I’m thrilled to share my conversation with Green Beret, husband, and father Gabe Gaines. Welcome to Vale Tudo, Sgt. Gaines.

What is a lesson your father taught you that you will pass down to your sons?

As a kid, my dad used to say a phrase that has shaped my approach to fatherhood.

He knew I was learning more by being around him, observing his life, how he treated people, and how he handled adversity than I ever could from a planned lesson or talk. I’ve carried his approach into how I show up for my own two sons. I prioritize quality time together to expose my boys to what I value and how I think.

I’m giving my sons the same wholehearted love and guidance my father gave me. I’d like to think that I’m building on what my dad taught me. I try to instill the same values I absorbed from my dad, plus the lessons I’ve learned in my own journey as a man.

How did you forge a brotherhood within your Special Forces Detachment?

No doubt, shared suffering plays a significant role in building a close team - we had plenty of long, stressful events to facilitate that. But the key for me was how we navigated those long, stressful events. The detachment was already comprised of specially assessed and selected high performers who were fit, resilient, and smart. The emphasis had to be taken off of how talented each individual was and placed on sacredness and strength of brotherhood.

My method of leading the team into unity was based off of the phrase,

From day one, I endeavored to set the tone for the team by giving my body and soul to the detachment. This means carrying more than your fair share of the work load, creating an environment where the guys feel genuinely cared for, fighting and advocating on their behalf to higher headquarters’ leadership at my own personal and professional cost. Sacrificial love had to be modeled.

This trickled down to the detachment. The guys went further, faster, and worked harder for the sake of the detachment. Each man followed the standard that was modeled to them and refused to let each other down. We had the most open and honest detachment I’d ever been a part of. We trusted each other completely.

In large part, this can be reproduced in the civilian sector. In my twenties I was a part of a missionary team, nearly the same size as a 12-man Special Forces Detachment. We served as mentors for at-risk kids living in government housing located in inner-city San Antonio. For five years, six days a week, we helped kids with homework, taught lessons on character development, played games, and shared our lives together. The team lived in real community.

There are aspects of military service, specifically combat arms that are difficult to reproduce in the civilian world. The sheer amount of time we spend together is unique. Six month long deployments, training events that last for weeks, days and nights spent together. We see each other at our very best and worst. There are facets of who we are that no one will ever know except the men on your team.

What did the military reveal in you?

Military service has caused me to systematically confront just about every limiting belief I’ve ever held. A career in Special Forces demands that you get out of your comfort zone and take on tasks and responsibilities you don’t feel ready for. For years, I struggled with self doubt and imposter syndrome as the tasks became more complex and the assignments carried greater consequences for failure. I found that I can lean on others’ expertise to fill the gaps I was weak in and that while hard work cannot replace experience, it can put you in a place to be successful in roles that feel beyond your current capacity.

Growing up, aggression was not encouraged or affirmed. I thought something was wrong with me. The military viewed these traits as virtues and gave me the opportunity to fully explore and develop this part of myself.

I have not experienced a combat deployment. I joined the Army in 2015 when ISIS was an emerging threat. My intent for joining Special Forces was to go to war on my nation’s behalf. To serve at my highest capacity.

When I arrived to my first team, they had just returned from Afghanistan. It was a very senior team and many of the guys had multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although I’ve had multiple operational deployments, they have not been in active combat zones.

Did the Army ruin the fun of jumping, shooting, and rucking?

I can do without jumping these days. A lot can go wrong on jumps. Each jump feels like I’m loading an additional cylinder with a bullet in a game of Russian Roulette.

I still enjoy shooting and rucking with the guys, everything we do turns into a competition.

Is your Stoicism something you studied or is it innate in your character?

Stoic Philosophy is fairly new to me. I read my first three or four books on Stoicism this past year. I learned some valuable lessons from Stoicism, but the value for me was gaining language for ideas and ways of thinking I had innately held for most of my adult life.

How are transitions between home and work?

I have operated in high stress environments where a mistake can get you or a teammate killed. Early in my career, I struggled with these major transitions. I still do sometimes. Your nervous system gets locked into fight or flight mode from so much time under tension. You come home from a six month trip and it’s hard to find the off button. Practicing presence has been helpful. I use my physical senses to ground me. The smell of my wife’s hair when we hug. The distinct sound of my sons’ laughter. The way the sunlight lights their faces. I take it all in as an observer. I let these moments wash over me and gratitude begins to take the place of hyper vigilance and anxiety. I also journal my thoughts and record what’s going on inside of me. This forces me to think through and confront emotions that are easy to avoid. Putting my thoughts on paper brings coherence and a sense of order to the storm within me.

What part of being a Green Beret do you put away sometimes and what part is always with you?

I realized early in my career that I can’t bring work home. I can’t speak to my wife with the same brutal candor and efficiency that I use with a teammate. My sons don’t deserve the same manner of correction I would give to one of my guys on the team. On a detachment, we expect so much from each other and when someone doesn’t meet the standard, we address it immediately. At home, my role is to lead with a greater sense of empathy and patience. This doesn’t mean that I don’t bring order and accountability to my home. It means the way I show up to love and lead my family looks much different than when I’m leading a Special Forces Detachment.

One thing remains the same whether I’m leading my family or Green Berets. I do my best to operate from the place of sacrificial love. I want to serve those around me in a way that costs me something and makes them better.

If your sons wants to follow your path, what advice would you offer them to prepare?

If either of my sons would like to pursue joining Special Forces in the future, I won’t discourage them, but I will advise them to count the cost before making the leap. For preparation, I would advise them to show up to Selection ready.

That was my approach and it worked out for me.

Best and worst food in the military?

When eating at a military dining facility, breakfast is always the best meal. Eggs, bacon, and grits is my go to. Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) are all terrible.

What do you eat now (when you have the choice)?

Most of my diet is beef, eggs, chicken, and rice.

Exercise you love? Hate?

Favorite: military press. Least favorite: burpees.

How do you recover?

Sleep when able, hydrate, and eat. Nothing fancy.

What does your inner scorecard measure?

Ultimately, all that matters to me is that I make the people around me better.

Next mission?

My next challenge is transitioning from the military to spend more time with my family and start a mentorship program.

Thanks for serving America and thanks for sharing your experiences and lessons learned with Vale Tudo readers. Deeply appreciated, brother.

I wish there were a Tactical Games general contractor who could just set new athletes up with everything that they need at once. But since I’ve spend time and money through trial and error, here’s what I’ve learned in hopes of saving you both.

Shoes

Salomon Speedcross 6 are my standard trail running shoes. Some athletes compete in boots, but I far prefer trail running shoes for added mobility.

Socks

Hollow alpaca are comfortable and don’t hold moisture (or stink!).

Plate carrier

Jacked Rabbit plates are more comfy than metal plates. Holds three rifle magazines. Practice rope climbs with your vest (and belt). It takes practice with weight and a different weight distribution.

Eye Pro

If you get on line without eye protection, you get DQed. Don’t. My favorite is the Gatorz Magnum with ballistic-rated lenses; I have them in tinted, contrast and clear. As with firearms, I prefer the all metal Gatorz to most competitors’ plastic. Since I got Zeiss SMILE surgery to fix my eyesight, I wear the Gatorz nearly constantly. Anything with eye risk, even trail running at night, causes me to toss on the clear Gatorz. The ballistic glass isn’t bulletproof, but it could save your eyes from spent brass and even shrapnel.

Ear Pro

I like double ear pro. My instructors don’t. So for classes I use Axil GS Extreme 3.0 to make it easy to hear their instructions. But for competition I like maximal noise reduction to stay as calm as possible. For that I combine foamies. The key to over ear protection is gel cup, which make pressure headaches less likely. Sordin makes the best. To measure the combo, you can’t combine their claimed NRR dB; my best estimate is that they reduce it by ~38 dB, bringing down 150 dB rifles to tolerable peak impulse.

Wagon

The key is to get something like this with large wheels that won’t get stuck on rough terrain.

Targets

I love splatter targets that allow you to easily see and adjust to your shot placement.

Optics

Don’t scrimp on optics. They can cost as much as the firearm itself but a flexible quality optic such as the Leupold 3.6-18 is worth every penny. Then get a red dot offset. I like using the same red dot as on your pistol, ideally something with a large open lens for fast target acquisition.

Axle

TTG’s fitness component is pretty similar to CrossFit. The only requisite skill is rope climb. Besides that it is mostly carrying, pushing, and pulling weight. You just need an engine, strength, and will. My gym had almost everything I needed – yoke, sandbags, sled, and stuff to farmers walk. The one missing item was the axle bar. You need it to get accustomed to the grip and the fact that it doesn’t spin like an Olympic bar. Deadlift, clean and jerk, overhead press, and overhead carry it.

Pistol

The good – I’m increasingly convinced by 2011s for light and flat recoil that speeds up follow up shots. I’m guilty of anticipating recoil and these lessen that sin. I feel better control; I run the gun instead of the gun running me. My favorite so far? The Kimber 2K11 Comp. It is machined from stainless steel in Troy, Alabama. When you pull the trigger, the red dot barely budges. It is less expensive than the Staccato XC but is lighter and has a lighter trigger.

The bad – I was rushing between classes and eager to use my 20% student discount so was talked into buying a P320-XFive Legion. This was never really going to be more than a backup but even as such it has been an unmitigated disaster. It is not reliable; I’m not even sure that it is safe. Running a new Sig gun with a new Sig optic and Sig ammo, it doesn’t consistently cycle clean and lubricated. The company was blasé and unconcerned but wouldn’t take it back. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Further complicating the Sig’s malfunctions: Connecticut’s 10-round magazine limit means that CT compliant magazines are flush instead of extended. Thus they are far harder and slower to clear jams. Follow the law, even the stupid ones. But the second you’re in a freer state, use extended magazines. The clock doesn’t stop for you in a competition if your weapon malfunctions. There is no calling a time out. You have to keep pointing down range, clear any jam, and get back in the game.

The ugly – the M&P 2.0 Competitor is not a thing of beauty (I like the aesthetics and feel of the boxier Kimber or Staccato 2011s). But it is a good value for a light pistol with manageable recoil. I prefer metal to plastic so have been happy with S&W’s pivoting from polymer to aluminum frames. Plastic is fine for toys; metal is better for tools which is one reason why I prefer the Competitor to the plastic VP9 Match, an otherwise competitive option.

I have yet to shoot the Atlas Titan which might be the optimal TTG pistol. Please comment below if you’ve gotten your hands on one and can share a review. But whatever pistol you get: spend as much on ammo and training. In competition, it is clear who is and isn’t 100% familiar with all of the quirks of a specific platform. The most important thing is to shoot so much that you know all there is to know about how it performs.

