized outline of what I want to say, not a draft of the article.
Continue iterating on the organization until I explicitly approve it.
## Phase 2: Write section by section
Once I approve the organization, work through the article one section at a time.
I will normally provide the initial wording or rewrite for a section.
For each section:
* Preserve my ideas, meaning, and tone
* Improve logical flow
* Smooth awkward language and transitions
* Reduce unnecessary verbosity
* Remove repetition
* Prefer concise language where it communicates the same idea
* Avoid making the writing sound generically polished or unlike me
* Do not introduce significant new arguments while editing
* Ask rather than fill when something important appears to be missing
* Leave wording alone when it is already working rather than rewriting it simply to make it different
* Prefer small, reviewable edits over rewriting the entire section
* When showing me a proposed revision, bold the words or passages you changed so I can easily distinguish my original writing from ChatGPT's edits
Show me the proposed revision and allow us to iterate on it until I am happy.
Do not move on to the next section until I am satisfied with the current section.
# Working with the Google Doc
ChatGPT is allowed to write and edit the Google Doc, but I retain control over what is written to it.
Before making a change to the document:
* Show me exactly what you propose to add, replace, or change
* Wait for my approval
* Make only the approved change
* Do not overwrite other material while making the change
* Do not make additional cleanup edits that I have not approved
The Google Doc is the canonical version of the article. I may edit it directly at any time as I work through my own thinking and writing.
When we are actively collaborating on a change, use the conversation to discuss, organize, draft, and review the change before ChatGPT writes it to the document. ChatGPT should not make unapproved changes to the document.
Because I may make changes directly in the Google Doc between conversations or edits, always read the current document before proposing or making changes rather than assuming the version from earlier in the conversation is still current.
# Article structure
Articles should generally be about 4 to 5 sections long.
The structure does not need to be identical for every article, but it should generally accomplish the following:
* The first section establishes the context for the article
* The middle sections explore why the subject matters to me and, where appropriate, to different communities
* The middle sections explain what I have done, learned, observed, or changed
* The middle sections explore the impact on me and potentially on other people or communities
* The final section gives the reader at least one meaningful action they can take
The structure should follow the ideas rather than forcing every article into an identical template.
# Calls to action
Every article should end with at least one meaningful call to action for the reader.
Prefer one or two actions that someone could realistically take after reading the article.
The actions should emerge naturally from the argument of the article rather than feeling like generic motivational advice.
When the appropriate action is unclear, ask me what I want the reader to do rather than inventing a conclusion.
# Formatting
## Section headings
* Use bolded phrases
* Capitalize only the first letter of the phrase
* Do not end headings with punctuation
## Bullet points
* Do not end bullet points with punctuation
# Punctuation
* Never use em dashes

And that’s it. You can try out writing the way I am. I’ve been writing this way at work too for my technical docs and it’s been working really well. I find them easier because with tech docs, most of the content comes from reference documents. The challenge is that there is a lot of reference material and it is usually all over the place.

What I am really excited to see is how things pan out with the creative fiction writing that my friend M does. I recently got her into using AI in this iterative way and so far, it seems to be a bit of a game changer for her. I think creative writing is a lot more difficult because the key source of content comes from the writer’s head, so the process of collecting and organizing ideas is quite critical. I am betting that as M starts to really lean into using AI, her instructions are going to be even more complex and she’ll probably need multiple projects or maybe even sub-agents to manage things.

A big takeaway from how I’ve approached using AI is that I am leveraging it primarily to improve the quality of my work instead of opting for speed. I am not entirely sold on speed being a good thing when it comes at the expense of quality. My instructions are extremely protective of originality; the content and tone have to come from me for the article to be something I want to put my name on. This kind of thinking is why my other friend N has won me over to including my original running pics alongside the AI-generated ones I make.

My AI setup and instructions, the harness I have for writing, make higher quality work more repeatable, which I ultimately believe is a great reason for us to leverage AI and relearn how to write.

Why I choose volume over speed

As a runner, I run a lot of miles. Like a lot more than you would expect for someone that is running marathons just for fun. At the moment, I am pushing past 70 a week. I am focusing on doing higher mileage over speed so I can comfortably do these races.

Most who sign up for a marathon or half are looking for a challenge. They want to accomplish something meaningful. They want to cross that finish line feeling strong. They want to thrive, not just survive.

Unfortunately, there often ends up being a mismatch between that goal and the training plans that people get. A lot of traditional plans are designed to get folks through at a specific time so it is common for them to include pace targets and tempo workouts. There is nothing wrong with those plans and they can absolutely improve performance. They just aren’t for me. When you are focusing on time or pace, you stop listening to your body. That is where you can get hurt by pushing too hard. You can also get burnt out by chasing a number that you can’t ever seem to hit.

That is why I don’t care about speed. I care about being able to run everyday. That means I focus on being injury free and recovering quickly. I strive for durability. Distance over speed.

Becoming a durable runner

This approach takes a lot of time. Slow and steady; out there grinding. I am exchanging speed for durability. Most of my training runs are easy ones. I love sitting in zone 2 and seeing how far I can go. My gym workouts and hot yoga are there for mobility and recovery. The only tempo runs I consistently do are continuous ones. I do them to improve my zone 2 pace so I can go further.

