10/15/2026
Two bananas, two finisher medals, and one of us is clearly having a worse time than the other.
That's my cousin Caleb on the left (I may have mentioned him once or twice recently). Spartan Beast, Pan American Championship, Seattle, 2024. Five hours in the mud. He has retold that morning roughly four hundred times since, and the version where he suffers more keeps getting longer.
I bring it up because this photo is the whole argument in one frame.
Caleb is an orthopedic surgeon. He spends his week with people whose bodies quit before their plans did. I spend mine with people who built something real and then found out they had no idea what it was for.
Same problem, opposite ends.
You can do everything right on paper and still arrive at the part you were saving for with nothing left to spend it on. Neither of us is interested in the version where you grind now and live later. Later isn't a destination. It's the word people use instead of scheduling something.
So schedule something. Go be genuinely bad at a race with somebody you like. Finish it anyway. Eat the banana.
Then come back and plan like you expect to be around for all of it.
