Time is doing that thing again where it moves slowly day to day and then, somehow, three months disappear.
It feels like about five minutes ago that I stepped away from work and jumped into this sabbatical / retirement trial / self-directed chaos experiment. And yet here we are. Three months in. Already.
I’m not sure I have some grand conclusion about that yet. I don’t think I’m magically transformed. I haven’t emerged from the cocoon as a perfectly optimized human founder monk with a six-pack, a completed SaaS business, and a radically simplified garage.
Although, to be fair, the garage is getting there.
This is probably going to be another one of those posts that is part life update, part health update, part domestic logistics report, and part meditation on the weird little joys that keep showing up in the middle of everything.
Tag it as slice-of-life, perhaps. Bear with me.
The Health Stuff
The big update first: I’ve fully recovered from the anemia I wrote about in the April update.
That feels worth saying plainly because it was not a small thing. For a while there I was in rough shape. Dizzy, tired, weirdly breathless, low capacity, all of it. It had crept up slowly enough that I didn’t quite realize how far below normal I had fallen until I started coming back out of it.
Now I feel like myself again.
Not “perfectly optimized” myself. Not “biohacker final form” myself. But normal. Functional. Capable of doing things without feeling like my body is quietly filing a complaint.
I’ve also changed my fitness routine a bit. I’ve been following the schedule over on the Men’s Health Daily Tracker fairly consistently, which has been helpful mostly because it gives me a structure without needing to overthink everything.
That’s probably been the theme of the last little while: simple things done consistently.
Diet has been fairly dialed in recently too. Nothing exotic. Mostly just trying to get vegetables into every meal.
Morning shake with kale.
Mid-day eggs and a greens salad with olive oil dressing.
Dinner with more greens and whatever other vegetables make sense.
I’ve also been eating more fruit, mostly apples and bananas, which feels almost too obvious to mention but also, apparently, obvious things still work.
I’ve started a new little morning regimen as well: vitamin C plus creatine, followed by ankle exercises for my persistent achilles tendonitis.
And shockingly, annoyingly, wonderfully, it seems to be working.
The achilles thing has been hanging around for a long time. It’s one of those injuries that feels like it belongs to the category of “old man warnings from the musculoskeletal system.” It doesn’t always stop you outright, but it’s always there in the background like a tiny bureaucrat with a clipboard, ready to shut down your application to run.
But lately it has been better.
So much better, actually, that two days ago I went for a 5 km run.
I didn’t plan anything heroic. I just went out and ran. And it felt good. Really good. The kind of good where you realize you’ve missed something more than you thought.
Even better, I had no residual pain afterward. Which feels almost suspicious. Like my achilles is lulling me into a false sense of security before sending me a strongly worded email.
But I’ll take it.
Balance, Literally
I also got a new slackline.
Slacklining has been a casual hobby of mine for a number of years now. I’m not doing circus tricks or walking across canyons or anything like that. It’s more backyard balance practice. A bit of focus. A bit of movement. A bit of zen between meetings and kid pickups and drop-offs.
There’s something very useful about standing on a line, that’s just a couple inches wide, and immediately being reminded that your nervous system is not as calm as you think it is.
It’s good for balance as I get older, which is the respectable middle-aged explanation. But honestly, it’s also just fun. And slightly ridiculous. And those are also valid reasons too.
The Pool Is Open
The pool is open now too.
My wife likes to comment how during the Summer months, if she is looking for me, she will likely find me just standing by the pool looking at it. But I don’t think she realizes truly what’s going through my head - it’s all chlorine levels, ph balance, water hardness… If you know, you know…
We started getting it ready a couple of weeks ago and had it properly open for the May long weekend. On Monday, we spent most of the day in the pool and hackysacking.
No kidding.
My kids are now into hacky sack.
This is very funny to me because hacky sack was a regular thing with my skateboarding buddies in the 90s. Somewhere between baggy jeans, chipped boards, parking lots, and some alternative album, there was always a hacky sack kicking around.
And now my kids are doing it.
There are few things stranger than watching your children independently discover some small cultural artifact from your own youth. Not because you forced it on them. Not because you sat them down and said, “Gather around, children, and let me tell you about the ancient ways of the footbag.”
They just found it. And liked it.
Forty-Eight
Most importantly, my 48th birthday was just a few days ago.
We celebrated with a nice dinner at 4 Fathers in Cambridge, which was lovely. And my wonderful wife got me an upgraded watch for my birthday.
I have now traded in my Apple Watch for a Garmin Vivoactive 6 and honestly, I couldn’t be happier.
This watch is pretty awesome.
It is much more fitness and health oriented, which is exactly what I wanted right now. But the thing I didn’t expect is that it also keeps delivering these little moments of charm and delight.
I wake up and it says, “Good morning!”
It tells me about various badges I’ve earned for good health behaviour.
It celebrates streaks and workouts and movement in a way that somehow feels encouraging instead of annoying.
And just this morning it suddenly gave me a party poppers animation and informed me that my fitness age is several years younger than I actually am.
I will absolutely be accepting that result without further peer review.
Besides the battery life being orders of magnitude better than the Apple Watch, what’s interesting to me is that Garmin seems to be doing the “delight” thing better than Apple too.
Apple used to be so good at that. I vaguely remember Steve Jobs talking about this kind of thing (or maybe it was Tim Cook) the idea that products should have these little moments that make you smile. Tiny design gifts. Small emotional payoffs.
The Apple Watch still does plenty of things well, obviously. But for where I’m at right now, Garmin feels more aligned. Less like a tiny phone strapped to my wrist and more like a health and fitness companion that occasionally throws confetti at me for not becoming decrepit.
Again, I’ll take it.
The Garage Era
Most of my time in recent weeks has been spent in the garage.
This is not a glamorous sentence, but it is true.
I’ve been cleaning it up, painting the walls to cover all the stains, adding new storage, setting up a new workbench, minimizing the stuff in there, and generally trying to turn it from “suburban object accumulation zone” into something that feels usable.
Soon I’ll be working on the concrete floor. The goal is to get epoxy flooring in place in the next week.
The practical reason for all of this is that we have a basement renovation starting next month. We’re going to need to move things out of the basement and into other rooms in the house, including the garage. So the garage cleanup is mostly a dependency.
A very domestic project management dependency.
Before basement reno, clean garage.
Before clean garage, remove junk.
Before remove junk, confront every bad storage decision made since moving in.
But it’s also just really nice to have a clean garage.
There is a specific kind of middle-aged joy in standing in a freshly painted garage with a proper workbench and storage.
Talk about moments of delight.
The Thread Through It
So that’s mostly where things are right now.
Three months in and time is moving fast. I’m healthy again. I’m running a little bit. I’m eating well. I’m apparently a Garmin person now. The pool is open. The kids are hackysacking. The garage is slowly becoming civilized. The basement renovation is looming.
It’s maybe not exactly the version of the sabbatical I might have imagined before stepping into it. I think part of me expected more dramatic reinvention. More obvious progress. More big external markers that would make it easy to say, “Yes, this is working.”
But maybe that’s not really how this phase works.
Maybe some of it is just getting your iron back.
Getting your achilles to calm down.
Painting the garage.
Eating kale.
Watching your kids rediscover the 90s through hacky sack.
Running 5 km and feeling grateful that nothing hurts afterward.
Waking up to a tiny watch telling you good morning.
And honestly, I am grateful for it all…
Finally, here’s a video of me and the kids kicking a soccer ball around. We do that quite a bit lately too. (Took the video on my Meta Raybans. I love those things.)