It took me years to build this high mileage base and I am still trying to add to it. The bulk of my miles are easy ones; spending a lot of time on long runs. I mix up where I do them on the weekends to explore. I am always on the look out for fun ways to get my miles. I love volunteering at races where I can do the pre run or course sweep. Whenever I travel for work, I always try to find a new trail to hit.

To be durable, you have to do more than just miles. I put time in at the gym focusing on posture, stability, and injury prevention. I use hot yoga sessions for mobility and recovery. You have to do these types of workouts if you want to run high mileage without breaking down.

Living inside a fatigue block

One aspect of my training that I particularly enjoy is that I am almost always carrying some level of fatigue. I am almost never fresh. That sounds like a bad thing but I think of it differently. It is like wearing weighted clothes. My body is constantly adapting to the workload because the workload never completely disappears. As a result, I rarely know just how fit I am.

Races are always a surprise for me. When race week arrives, I taper. The weights comes off. Race day shows me the progress I’ve made. Every taper feels like Christmas morning because I get to see what the consistent mileage under fatigue has built. Sometimes the result is faster. Sometimes it is not. Either way, I love this process because it makes every race a celebration.

Investing in the grind

The biggest benefit of this approach is sustainability. I enjoy running. I enjoy spending hours on trails. I enjoy the grind.

Racking up weeks, months, and years of consistent mileage lets you always be race ready. I’ve completely leaned into that; always being ready for a half or full. Will it be a killer time each time? LOL… no. I do know, however, I can get out there and just grind it out.

That said, doing high volume is having positive impacts on my races. Slowly I am chipping away at my race times. It is cool to see it. Consistency compounds.

Build your training around your goals

One of the best things happening in running today is that more people are participating than ever. It’s bonkers just how many people are simply getting out there and getting it done. Everyone has their own reasons for running. Some want podiums. Some want Boston qualifiers. Some want adventures. Some want community. Some simply want an hour of peace before work.

These are all valid goals. What is important is to put your goals at the center of your training, not as an outcome. If you love getting easy mileage like me, then don’t train like you are trying for a PB at every race. The best training plan has to support your goals. It is one you can follow consistently for years rather than months.

Think about your goals. Are they your own or someone else’s? Keep yours and discard the rest. Are they at the center of your training plan? Make adjustments until they are.

My Favorite Habit Stack Is Hot Yoga

I’ve written a couple posts discussing chapters from Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This one is about Working Your Ass Off, probably my favorite because I love doing the work for my goals. I love that grind where you are making progress.

I think everyone has heard the saying “work smarter, not harder” and I hate it. I think it should be “work smarter and harder”. The whole smarter not harder concept is about finding better and more efficient ways to get things done. However, these efficiencies don’t mean you don’t have to work as hard. Figuring out a better way to do something means you can operate at a higher level; you can do more and make more progress towards your goals, your vision.

Habit stacking is a way for you to make better use of your time by doing two or more things, that make progress, at the same time. There is only so much time in the day to get things done. Habit stacking is maximizing the use of that time. That’s when you’re really working your ass off. Not wasting time is the easy stuff. We all know what a waste of time looks like and committing to not doing them is how you deal with it. Habit stacking is trickier because you are already doing something productive with your time. Now you are trying to find something else to do at the same time without screwing that up.

That is why I love hot yoga so much. It is by far my favorite habit stack for running.

Heat and mobility

I added hot yoga to my training almost a year ago and have been super happy with it. I tried it before a few times and enjoyed it but it never stuck; it wasn’t something I was considering for running. This time around, I saw it as a habit stack and it immediately snapped into focus.

It’s a no brainer that mobility is important for running.

  • Helps stride efficiency
  • Reduces risk of injury
  • Improves balance and body awareness

Yoga is a great source for mobility exercises.

Heat training is also surprisingly very helpful. Sauna sessions is a way to do it however hot yoga gets me both in a single session; that is a huge time saver. I have always been able to justify the time spent on mobility; I could never fit in regular sauna time though.

Heat gives you runner’s blood

Heat exposure, whether from a sauna or a hot yoga room, drives real adaptations that matter for runners. The biggest win is that it will increase plasma volume by 4-15%. That is the liquid part of your blood. Bumping it up improves cardiovascular efficiency. In other words, your body is more effective at delivering oxygen throughout your system.

So by changing the location of where I do stretching, I get this win for free. That is why I love hot yoga as a running habit stack.

Make more space with habit stacking

The bigger idea here isn’t just hot yoga. It’s where else you can stack two or more habits that align with your vision. Don’t forget that what you do needs to support at least one of your goals otherwise you won’t be stacking; that means watching cartoons while on the treadmill doesn’t count.

I have two main areas where I try to habit stack. The first, of course, is my running. Here my body is engaged but my mind is relatively free. I’ll pretty frequently plug into an audiobook or podcast for professional development. I also love working my way through language phrase books which I have ambitions of helping me have deeper experiences when traveling.

The second is at work. When working on a project, I am always looking to create mentorship moments at the same time. I mean if I am going to get something done, I want others to learn at the same time. That helps engineers grow while at the same time empowers teams to deal with similar projects and challenges in the future. It’s a win win for everyone involved and ultimately helps build a stronger engineering community.

