52. Systems
This was a week of two halves. The first half was all board meeting — preparation, focus, the kind of sustained concentration that leaves a mark. It went well, but the second half felt like the adrenaline leaving my body. Plenty to do, yet that hollow, spent feeling that follows intensity. I’ve learned not to fight it. Just show up and keep the wheels turning.
Training held steady. I’ve been running into work all week, the routine now locked in. By Sunday I’ll be around 115 kilometres — the fifth week in a row at this load. The body is coping. Nutrition is dialled up and holding. Sleep is the outlier: averaging six to seven hours against a target of seven to eight. I’m conscious of the tightrope. For now it feels manageable, but it’s on my radar.
The project that has most of my attention outside work is the agentic framework I’ve been building with Atlas. We can now communicate via WhatsApp, send voice messages (thanks to Whisper and ElevenLabs), search the web accurately through Perplexity. I’ve upgraded the subagent models — DeepSeek, Kimi, GPT — and we’re moving toward a managerial approach where I split tasks into smaller chunks, as I would with a human colleague, and Atlas executes them autonomously. We co-author short pieces on fdicostanzo.com/shorts through an autonomous pipeline. I also wrote a piece on OpenClaw and agents within the corporate framework. It is still hard for most people to grasp, but if you’re even slightly curious, try it. You will be blown away.
Shorts:
Long form:
Carve Out
I’ve been listening to Marc Andreessen across David Senra’s podcast, Lenny’s, and 20VC. He sees AI as deeply deflationary, and the real unlock as delegation — splitting work into tasks and managing it well, while crossing between specialist roles that previously required separate careers. The parallel to endurance training is not accidental. Both are about building systems that let you operate at capacity without burning out.
A new blog post on WeRunUltras.com about sleep banking before long events, a short summary below. If you are looking for a training plan, check out my range. Each plan is only £5.
The coaching advice to “bank sleep like glycogen” is directionally useful but mechanistically wrong: sleep cannot be stored above biological need, only debt can be corrected — and for the majority of mid-pack 100-miler runners, who habitually sleep six to seven hours a night, that correction is both real and worth pursuing. The evidence, anchored in independent lab trials and a 1,154-runner field dataset, shows that banking reduces attentional lapses and is associated with a meaningful drop in fall prevalence during a race, but a 2019 study using the same protocol found no benefit whatsoever for executive function — the cognitive layer that governs map reading, pacing judgement, and the DNF decision at mile 75. The practical implication is precise: start ten to fourteen days before race day, shift bedtime earlier rather than sleeping later, and design your in-race nap strategy on the assumption that your footing will be protected but your judgement will not.
Full article here.