GTD #28: Elastic Attraction Theory

Lifting weights on the regular and taking a step back from running has lead to a major transformation in my personal health. First of all, I've been eating very poorly over the last few years, and this was the first month that I finally got it under control. I started lifting weights by following my 12-Week Dumbbell Training Program and started taking protein after each workout, and after each yoga workout as well. Those two changes gave me more energy and clarity, and made me actually want to eat, which is something that I struggled with when I quit smoking. I started making egg sandwiches for breakfast again and that's been a huge plus. Now I'm eating lunch consistently, and because I'm hungry, I'll eat apples and bananas and yogurt throughout the day.

I feel like I'm coming back to life in my body after a long journey away. I can't believe that I neglected nutrition so much - it's just as important as training. Yes people say that, but I have lived through how much my poor nutrition was limiting my greatness. And as much as I hate it, I'm working harder than ever at the office, which has helped me stay focused and driven as well. I don't know what's next, but I'm living day by day, paid off my credit cards and working towards a good future.

I feel alive, I feel good and grateful.

January 1st, 2026 to January 31st, 2026

Long story short: I'm training hard and talking about it. Hopefully you find this entertaining enough to subscribe, tell a friend and take on The Sendō Challenge.

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Honestly I'm OK with one run this month. First off, it's cold as hell, and second, I'm rediscovering that lifting weights is actually fun for me. As I work to rebuild my nutrition, it's better for me to take a break from running but make sure I walk as much as possible.

Turns out I love strength training more than running. Doing very simple workouts, repetitive stuff, but it's coming together nicely.

No 40+ minute sessions but I feel incredible because it's been plenty of sessions every other day. I'm locked in and focused. This is my martial arts.

Moment of Truth by Gang Starr is one of the few late-90s rap albums that I didn't absorb as a kid, but from the first moment of the first song, I could place it amongst the peers of that era that I've been obsessed with. IT's electrifying - there was something about that moment in time that combined spirituality, frustration at the system, brotherhood, gangster-ism, love, West Indian pride, drum beats, voicemail recordings, all of it just melds together into a sublime sound. It just works, you know?

Jujutsu Kaisen is cooking hard this season, each episode has incredible storytelling and art direction. Artsy and soulful, how cool is that? Also been loving Turn A Gundam as well, it's another great epic on the awfulness of war and the only way forward for humanity is through empathy and collaboration.

Bayonetta is a great action-adventure game with a focus on mastering combos and timing. I grew up loving Devil May Cry so I love a good action game, but Bayonetta felt really hard for me a few years back so I put it down. Now with some more time for action and a better sense of focus, it was easy for me to get through it on Normal mode, and now I'm replaying each chapter to get a little bit better. It's addicting because it's a combat system that you can learn quickly but because of the depth of the combo system, there's so much depth for self-expression and creativity. It's like learning an instrument, and it's been a ton of fun for me. If you need a great game with a good-enough story, but super cool characters and loads of style, give Bayonetta a shot.

The Rip, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, is a great movie with lots of twists. It's a by-the-books action movie for the most part, with great big setpieces and tension, but there's also strong psychological drama as well. Really like The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson as well. The way that the Safdie Brothers shoot their movies is so beautiful.

The Fallout show, now in it's second season, is the best videogame adaption I've experienced. Just like the games, it's really funny, it's about family, and it's about how absurd and frustrating the Wasteland can be. The show ties perfectly into existing game lore and expands on the universe in a meaningful way. Great stuff.

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Don't go anywhere! Sendō: GTD will be back after a short break.

Miles didn’t just play jazz. He kept moving jazz forward, again and again, even when it meant alienating fans, critics, and sometimes himself. While others perfected a sound and guarded it, Miles treated mastery as a launching point—not a finish line.

Early Life: Discipline Before Freedom

Miles Davis was born in 1926 in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis in a middle-class Black family. His father was a dentist—strict, disciplined, and financially stable by the standards of the time. Miles grew up with structure before rebellion.