Rifle

Delta Level Defense is building my rifle, so I haven’t tried too many alternatives. The barrel length should be ~14.5”. I like running a suppressor. What would I look at if I wasn’t getting one made by DLD? I tried the JP-15 which had a booth at the last TTG event I attended. It is faaaast. With the right shooter, it could be mistaken for full auto. Speaking of the right shooter, here’s Jacob Heppner showing his rifle setup as well as his (far more important) training with it.

Kevin Koester has been a CrossFit masters champion multiple times. In addition to being a competitive athlete, he is a husband, father, steel company CEO, and gym owner. He’s one of the athletes I most admire because he juggles all of the other responsibilities that I do while rising to the top of the game of fitness. So I’m excited to get a chance to hear from Kevin Koester.

How do you stay durable?

Lots of mobility work.

How do you minimize injuries?

Following a regimented program when training for a comp so that it is progressive.

Favorite exercise?

I love when gymnastics is in a workout.

Least favorite?

I didn’t like a lot of overhead work early on in CrossFit because of my mobility, I have corrected that.

Do you have elk in the freezer?

I do but come September the supply gets low and it’s time to do it again.

What else do you eat?

I like any protein and occasionally I cheat.

Any supplements?

I am taking Creatine with NMN right now, something new and I like how it makes me feel. I am big on reading my body and what makes it feel and perform better.

What do you judge yourself upon?

100% on the way I feel. I’m not a tech guy, I’ve never worn a monitor, I rarely look at past scores or times on workouts. I know when I can crush any work out in front of me, I have put in the work.

How do you recover?

I get eight hours a night as a standard, I like quiet, alone time to think and plan.

Do you avoid pain or have a high pain threshold?

Some of the heavy lifting will stick with me for a day or two and bring out any nagging injuries but with a few days rest before a comp I am ready to go.

I do not take any pain meds like Advil because I want to feel every nagging injury so I know if I can push through or in a rare case I have to modify.

A similar question about fear: in situations that are hard or impossible for most people, do you have less of it or do you have tools to manage it? For example: heights. You’ve climbed mountains for fun and steel gantries for work that most people would never try. Should someone look at that and think “he’s a natural” or think “that just takes mental training the same way it takes physical training”?

Open water swimming tips?

Slow and steady for me! I am comfortable in the water but never did a lot of open water until training for the swim run event a few years ago where we swam five miles during the race. I breath every right stroke and keep my heart rate down.

Satisfied or still hungry?

I expect excellence in everything I do and I will most likely die trying to find perfection because perfection is not attainable.

Thanks for your time but more importantly thanks for the inspiration.

Bold leadership, undaunted courage, and complete dedication to duty

Pop culture is overly focused on superheroes, whose abilities cloud the distinction between what is possible and what isn’t. If you can just fly away, shoot lasers from your eyes, or withstand direct gunshots with bulletproof skin, it is harder to judge what is courage and what is science fiction.

Everyone and especially young people should refocus on the non-fictional heroes who can’t fly away and whose bodies bleed when shot. That takes real courage. One of my actual non-fictional heroes is Maj. Capers. It is gratifying to see him justly honored in his lifetime. His recent CMOH citation reads,

I’m preparing for a few upcoming Tactical Games events, a competition combining functional fitness and marksmanship under duress, essentially armed CrossFit. DLD is building my rifle and pistol, which so far has been a fun process designing gear specifically for this series.

Whatever one spends on weapons, there should be a 1:1:1 ratio of investing in weapons to ammo to training. Owning a gun as a step towards being an effective shooter is like owning a baseball to play in the major league – probably necessary but far from sufficient. For ammo, I love Ammo2, a subscription service to dollar cost average ammo purchases. This helps manage the ammo budget while also reminding me to train.

For training, I’m going to be combining various schools including Sig Sauer Academy. I started at the beginning with Rifle 101, then raced through Handgun 101-104 which opens up a lot more training options. That 104 level is the prerequisite for the fun stuff that they offer in their more advanced classes.

A decade ago leading up to my 40th birthday, I raised $12,302 for a favorite healthcare mission. It would be fun to surpass that for my 50^th birthday this year. I’m raising money for the Navy SEAL Foundation and have $2,202 to go to surpass last decade’s effort. I’m not yet ready to decline or decay so hope to beat my younger self here and in all possible ways.

I started training for the Frogman Swim this week, with two 1k open water swims. Arms and legs feel strong; breathing cadence is a sloppy mess that needs work, but the second was less bad than the first. Again this afternoon. I’m happy with my new wetsuit; it is hot for August but will be optimal for September. I still train in it to get used to how it feels even if it makes water feel like a warm bath. What does a win look like for me? Raising $12,500 for the SEAL Foundation and finishing what will be my longest swim, ideally within a few hours.

On the topic of SEALs, success at making it through selection has long been a mystery. Even experienced instructors can’t consistently guess who will make it. What helps in High School? Maybe wrestling, maybe water polo, maybe living in New England where we’re used to swimming or surfing in frigid water. But there’s no sure way to tell who quits and who doesn’t.

One statistically significant indicator: self-awareness. SEAL candidates whose self-assessments most closely match their peer reviews outperform those whose self-assessments most deviate. It is unsurprising that if someone correctly thinks that he is a stud in some domain, that he’s more likely to succeed. More surprisingly, if someone correctly thinks that he is a dud in a given area, he is more likely to succeed as well. How can this be? My interpretation is that we need to prepare ahead of time or improvise during any selection process. If you are great and know it, you can improvise. If you are struggling and know it, you know that you need to prepare more. Both are fine. What’s not fine: delusion. That means you need to seek out objective feedback. Avoid echo chambers. Know the truth, even the ugly truths.

I’m mourning the death of Nims Purja who died in an avalanche this week. He was a great climber and teacher and someone I had planned to use as a guide for future expeditions. I doubt that he could have done anything differently to survive. But that is rarely the case. I pour over the stats from American Alpine Club’s Accidents in North American Climbing and listen to the related podcast The Sharp End. A few basic safety measures would avoid or ameliorate most of these accidents.

• Pack a puffer. Mine weighs 8 ounces so is easy to pack in my running vest. I’m comfortable in shorts and a t shirt in the 30s when it is 1) day and 2) I’m moving. However, an injury can change both those variables. In the backcountry: prepare to spend the night.

• Bring water. You can last a long time without food; you can’t last long without water.

• If you’re around rock and ice, keep your helmet on. Modern ones are comfortable and light. Don’t take it off when you think you’re out of danger. Just keep it on.

I’ve been listening to the Real Survival Stories podcast series, which is good, but could also be called “Real Bad Decisions”. The above lessons all apply and would have at least largely solved most of the episodes. Bring a jacket and water. Wear your helmet. The day might suck, but you’ll see another. A few more to add.

• Bring a Garmin; you can get help from anywhere and cut down rescue timelines from days to hours. Anyone with satellite connectivity is part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

• Bring a friend. Venture into the wilderness with at least one buddy.

If you absolutely insist on going out alone, have someone know your route and planned return. They can send rescuers out if there is an unexpected delay. None of that would have saved Nims. But it could have saved many others. It could save you.

I don’t know. It is a wild world. I’m about to start sending them off into the wild one by one. It is probably an evolutionary advantage that we are as a species overconfident – not just cheerily optimistic but also sure that we have a good sense of what comes next. Our ancestors might have stayed under their woolly mammoth blankets in their caves if they could fully contemplate what lay ahead. The catastrophes would be too scary and the opportunities would be too exciting to contemplate.

So herein some wild-ass guesses at what matters as the next generation starts to leave home. I don’t really know and that is the point. But I’m quite sure my job isn’t to optimize kids for success circa when I left home or as the kids now apparently call it “before the turn of the century”.

First, learn how to learn. Hopefully that has been a part of their education from the beginning. But study habits and memorization techniques (probably?) still matter. Swaths of our skills will get replaced by technology. I don’t want to be sentimental about them – lots of work was actually boring. It only mattered because it was valuable at the time and we liked adding value. Pivot. Instantly. The more flexible, the better. That means having all the tools to learn new things fast and effectively. This is not passively getting exposed to information that washes over us. It is trial and error wrestling with material, vectoring in on the hard stuff and the sticking points. We will all get replaced. But we can be the replacement.

Secondly, be frugal. It might take money as well as brains to grab the opportunities ahead. Be more frugal than you planned to be. Allowing consumption to track income is normal, but also stupid. It makes sense only in a world that stagnates around current patterns so that your consumption is sustainable and appropriate. It won’t be. If there are disasters – and there will be – you’ll be glad to have saved more. If there are bonanza opportunities – and there will be – you’ll be glad to have saved more so you can survive disaster and exploit opportunity.

An emergency fund is a good idea. Have 6-12 months of living expenses set aside to survive calamities. Sure. But it doesn’t have to be a bad emergency. Also have money set aside for good emergencies. Have some amount of money (it doesn’t necessarily need to be more than $50-100k but can’t really scale down much below that to hit practical minimums and be relevant) set aside to invest with every smart person you know and trust whenever they launch a startup. Make it small enough to not ruin the relationship if it is a $0, but big enough to change your life if it is a 100-bagger.

Besides having the liquidity ready to deploy, aggressive saving is also a good practice to let the world underestimate you. Once you get far off of the track of stupid consumption fads, it gets easier to stay off. Keep up with the Joneses? Let them drive by (probably in an expensively leased sports car). Let them be unimpressed. Let them pity you. Let them forget about you. The easiest way to get rich is to not spend $0.01 trying to look rich. The easiest way to avoid getting rich is to make a lot of money but spend it impressing people you hate.

Here’s a highly actionable easy place to stick savings: a treasury fund. Mine gets a tax aware 3.33%. Nothing exciting. But whenever I want to move savings to investing, I can shift it to my long/short direct index. Direct indexing is great but one of its caveats is tracking error, especially when leveraged. Dollar cost averaging from savings can get it back on track with its underlying index. Whenever I want liquidity, I can use the portfolio line of credit for 4.64%. So there is a quite intentional ratchet effect – I add over time but never need to subtract from net investments. I can seamlessly borrow against it far more than I’d ever want or need.

Third, get a job. Unless you sing like Taylor Swift or dunk like Lebron James, your salary isn’t going to make you rich (and theirs is a small minority of what drove their net worths). It doesn’t have to. It just provides a runway. If you are exclusively an early stage entrepreneur founder, you are either quickly or slowly drowning. But if you have a job, you can still keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities while you get paid and can buy groceries. This takes off a lot of pressure while you think, build, connect, and tinker on your own time.

Actors Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Reynolds are two examples of men who put their wages to good use. They share many similarities: good acting careers that were lucrative, but not spectacularly so. In both cases they used what they were paid for work as their bankrolls. They made far more money in equity deals, Kutcher in angel and VC investments and Reynolds in Mint Mobile and Aviation Gin. They didn’t coast. They didn’t waste their money. They didn’t act as if they were too good to hustle. Reynolds even makes his ads into shtick, lightheartedly and self-depreciatingly shilling for his companies. A lot of actors who act too good for that kind of work are a lot poorer than he is because of his willingness to do it.

