54. Reset
This was a lighter week — barely eighty kilometres on the plan — and I needed it. The legs have felt heavy for a while, that slow accumulation of fatigue you don’t notice until one morning you wake up and suddenly everything clicks again. I prioritised sleep, kept the easy runs genuinely easy, and by Thursday there was actual spring in the stride. The joy crept back in. Some of the grind dropped away. That’s the whole point of a down week, and this one delivered.
I also finished reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao. It’s a sharp, reported account of how OpenAI was built — the ambition, the money, the interpersonal fault lines. I wish I’d read it last year; I would have enjoyed it even more when the drama was unfolding in real time. But it’s still the best single book for understanding how that place actually works, and what the culture of frontier AI labs looks like from the inside. If you want to go deeper on OpenAI specifically, it’s worth the time.
With the legs feeling fresher, I started mapping the first half of London to Brighton with Atlas. It’s a 58-kilometre push from Richmond through Surrey and Sussex to Turners Hill, with roughly eight hundred metres of climb and about sixty percent off-road. The vest setup is the key detail: two five-hundred-millilitre soft flasks up front, electrolytes, two/three gels per hour, and a compact rain shell stashed at the back. A head torch goes in too — mandatory even for a 7 a.m. start in late May. The main rest stop is at Oaks Park around twenty-five kilometres, which I’m treating as a psychological waypoint rather than a long break. Nutrition target is sixty to ninety grams of carbs per hour from the off, anti-chafe before I leave the house, and a drop bag at the finish with warm clothes and recovery sandals. Logistics are straightforward: early registration Friday evening to skip the Saturday queue, then shuttle from Tulley’s Farm to Three Bridges and a train back to London. Nothing complicated, but the difference between a good day and a slog will be discipline on pace and fuel in the first thirty kilometres.
The plan from here is a reload to around one hundred and twenty kilometres next week, then a proper taper into the event. I like having the shape of it in front of me.
Carve Out
I have bought The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I’ve read so much heavy non-fiction lately that I think some fiction will be the right kind of distraction. Weir builds problems and solves them with engineering logic — there’s something about that rhythm that I suspect will feed the part of my brain that comes up with new ideas when it’s not being forced to. I’ll see if a few chapters before bed does something for the imagination that scrolling through research doesn’t.
