I went for a run today, and after few kilometres I began to feel low on energy. I kept going for a while, then I had to slow down and continue walking to recover. I did that three or four times, with running segments ever shorter and walking segments ever longer. I was feeling depleted, as if I had no energy, and particularly the parts uphill were almost painful. I was not proud of myself, to be honest.

When home, I checked my tracking app and, to my complete surprise, I had been faster than I had ever been before. A lot faster. On the same track, I had cut my personal best by more than 7 minutes, and I had kept a pace that was way higher than I am used to, with peaks that I had not reached ever before.

That was probably the reason why I was feeling so tired and low on energy. Without any particular intention, without even noticing it, I was overdoing it.

Three key take aways.

First, you need to allocate flexibility and space in your practice to slow down when you feel tired, stressed, sick or simply down.

Second, we are very poor judges of our own performance, being kinder to ourselves and more receptive to the signals we get (from our body, from the environment, from people around us) is most likely a good idea.

Third, as we are very fallible when it comes to judging ourselves, we need to have clear ways to measure what we are doing, free from bias and narratives.

I am a lazy person, and I have so far failed at taking care of my body.

Despite being very active in my teens and early twenties, I have basically refrained from doing any type of regular physical activity in the past fifteen years.

This year, I have decided that I am also going to change that. Because I am getting old, and a healthy body is important and shapes the impact you want to have in the world. And so, after taking on light exercise in the form of Tai Chi training from January, today I have started (lightly) a more intense training that will hopefully take me to run a half-marathon in two years.

Wish me luck.