Fourth, get strong. Being physically fit is as important as ever. The faster technology advances, the more upside you get from health and longevity. AI could cure cancer. But it is up to you to survive until then. Health is a choice. Pay special care to things that we have failed to fix after bad damage – eyes, ears, teeth, and especially brains. We’re getting good at limb trauma so I’m not endlessly worried about scrapes and bruises (and appear to gravitate to things that cause them) but in some cases prevention is still far better than what we can do after unforced errors. Earn your scars, but wear eye, ear, teeth, and head protection. Materials have improved so they are far lighter and more comfortable than they were in prior decades. No one used to ski in helmets. Now practically everyone does. Protect your eyes and ears shooting. Protect your teeth rolling and boxing. If you’re around ice and rock, keep your helmet on even when you’re not the one climbing.

My informal fitness test is to be able to say “yes” to any inbound invitation that comes my way regardless of domain. Get and stay fit enough to not dodge anything with anyone you’d want to do stuff with. Be strong for a fast guy and fast for a strong guy. Powerlift >1k lbs. with abs. Run an ultra with an upper as well as lower body. Plenty of guys can lift heavy with enormous bellies or run far with no chests. But be at least somewhat capable across both.

Fifth, be reliable. If everything changes, the specific job at hand might go away forever. But people will still remember if you did it cheerfully, competently, on time, and under budget. Those attributes will still be in demand as technology transforms the specifics. If you don’t know what to do, just do the task in front of you.

Finally make friends. Forge authentic connections. Live life with people who know your true self and still for whatever reason love or at least tolerate you. This more than anything is what makes life worth living. I find such people dangling from the sweaty, muddy, sometimes bloody limits of my capabilities. Do hard and dangerous things together to find out who people are. If someone saves someone else’s life, it becomes impossible to come between them. So do consequential things. Be there for the people who are there for you. Never let them down.

In the most transactional way, if your ability to perform specific tasks and even intelligence itself gets commoditized, smart jerks will be in a lot of trouble. The people who thought they were irreplaceable but you wanted to fire? You will be able to get rid of all of them. The people you just like having around? The never complainers. Mirthful people who make everything better by their presence. Those with calm energy. People with the first five attributes – learners who aren’t wasteful, who work even if they don’t have to, strong people who would be good in a bar fight who you can always rely on? They will always be in demand whatever specifics are demanded. Teams will just make up reasons to keep them around no matter what. Be such a man.

In the least transactional way, if we are about to enter a new heaven or hell, then we might all have it rich and easy even if we don’t deserve it or might have doom and destruction even if we don’t deserve that. Maybe nothing matters. So let’s go down (or up) with the people we love. Let’s be the people we want to be. If you are purely transactional, it is entirely possible that the transactions all flop. Don’t be miserable in some convoluted scheme to eventually be happy later because no one knows what later looks like.

Savor this moment. Focus on the here and now. If you are equal weighting the people in your life, that is almost certainly wrong. If you allow inbound solicitations to drive your attention, that is probably a mistake. Choose. Cut off the bottom three quarters of people who try to get access to you completely. Ignore. Ghost them. Reallocate all of that time and energy to your best relationships. You might not need more friends but can always have deeper friendships. Find the people worth more to you than you can or would count.

Circle your wagons tight. If the outside world wants to burn it down, let the outside world burn. If you are someplace beautiful with people who love you, then the ups and downs of the wider world become unemotional. Be in the right tribes and do everything you can to make them better. Then glance at the outside world’s depredations only when interested. Waiting for fairness and justice is just an excuse to not start because they never come. Once you have the right team and plan, just start. You can figure it out as you go.

TL; DR

Learn to learn, save your money, get a job, get strong, be reliable, and make friends. Almost everything else around you could change. Those things won’t.

I turn 50 this year. To celebrate, I’m participating in the Boston Frogman Swim to honor and raise money in support of the Navy Seal Foundation. This combines some fun with a physical challenge and support for the worthiest of causes.

We’ll swim across Boston Harbor. The Boston Frogman Swim is a 5k open water swim and fundraiser that supports the Navy SEAL Foundation (NSF), a 501(c)(3) with a four star rating by Charity Navigator. 100% of the net proceeds will go directly to support the mission of the NSF.

I ask for one thing from my family, friends, and readers: please give something to support the NSF mission of providing critical support for the warriors, veterans, and families of Naval Special Warfare. Please click here and give what you can but please give something.

Want to join me? You can register here. NSF offers terrific events including their Range Day the following month. If you served or want to help those who served, NSF combines effective support with inspiring events where you not just meet but participate alongside heroes such as Jonny Kim.

I want to raise as much as possible and want your help to do so. This would be a fantastic birthday present to me and more importantly would be a small token of gratitude in support of those who have given the most to our country. Please help. Thanks to each and every one who does. I won’t forget you.

Training for The Tactical Games involves some stuff and some skills, but mostly a lot of reps. Fitness gear is mostly redundant with CrossFit gear that I have at home or access to at the gym, but I needed to add an axle bar and weight vest which I’ve been using this week. Both work great – the axle bar is no factor once it is overhead, but takes a bit more grip to deadlift or clean. The vest is far comfier than the 5.11 plate carrier it replaces.

Classes are mostly at Sig Sauer Academy with lots of side benefits including evening jiu jitsu and time on their belt fed M250. I’m supplementing those with M2 Tactical Solutions and am waitlisted at Rogers Shooting School. Hitting the best schools requires travelling with weapons, so crucial to have hard locking cases for the task.

A great way to get accustomed to TTG is to volunteer. Judges report about a half marathon per day on their fitness trackers during competitions (since they move with the athletes). I am going to go through the shakeout classes then volunteer at an event before my competition.

One of the big unavoidable expense: ammo. Classes go through upwards of 2,500 rounds per week. My favorite source is Ammo Squared. You can build up an ammo portfolio over time and lock in the price. They professionally store it and ship it when you want it. New customers get $35 when you spend $20. I like 50k rounds of $0.33 9mm practice and another 50k rounds of $0.60 223 practice as well as 250 rounds of $0.96 5.56 match grade and 250 rounds of $0.46 9mm premium. This comes in at just under $47k. Worth every $0.01. After learning fundamentals, it comes down to reps.

Ammo is security. In a crunch, ammo is food. In a crunchier crunch, ammo is currency – with a known value, compact, standardized, and durable, it has all the attributes of money. In a crisis, this portfolio could easily 10x in value or more. If things go off the rails, you’ll be glad to have some in supply. If not… it is still fun to shoot. And shooting more exotic fare is especially fun, but standard military rounds are going to be the most widely demanded and accepted.

Finally, the second amendment provides Americans with constitutional protection for our firearms. But many regulations are still being litigated and some jurisdictions have been especially aggressive against ammo. Your best bet is to buy at least some while there aren’t dramatic shortages or threats to acquiring it. If nothing else, as a bare minimum you can get 200 rounds of $0.10 .22 practice ammo to teach your kids.

I have a family friend deployed to Lebanon to fight Hezbollah terrorists. I want to do something tangible and immediate to help keep him and his unit as safe as possible in difficult circumstances. To that end, friends and families are organizing to send them the best available life-saving equipment including upgraded plates and goggles.

This project costs $50k. So far we’ve raised $12,217; if we can raise another $2,165 today, that would let us buy the ballistic goggles. They cost 1,230 shekels or $423 each for 34 pairs. I have given to this worthy cause as has my family. If you can help, I would be grateful.

You could save someone’s eyes from shrapnel. We will move fast — if we can knock out this attempt to pay for the final 6 pair today, we can get the money in motion to get gear to the front lines within a week. They are on the front lines of civilization. I want to protect them at all costs.

These soldiers don’t want flowers. They don’t need you to thank them for their service. They volunteered. They want to be there. But this relatively small step could protect them from avoidable blindness, maiming, and deaths. It will save lives. Disregard if not interested, but if you donate a pair of goggles, please comment below to let me know!

You can help here.

Reflecting

Dean Potter was one of my climbing heroes, but his story is a complicated one. The new documentary on his life The Dark Wizard gets it mostly right (although I think they forced the narrative of Alex Honnold as the villain; Alex admired Dean but they edited it to emphasize the undeniable shit talking).

Dean wasn’t willing to take antidepressants. His girlfriend at the time:

So what should people attracted to extremes do for their mental health? Antidepressants have a use case but my sense is that they are wildly over prescribed. Instead of taking an extreme “pro” or “anti” stance, here’s one way of approaching mental health. It is downstream from physical health. Dial in what you can physically control first.

Recovery programs have a useful acronym HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired) as a mnemonic for the most common stressors in recovery (and, I’d add, in life generally). You can improve the quality of your decisions, habits, and behaviors if you first use this as a checklist of things to avoid before you turn to therapy or drugs for the mental health problems that could be a simple cause and effect with avoidable factors.

Hungry? If you’re currently in Ranger School I can’t help you. Suffer. Don’t think about it. For everyone else, satiate your hunger. For me, the best solution is to prioritize protein such as steak, fish, eggs, and Greek yogurt which are the most satiating foods per calorie. Then today Tirz or tomorrow Reta (discussed further below) to silence the food noise. No one should have to feel hungry all day… unless you’re earning your Ranger tab.

Angry? The thing that works best for me is breathing exercise. There are varying versions, but I like the simplicity of box breathing with 4 seconds inhale, 4 hold, 4 exhale, and 4 hold. Simultaneously I try to relax my face. Combining slow breathing with normal face slows down my heartrate and prevents (more) wrinkles.

Lonely? Being lonely is a choice. It is one of the best ways to be less happy and less productive. Be a part of a team in everything that you do. Reinvest in your best relationships. Double down on your marriage and kids. Double down on your gym/trail/BJJ/range friends or wherever you do hard things together with people you like and admire. Show up every day so that anyone who skips is noticed.

Tired? Set aside the same 9 hours for rest each day to get at least 8 hours of high quality sleep. If you sleep a consistent 8 hours and are still tired, that is an interesting mystery. If you don’t sleep a consistent 8 hours and are tired, it isn’t a mystery at all. You can take the time. In 15 hours, you can make more money, burn more calories, lift more kgs, run more kms, enjoy more friendships, and climb more mountains rested than you can in a sleep deprived 20.

I’ll seek help from therapists and pharmaceuticals if I’m ever still mentally unhealthy after optimizing those variables. So far, the record of nailing these fundamentals has been perfect in solving downstream ramifications.

If my choices cause bad feelings, I prefer to improve the choices before altering the feelings. In fact, I’m not sure I want to hide the feelings – maybe I’m better off feeling like shit for shitty choices. If I could drug myself into a stupor that lets me tolerate intolerable choices, it might allow me to avoid improving.

