Writing this from Bali on Monday evening. This one is a few hours late, which hasn’t happened before…the truth is we had such a wholesome family weekend there wasn’t the time to stop and write. I prioritised time with my wife and son and I don’t regret a single thing.
With Jakarta behind me, and a result I’m beyond proud of, my focus is shifting to improving my running. I’ve got the warm climate on my side and some amazing places to run. I want to make the most of that.
The hardest pace is the one that feels too easy.
Sunday I ran ten kilometres around the rice fields in Seseh. Seseh is an area that makes Bali feel very different to the version people usually see on Instagram. Quiet roads, a few stray dogs and fresh air.
The actual win was not the scenery. It was that my heart rate stayed in zone two the whole way. No creeping into zone three or four and no ego pace. My body has finally adapted to running in the heat and humidty.
That will sound deeply boring to anyone who does not care about running. To me was a small personal victory.
Running has been the weak link in my Hyrox prep for a while now. Weakness might be a stretch as I’ve become a pretty competent runner. But it’s the area with the most room for improvement. 60% of a Hyrox is running so if you want to shave off time…just run a bit quicker. Easier said than done though. The fix has never been running harder. It is running slow, and clocking some serious miles.
After the run: sports massage, a mobility class, then rounds of cold plunge and sauna. This is why I love Bali. All of that was done by lunchtime. Nothing crazy, just a really good Sunday built around family, training and feeling like my body was doing what I wanted it to do.
There was no big event. No massive achievement. No dramatic story. Just a lot of small things that, put together, made me feel like I was living inside a version of life I had been trying to design for a while.
That is probably why this quote hit me when I read it recently:
”Today you are living the results of your decisions three month ago. The same will be said in three months’ time”.
I love that because it is annoying and true.
Most of what you are experiencing now did not come from what you did yesterday. It came from the decisions, habits, conversations, risks and repetitions that happened in your recent past.
The same is true in business. The same is true in fitness. The same is true with family. The same is true with pretty much anything worth having.
I am not writing this to sound wise about it. I am writing it because I keep needing to remind myself of it…and my newsletter is as good a place as any to do that. The good times are not proof you are doing something right today. They are proof you did something right a while ago, and today is just where it landed.
The best growth is the consistent, predictable kind.
This newsletter is growing. Not explosively, just steadily. Low unsubscribe rate, a high open rate, and enough people telling me they genuinely enjoy reading it that I know it is landing well.
That was not really the plan when I started it. I thought I was writing a business newsletter with some personal colour round the edges. Somewhere along the way it flipped. If you read this every week, you probably know more about my actual life and my actual head than most people I see in person day to day.
I did not set out to write a diary. But it seems to be the thing that resonates, and if I am honest, I enjoy writing it more because of that. I could tidy it up, make it more polished, more clearly about business, less about a run in the rice fields or a coffee shop back home. I do not think that newsletter gets read the same way, and I am not sure I would enjoy writing it as much either.
The lesson, if there is one, is a boring one. The thing that grows is usually not the thing you were trying to optimise, but the one that’s most authentic.
So I am trying not to over engineer it. Keep showing up. Keep letting it be a bit business, a bit family, a bit training, a bit whatever has been sitting in my head that week.
That's issue twelve.
This one's shorter than normal. But it's late and I'm tired.