Athleticism, Running, Routine

January 2026

One month before our scheduled Hyrox Doubles, my partner (a childhood friend) called to drop out—injuries, unavoidable. The race was during a trip home, halfway across the world. I hadn't trained for Singles. Four weeks left. There wasn't much I could change.

I said, “That's ok. I’ll do it myself.”

People who knew me then were puzzled. In school I'd spent years finding ways to avoid PE. I didn't hate sports; I simply didn't see the point in moving unless there was a clear reason.

Going solo didn't feel like a big decision, despite being underprepared. I wasn't proving anything. I'd set a goal for the year. Showing up mattered. The outcome was, deliberately, almost secondary.

Still, that dissonance—between who I had been and who I’d become—made me curious. How do you change your mind about something so deeply rooted?

Looking back, my move to Los Angeles in 2016 shaped me more than I realized. After relocating so often, I'd grown numb to new cities. I never fully clicked with LA, but I couldn't ignore how normalized fitness was. People ran before work, stayed active after, talking casually about 13-mile runs. Movement felt like ritual rather than aspiration.

The environment didn't force change. It offered permission to experiment. I tried hiking, rock climbing, boxing, Pilates, bootcamps—whatever felt remotely interesting. The rule was simple: show up without needing to be good. That made it easy to keep going.

Running, of all things, stuck. Early on, even a 5 mph warm-up felt like a workout. I'd finish flushed and lightheaded, mentally scolding myself for signing up. Once, a woman in the locker room asked if I was a runner. I denied it—not out of modesty but because I hadn't earned it yet. I had no plan, no finish line—just a vague desire to improve.

It remained aimless until I found the right structure and the right people: Barry’s, Precision Running (at Equinox), and a handful of great instructors. Intervals turned vague effort into data, and consistency became momentum. The right setup (whatever that looks like for you) makes all the difference.

Once I had consistent miles under my belt, I layered reading and research. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami and The Art of Running Faster by Goater offered small doses of intimate knowledge that refreshed motivation. Each nudged habits forward and carried me further.

There's an entrepreneurial rhyme to it. Fitness rewards the same behavior: small, repeated choices compound. Eventually, it becomes something you can't imagine living without. Now I sprint on the treadmill without deliberate thought. Thinking, ironically, only makes it harder.

For a while, I treated progress as something to maximize. More classes. More miles. Heavier weights. Less rest. If I wasn’t sore, I assumed I wasn’t doing enough.

It worked—until it didn’t.

The first correction came through overtraining. After a stretch of intensive training, I encountered my first injury and was ordered by a doctor to rest. It was disruptive. It was frustrating. And it was avoidable. More than anything, it forced me to confront how casually I had been ignoring small warning signs in favor of short-term gains.

Overtraining also showed up more quietly, in the form of plateaus. Recovery thinned. Workouts felt heavier. Persistent stiffness crept in. Pushing harder stopped producing better results. My capacity wasn’t expanding; it was slowly narrowing.

Out of necessity, I shifted my attention to mobility and flexibility. This became especially important as I moved into my 30s. Range of motion, joint health, and basic movement quality turned out to be paramount. This kind of work doesn’t appear on dashboards and rarely feels productive in the moment, but it quietly determines what your body is capable of over time.

Then there were the lifestyle inputs: sleep, nutrition, alcohol. I began treating them as variables rather than background noise. Sleep became something I protected instead of borrowed from. Nutrition, something I approached more deliberately. Alcohol—wine I genuinely enjoy—became a conscious tradeoff rather than a default.

Over time I realized that all these elements form a tightly coupled system. Improve one, and the others tend to follow. Neglect one, and everything feels harder—physically and mentally, and emotionally.

After all, I embrace athleticism not for aesthetics, not to optimize every metric, not out of discipline-as-virtue. I do it because curiosity led to consistency. Consistency led to competence. Competence led to self-knowledge. And self-knowledge changes how you make decisions.

It makes certain choices feel obvious.

Doing the race solo wasn’t a performance of bravery or fitness. It felt inevitable—the result of years of learning what my body could do and trusting that process.

On race day, that became my mantra. I paced conservatively, managed my breathing, and adjusted as fatigue built up. No dramatic breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other. Finishing back home made it feel full circle—like meeting a different version of myself at the same starting point.

There's still a long way to go. I'm grateful for a body that allows me to move this way, and for the people and places that made the learning possible. If you'd told my younger self that athleticism would become core to how I think and decide, I would never have believed you.



A handful of instructors in my routine made the real difference, consistently raising my floor, not just my ceiling. They combine technical rigor, seamless programming, and an insistence on honest, hard work. Each opinionated in their own way. All effective.

My All-Star Picks

Honorable Mentions Outside NYC



If you’ve ever had to rewrite part of yourself too, I’d love to hear about it.