Training

Celebrated my eldest son’s birthday with a father/son gym crawl. We raced 5 miles between various gyms, doing workouts along the way. It was fun and we raised a bunch of money for a good cause. After, they had a sauna set up and I won a thousand dollars’ worth of shooting classes at M2 Tactical Solutions. Definitely an event we both want to compete in again next year.

At CrossFit my favorite recent WOD was Drew, a Hero workout in honor of Chief Warrant Officer 3 Andrew “Drew” Gunnison Cully, 35, of Ozark, Missouri, and the legendary Night Stalkers of C Company, 4th Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). Cully died on Sept. 17, 2025, when his MH-60M Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a training mission near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He was serving with C Company, 4th Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the legendary Night Stalkers. Born May 12, 1990, in Springfield, Missouri, Cully graduated from Missouri State University, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 2013, and advanced to captain. He later achieved CW3, served as an instructor pilot, earned a master’s degree, and was selected for the elite 160th SOAR. He is survived by his wife, Layne, and children, Lennox and Abbott.

Each section of this workout honors one of the heroes who died in that helicopter crash. As with many Hero workouts, this workout is a long grind and is more about the effort and your mindset than the scoreboard. The pull-ups and push-ups are challenging, but each movement should not take longer than 1:30 to complete on any round. The deadlifts are intended to be moderately heavy, where 4 reps can be completed consecutively. Complete Kraus in under 5 minutes, Scott in under 6 minutes, Good in under 7 minutes, Cully in under 8 minutes, and the step-ups in under 15 minutes.

Drew

For time:

Kraus
200-meter run
30 pull-ups
30 hand-release push-ups
4 deadlifts

Rest 30 seconds

Scott
400-meter run
25 pull-ups
25 hand-release push-ups
4 deadlifts

Rest 30 seconds

Good
600-meter run
20 pull-ups
20 hand-release push-ups
4 deadlifts

Rest 30 seconds

Cully
800-meter run
15 pull-ups
15 hand-release push-ups
4 deadlifts

Rest 30 seconds

Night Stalkers
269 box step-ups

Perform the full workout with a weight vest.
Each round honors one of the Night Stalker Heroes, who died in a helicopter crash on Sept. 17, 2025.

1.5x bodyweight deadlift, 14-lb vest, and a 20-inch box

Fueling

Mulu just launched a high protein cottage cheese – great taste/texture/macros. So far this is just available at Walmart but they’ll roll it out to other stores soon. Worth trying.

Supplementing

Obesity is now 100% voluntary. The pace of weight management drug improvement is meteoric. Ozempic is still used as a shorthand for the category, but Tirz (Tizepatide) is a step change improvement. Reta (Retatrutide) will be a further advancement and there’s more to come after that.

Who should be on what? The default for men with >15% body fat today should be a full dose of Tirz. Men with <15% body fat should microdose Tirz. In your court to find a way to get insurance to cover it but it is worth even paying cash (you’ll save the money on food and avoiding other health complications).

Who shouldn’t be on it? Someone with both <10% body fat and no room for improved impulse control. I know people like that (sadly excluding me). They are well <5% of men I know. They can’t improve mindless snacking, drinking, recreational drugs, gambling, shopping, or impulsive commenting all of which can be helped with Tirz. You still can enjoy all of these things, but the way the drug works even at a microdose is to give your mind a beat. You get to make decisions intentionally before you just reach for food to stuff in your face.

Measuring

Recovering

It is hard verging on impossible to avoid xenoestrogens from modern manufacturing processes. But it is worth trying. Here’s my new natural pillow to keep unwanted chemicals away from my face at night.

I hate rest days, but am recovering from an arm injury. It (some sort of elbow injury that makes contracting it nearly impossible and painful) is healing slower than I want, so contemplating taking time off for healing. Not doing it. But thinking about it…

Closing

I’m shifting my fitness focus to prepping for the Tactical Games (TL; DR: CrossFit with guns). I’m already pretty comfortable with the running and strength components, but am going to work on heart rate control over the next six months of training. I’ll spend plenty of class time with both rifle and pistol from the beginning – Rifle 101 and pistol 101-104. 1-on-1 coaching to fix problems that reveal themselves in class. Then tune up class and plenty of time on my own drawing/transitioning/dry firing at home and also shooting/moving on the o-course. I’m going to judge an event before competing, which is a nice way to get involved (judges in prior years report ~13 mile days on their fitness trackers since they run alongside the athletes). This should be a fun way to build skills. I’m making the decision to restart from scratch in order to let a set of instructors build my technique from the beginning. TBD how this goes. Will report back.

Austin Garrison is a lifelong leader: team captain, professional lacrosse player, BJJ black belt, and senior credit trader. No midlife crisis here as there is no crisis, but perhaps a midlife refresh. I want to explore when it is time to let go and when it is time to hang on during this transition from Wall Street to marriage and fatherhood. Austin, thanks for answering a few questions for Vale Tudo readers.

Your home went from one to two to three. What about being a single guy and then a newlywed are you keeping as your family grows? And what are you dropping?

Big caveat up front, I’m only seven weeks into this fatherhood thing. And despite logging some serious reps with eight nieces and nephews over the years, I’m still very much figuring this out on the fly. Embracing the chaos.

Every father knows this, but the speed and depth of that priority shift is still profound when it actually hits you, in ways big and small. That was already evolving with a partner and a marriage, of course, but the growing sense of purpose I have as we’re now a family unit is immense. It’s a different fuel source entirely.

Practically, I’m also having to reevaluate some of my single-guy hobbies. Motorcycle riding, for example, and I know this is something you think about a lot around personal risk, I suppose the calculus just changes when people depend on you in that fundamental way.

As far as what I’m keeping, having gotten married later in life, I’m a pretty independent person, accomplished by certain measures, and I think wary of getting consumed by parenthood. Not in the sense that I’m not all in. I’m obsessed with this kid and committed to being hyper present through every stage. But I’m trying to retain my core while allowing space to grow into fatherhood on my own terms, and quite excited about how my world view will inevitably shift. I’ve just seen guys lose themselves entirely in it. Dad mode becomes their whole identity. I’m just trying to be intentional about what that evolution means for me.

In practice, it looks like me burping her after a 3am feed, folding a pile of pink onesies, and then forty minutes later I’m in an assault bike pain chamber in the garage trying to hold my VO2 max together. Planning a family friendly trip to DC in one browser tab while lining up a brother’s outing to Texas to run a Tactical Games obstacle course in the other. Or even answering these questions while wearing a baby bjorn… I’ve also gotten more diligent about checking in with friends and family too, making sure those relationships don’t quietly atrophy because I’m in new dad mode. And I’ll confess I spent more time than I’d like to admit redesigning my strength and conditioning programming around newborn demands, something that doesn’t break on minimal sleep and limited training windows. That was actually a pretty fun exercise.

After losing your father, you wrote that you ‘came out of it clearer about what I value.’ You were a son. Now you’re a father. What are you burying and what are you reviving from your dad’s fatherhood as you begin yours?

What I’m reviving, a few things come to mind immediately. The way he treated and revered my mother. That lands even harder now that our first is a girl. I want her to see what respect and partnership look like from day one, not as a lesson but the baseline. His work ethic: steadfast, Midwestern, no-complaints perseverance. I saw that most acutely through his cancer, actually. He just kept showing up. And his commitment to family above everything else. That wasn’t aspirational for him, it was just how he operated. He was at every one of our games. A devoted fan. And he had this impressive writing style where he’d send thoughtful emails capturing something we were going through as a family, a season, a moment. He was just always around. Not in a loud way. In a steady, present way that I didn’t fully appreciate until he wasn’t.

What I’m burying is more nuanced. Our relationship was very close and I never doubted how deeply he cared for me. But physical affection was muted. Hugs, warmth, that kind of thing, it just wasn’t the language. Partly generational, maybe the other side of that Midwestern stoicism. I don’t hold that against him at all. Different era, different norms. But it’s something I’m very intentionally leaning into with my daughter, and with any children after her. Regardless of age, regardless of gender. I want affection to be the default.

Does your success in athletics lead you toward encouraging kids to have a wide aperture, many activities and sports, or to narrow the aperture and focus early?

Wide aperture, no question. I’m old enough to remember when a college lacrosse coach would show up at your high school hockey game just to see what kind of competitor and leader you were in a completely different context. That told them more than any sport specific showcase ever could. The amount of specialization in youth athletics now genuinely troubles me as I think about my kids’ experience.

I’ll add a personal footnote here. Despite lacrosse being my path, Hockey was truly my first love and I was a pretty good player growing up. A defensive minded center on a very select team in middle school, quite serviceable at a high level. But I burned out. Quit the sport for a year, which at that age is pretty catastrophic for any trajectory you might have been on. Not that I was getting drafted, but I could play. And the burnout was real. The team was set to travel to Russia. I would have had to miss the early lacrosse season, which by then was where my heart was heading. Everyone was super excited and I was miserable and stressed. That was the moment I knew. When you’re a teenager and the thing you’ve committed years to starts making you dread the thing that’s supposed to be the reward, something’s broken. There’s a cost to pushing too hard too early that doesn’t always show up in the stats.

And it’s not just my experience. The Soviet athletic development system, arguably the most successful talent pipeline in sports history, deliberately delayed specialization and built broad athletic foundations first. If that program thought early specialization was counterproductive, maybe the travel-ball-at-age-eight parents should take note.

As someone who has diverse interests and passions across a lot of domains, I love the idea of exposing my children to as much as possible. I’ll only ask, perhaps a bit later when they naturally need to choose certain paths, that they do it with intention, energy, and a focus on doing their best. Which might mean riding the bench and being a great teammate and cheerleader by the way. I’m much more interested in the life lessons: working toward a common goal, practicing your craft, being part of something bigger than yourself. Not any specific sport or resume builder that’s going to look good on a college application.

I’m curious if professional athletics was worth the physical damage to your body, and if the answer to the ‘worth it?’ question is starting to shift.

Man, this one hits. In my mid-40s the litany of orthopedic issues has piled up. Two ankle surgeries, two knee surgeries, one hand surgery, and a handful of other ‘recommended interventions’ I’ve staved off through alternative methods. I certainly wish I’d been more conscious of the longevity concepts that are much more mainstream now, and I’m especially aware of it as someone having children later in life who plans to be a very active father and husband for a long time.

So yes, the answer to that question has shifted a bit. But as a lifelong athlete and competitor, those pursuits are so deeply part of who I am that I genuinely wonder if I’d have been able to pump the brakes, even with more awareness of how fragile my joints were at 18 or 25. I doubt it.

Where it’s shifted more recently is jujitsu. I love the art, and always will. But the grind of the ‘gentle art’ is anything but, and in my mid-40s with the orthopedic resume I’m carrying, I’m trying to be very intellectually honest about where and how martial arts fits into my life going forward. That’s an ongoing conversation with myself and one I haven’t fully resolved. The competitor in me doesn’t want to hear it. The father in me knows the math.

