60. Like a rocket
Two weeks in Italy with the family. Matthew at my childhood beach, nearly unlimited tiramisu, proper pizza, and time with my parents and Alessia's. This was the kind of holiday that makes you forget everything else for a while, which was needed. And I took holidaying seriously this time. Also no training!
Back in London, I finally got round to the garage. It's still a work in progress, but the internet is in, the lights are up, and the Wattbike is connected to the mains. What was storage is now a training room — sort of (this is a genuine em-dash). Being able to supplement running with cycling through the fall should change what I can do.
The target is a sub-80-minute half marathon at Battersea Park in the first week of December. That would beat my PB from 2022, 1h24m44s. It's a bold objective, and I'm under no illusions about what it demands. But it’s entirely possible as long as I put in the work, especially on a flat course like Battersea. More structure in training, better nutrition, and real attention to performance will get me there. The basics: train, sleep, eat.
This bring us then to week 1. This was meant to shock the body, on purpose. Get myself straight to the deep end and see if I can swim. A week on, I feel pretty good. Heart performance is tracking where I'd expect it, and my legs have caught up faster than I thought they would. The details are below.
I’m running a calorie deficit to lose some weight over the next couple of months. At the moment I don’t feel this is particularly affecting me, because I’m adjusting the carb intake to the training and making sure I’m eating enough protein.
The holiday was a reset in another sense too. I'd been writing steadily through July, and the break gave me a chance to step back and look at the threads I'd been pulling on.
I got one long piece (20) Why AI Adoption Depends on Management with the argument being that enterprises keep blaming models for what are really failures of ownership, workflow design, and governance. The technology works in well-managed environments, and management is what creates them.
Then I put together a couple of shorts as reaction to a couple of events out there:
(4) When Guardrails Become the Attack Surface: The Hugging Face breach showed how hosted LLM guardrails can become the attack surface itself, blocking forensic analysis when you need it most.
(5) Caught Off Guard, Again: Why Kimi K3 Was Predictable: The release of Kimi K3 was the third scheduled Chinese frontier release in ninety days and caught the market off guard.
On a personal note, these open-weight models are starting to become really good and their reduced version (aka quantised or distilled, depending on the approach) can also be run on (expensive) home hardware. This means not being dependent on AI labs and their economics but also 100% privacy. I’m thinking about this.
(6) Borrowed Time: The Horizon Mismatch That Ended Situational Awareness: And the Situational Awareness fund unwind was a multi-year AI thesis financed with daily margin money. Not the first of its kind. Worth reading More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby and see how history has repeated itself.
Carve Out
I watched Rafa on Netflix and enjoyed it. Nadal's career told through his perspective and the people around him, the obsessive routine, the injuries, the way he kept coming back. I also revisited Liverpool's Istanbul 2005 Champions League final. I remember exactly where I was that night, in complete disbelief at what I was watching. Both worth a watch. I have also been reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. A great fable for those running teams.
Pangram
Substack and Pangram are working together so that AI writing is limited on the platform. This is the result on this post:
And it’s false. All my writing — as should yours — is AI-assisted, I’m just pretty good at it. I work a lot with Codex and my Openclaw (Atlas) and you should too.
AI Slop = Lazy
Learn how to do it, very well. It’s great and it works. And also requires some effort and thinking. Kudos to Peter for sharing his no-ai-slop skill, from which I have created my custom recipe.