Being successful at working your ass off isn’t just about banging out hours. It’s about maximizing the value of each hour you’re putting in.

Find your habit stack

If you take a look at the things you regularly do, you’ll find lots of opportunities to habit stack. A key to getting started is that it needs to be a thing you enjoy doing. Trying to learn to habit stack with something you hate is hard because you’ll get distracted by hating it and probably won’t end up doing it regularly; it probably doesn’t aligned with your vision either.

Pick a thing you do regularly and think what else can you do at the same time that aligns with your vision. Easy things to pick are ones where your mind is relatively free, like exercise, running in my case. Then it is about picking content that engages your mind that helps you make progress to one of your goals. It is okay if you can’t pay complete attention to that content; I often have to re-listen to audiobook chapters for them to sink in; it’s more for phrasebooks.

We all want more time in the day to get important things done. Habit stacking is a way to make that time. It might not be perfect but you end up making better use of the time you have. Making more progress is still making more progress than you were before.

Why compression matters in how we talk as engineers

A solution is only as good as others understand it.

I say that a lot to younger engineers that I mentor. It comes up because in software engineering, we are taught to think and reason objectively and deeply about the problems we tackle. We build complete mental models around them; track edge cases; and evaluate trade offs before coming to a decision on what to do. That’s our strength. There is another challenge though, how do we explain it to someone else?

The tendency is that we communicate everything instead of what our listeners or readers actually want or need. That forces the audience to do extra work; they have to filter all that extra… noise… and it is pretty common for them to tune out or get distracted in the process. That is a lose / lose because relevant information that an engineer worked hard to get doesn’t effectively get to those that need it.

To turn that around, engineers need to learn compression. That is the ability to take complex ideas, observations, and decisions and condense them into a short, clear message without losing the most important signal for the audience.

Compression focuses on saying what matters to the target audience and nothing more. Sometimes that means condensing a month of work into 90 seconds in order to maximize the understanding of what was accomplished.

What compression looks like

Compression is a structured and personalized method for communicating. The structure is what stays consistent and is there to help you be concise and organized. The content that you apply to it is personalized; focused on what is most important to the target audience.

The structure you pick needs to be something simple as well as appropriate for the work environment you are in. Generally, I stick to the following:

  • Outcome
    • Precisely what has happened or is happening 
  • Impact
    • Exactly why my audience needs to care
  • Context
    • Briefly why this outcome has occurred or is occurring 
  • Principle (optional)
    • The tenet, mutual contract, or cultural principle that is directly relevant

Structure forces you to organize and focus the information you are communicating. I like the above because it leads with the most important information for your audience; it starts with the punchline.

The content you apply must be tailored to the people you are talking to; it needs to be what is most relevant to them. As in, you are flipping the equation and doing all the work of filtering the information to only the bits that they care about. It is pretty common for there to be only one or two things that are truly important out of all the information you have.

That’s right. It is a tough pill for a lot of folks to swallow. There are many reasons why it is natural for engineers to want to unload all the information they have on a project or feature. However, part of the job is also making sure you don’t saturate people with that information when it isn’t important to them. When you do, you add to their information overload problems instead of providing immediate clarity. 

Here’s a quick example:

Uncompressed:
We evaluated three different approaches to handling event deduplication. The first had scaling issues, the second introduced operational complexity, and the third required changes to our ingestion pipeline…


Compressed:

  • We chose a TreeMap-based approach for deduplication
    • Outcome
  • It reduced duplicate event processing and stabilized downstream systems
    • Impact
  • Other options either didn’t scale or added operational risk
    • Context
  • We biased for simplicity over complexity
    • Principle

Compression works because it mirrors how leaders and stakeholders think. They want to understand what happened or is happening; why it matters to them; and how to reason about it going forward. Compressing the information that you have into exactly what is important to a listener or reader is how you stick the landing.

Let your audience choose where to expand

Compression ensures that your communication is efficient. When using it, the person you are talking with can then ask targeted questions on things that they want more information on. They choose where to expand.

Audience lead expansion doesn’t mean you abandon compression and unload on them after they ask questions. Continue to maintain the structure while refocusing on the area that they asked for more details on. Not only does that ensure you are continuing to provide them with only the information that they want, the structure makes your messages predictable and easier to understand.

Efficient communication is about what is efficient for the people that need the information. Different people care about different things which means you frequently need to have multiple threads of communication on the same topic. That will help ensure rapid consumption of the right information by the right people. For example

  • A product manager will ask about impact and risk
  • A principal engineer will dig into design choices and trade offs
  • A junior engineer will want to know what they are suppose to work on and how it applies to the overall project

That might sound like a lot of uninteresting work but remember, this is about sticking the landing. A solution is ONLY as good as others understand it. 

Fortunately compression is really easy for AI agents to adopt with a good prompt. A little trickier is getting the content right for different target audiences. Regardless, when you are using an agent, you must absolutely own the content that you send out. On complex projects and challenges, it doesn’t take much for an AI to get confused and do a terrible job. If you aren’t careful, you just get compressed garbage.

AI is also terrible on tone and the moment that your reader or listener thinks you are just dumping something that AI produced, your creditability drops rapidly; it takes a lot of time to recover from that kind of mistake.