On your time as a lacrosse captain, how much could you get out of players by just leading by example? When did you have to actually intervene with words?

I think it’s both, and they’re sequential. You have to have street credibility first and foremost. How do you carry yourself in the locker room? Do you do the little things? How do you perform when the pressure’s on? How do you manage life away from the sport? How do you do in the classroom, handle yourself in a bar fight etc? It all matters. That foundation of credibility is non-negotiable.

I was more of a quiet, lead-by-example type for sure. I liked to socialize things, build consensus, and move forward together. But that’s not always possible, so yes, I picked a few fights in practice to challenge a teammate whom I thought was slacking.

And apparently, I don’t actually remember this, my linemate and close friend Steve told me about a game where he took an open-field hit. Wind knocked out of him, doubled over in pain. I ran by mid-play, grabbed him by the pads, dragged him to his feet, and told him “get the f*** up, you’re fine, don’t let them see you hurting.” Not exactly a Hallmark moment. But Steve’s told his kids that story, so I suppose getting my hands dirty made an impact.

What comes next for the parts of your life that had been filled with a big role at a big bank? What will you miss, and what are you most excited to refocus on?

So here’s the thing people don’t tell you about walking away from a seat like that: the logistics of your day, structure, organization, what you’re actually doing hour to hour, that’s manageable. I’m self-motivated, not someone who gets bored easily. You fill the time. That part’s fine.

The identity piece is where it gets real. I think a lot of people in my position either pretend it’s seamless or overcorrect into some dramatic narrative about finding themselves. The truth is somewhere in between. I was very good at the job, and it provided me with an amazing amount of optionality which I won’t try to understate. But “good at it” and “it’s my game” are two very different things. I knew for a while that the game I was playing wasn’t the one I ultimately wanted to win. And so the challenge was figuring out what that meant in practice versus just theory. Walking away from that seat isn’t something people really do, and honestly I’m not sure I’d have understood it from the outside either.

So I don’t feel the need to jump right back into markets. I’m leaning into the discomfort that comes with reinvention which is uncomfortable some days. There’s a tuning fork somewhere in my gut that’s pointing me in a direction, and my job right now is to listen to it rather than override it with pattern-matching and action bias, which is my default wiring after twenty-three years of exactly that. As good as I was at the game, I knew deep down that my passion for it was more about winning, competing, and leading than any deep love of financial markets themselves. I landed in a spot that rewarded my skills and I was grateful for it. But the subject matter didn’t light me up the way the competition did. That’s an important distinction when you’re deciding what comes next.

Right now I’m investing in my wife and our daughter, slowing down enough to actually be present for it, and giving myself space to chase things that have zero commercial application. Exploring intellectual interests, active hobbies… I suppose like you Chris I can go down some serious rabbit holes. Just following energy for the first time in my adult life. That’s the part nobody tells you about when you walk away, how good it feels to do things for no reason other than you want to.

What I’ll miss? Being at the helm during major market dislocations. When volatility spikes and the decisions that matter most aren’t about models or spreads but about conviction, knowing when to cut a loss, and keeping a room of very smart, very stressed people pointed in the same direction. That wasn’t always easy but it was usually fun and deeply rewarding when we got things right. There’s a particular feeling when the phones are ringing and you’re the one everybody’s looking for the call. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love that. The rest of it, the regulatory, compliance, institutional machinery, political knife fights, I don’t miss for a second.

The investing I’m doing now is small, totally different scale. I don’t feel the need to whip around crypto in my PA just yet. It’s more about alignment and overlap with areas that actually interest me: health and wellness, stem cells and orthobiologics, interesting consumer brands that catch my eye. Much less ruthlessly economically motivated. Much more about being in proximity to ideas and people that energize me.

Speed round

Best BJJ submission?

Rear naked choke. Old school fundamentals. Simple scales, fancy fails.

Favorite rifle or pistol caliber?

9mm

Your kid gets recruited to play lacrosse… at Duke. First reaction?

After I throw up in my mouth a little? Super pumped for her if that’s what she wants and presumably worked very hard for. We’ll have to negotiate what color blue I’m wearing in the stands though.

Exercise you love? Hate?

Love kettlebell snatches and B-stance trap bar deadlifts. Hate? Bulgarian Split Squats.

Drugs! Just say no? Or just say maybe to some supplements?

To each their own, but I try to get all my nutrition through whole foods. I’ll supplement with fish oil, creatine, and whey protein to round things out. Bloodwork quarterly, which is where I’ll add to that base list as needed. I’m more interested in what the data says I actually need than what the wellness influencer du jour is hawking.

Any rest and recovery gimmicks?

I’ve tried them all. Cold plunge, sauna, peptides, every gadget and protocol you can name. And nothing I’ve found competes with sleep, clean eating, managing my stress, investing in my relationships, and getting outdoors. Boring answer. True answer.

How strong is the urge to pass on what got you there? What is the role of life coaching, both that you’re getting and giving? How did you pick your coach and how do you pick the people you’re coaching? What have you learned so far?

If I think about my core value to a large sell-side markets business (beyond picking credits and managing risk, which yes, you have to do), it was really as a coach, motivator, and ultimately allocator of high-priced talent. The ability to know who needs what in any given hour, day, or week in volatile markets. What situations are suited best to which individual. How to keep everyone’s heads in the game and rowing the same direction. That was a fascinating, and sometimes exhausting, deeply rewarding exercise depending on the day, personality, or market environment.

Post exit, people started reaching out, I think I realized that this aspect of the job, less the buying low and selling high, more the helping high performers navigate their own complexity, was something I could really take with me. I was fortunate that a handful of my current coaching clients reached out to me organically, and things have grown from there. Word of mouth. No marketing. No pitch deck. What surprised me was the range. I’m hearing from people spanning all levels of seniority, and not only from high finance. They are curious about my decision to check out, and quietly interested in how I’d developed the conviction and self authorship to actually do it. That told me something about the need that’s out there.

On picking my own coach, he wasn’t a Wall Street guy, which checked box one. He was a warrior archetype but with a philosophical presence that held real weight with me, not in a cheesy over the top way. He also had a tremendously interesting and challenging origin story which gave him instant street cred. I knew pretty quickly that this was someone who could challenge me, not coddle me. That he had the range to hold space for the heavy stuff and the tactical stuff in the same conversation without flinching at either.

On the people I’m coaching, it’s the same instinct in reverse. I’m looking for a signal that someone is committed to the work, wants to test the edges, and is up for that kind of ‘exploration’ rapport where we’re genuinely thinking together rather than me dispensing wisdom from on high. If someone wants a guru, I’m not the guy. If they want a thinking partner who’s been in the arena and is willing to push back, that’s usually a good fit.

What I’ve learned? Cliche but, ‘to coach is to learn twice.’ That sentiment has never been more true for me than right now. Every conversation with a client teaches me something about myself. And I’m more convinced than ever that everyone has what they need within themselves to thrive. My job isn’t to give them answers. It’s to create a framework, a pathway, a space safe enough and rigorous enough for them to find their own. That’s the crux of the work which I find extremely rewarding.

Austin, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Appreciate it. This was fun.

Conor Heffernan is a historian of strength, sport, and physical culture. A Lecturer at Ulster University, Conor writes about muscles, myths, and the making of modern fitness including the terrific Physical Culture Study here on Substack. Conor, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for Vale Tudo readers.

What is physical culture?

More ‘properly’, I use the Stark Centre’s definition (the Stark Centre is the primary archive for strength). They go with:

We define Physical Culture as the various activities people have employed over the centuries to strengthen their bodies, enhance their physiques, increase their endurance, improve their health, fight against aging, and become better athletes.

Elites keep breaking records while the general population remains sedentary; is this paradox new?

In 1901, Eugen Sandow, the most famous strongman alive, staged what is believed to be the world’s first major bodybuilding competition at the Royal Albert Hall. The audience sat in evening dress and applauded men flexing on a stage, then went home and did nothing.

Sandow knew this. He wrote about it obsessively in his magazine Physical Culture and spent the following years trying to build a chain of gyms to convert spectators into participants. He ran his institute on St. James Street from 1897, eventually converting it into a Curative Institute in 1907. His latter years were overshadowed by financial difficulties. You need an audience of non-participants to fund the performers, and that structural problem has never gone away.

My grandfather called his cigarettes “coffin nails,” slang dating from the mid-1880s, long before scientists published studies of their health risks. Do people really need more information about health and fitness or more inspiration to act on what they already know or could easily find out?

Working-class Britons in 1880 lived in cities where the air was visibly toxic, food was routinely adulterated with chalk and sawdust, and working hours left no time for anything resembling exercise.

They did not need more information. They needed an eight-hour working day, which they did not get until 1919 in Britain, and affordable uncontaminated food, which required the 1875 Food and Drugs Act to even begin addressing.

The information problem in health and fitness has always been overstated. The infrastructure problem has always been understated. In 1900, a Manchester factory worker could not afford a gym membership, could not take time off for a walk, and was eating bread cut with plaster of Paris. Telling him to make better choices would have been insulting.

We are making a version of the same mistake today when we attribute population health failures primarily to individual decision-making.

What fitness practice from the past deserves revival? And what deserves to stay buried?

Before barbells were standardised in the 1880s, strongmen lifted whatever was available: anvils, beer barrels, mill stones, loaded carts, and enormous field stones. Strength was expressed through objects rather than calibrated equipment.

Thomas Inch, one of the greatest British strongmen of the Edwardian era, had a 172-pound dumbbell with a handle so thick, two and three eighths of an inch in diameter, that almost nobody could lift it off the floor with one hand. Arthur Saxon attempted it and failed. So did Lionel Strongfort and Ivan Poddubny.

That object-specific challenge, where the implement itself is the problem and not just the weight, develops grip, proprioception, and concentration that no standard gym movement replicates. I lift traditional Irish stones for exactly this reason. They have no obvious grip point. You negotiate with the stone every single time.

For something that deserves to stay buried: the Vibro machine, sold across Britain and America from the 1890s through to the 1920s, which promised to deliver all the benefits of vigorous exercise while you stood still.

The device shook you at high frequency. Some versions used steam power, and the marketing claimed it would stimulate lymphatic drainage, burn fat, and develop muscular strength without any effort on your part.

Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal man, had an entire ward of these machines that wealthy patients used while reading newspapers. They accomplished nothing. Several people were injured when the machines malfunctioned.

They were also wildly popular and made fortunes for their inventors. I am slightly nervous we are reinventing this right now with certain passive recovery devices, but the Victorian originals were genuinely dangerous.

What did physical culturists eat?

The most instructive dietary figure in physical culture history is George Hackenschmidt, the Estonian-born wrestler who was probably the strongest man alive between 1900 and 1910.