He started trumpet young, trained formally, and learned early that sound was something you worked for, not something you stumbled into. By his teens, he was already playing with professional musicians, absorbing blues, swing, and big-band rigor.

This matters: Miles didn’t come from chaos. He chose risk later, once the fundamentals were in his bones.

New York: Apprenticeship and Friction

In the mid-1940s, Miles moved to New York to study at Juilliard—but his real education happened at night, on 52nd Street, playing alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He was surrounded by geniuses. And he knew it.

Instead of trying to out-play Parker’s speed and fire, Miles leaned into restraint. Fewer notes. More space. More tone. What began as limitation became identity.

But this period also introduced the darker side of the path: heroin addiction, instability, and self-destruction. Miles paid for proximity to brilliance with years of struggle.

Reinvention as Discipline

What separates Miles from many great artists isn’t just talent—it’s his refusal to settle.

Cool jazz → modal jazz → fusion → electric → late-era experimentation

Each era wasn’t a detour. It was a deliberate burn of the old map.

Albums like Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew—each one didn’t just succeed, it redefined the terrain. And just when people caught up, Miles moved again.

This wasn’t chaos. It was controlled risk, taken from a place of deep fundamentals. Miles practiced relentlessly, studied constantly, and listened harder than he played. He trusted silence as much as sound.

Surround Yourself With Killers

Miles had an almost supernatural eye for talent. He didn’t just recruit great musicians—he unlocked them.

John Coltrane. Herbie Hancock. Wayne Shorter. Chick Corea. Time and again, Miles assembled bands that would go on to change music after they left him.

His leadership style was demanding, sometimes brutal, but precise. He didn’t micromanage. He set conditions.

• Show up prepared.
• Listen deeply.
• Play like your life depends on it.

Miles understood that going the distance is rarely a solo effort. You build ecosystems that push you beyond your comfort zone—and sometimes beyond your ego.

Collapse, Silence, and Return

By the mid-1970s, Miles disappeared. Years of physical pain, addiction, and exhaustion forced him into near total silence. Many assumed his story was over.

But silence was never failure for Miles. It was incubation. When he returned in the 1980s, the sound shocked people again—funk, hip-hop, electronics. He dressed differently. Played differently. Refused nostalgia.

He didn’t come back to relive the past. He came back to stay relevant to the present. That alone is rare.

The Cost of the Path

Miles was not a saint. He was volatile, difficult, self-destructive at times. He burned bridges. He hurt people. He paid for his intensity.

The lesson isn’t to imitate his demons. The lesson is to understand that growth is costly, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Silence, Space, Restraint

Miles famously said: “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.”

That idea applies far beyond music.

• Training: recovery matters
• Writing: editing is power
• Life: pauses give meaning to motion

Distance isn’t filled with nonstop effort. It’s filled with rhythm.

Back to Sendō: GTD! Hope you learned something new.

Unedited ramblings, typically after a run.

Please feel free to skip to the end.

1/2/2026

New year! Welcome to the year of the horse.

1/5/2026

Drove back to Austin from NYC in two days! Absolutely exhausting but it was a much easier time in a gas car. Never doing a road trip over a thousand miles in an electric car again, or at least one without 800V (super fast charging essentially).

My favorite parts of the country on this journey are the mountains and rolling hills of Virginia, the simplicity and beauty of Eastern Tennessee (though the people are a little...country), and the tall skinny trees that hug the roads and everything in East Texas. My least favorite part - all of Arkansas on the I-40 West. It's two lanes and almost all of it is trucks. It is impossible to go even remotely fast for a couple hundred miles. Dallas traffic is awful, no surprise there, and the I-35's endless construction and dangerous merges continue.

Being home, which I talked about last chapter, was healing. Well, I was sick as a dog with that super flu this year, but even during those four days, it was nice just being around people I hadn't seen in a long time. And it helped me remember that family and friends are how we navigate through life - you don't have to go at it alone.