Efficiency with Effectiveness

Compression is really a process for efficient communication. There is the matter of tone and tone matters. If people think you’re being the loudest voice in the room instead of being calm and cool under pressure, that is a huge distraction. That is where methodology is important. Methodology is how you behave which is important for effective communication.

BIFF is a methodology for communicating when in high conflict; its roots are in divorce and co-parenting. I think it is brilliant and can be used in professional settings with a tweak. BIFF stands for the following:

  • Brief
  • Informative
  • Friendly
  • Firm

This methodology is incredibly useful for conversations that are tense, emotional, or high-stakes because it keeps things grounded and professional. However at work, generally speaking, you don’t have that high conflict element. My tweak is to replace Firm with Focused which is intended to mean staying and steering back on topic. Don’t let the conversation wander or drift.

It is important to have both compression and a positive methodology in engineering / professional conversations. Compression helps you determine what to say. Methodology helps you determine how to say it. They create communication that is clear, calm, and effective regardless of the situation. 

How to start compressing

Compression is a skill you build through repetition. The more you practice, the more it shapes how you think about what information is important to the person you are talking to. You aren’t withholding information. Compression is not about hiding complexity. It is about respecting it by creating focus on what is important to your audience. You are filtering the noise so your listener or reader doesn’t have to.

Pick a structure that both works for you and your job. Next, when you put it into practice, pause. Think through how to structure your content. 

There are lots of places where you can start practicing compression:

  • Summarizing a completed task
  • Starting a status report with a short exec summary
  • Answering questions concisely in meetings and allowing attendees to choose where they want more details 

When you compress well, you show that you understand what you are working on well enough to extract what matters the most to your audience. You stop burying the lead. That doesn’t just make your communication more efficient. It also builds trust. It is trust that you both know the system and how to talk about it.

Don’t forget the methodology that you use to regulate your tone. You want that compressed message to be both effective and efficient. Great compression invites conversation. 

My never ending running journey from never think small

Previously, I’ve talked about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book, Be Useful; it is one of my favorites for guided book studies that I run at work. The second chapter, Never Think Small, is particularly good and I think about it a lot as it applies to all parts of my life. Never think small is a critical mind set that you need to adopt for how you think about things that are truly important to you; things that are central to your vision. It is what drives me from when I accomplish a goal, to going after another bigger one. It is that constant pursuit of that next thing.

There is a very practical skill to develop when you are always chasing that next thing, goal setting. Picking good goals is a must. They have to be aligned with your vision obviously but they also have to be small enough to allow for meaningful iteration. Achieving a goal in my world isn’t actually hit the next big thing. It is what I learn in the process of doing the work, all the small steps. That allows for course correction as well as discovering small serendipitous steps that I might not have otherwise found. When you are thinking big, you have to be realistic about your goals. Decompose them down into smaller practical ones that have a feedback loop. It is these small steps and feedback that help you grow.

That means there is always more to do. MORE!

I honestly love it. Never being done. It is a life long commitment to doing more that has taking me on an amazing roundabout journey with running.

Running has been a constant

It has been one of the few things that has stuck with me since my time in the Army. The reasons I have done it have evolved over time. They have ranged from mental health, discipline, identity, but most importantly joy. Running has given me a great many things and is core to who I am today.

My vision over the years has grown and sharpened or zoomed out and zoomed in as Schwarzenegger says in his book. It has also been a lot more than just races and big miles. There have been ups and downs along the way. When I started out, there were times I got hurt; there were a couple races I DNFed; and of course there were long runs I just gave up on and walked home. Successes and failures are all part of the journey but the key is that you never give up. You lean. You learn. You adapt.

Always being race ready

When I reflect on things, I am pretty sure that my starting point was a couple half marathons a year and just being out there for fun. I was enjoying racking up miles for races. Naturally, things got easier and I started to think bigger.

What if I was always half marathon ready?

That basically changed how I thought about running and when I stopped being casual about it. I changed how I trained and ultimately my lifestyle to just always being in a state where I could show up and run a half. That meant half marathons needed to stop being a big distance which meant more mileage. That is how I started loving big miles, the grind. I had non-negotiables though; things core to my vision.

  • Injury free
  • Joy

I focused on carefully adding mileage, always listening to my body, and taking care of it. I got more strict about stretching and disciplined about hitting the gym specifically for injury prevention. I was very intentional about add things that allowed me to build that mileage. Eventually always being half marathon ready became my new normal.

Goal achieved

Big mileage was starting to be interesting to me but it wasn’t fully in focus yet. I did however set my sights on marathons. I was a little nervous about that one because I tried before and got hurt. However, I was crystal clear about one thing.

I will run a marathon injury free

I didn’t care about time. It was all about completing injury free and honestly seeing how much mileage I needed to do that; the grind was now coming into focus. I remember trying to figure this out and rejecting virtually all the training plans I found. They focused on pace and speed. That was and still is counter to my philosophy on running. I listen to my body. If I can comfortably go faster, I go a little faster. If I need to go slower, I go a little slower. If I need to walk, I walk. I did my first marathon and it was injury free. With that, I achieved my goal. 

New vision unlocked: the grind

Accidentally discovering speed

While on this quest for injury free big mileage, something unexpected happened. I was proudly not giving a damn about pace or time. I became an eater of miles. I loved doing volume. Then at one of my local half marathons… I earned my first age group podium.