He held the world heavyweight wrestling championship, bent pressed 269 pounds, and full-squatted serious weight for reps. His dietary advice, published in The Way to Live in 1908, was simple:

There were no supplements, no meal timing protocols, and no macronutrient calculations. Hackenschmidt lived to ninety-three and was still doing handstands in his eighties.

The contrast with his contemporary Eugen Sandow is instructive. Sandow published elaborate dietary prescriptions in his magazine and sold branded health foods. Sandow’s Health and Strength Cocoa was a real product, available by mail order, and it was essentially drinking chocolate with some malt extract.

The marketing was sophisticated. The product was not particularly useful.

For a recipe with a direct physical culture lineage, Arthur Saxon and his brothers, according to a detailed account of their daily routine that circulated in the strength press, ate roughly two dozen eggs and several pounds of bacon for breakfast. Dinner consisted of roughly ten pounds of meat with vegetables. After their evening performance they ate cold meat, smoked fish, butter, cheese and drank beer.

This is not a diet I am recommending. But the underlying principle, large quantities of simply prepared whole food eaten at fixed times, without snacking and without products, is completely sound and costs a fraction of any modern nutrition protocol.

Are supplements new?

Roman gladiators at Ephesus, according to isotope analysis of their bones published in PLOS ONE in 2014, ate a diet high in barley and plant ash. The ash was deliberate. Elevated strontium-to-calcium ratios in gladiator bones compared to the general population led researchers to conclude that the ash drink described in ancient texts, including Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, really did exist.

Plant ashes were consumed to fortify the body after physical exertion and promote bone healing. The study leader Fabian Kanz from the Medical University of Vienna drew an explicit parallel with modern athletes taking calcium and magnesium supplements after training. The intent to supplement strategically is therefore present as early as the second century AD.

The golden age of fitness snake oil is the American 1890s and it is extraordinary. Sears Roebuck’s 1897 catalogue sold Compound Oxygen, essentially bottled air, as a training aid.

Allan’s Anti-Fat tablets, marketed specifically to women wanting to reduce, were primarily thyroid extract harvested from livestock. They did cause weight loss, but only in the same way that a low-grade thyroid condition causes weight loss: by making you ill.

Strychnine in tiny doses does stimulate the central nervous system, which is why it appeared in various training tonics throughout the late Victorian period. It also, at slightly larger doses, kills you.

I take creatine because the evidence base is thirty years old and thoroughly replicated. That is basically it.

What did physical culturists measure?

Dudley Sargent ran the Harvard physical training programme from 1879 and spent the following decade and more measuring thousands of male students: every limb circumference, every angle, chest expansion, lung capacity, and grip strength.

In 1892 he compiled the statistical mean from over ten thousand college students and commissioned two sculptors, Henry Hudson Kitson and Theo Alice Ruggles, to render the average in physical form.

The resulting statues were exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and presented as a scientific health standard. In reality they were an aesthetic ideal in scientific clothing, and they became the template for nearly every fitness measurement system that followed.

The most telling historical measurement trend is the decline of functional tests. Sargent himself used a vertical jump test, the Sargent Jump, that remains valid today and measures something real.

By the mid-twentieth century American fitness culture had largely abandoned functional measurement in favour of aesthetic measurement: waist circumference, body weight, photographs.

We are only now, with the rise of performance metrics in CrossFit, powerlifting and obstacle racing, returning to the question Hackenschmidt would have considered obvious: can you do more than you could before?

I do not weigh myself. I measure progress by whether the stones get easier and whether the barbell numbers go up.

How do you bounce back? Oddities worth reviving?

Over 700 Victorian Turkish bath establishments have been documented across Britain and Ireland, a remarkable density of infrastructure for heat and cold contrast recovery. They were accessible, often sixpence for a basic session, communal, and used exactly the physiological principles that modern sports science has confirmed do measurable things for recovery and cardiovascular health.

The Hammam on Jermyn Street in London, which opened in 1862, specifically marketed itself to athletes and sportsmen. Professional boxers, wrestlers, and footballers used it as standard post-competition recovery infrastructure.

Then indoor plumbing became universal, private shower rooms became the norm, and the communal bath was gradually reframed as a sanitation relic rather than a recovery tool.

Finland did not undergo the same privatisation of hygiene. We are rediscovering this now, slowly.

The most interesting historical recovery method that has essentially vanished is what the Victorians called constitutional exercise: a long, moderate pace walk taken specifically as active recovery and not as training.

Edward Barton-Wright, who introduced Bartitsu to London in 1898, was an enthusiastic advocate of walking as recovery practice. Conan Doyle famously misspelled the martial art as baritsu when Sherlock Holmes used it against Moriarty.

The idea was simple: not a jog, but a walk at a pace slow enough to hold a conversation. The evidence that this works, for recovery, cognitive function, and mood regulation, is overwhelming and has been accumulating for well over a century.

It requires no equipment, no membership, and no products.

Who is your hero among strength athletes?

Saxon was a German strongman from Leipzig who performed throughout Britain and Europe between 1898 and 1914, and he bent pressed 370 pounds in official competition in 1905, taking that weight from the floor to overhead with one arm, bending sideways and rotating in the specific movement pattern the lift requires, 370lbs! He weighed about 200 pounds when he did it. No one has officially beaten that number in the century since, despite dramatically improved nutrition, training methodology, and pharmacology. What I find as compelling as the numbers is the book he published in 1905: The Development of Physical Power.

It is one of the most honest training books ever written. Saxon says, in essence:

The book has no progression schemes, no periodisation tables, no peak weeks. It describes what Saxon actually did, which was train twice daily, every day, with his brothers, lifting implements that most modern strength athletes could not approach.

Do you have a scholar/athlete tribe or are these groups separate in your life?

The stone lifting community, the people who gather at Cloch Nirt events in Kerry and Galway and Donegal, who drive two hours to lift a specific stone and then drive home, are warm, technically serious, and almost completely uninterested in the academic literature. When I mentioned that I had published a paper on Irish stone lifting in Irish Economic and Social History, the response from one of the best stone lifters in Connacht was a sincere and unembarrassed ‘fair play to ye’, followed by a detailed conversation about a specific stone’s grip surface. Which is exactly as it should be.

My academic colleagues are curious about the stone lifting in the way that people are curious about an unusual hobby. A colleague in the history department at Ulster asked me once, very politely, whether it was ‘a bit like CrossFit.’ It is not a bit like CrossFit. What has surprised me is the readership at Physical Culture Study, a website I have been running since 2014. I assumed I was writing for historians with a specialist interest. The people who have read it most consistently and most carefully are coaches, competitive lifters, and strength enthusiasts who want to understand where their sport came from: why the barbell looks the way it does, why powerlifting and Olympic lifting split in the mid-twentieth century, where the rep-set structure comes from. That audience asks genuinely good historical questions. The most interesting correspondence I have received about my research has come from a competitive powerlifter in Oslo, a classicist and club swinger from America, and a kettlebell coach in New Zealand. None of them has a history degree.

How is Irish stone lifting culture?

Irish stone lifting is more alive than almost any traditional physical culture I have encountered. We have documented forty-two verified stones across the island through a registry I have been building with the community: stones with confirmed lifting histories, some traceable through oral tradition to the seventeenth century, some with unbroken community competition practices. People do travel specifically for the stones. I have met lifters from Norway, the United States, and Australia who have come to Ireland with a list of specific stones as their itinerary. The Scandinavians in particular recognise something familiar. There are Norse husafell-type traditions of lifting and carrying heavy stones that are clearly cognate with the Irish tradition, and the more serious practitioners are aware of the shared history. We are pursuing Intangible Cultural Heritage status for the tradition, a UNESCO-adjacent designation that recognises living cultural practices worth preserving. It has been more complicated than I anticipated, involving ministerial correspondence and some archaeological sensitivity about specific sites that I will not detail here, but the direction of travel is positive.

My favourite stone I am deliberately vague about in public, to protect the landowner’s goodwill with access. What I will say is that it weighs approximately 220 pounds, is roughly spherical with no obvious grip point, and sits on working farmland. Lifting it for the first time on a grey October morning, with the farmer watching from a gate, felt like touching something that had been waiting a long time.

What are you currently working on?

Several projects simultaneously, which is either industriousness or poor impulse control. The most immediate is a book called Ireland’s Impossible Olympics, about the Tailteann Games: an ancient Irish athletic festival revived in 1924 as a deliberate act of nation-building by the new Free State government. The 1924 Games brought 5,000 athletes to Dublin from across the Irish diaspora, included events ranging from athletics to Gaelic football to motorboat racing on the Liffey, and were attended by figures including Douglas Fairbanks and W.B. Yeats. They ran three more times, in 1928, 1932, and a truncated version in 1936, before collapsing under a combination of the Depression, government indifference, and the impossibility of sustaining diaspora participation once the first nationalist excitement faded. It is the best sporting story almost nobody outside Ireland has heard. My agent is taking it to publishers shortly.

My book When Fitness Went Global came out last November from Bloomsbury, a global history of how fitness became a worldwide industry and obsession from ancient Greece to the contemporary wellness complex. That is probably the most accessible entry point.

Everything is at Physical Culture Study on Substack or my website Physical Culture Study!

One thing from an earlier era that readers could bring back for a month?

Walk everywhere you possibly can, for thirty to sixty minutes a day, without listening to anything. The unlistened-to part matters as much as the walking itself, and I say this as someone who listens to podcasts constantly and has to actively fight the habit. It is free. It requires nothing. It has been working for 200,000 years. The reason it does not get marketed more aggressively is that nobody makes any money from it.

Thanks, Conor, for taking the time chat about fitness. This was fun.

The first question is slightly interesting but the second question here and everywhere is more important. What do you think relative to what’s priced in? The first level thought “Seattle (or New England) will win” is just an assertion devoid of much content. There is no comparative advantage in observing widely known attributes that you have to pay for.

The second level thought “Seattle (or New England) is undervalued relative to the market” if backed by data, evidence, and logic, is the more edgy and actionable one. Markets don’t just facilitate transactions and assign value, they also convey the best current information while framing the most useful communication.

Question three is the crux. Once you have a view that’s differentiated relative to the markets, you conceivably have an edge over the odds. Now act on it or it didn’t mean anything. Go big on a big edge. Go no smaller than a $25 flyer (that offers that money back) on any view at all for a first time wager. Get as expected value rich as you can.

Almost everything is a gamble. What’s important isn’t avoiding risk. What’s important is understanding it, measuring it, making bets with positive expected value, and sizing them accordingly. Judge yourself on the setup you find and act on. Judge yourself no harsher (or gentler) based on the outcome.

