84 days to ultraman Mexico
07/25/25 – 84 Days to Ultraman
New Hampshire: Zach’s Apartment
I drove up this afternoon. There was a car on fire, facing the wrong direction—minor construction delays slowed me down. I got gas, handled two phone calls with Ryan Carmen and Mitch Harrel, and spoke with my dad before the trip. We discussed Milwaukee and Mexico, and even the possibility of a Florida trip for a third Ironman this year. One thing at a time.
I’m excited with how things are coming together. It’s funny—when things are going well, there’s more fear than when they’ve gone so wrong they’re over. And when things are completed successfully, there’s a lack of joy, or more accurately, a sense of being lost. There’s a bittersweet quality to accomplishment: one chapter ends, another has yet to begin. Can I feel more acutely the opportunity inherent in that ending? Can I find pleasure in the open-ended possibility that comes with it?
Tomorrow we plan to visit a running store, a coffee shop, and a lake. Zach will give me swimming lessons, watch my stroke, provide feedback, and then we’ll work out. He told me about the “combat side stroke,” a swimming method that conserves energy while maintaining forward progress. This could be a useful tool for my 10k swim this October.
This week has had almost no training—just one run and daily stretching—but tomorrow I can swim. After that, I need to get right back on the horse and resume full training. Time is limited before October, and that massive race looms over every day. It’s a constant reminder of the life I want to live and the distance between it and my current state.
It’s hard to define, measure, or compare life with intention. These things always happen automatically; I don’t control the rubric. Fundamentally, they are illusions—a framework attempting to contain the indescribable. Life is immediate and constant. We carry our entire pasts through each present moment.
At some point, I need to sit down and observe the disorder within me. The thesis is this: by observing disorder without acting on it, order emerges in the perspective of the observer. You become both the observer and the observed. This duality necessitates disorder and order to exist together. When all you have is disorder, the act of observation allows order to arise. Placing more time and effort into creating order gradually shifts the internal tide.
I’ve been working on this for many years—perhaps my entire life. Disorder was introduced early, and I grew up within it. I’ve sought to change it, sought every teacher and tool I could find, but I was still acting out of disorder on disorder. The next step is to simply observe disorder as it is. Only there can I become truly ordered.