Surprise achievement: 3rd place

I was completely shocked. I can still remember the last half mile… wow, a lot of folks here are cheering me on. These peeps really dig their local races. I crossed the line and was curious about my time. They handed me a 3rd place medal at the timing tent.

Mind… blown

Speed was literally never in the plan. I actually kind of bucked at it because I thought it required fragile training, weight loss, and reckless intensity; all counter to my run forever lifestyle. I remember taking a selfie and sending it to my parents, thinking, I guess I am fast now.

New goal: see how fast I can get while staying injury free and keeping high volume

I’m not chasing VO2 max or short unsustainable blocks. I still firmly believe in grinding big volume and being highly durable. I am now experimenting with training sessions that push my speed and don’t screw any of that up. That is why I’ve only incorporated continuous tempo blocks. I am focused on how my body feels and letting speed emerge on its own. I’m trying to prove to myself that it is possible to have a running lifestyle that centers around:

  • Joy
  • Injury free
  • The grind

And now

  • Speed

Small steps

You don’t need to be a runner for this to apply. I talk about running a lot because that is apart of who I am. However, never think small is how we should all think about our visions. It is about one goal after another. It is the never ending cycle of achieving and growing. When you achieve a goal, celebrate the win. Then set a new one.

There is something to be said about setting smaller achievable goals. I vastly prefer them as I can nail them off in quick succession instead of big monster ones that take forever. They let me iterate, course correct, and measure progress more easily. I love taking tons of small steps for that reason. Plus they often have me discover things along the way; smelling the roses so to speak.

Struggling with goal setting is common. If you are, then try the following:

  • Check that your goals align with your vision. Good goals aren’t about achievement. They are about growth that aligns with your vision. If you have a goal that you aren’t motivated to achieve, guess what? Chances are it doesn’t support your vision. Toss it out because it is getting in the way of a goal that does.
  • Decompose your goals into smaller ones, small steps. Focus on the steps that come first. If you want to run longer but can’t then take walk breaks. Walking isn’t cheating. Small steps aren’t cheating. They get you to the next step which gets you to the next one and the next.

The size of the step doesn’t matter. Each one is growth.

Using AI to tune your running and avoid hurting yourself with Slop

AI is showing up everywhere these days. Everyone is getting told to use it but there isn’t a real solid understanding of how to use it effectively. I told myself I wouldn’t write about AI because I didn’t want to add to that chaos until I figured something out for myself. 

It is chaos at the moment. AI is incredibly powerful and is changing how the world works. However, it isn’t a hyper intelligent all knowing being. I have been seeing more and more folks using AI in their running to get training plans. When you read what it gives you, it does sound incredibly convincing and it feels like having a little AI powered coach. That’s also incredibly dangerous.

The most important thing that anyone MUST understand upfront when using an AI is that you have to be the one that is in charge. For running, AI does not have your body, your history, or your experience and it certainly isn’t there to see you running or working out. It is entirely limited to the information that you give it. If you hand it vague, shallow, or inaccurate statements about your running, it will still confidently hand you a training plan; that plan is going to be AI Slop.

The Harvard Business Review recently published a solid piece on AI slop. One of the key takeaways is that if you don’t fully control the conversation with AI, then you’ll get something that sounds great but is actually hot garbage.

For running, following the recommendations from AI slop isn’t just trying things that won’t really work for you; it is trying things that could also get you hurt. So before using AI to support your training, you need to follow some ground rules.

Rule 1: You must drive

AI will never know how your legs feel when you wake up; how your posture collapses late in a race; or how stress from your work screws with your sleep and recovery. These are things that you know by listening to your body. The AI doesn’t. Period.

That’s why the first step is being brutally clear to the AI about your goals behind running both on and off the road. For me, that has been consistently

  • Have an injury free lifestyle where I can run every day
  • Distance is always more important than speed or time
  • Consistency and sustainability are king

When… not if… the AI suggests changes to my training that puts my ability to run daily at risk, it’s a bad suggestion no matter how good the AI tries to make it sound. It isn’t aligned with my goals. I regularly push back and argue with ChatGPT, my AI of choice. AI doesn’t retain the information you give it the way you think a computer brain should. It regularly forgets my goals and the rules I set even when I create very specific project ones, a feature of ChatGPT when you have a subscription.

You need to watch for AI misbehaving like that. That is what I mean by you having to drive. When it starts to suggest things that are off or not aligning with your goals, you need to question why it did that; quite literally ask the AI why it said something you didn’t think was right. Then you can clearly identify when it has forgotten or incorrectly remembered a goal or rule and got itself confused. That’s where people get into trouble. You have to always be using your best judgment and be questioning the AI. 

Rule 2: Start with a real training plan made by experts for you

AI works best when it’s anchored to something real. A great way to do that is to bring your own training plan that supports your goals. Don’t make the mistake of asking AI to just create a plan from scratch.

If you’re newer to running or have only been running casually, it’s worthwhile working with a coach, a real expert, for a few months. Everyone’s body is different so training plans are naturally personalized. Coaches are great for helping you get started.