Last Call

Here’s a bet that you can only lose by not making. Today is the last call because bank transfers can take 3-5 days, so if you wait until tomorrow it could be too late. Deposit $25 in Kalshi and bet $25 on your favorite team (I bet on the Seahawks). Bet only that $25 and get 100% of that $25 back in a sign up bonus. If you bet with me on Seattle and win you get a $38 payout + $25 bonus for $63. Lose? You tie after the bonus. Bet against me on New England and get a $72 payout if you’re right and another $25 for $97 if you win and tie if you lose.

There are a lot of unknowns about the Super Bowl. But there are two sure things.

1. A freeroll has positive expected value.

2. The game will be more fun with a bet.

Here is my Super Bowl portfolio:

And my favorite Super Bowl bet for 2026:

Here’s the part where I normally add,

Think for yourself. Do your own work.

Buyer (always) beware.

Don’t. Instead just do this one.

It is an honor to hear about John Dailey’s experiences and lessons learned. John, thanks for sharing your wisdom here on Substack — I love both Walking Point and RTFU — and in Tough Rugged Bastards: A Memoir of a Life in Marine Special Operations. I’m grateful for you answering a few questions for Vale Tudo readers today.

What did you keep and what did you drop from your days on active duty?

I have tried to stop living with a “hurry up and wait” mentality. The Marine Corps owns you in a way civilians can’t really understand. We are big on formations, last-minute tasks that change constantly, and we can be masters of beating dead horses. Since I retired, I try to be in charge of my time and not waste any of it.

I have kept the concept of standards. I still try to do the small things like they matter, because they do. I lay my gear out. I show up early. I keep my kit squared away. I work out whether I feel like it or not. The Marine Corps taught me that we don’t rise to the occasion, we sink to the level of our training and preparation. That is probably the most important thing I learned over my twenty-plus years.

What would you tell your teenage self about preparing for selection and combat?

I’d tell him three things:

1. Stop chasing “hard for hard’s sake” and build a strong foundation. Young guys want to prove something every day. Selection doesn’t reward the guy who goes hardest once. It rewards durability. Ruck a lot. Learn to move under load without breaking. Build a strong back and hard feet, solid cardio, and get strong in compound movements. Being boringly consistent will build mental ruggedness and resilience.

2. Be coachable. Everybody thinks selection is about being a savage. It’s not. It’s about whether you can take feedback, stay calm, and keep getting better under pressure while making the team better. Although we still expect you to be a savage when the situation requires it.

3. Train your mind like a weapon system. If a movie showed the reality of combat, no one would sit through it because it would be boring as shit. It’s long stretches of monotony, interrupted by moments that demand perfect violence and perfect judgment. Learn to regulate yourself through breathing, self-talk, focus. Learn to do the next right thing when you’re scared, exhausted, and unsure. That’s the job.

Did war reveal anything from your childhood or training that you needed when it counted?

Training and combat taught me to be grateful for my upbringing. My parents taught me to work hard for what I wanted and never to quit. I grew up pretty humbly, so a lot of the things I wish I could have changed about our circumstances at the time have wound up being the things that really shaped me. I am incredibly grateful for them now.

Second, I am grateful for the hard leaders who taught me that it’s not enough to rehearse until you get it right. You need to rehearse until you can’t get it wrong. That is what saves your ass in combat, a reliance on standards and the knowledge that the guy on either side of you has been held to the same standard. If your preparation is adequate, mission success is assured long before the fight ever happens.

Who makes the best Marines? Who makes the best Raiders?

For the Marines in general, the best candidates aren’t always the toughest kids. I wasn’t. They’re the ones looking for a standard and willing to be shaped by it. People who want to earn something and are willing to sacrifice their wants for the organization and unit to get it. People who want to belong to something demanding and bigger than themselves.

To become a Raider is harder. The best candidates tend to have:

• A strong understanding of why they want to be a Raider.

• Humility and willingness to learn from anyone.

• Composure, they can’t fall apart when it’s chaotic.

• Relentlessness, they always go a little further.

• Selflessness, they make the team better.

• Trust, they can trust and be trusted.

Are those traits innate?

Some people are born with a head start. But I’ve watched plenty of natural athletes quit because their character was weak, or because they couldn’t stand the thought of not being first at everything they do. And I’ve watched average guys become operators because they were disciplined, coachable, and stubborn in the right ways. You can cultivate it if you’re willing to do the little things consistently.

What’s your current mission?

My mission now is to take the lessons I’ve learned over the past almost forty years, 21 years on active duty and 18 years helping make Raiders, and translate them into a framework anyone with the will can use to get better at getting better.

My mission has two branches. The education arm is Walking Point. It is based on the idea that you’re responsible for your own azimuth. If you don’t choose your mission, you’ll end up executing someone else’s. The training arm is RTFU, Ruck The Fuck Up. Because life is hard, and we need to be harder. It focuses on using rucking to build durability and mental toughness.

What’s your favorite and least favorite exercise?

Favorite: Rucking. It comes as close as possible to being a full-body workout, and it is infinitely scalable by adjusting how far, fast, heavy, or high you go.

Least favorite: Lunges. I do them. I hate them. My knees have taken quite a bit of damage over the years, so for me, they are the exercise version of getting kicked in the balls.

What was the worst thing you ate in the military?

The worst thing I ever ate was absolutely Balut on a dare. It is a street food in the Philippines. It is a steamed, fertilized, developing egg embryo eaten out of the shell. I just threw up a little in my mouth thinking about it. The only saving grace is that I was really drunk.

What do you eat now?

Now I try to treat food as fuel 85-90% of the time. I meal prep once per week and am fine with eating the same thing repeatedly. I try to stick to real food, high protein. I eat a lot of eggs, meat, Greek yogurt, rice/potatoes, and fruit. I’ve also started modifying my eating plan based on the workout I’m doing. I do fasted cardio, but fuel before gym sessions. The other 10-15% of the time I eat whatever I want. I don’t want to be the guy who shows up at your party with his own food in a container.

Any supplements you take or recommend?

The big one is creatine. I think there is enough research to show that everyone should be taking at least 5 grams per day.

Beyond that, I take protein powder if I won’t get enough from food during the day. Vitamin D and omega-3s. I also think many people would benefit from taking magnesium at night to improve sleep quality.

I get bloodwork done a few times a year and change what I’m taking based on that. Not medical advice, just what’s worked for me and what tends to be useful.

What does your inner scoreboard measure?

My daily scoreboard has three questions:

• Did I do what I said I would do?

• Did I get better?

• Did I help anyone become more capable?

If I can hit all three in a day, I feel pretty good about myself.

What metrics matter the most to you today?

On paper, I track habits: training consistency/volume, strength trends, sleep, and recovery numbers like resting HR/HRV.

I also track output. Words written, tasks completed, etc. I’m a big ‘to do’ list guy. Not because numbers are everything, but because data doesn’t lie. I believe that we spend our time on the things that are most important to us. If the things I am tracking and the way I’m spending my time don’t align, it’s time to have a meeting with myself and figure out why.

What’s the best way to be ready to attack the next evolution?

Recovery has always been a weak spot for me. I tend to push to the brink of breaking. But now that I’m getting a bit older, I’ve had to re-evaluate.

In the gym, I don’t schedule deload weeks at rigid intervals. I pay attention to sleep, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability. When those numbers start trending the wrong way, it’s a good indicator that I need to back off.

For running and rucking, I dial back roughly 10% on distance or intensity one week per month. Life also forces breaks on me due to travel or work, which I’ve learned to treat as strategic instead of frustrating.

And I’ve finally gotten serious about scheduling mobility sessions separate from normal workouts—and using sauna, massage, and sports therapy not just to recover, but to increase capability.

If you could get every reader to take on one hard challenge this year, what would it be?

I wish I could get everyone to undertake at least one hard challenge this year. But I wouldn’t dictate what it has to be.

It should be something that both scares and excites you. Something that tests you physically and mentally. Something you’re not 100% sure you can complete. And something that, if you do complete, finds you more confident and capable on the backside.

I’m a fan of rucking challenges and solo multi-day backpacking trips. They don’t just test your fitness; they provide a platform for you to test yourself.

John, thanks for your time. I am 100% committed to more rucking and less Balut. More importantly, thank you for your service to America. Thank you for reviving one of the deadliest units of warfighters in our country’s history. Marine Raiders have been bad news for our enemies for generations.

Readers, want to learn more? Order a copy of Tough Rugged Bastards. I did and I loved it. I’m currently following it up with The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II which tells the story of John’s military lineage.

When he described the best Marine Raiders, was he talking about you? They need the right people to become Raiders and Raider officers. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone will try. But everyone should prepare — run, swim, and especially ruck. They have an excellent program. They only take the best, but everyone can use their doctrine to become better.

Multitasking is a lie. A dual mandate provide a perpetual excuse. That is why it is a both popular and bad idea. If and when they fail and the first job, they can point to the second. If and when they fail and the second, they point back at the first. Most people and institutions do – at most – one thing well at a time.

For example, the Federal Reserve Board is directed to pursue stable prices, typically targeting 2% inflation, and maximum employment. Whenever the central government has conflicting priorities between the long-term and short-term, there is a tendency to favor the short-term.

On fiscal policy, Republicans traditionally favored tax cuts (fun) and spending restraint (no fun) while Democrats liked more redistribution (fun for the recipients) and higher taxes (no fun for the people assigned to pay for the handouts). The compromise is typically to overdo the fun parts and shortchange the no fun parts.

The Fed’s version is to emphasize employment (fun with a current constituency) and deemphasize stability (no fun but with longer term consequences). This is getting exacerbated with the current bipartisan consensus against any form of fiscal discipline and the president who is a present over future maximalist.

So what the Fed should do is focus on stability. You can have only one priority. The plural of “priority” is “distractions”. Once focused, the correct amount of inflation is zero. Stealing 2% of savers’ money each year is still theft. It is less bad than stealing 3-4% but it is still avoidably evil.

What the Fed will do is debase the US dollar towards zero. Own enough gold and bitcoin to be indifferent to fiscal and monetary policy. It should be the inverse of your faith in our politician-backed fiat currency. Gold is based on geology. Bitcoin is based on math. Fiat is based on words.

Time for more words: the Fed chairman holds his January press conference this afternoon at 2 PM Eastern. Hear what he has to say. If you have a bet, you can place it on Kalshi (with a $25 freeroll). I love mentions markets of things I plan on listening to anyway because turning something into a game makes me listen with 10x more attention.

In What Good is Faith?, I discussed three things that faith communities do that secular people should try: rituals especially sabbath, scripture, and a sense of awe. A fourth: tithing. It is common among faith communities and should be considered by the secular and faithful alike.

Tithing is reassuring. There is a man out there, perhaps someone you already know, who made 90% as much money as you did this past year yet is living a better, more fulfilling life. He’s slightly more frugal. He’s just a bit more grateful. He goes hard on the many free or virtually free joys that life offers. He’s slightly poorer yet slightly better than I am in the ways that matter most. Setting aside 10% is a reminder that I can survive on the other 90% and improve with tweaks here and there. I could have even cut deeper without huge sacrifice. Proving that to myself is a comforting reminder.

