Opening Balance

I've spent years building a body I can count on. Two weeks ago, it failed me anyway—80% through a familiar run, in the exact place I go to feel unbreakable.

Central Park is one of my favourite places to run—the entire reason I book hotels in Midtown when I'm in New York City. There's something about this loop that resonates with me. The city rising on all sides—East Side, West Side—while you're cutting through this massive pocket of green. Ambitious people everywhere, everyone moving with purpose, but there's a calm to it. The scenery, the energy, the fact that you're surrounded by millions of people.

For 60-75 minutes I'm just focused on the path ahead.

I was pushing through the last interval of a speed session when my right knee sent up a signal I'd never felt before.

The pain came sharp. Outer edge of my right knee. Not the usual muscle fatigue. Something specific. The kind of discomfort that makes you stop mid-stride and test it. Bend. Extend. Weight shift. Still there.

The injury exposed a weakness I'd been carrying without knowing it existed. IT band syndrome. A band of tissue running from hip to knee that, when tight, pulls at the joint with every stride. Mine was tight. And running made it angry.

I tried running again two days later and the pain stopped me in 20 mins. Then I tried again, and I failed again. So, I decided to stop and asked my trainer to come up with replacements that involve a combination of the stairmaster, rowers, assault bikes, so that I can still maintain my conditioning while allowing my knees to recover. 

It's not the temporary discomfort that gets me. It's the helplessness.

I can't do what I've trained my body to do. Not because the voice in my head won. Because my body said no, and I didn’t get a vote.

This is the feeling I'm trying to prevent when I’m older: a body that can't answer when you ask it to move. I've been building strength and endurance as insurance against that future, strengthening the fortress around my vulnerabilities. And if I don't address the underlying weakness now, I'm just postponing the reckoning.

The vulnerability's exposed now, and with it comes the clarity I didn't want but needed. My hip abductors aren't strong enough, which is partly what causes a tight IT band. I also was not engaging in enough IT band stretching movements.

This helplessness is temporary. Minor. But it gave me a microscopic preview of what I'm fighting to avoid decades from now. Except then it won't be temporary. It won't be minor.

So, my training program moving forward will have to account for what the injury revealed: more deliberate hip abductor work, more glute strengthening, IT band stretches that aren't just an afterthought.

This is the feedback loop that matters. The ones we can measure through testing, like inadequate strength or power or VO₂ max, and the ones that announce themselves uninvited through injury, exposing weaknesses that were waiting for the right conditions to fail.

The body sends the invoice. I adjust the work.

The injury isn't the lesson. The helplessness is. The vulnerabilities you don't see coming are the ones that break you.

📈 The Paper Trail

💪 Weightlifting (3 days per week)

⇥ Full body workout with an upper or lower tilt each session.

• It’s not my favourite split. But with only 3 days allocated to lifting, this is the most effective strategy.

• Hitting each muscle group twice per week drives much more growth than once per week.

⇥ I cycle through training blocks, each lasting 3-4 months.

• One block focuses on heavy lifting to prioritize strength. The next pivots to lighter loads, higher volume, higher intensity work to favour muscle mass and endurance.

• Sprinkled between: non-glamourous exercises to ensure muscle power doesn't fade and my accessory muscles don't get neglected. The body sends a bill later if you ignore them.

🏃 Running (3 days per week)

⇥ One slow, steady run. Zone 2 heart rate—the kind that feels easy but demands patience.

• It’s boring but builds the foundation for higher intensity work, teaches the body to mobilize fat better, and improves energy efficiency.

⇥ One fast run. Sprints fast enough that I can only hold them for 400-800m before gassing out.

• This trains your body to generate and tolerate high power output. VO2 max doesn't maintain itself. I build it here. It hurts like hell. And that's the point.

⇥ One tempo run. Think of it as in-between. Faster than steady state, slower than sprints, sustained for 20-30 minutes.

• This one burns the most and taunts me mentally more than the sprints.

• It's not the hardest pace, but it's the hardest to hold.

• Why subject myself to this? Because muscular endurance at speed matters. I don't enjoy it, but enjoyment is irrelevant; it's what my goals demand.

🏊 Swimming (1 session per week)

⇥ 45-60 minutes. I don’t do this for ‘fitness’ or ‘longevity’, but for skill.

• My deep water skills are weak and my front crawl is embarrassingly inefficient. So, I've been taking lessons to improve.

• Progress on this has been slow. Partly because swimming is technical. Mostly because I haven’t been able to prioritize time in my schedule to add practice sessions.

• Anything above zero compounds.

🧾 The Receipts

October's Ledger: 22 workouts completed / 26 planned.

This was one of my worst training months of the year, in terms of consistency, quality of effort, and mileage.

• Sick for 4 days.

• Then 14 days of clinical work crammed into 9. Long days, difficult cases, out the door at sunrise and back after the gym closed.

• Tweaked my knee mid-month and had to pull back when I didn't want to.

All of it compounding into missed sessions I'm not proud of.

Some days I showed up tired and did the work anyway. Other days the voice said "skip it" and I ignored it. And some days I listened, because injury or illness had a better argument than my training goals.

📊 Micro Frictions, Macro Lessons

✏️ Small Sentences, Smaller Excuses

⇥ Writing down my training intention in one line before bed helped reduce my resistance the next morning. 

↳ For example: "Lower body unilateral strength work tomorrow. Don't water it down when it gets hard. Choose hard now, or accept worse later. No third option. Good night."

• When the alarm hits, I don't have to renegotiate who I am and why I do this before coffee. The decision's already made. 

• Does it eliminate the resistance when the alarm goes off? No. But it gives me something to anchor to when the voice starts negotiating.

• It's harder to betray a commitment I made to myself 8 hours ago than prior. And some mornings, that's enough.

🧠 Supplements I Tested

⇥ My brain treats 10 PM like a staff meeting. To help with relaxation and enhance sleep, I've been experimenting with L-Theanine, Glycine, and Magnesium L-Threonate for the last couple months.

• None of them perform magic. But they seem to help. My heart rate variability improved, and resting heart rate edged down.

• I find supplements either get a blanket bad rep, or over-hyped without an appreciation for their evidence. I’ve been in both camps before.

• It has forced me to dig deeper into the evidence behind specific supplements, which I will write about in the coming months.

💹 This Month’s Return

A Lesson I Didn't Want, But Got Anyway

Discipline without discernment is inflexibility wearing a medal.

I've built an identity around not missing: workouts, targets, commitments. 

There's a version of me that would've pushed through that run. Finished the tempo. Logged the session. Worn the grit like armor. And paid for it with two weeks of actual injury instead of three days of caution.

I didn't do that this time. But I've done it before. The cost is always higher than the pride is worth.

The hard part isn't knowing when to push; I'm fluent in that. It’s knowing when to pull back without letting that become the new default. Because "be smart" is a slippery permission slip. One day it saves you. The next, it betrays you.