  • Finding routines and exercises that work for your body and your schedule
  • Learning how to listen to your body on how effort, fatigue, and recovery feels
  • Understanding what too much actually feels like and identifying when to stop

That information and your understanding is the context you give AI. Explaining your training plan and goals is pretty straightforward

  • Weekly mileage and long run structure
  • Strength and mobility exercises
  • Routines and schedules
  • Non-negotiables

How your body is feeling and how you do on your runs and at the gym is what you have to be pretty consistent with AI on. I can’t stress enough that running is deeply personal. A human coach picks up a lot on how your body reacts when they are working with you. They teach you how to listen to your body to understand those reactions. After that, they help you figure out training that is specific to you. AI can help you reason and reflect on your training but it should NEVER replace your judgment that you develop and hone from coaching.

How I use AI in my running

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help me refine my training for about six months now. I have a paid subscription and a dedicated project for it. I use it in three primary ways:

  • A daily running diary where I log mileage, effort, and how my body feels 
  • Weekly reflections based on those diary entries
  • Targeted questions about small tweaks and supplemental exercises for my training plan

The real value isn’t the answers the AI coughs up. It’s the reflection that it triggers. The weekly reviews are especially powerful. They help me spot things, both progress and challenges. I use those to decide what NOT to change. I’m intentionally very slow with adjustments.

  • Only one or two changes at most every few months
    • Enough time to see how my body adapts
  • No wholesale plan rewrites

I stay critical of ChatGPT and I swear it forgets periodically that I love running because I like to grind out a ton of miles. AI loves the wholesale rewrites; optimize everything all at once! That’s almost never what your body wants but more importantly, it isn’t what you want either. You MUST drive. Resist the urge to do big changes even if they sound good.

Adding AI to your running

For AI to help, it’s an absolute that you be in control. It is more than just chatting back and forth with it. You set the goals and the rules. You stick to those goals and rules even when the AI isn’t. You know your body better than the AI ever will. I recommend the following:

  • Before working with the AI, get some coaching for a few months
    • Coaching isn’t about training. It is about bootstrapping your knowledge and understanding
  • Start things off with the AI by giving it your non-negotiables
    • These are your goals and rules
      • In my opinion, injury prevention needs to be one
    • Be prepared to repeat them to the AI
  • Give the AI your training plan
    • It is important to start from something that is already working
  • Daily
    • Use AI as a diary to record simple entries that are focused on effort and feeling
  • Weekly
    • Review your progress with AI
      • Here is where I have found real value 
      • Ask it questions and tell it how you and your body feel
    • Remember the answers it gives are suppose to trigger self reflection
    • Be critical of it
      • It doesn’t actually have feelings

AI can be a powerful mirror but only if you’re willing to drive; be the human in the loop. Don’t be tempted by really cool ideas and suggestions that don’t align with your goals. Be firm with it and be prepared to remind it when it is ignoring your non-negotiables.

Why I leave Washington for the winter holidays

There are a lot of reasons I like to travel, especially during the winter holidays. The mental break from work when you know everyone else is off is a big one. During the winter however, I make a point of going somewhere warm that has plenty of sunshine. I usually make cracks about not liking to be cold but the reality is that I really do hate running when I am cold; that is a problem as I still need to rack up miles in the winter.

I’ve tried to deal with it with all sorts of cold weather gear but once it gets icy, I abandon the roads and trails and head to the gym for my daily grind. Anyone that tries to put in serious miles on a treadmill though knows that your sneakers will get soaked in sweat which really limits how long you can run unless you are willing to swap your kicks mid workout. 

This is where heading off somewhere warm where I can detach from work and get back onto trails has become an annual routine for me. These self designed running retreats also have surprised me in that they are great for a reset or a deload. I’m still running but just not with the same volume and most definitely without tempo paces. These retreats let me focus on the primary reasons I love running which is to be out there, appreciating my surroundings, and lost in my thoughts; kind of a contrast from life in the pain cave.

A welcome break from tempo days

I love my long runs. I love that infinite grind. Long runs give me space to think; they’re still my favorite place to spend time. To be clear, these are easy pace zone 2 runs where I can listen to my audible books or music and just run forever. However, my weekly training block doesn’t just have these kinds of runs. I have a couple “quality” tempo ones which are hell; I have no idea why people call them “quality runs”. I also have weekly weight training that usually levels me.

It is really the tempo days that get me. I know I have to do them if I want to grow but there is no getting past that they are tough as hell. They are uncomfortable and mentally demanding so when I go on holiday, I am on holiday from those too. I spend my whole vacation doing my favorite easy pace runs. I also make sure to take advantage of the places I visit by getting miles from things that aren’t part of my regular routine at home.

Swapping in swimming and hiking

Outdoor lap swimming and hiking are my top choices. Swimming and hiking are also really easy to pack for so it keeps things simple. I do like cycling and mountain biking but things get more complicated on the planning side. Plus I am still awful at fixing flats.

Lap swimming is almost an exact drop in replacement for running in terms of routine. What I love about it is that I can grind out laps just as I would with my daily runs but without any of the impact.

Hiking lets me feed that explorer side. I can confidently say that my best hikes have all come from my travels to National Parks like Zion and Volcano. Grinding uneven terrain through those trails is also great stability work.

Keeping things at that do it forever pace lets me get really amazing decompressing workouts in once or twice a day. The key is being consistent at doing the grind while not pushing the pace. That setups the deload. 