Thankfully it's not freezing in Austin so I'm looking forward to logging a few runs this week and getting back in the saddle. My goal is to run a marathon this year and complete a century ride. These two are essential before we make the website public.

1/6/2025

First run of the year of the horse, first run in several months. Still getting over the flu so only did 1.75 miles, but better than nothing. This month I'm just going to focus on a goal of 15+ runs, 15+ yoga sessions, 12+ weightlifting sessions. Even if the yoga sessions won't all be super long, this is what I need to get back on track. Especially weightlifting - more than enough people have commented on how skinny I look, so it must look really terrifying. So good old fashioned weightlifting and pounding protein shakes to get the muscles back online. So even if the runs aren't long or impressive, it's only just to maintain a baseline of cardio while I focus on strength training and yoga.

I also did an Instagram ad campaign for a new post that introduces the Sendo Challenge. It's gotten a lot of views and it's led to people clicking out to the website, but it hasn't translated to any new subscribers yet. I'm still only on Day 1 of course, and I know this website isn't compelling enough to be worth a subscription, so I just need to keep fighting to prove my worth. It's more interesting to do this anyway.

1/8/2026

First weightlifting session of the year yesterday. I can't believe how weak I've gotten - just doing shoulder presses with 25 pounders felt hard as heck. But I'm also excited to start from zero: I'm using the Sendo Physical Training Program II and this is my opportunity to make it excellent. This is a great program for me to start with as I got a bunch of dumbbells for Christmas. I've been using kettlebells to train at home up until this point, which are really awkward to use for bench presses and rows, so I'm already happier with this current setup. Crazy how expensive weights are though, this was a big blocker in me getting them beforehand. But the money was worth it, one session already made a solid difference. And I hit my 3rd yoga session of the month this morning, so as long as I keep up the momentum, good things are ahead.

Also I'm two weeks clean as a whistle, and the clarity I'm getting during meditation is getting stronger and stronger. Still getting bored and anxious at nighttime, but I'm just going to double down on playing videogames as a good distraction. I'll still use the days to be productive and read and reflect, but the night hours are where really good distractions that also train the brain will be helpful. Fallout 4 is excellent so far, so I'll continue grinding through that. I've also got Digimon Time Stranger on the backburner, but I'm not in the mood for a big ol RPG adventure yet.

1/12/2026

Got two weightlifting workouts in for the month so far, feeling happy. Physical Training Program II has been good to me so far, but god damn it's hard to lift weights when it's been a while. I still look small, in fact I feel like I shrank since lifting weights again, but I'm trying to eat as much as possible. Even going back on Whey Protein, though I got a random one from Target so it might have tons of metals in it, so it's a temporary solution. It's finally time for me to start tracking what I eat so I can hit my calorie numbers more effectively. Don't think I'll use an app, just write it down with pen and paper and look back at the month. I had honestly hoped this would be a world class business, but really it's just a way for me to organize and get my life together. At least it feels fun.

Almost done with Autobiography of a Yogi, like 5 pages left. I've been reading this book for what feels like years, and with this recent stretch of clean living, it feels good and right. Just got to hold the line and maintain clarity. I think I had written about this before, but I feel a sort of 'emptiness' or 'clarity' when I'm really good on my meditation flow, just following the breath and focusing on what I'm focusing on. But it's like I become kind of emotionless in general throughout the day, or maybe just neutral. It sounds depressing when I word it like that, but really it's just a feeling of calm, but it's a different kind of calm. Detached, maybe.

1/14/2026

Turns out I have no been consuming enough protein, by a very big margin. Now that I've completed the first Week of my 12 Week Physical Program 2 training, I'm realizing that I feel stronger but I don't feel bigger. Insecurities aside, I did chatting with ChatGPT and realized that for my weight, I should be consuming 150g of protein, and honestly maybe I'm eating 50g a day. Because of that deficit, and that I'm doing ashtanga yoga every day, my body is eating away at my muscles, which is why I've become so thin. So the strategy has changed - every day I do ashtanga yoga, I'll have a 50g protein shake, same for weightlifting days. And now that I've gone back to eating eggs, which is OK for me on the yogic path, that should help with protein intake as well. I'm also writing down everything I eat each day to better track all of this which has been helpful so far. I'm pulling back from running this month, maybe I'll try to get in 5-10 runs, but the focus is just dialing in nutrition intake first and foremost.

