Anti-viral writings for financial resilience, location independence and meaningful relationships.
What’s really, really hard, is to train to do extraordinary things. It’s the time you spend learning, the energy you put in training, the opportunities you skip by being on your own path, the joy you take away by not engaging in simple, normal, daily life, the mental fight with the comfort pull, all that … Read more
Today I finished the Lisbon Marathon. It was my first official race of this length since the Covid clusterfuck unfolded (just for clarity, when I’m referring to this as a “clusterfuck”, I’m referring to the way it’s handled, and how the powers in charge are piggybacking this black swan event to tighten control and restrict … Read more
… I finished my first marathon. On October 7 2012, beaten and bruised, still overweight, I was crawling towards the finish line of what eventually became the start of my new life. I finished 42km for the first time ever, just a month before my 42nd anniversary, in 5 hours and 20 minutes. Looking back, … Read more
Including training sessions, I think I ran over 50 marathons by now. Maybe more, I didn’t keep count, I just did a short back of the envelope mental calculation. I don’t consider myself a competitive ultra-runner, mostly because I personally know people who ran hundreds of marathons. I know my place, but even if I’m … Read more
When I started to run, it took me a few months to be able to run continuously 1 kilometer. In hindsight, this seems ridiculous. And yet, that was the level I was at, back then. Overweight, untrained, stressed and ignorant. Slowly, by pushing through, I somehow broke those barriers, but it was rally hard. After … Read more
First of all, the title is piggy-backing on a popular meme, I speak English long enough to know when to say “more important”, so don’t even bother correcting me. Second, this is true. I mean, the title. New beginnings are fundamental, but they can’t exist outside honest endings. Let me tell you a story about … Read more
“In an ultra, walk before you have to.” I know that for many of my readers, the sentence above doesn’t make any sense. So let me explain. An “ultra” means an ultramarathon, a running competition longer than 42km (which is the length of a standard marathon). Any number of kilometers on top of 42 will … Read more
As I’m slowly getting on track with my 230 days blogging challenge – this is my 6th day, by the way – I’m starting to revisit feelings and attitudes from my ultra-running races. If I really think about it, such a long writing challenge is very similar with an ultra. It stretches over a huge … Read more