Why resets are valuable

For me, they aren’t about recovery because something is wrong or I am injured. It is actually the opposite. These resets are about keeping me running injury free.

By the end of a week long trip, my legs feel rested and I am mentally charged up to tackle my tempo and weight training blocks again. That’s the reset I love. Not a full stop; just a different routine for a short period of time so I can comeback fresh physically and mentally.

Habit stacking your vacations with training resets

Holidays and travel don’t need to be more of the same when it comes to your running and frankly some travel makes it pretty hard. Take advantage of what a location has to offer and take on a new vacation training routine. You will get all the grind while leaning into that place and letting your body reset.

Accept when your environment makes your normal impractical. Don’t force running where it doesn’t make sense. Your running isn’t going anywhere. Avoid frustrations and create win wins by experiencing different kinds of grinds that are readily available to you. Focus on getting that reset that keeps you injury free.

Improving Team Collaboration Using A Structured Session

An effective team doesn’t just get along with each other. They work together on solving problems and figuring things out. Getting along and being friendly tends to be easy while actually coming together and tackling big messy problems is hard.

At a recent leadership offsite for my pillar, we decided to take this one head on; how can we work better together. Collectively, we agreed that while our teams worked well on their own, they often operated in silos when it came to pillar wide initiatives. There wasn’t any conflict or friction between them. These silos formed from habits where everyone was just trying their best to get their work done. The pillar’s teams are strong but when multiple of them have needed to collaborate or coordinate on a larger or more complex problem, that is when things have gotten confusing around ownership, priorities, and communication.

We set aside a two and a half hour block to work through this topic as we all felt it was pretty important. At first, it was pegged to be an open conversation without any structure. The intentions were good and open conversations have their place in relationship building but from my experience, they aren’t great for fixing or improving processes. Usually they end up with few tangibles or action items and with nothing written down leading to them being easily forgotten; that would waste the session. So I put together and lead a structure session specifically designed for us to start doing things differently.

Structure without slides

Good structured sessions have activities that involve everyone. They need everyone to participate and contribute. That results in everyone being understood and shared ownership in resulting changes and improvements. It is possible to do that with open conversations but structure ensures it and is generally faster.

Don’t confuse structure with a slide deck or a lecture though. Those tend to skew participation with only a few getting involved and more multitasking. Structure has activities that have everyone participate and focused.

These activities matter. People respond well to the clarity and purpose they provide. For our session, I selected two that naturally dovetail:

  1. Start Stop Continue: A simple, familiar framework where each person reflects on what we should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing to improve how we collaborate. It’s direct and creates space for everyone to be heard while surfacing patterns
  2. Mutual Contracts: A second less common one that takes those patterns and turns them into explicit agreements on how we are going to work together in different situations. These contracts embody what we collectively define as “good collaboration” in our workplace with all of its processes and practices

Step 1: Framing at the start

We opened by being clear about the goal of improving collaboration and the two activities we were going to use to achieve it. We all wanted to have this session but it was worth stating it. Explaining the activities that we would use and how they would work sets expectations for everyone on how they will participate.

Step 2: Start Stop Continue

Everyone took 15 minutes to reflect on three questions for improving pillar collaboration:

  • What should we start doing 
  • What should we stop doing
  • What should we continue doing 

Miro, a digital white boarding tool, provides a slick template for Start Stop Continue with a built in timer. That made it easy for everyone to write their ideas on digital sticky notes and put them in the appropriate column. Only one idea was permitted per note which allowed us to quickly group together similar ones to form clusters; the patterns we were after. 

These patterns made it clear to everyone where our pillar collaborations had been working and where they had not. The next step was to formalize what we would do about it.

Step 3: Mutual contracts

Creating these contracts can be difficult because this is where we started committing collectively to doing things differently. Here we bootstrapped ourselves with an AI, MS Copilot. We fed the AI all of the sticky notes for a cluster and asked for a mutual contract. 

To use AI effectively, it’s important to give it prompts so it will process the sticky notes for each cluster in a consistent way. For example:

  • What does good collaboration look like here?
  • What do we each expect from ourselves and from others?

I am a big fan of using AI to get things going as it is very effective at making initial contracts that are short, concrete, and have shared ownership. That then enabled the team to quickly adjust them to be exactly what we wanted.

With these contracts, it was easy for us to make explicit commitments for each one on how we would fulfill them.

Step 4: Contractual commitments

This step we did after the offsite.  Consensus on the contracts gave us direction on how to make the right commitments for fulfilling them. We wrote out what we would actually do which included behaviors, practices, and processes. We reviewed it as a team and agreed to those commitments.

The typical way of conducting Mutual Contracts is going round robin and having each team member make personal commits. In my opinion, that can lead to shallow ones due to folks not having enough time to really think about what things they want done for themselves and their teams. That is why I like doing it as a post session action item. What you lose in decisiveness you gain in depth.

Step 5: Making it durable

The final step was to post the Mutual Contracts and their commitments so we could share them with all teams in the pillar. This post wasn’t another policy or best practices doc; it was a clear communication for how the pillar was going to be more effective at working together.

We decided that we would revisit these contracts every few months during our pillar leads sync to see how we’re doing and make adjustments as needed.