1/20/2026

Been a couple days, back on lifting weights as mentioned, focused on trying to just eat way more, being OK with the results not kicking in for months and just trusting the process. Had a great idea to include a Meal Tracker in the updated app, now that I'm struggling with eating more I'm realizing how important it is to be aware of what your intake is. Doesn't matter if you're trying to gain, maintain or cut weight - it's good to think about these things if you can. So I'm excited for that update. Still holding steady and it's been a completely clean month for me, which is weird and exciting, and I'm getting through it pretty well. I function well with fixations, and I've been playing Bayonetta, an absolutely rad action game. Just beat it for the first time on Normal difficulty, I think I'll play through each chapter again on Normal and then go through it on Hard Mode. It's all about rhythm and timing, and getting your combos in without getting greedy.

1/22/2026

Practiced a little golf yesterday with the 7-iron and an open field. It overlooks the river by my home, and has rolling hills and sand and all sorts of fields - feels like own personal Links course. I've been struggling with getting enough food to hit my calorie and protein goals, so sometimes I have the strength to lift weights at the end of the day and sometimes I don't. I needed to walk the dog and I couldn't lift, so I broke out the golf clubs for the first time in several months. Playing Bayonetta has taught me to refocus on the fundamentals, so I'm taking the same approach with golf. Just basic mechanics, one club, half swings and then graduating to full swings. I know I should take a PGA class so I don't lock in bad habits, but at the very least I'm grateful to be putting the time in. Some hits feel really good, some feel comically embarrassing, many times I destroy a chunk of the earth when I whiff the ball. It's such a frustrating collection of mechanical movements and positioning, especially for someone that never grew up playing sports, but it's another way to force myself to be present in my body. So I'm grateful for that. Even if I suck, I'll just keep reading tips, showing up and practicing every few days. It's just another tool in the arsenal of activity. This too, is yoga.

1/26/2026

Hit my 3rd week of weightlifting using the Physical Training Program 2. I've made a few modifications like throwing on three sets of curls at the end of each main workout, and I don't have an incline-able bench so I've been doing classic bench presses. But overall it's all coming together, and just as importantly, I'm finally taking my diet seriously again and eating more and cooking at home. It's exciting, because for the last few years I've been so lazy and disconnected that I've honestly ordered UberEATS and spent stupid amounts of money WAY more than I should've. Sure I was stoned, but I just really didn't get any joy out of making food. But here I am now, finding joy in eating and trying hard to get my protein and my overall calorie intake up. I would honestly say I've been eating a third of what I need to each day, so that's been my focus: delicious, easy stuff that adds up to a strong amount of calories. And taking more protein shakes has been smart too, so I'm optimistic by the end of this quarter that I'll feel and look totally different.

1/27/2026

Day #2 of making a fried egg sandwich for breakfast. It really is the little things in life, I'm so proud of this task that a child could do. I've made eggs before and cooked all sorts of things years ago, but it's the first time that I feel like I have a kitchen and a space where I can make things. I've been using my cast iron skillet and making one pasture raised egg, salt and pepper, with Swiss cheese on top. Then I put that on an English muffin that I heat up for a few minutes in the Ninja oven, and add Asian Zing (Thai Chili) sauce from Buffalo Wild Wings. It's absolutely glorious. I've got 10 more eggs, and I know I can easily make 10 more sandwiches. I might even get crazy and upgrade to two eggs per sandwich. This has shown me that I really neglected the nutrition aspect of my wellbeing, and it's given me so many dividends and agency in life to cook these little things that I'm proud of. I love the old school shit, so the cast iron skillet feels powerful and grounded to me, and I love that it evolves over time.

See you for the next one.

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