Positive fallout

We are still working through some of the commitments that we agreed to. Some of those commitments have required us to work through changes in our practices. Occasionally I hear people reference our contracts or tenets. Both are great because our pillar is committed to making positive changes and improving things. Organizational and cultural changes are slow but I am seeing progress. 

I cannot stress enough just how important it is in a team environment to have structures that empower everyone to participate. On top of that, it is an absolute that things that the team agrees to must be written down and shared broadly. That reminds everyone of those agreements and helps people that weren’t there to understand those contracts and commitments until they become culture.

2025 Running Year In Review: Committing To Boundaries

This was a breakout year for me however, it didn’t start in 2025. It was 2024, a year where I plateaued. I didn’t stick to my boundary between work and personal life. I was still running consistently and racing often. On the outside, it looked like things were normal but for me, I knew I was struggling. My running had stalled out. I wasn’t making meaningful gains whether it was distance or speed, even though I was grinding out miles. I still enjoyed races, but I wasn’t unlocking anything for myself. I wasn’t growing how I wanted to grow.

2025 worked not because I tried harder. It worked because I made a commit to that work / life boundary.

Boundaries allow for growth

The most important change I made in 2025 was committing to this firm boundary around my personal life. This boundary is hard for a lot of folks but it is probably the most valuable commitment a person can make to doing important not urgent things. There are lots of urgent things in life that can it breakdown. For me, it was work. My career has always been demanding and it always will be; I like it that way. In 2024 though, it was difficult for me to keep my work from interfering with my running and it showed. I refused to let that happen again. Running became a daily non-negotiable for me. Every day I ran. Every week I did my weight training. No bargaining with work. No shortcuts in my training.

That commitment came with tradeoffs.

I love playing piano. I’m still working on violin. Music matters to me deeply but this year, it took a backseat. When work was intense and personal time was limited, running came first. Music came after that only if I had any time left over. That often left me wanting more. I also enjoy crafting, especially paint by numbers, but that came third. As proof, my paints dried out on me.

Falling short in my other aspirations weren’t failures. They were the inevitable result of my running commitment. Holding firm to it is what made my work / life boundary worthwhile.

Learning to run on tired legs

The most profound change in my running this year that unlocked everything else were back to back long runs. A run club friend of mine, Corey, gave me simple advice. It wasn’t about speed. It was about sustainable volume; have high mileage weeks every week and to do that I needed to accept and learn to run when you’re already tired; not fast; just getting it done; all mental.

Those runs weren’t impressive. Pace didn’t matter. It was just showing up and putting in the work on that second day. I spent most of the summer doing that. The first few times were terrible. However, I toughed it out and got myself to that next level. Speed wasn’t what I was after. It was durability. Back to back long runs made fatigue my normal, which made 60-70 mile weeks my new normal.

My body adapted naturally. I stopped dreading the second long run and instead started looking forward to it. The second long run was my day and mine alone.

When the work finally showed up

That high volume foundation changed everything.

At the Larrabee Lakes 50k, I ran a 7:01, dropping an hour and a half from the 50k I ran in 2024. That wasn’t just grit. It was high volume weeks paying dividends. I was able to keep moving on tired legs. Mentally I learned how to deal with it.

That high volume base carried over to the road with new PBs:

  • 1:28 half marathon
  • 3:35 marathon

I ended the year with 4 marathons and 2 ultras under my belt along with 5 top 3 half marathon age group finishes which is really what I was after; speed on my half. Building a high mileage base slowly with patience and consistency let me run faster and stay injury free.

Habit stacking my running

Another change I made in 2025, and I’m doubling down on in 2026, is habit stacking during my runs. 

I’ve been using a lot more of my running time to listen to audiobooks focused on personal development. They range from leadership to personal growth to learning new languages like Spanish. It’s hard and surprisingly mentally taxing. Some days my brain can’t take it and needs its own rest day. Progress is slower than I want but progress is progress; it’s working. I now partially understanding Spanish TV and have had basic conversations while traveling in Mexico which is really exciting for me. I can listen to those audiobooks while crafting too; more habit stacking.

The 2026 plan

The biggest takeaway from 2025 wasn’t mileage or PBs. Those were the results from a firm commitment to a personal boundary.

No one at work is going to get angry because you take time to take care of yourself or your family. No one will stop you from prioritizing one thing that matters to you whether that is running, music, art, education, or something else completely.

There is only one person who can actually erode that boundary and that is you.

For 2026, I got new running goals:

  • 1:25 half
    • This one feels doable to me. I can see it from 1:28. I know I can grind towards it.
  • 3:15 marathon
    • This one feels just out of reach, and that’s the point. Holding that pace for the full requires trimming almost a minute off of my pace. For that, I have already modified my training and I am being a lot more disciplined about having 2 tempo runs a week. Those are tough as hell but I’m committing to them like I committed to my boundaries in 2025. 

If you want a 2026 breakout year on something that you’ve gone flat on then you got to make a commitment to your own personal boundary:

  • Pick that one thing to protect
  • Accept that other things may take a backseat
  • Hold the line long enough for adaptation to happen – when growth and gains become your new normal
  • Celebrate that growth – it is progress for putting in the time
  • Repeat

Growth doesn’t happen on its own. It needs protection; a boundary to allow for regular commitment. It comes from choosing and focusing on one thing and refusing to be distracted from it.