Tithing is liberating. Give to the causes you care about the most. Pay whatever taxes are owed and not a penny more. Insure against calamity. Provide for your family. Then what? Then do whatever you want with the clearest of consciences. Offend Greta Thunberg with your carbon footprint. Get banned from the casino. Fly the people you actually like half way around the world for an exciting adventure. How will you sleep at night? Ideally under high thread count sheets next to someone hot who loves you and will cook breakfast in the morning.

Tithing is efficient. You have more to give in up years and it costs you less net after tax benefits of giving. You have less to give in down years but can keep more of the less diminished utility of those marginal dollars. Giving well, you can cost yourself less for the same benefit to others or benefit others for the same cost to yourself (or some combination of both). This also dampens the volatility of the fluctuations of your after tax wealth.

Whether or not religious teaching compels you, consider this reassuring, liberating, and tax efficient practice. Convinced? Here’s the specific mechanics of implementing it. What to give? Where to store it? What deserves support?

What to give? In short, give your most appreciated assets with the lowest cost basis in order to kill as much taxable gains as possible. If you own a lot of old bitcoin, that is often a good option. I’ve accumulated it for over a decade and reach for it first for donating.

If you’re starting today, the best asset allocation for tithing is a direct index. Instead of owning a single index fund, it manages the components. This is far more tax efficient because they can automatically harvest tax losses so that you can make money overall while simultaneously lowering your tax bill. The impact after taxes is staggering. Added benefit: you can donate the most appreciated components each year.

A tithe of what? Up to you to pick the right denominator. The vast majority of my own economics are based on investing performance not a relatively modest salary (and one I pay myself as I own the company). Others in similar situations might consider tithing 10% of their net worth change. Just be consistent so that you can put this practice on autopilot each year.

Once you calculated the dollar value of your tithe and identified the most appreciated assets to gift, then contribute it to a donor advised fund (DAF). This gives you the tax benefit up front. It separate the topic of what and how much you give each year from the topic of where the money ultimately goes. My DAF is on the Daffy platform, which I love. I admire the founder, enjoy the platform, and find it easy and intuitive. I just made a donation from my DAF today.

Between the time that I contribute to my DAF and the time that the DAF donates money to causes of my choice, I have it invested in Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF Shares (VTI) with a 0.03% total expense ratio which is up over 800% so far.

I’m able to benefit causes I care about massively more via a DAF. My money makes a lot more money than I earn. My DAF’s money makes a lot more money than I give.

Then what? Then allocate the DAF’s gains (growing its principal by the amount you contribute) to charities. My favorite is Watsi where I’ve helped fund healthcare for 665 patients in 16 countries and counting. The DAF also allows me to fund the social obligations that come from a wife serving on boards and other local needs.

A caution about the non-profit world: there is greed and dishonesty just like in the for profit world. Always check with a guide such as Charity Navigator to make sure that a charity is legitimate. I also avoid any that spend a lot of money on political advocacy. Many charities are mostly lobbyists and rarely lobby for public policies I advocate. Many capitalists use capitalism to make money that they donate to charities that use most of the money to lobby against capitalism. If that isn’t what you intend to do, make sure you don’t do it.

Religiously oriented financial institutions can be great places to save your money before you donate it. My favorite example is Christian Community Credit Union where I bank. They don’t make a profit but instead run their non-profit for the benefit of its members. They also are incredibly generous with sign up bonuses:

• $50 bonus just for registering here

• $100 bonus for High-Yield Checking

• $100 bonus for High-Yield Savings

• $200 bonus for Cash Rewards Visa

They recently grew by merging with AdelFi and could convert to a bank someday. If you join, you’ll get first dibs on cheap stock in such a demutualization. Meanwhile, your money is used to finance church and ministry growth. TL;DR: you get $50-450 in sign up bonuses and give support to worthy causes indirectly without it costing you anything.

Caveat

I’m happy to share what I do, but understand that everyone’s circumstances and priorities are different. Just pick and choose whatever is relevant to you.

Conclusion

Steps to implement today: set up a DAF here with $1k via your credit card (for ~$30 in cash back for me or whatever you get from yours). They give you $25 for signing up.

Allocate it all sensibly (I like 100% in VTI). Then tithe your most appreciated assets to it each year and donate the DAF’s gains to your favorite cause (I like Watsi).

TL;DR

Give. But give with a hard head as well as a soft heart. Give with all of the seriousness that you use to earn, save, and invest.

Mackenzie Smith is one of the people who inspires me to be a better person in all aspects of health and fitness. So here she is. Thank you, Mackenzie, for sharing your lessons learned with Vale Tudo. To kick things off, how did you start?

Growing up, I played sports all through my childhood and into high school.

I originally started lifting in the gym during my volleyball off season because I wanted to get better at my sport (I sucked tbh). But at the same time, I was also at one of the lowest points in my life. I was really struggling mentally, dealing with depression and anxiety, insecurity, navigating trauma, relying on medications, and physically I was very unhealthy. That was my rock bottom.

I went to the gym with the intention of improving my performance, but almost immediately I noticed something else happening. The impact it had on my mental health was profound. It helped my anxiety in a way nothing else ever had. I felt calmer, more grounded, and more in control. I became addicted to that feeling in the sense that I craved the relief and clarity it gave me.

Over time, I started to see how much it affected every other area of my life. It built my self-worth and confidence. It taught me discipline and consistency. It showed me that I could set goals, work through hard things, and actually follow through. It completely changed how I saw myself and showed up in the world.

Shortly after I started training, I found a podcast that really sparked my interest in nutrition. I went down the rabbit hole learning about food, health, and how the body actually works. Once I addressed the nutrition piece, everything changed. I was able to get off my medications and truly get my life back.

That was incredibly eye-opening realizing how much the foods I was eating were impacting my mental and physical health.

I’ve now been consistently training for about 12 years and coaching for the last six. And it all stems from that initial experience — using fitness as a way to get my life back, and now wanting to help other people do the same.

What do people get wrong about health?

I think one of the most conventional, unchallenged assumptions people hold about health is that it takes too much time, or that it has to come last.

A lot of people believe that when work is busy or family needs them, health is the thing that gets pushed aside. The mindset is that you put everyone else and everything else first, and then your health comes after, once things calm down.

But in reality, it’s the opposite. Your health has to come first so you can actually show up better in every other area of your life.

What I see over and over again is that when people don’t prioritize their health, they’re more reactive, more stressed, and constantly operating in survival mode. They’re trying to pour from an empty cup. And then health starts to feel like another stressor or burden on top of everything else.

And that’s the part I think people get wrong. Health shouldn’t take away from your life. It shouldn’t feel like something you’re constantly juggling or sacrificing for. If it does, you’re doing it wrong. It should actively support your work, your relationships, your ability to be present and overall add to your quality of life.

Putting your health first doesn’t mean it has to look perfect. It doesn’t mean ideal conditions, endless time, or some flawless routine. It just means it needs to be a priority.

When you start with your health, you go into work, relationships, and life more calm. Everything else becomes easier to handle because you’re not constantly depleted.

Health isn’t something you fit in after life happens. It’s the foundation that allows you to handle life when it does and actually improve every area of it along the way.

What is the point of fitness?

For me, fitness is about truly living life.

It’s about being able to experience life without feeling restricted or limited by my body, my energy, or my health. I want to be able to go on adventures, try new things, play sports, and pour into the people and experiences that matter most to me without a second thought.

When I first got into fitness, it honestly started as just wanting to look better because I didn’t like how I looked. But over time, it turned into something so much bigger than that.

The process was incredibly transformative for my mental health, and that’s been a huge driving force for me the last 10 years. As my physical health and mental health improved, everything else started to change too.

Fitness has become the foundation for everything else. It supports how I live, how I feel, and how I move through the world.

So ultimately, fitness isn’t about being fast or strong just for the sake of it. It’s about building a body and a life that allow me to live the longest, fullest, healthiest life possible.

Best — and worst — exercise?

This definitely changes depending on when you ask me.

Right now, my favorite exercises are anything shoulder-related, because that’s the area I’m really focused on bringing up. Love me some lateral raises or Viking press.

My least favorite exercise has to be Bulgarian split squats. I feel like they’re everyone’s least favorite right?! Or at least one of those exercises you have a love-hate relationship with. You know they’re good for you, but that doesn’t make them any more enjoyable in the moment.

What do you eat?

I have a handful of go-to meals that I pretty much rotate on repeat.

Most of my meals are some version of a burrito bowl, burger bowl, stir-fry, or homemade pizza. They’re all stupid simple, quick to make, and easy to adjust depending on what I’m in the mood for.

The base is usually some combination of rice or potatoes, then some sort of veggies, then a lot of protein. Ground beef is my favorite but I’ll also eat chicken or seafood. Eggs and sourdough are staples for breakfasts. That’s basically my daily rotation.

I prep my own food. Every weekend I’ll prep my meals for the week so that during busy days I’m not having to think too much about what to eat. It makes everything easier and removes a lot of decision fatigue.

I typically eat four meals a day, spread pretty evenly throughout the day. That structure works really well for me in terms of energy, consistency, and making sure I’m eating enough to support my training and lifestyle.

Worthwhile supplements?

Creatine is the one supplement I recommend pretty much everyone take.

It’s one of the most researched, effective, and affordable supplements out there. I personally like taking it either in gummy form or as a powder, depending on what’s easiest.

Beyond that, some other staples I recommend to most people are magnesium glycinate, a quality multivitamin, and fish oil. Those tend to cover a lot of the basics and support recovery, overall health, and consistency.

I recommend getting labs done to determine what other specific supplements are necessary for each person. These ones are a good starting point for the general population.

I also think it’s helpful to have a solid protein powder on deck — either to bake into recipes or to use on days when protein intake is a little lower. It’s not a replacement for real food, but it’s a great tool.

As for supplements worth avoiding, I’d stay away from anything that feels gimmicky. Things like fat burners or “quick-fix” products usually promise a lot and deliver very little. If a supplement sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

What about your body do you measure?

I measure basically anything and everything. But keep in mind I’m a psycho with this given I’m a coach and enjoy living this way.

I love data and structure, and I like being really dialed in understanding what’s going on with my body. Right now, I’m also working with a coach to balance my gut health and hormones after a period of extreme chronic stress, which set me back a bit both physically and performance-wise. So healing and stabilizing is my main focus at the moment.

From a tracking standpoint, I use my Oura Ring to monitor sleep, steps, heart rate, and recovery. I also track my weight daily, take progress photos, monitor fasted blood glucose, body measurements, and track my macros. I like having a full picture rather than guessing.

That said, I don’t think everyone needs to track everything forever. In general, I think the most important thing for people to measure (at least for a period of time) is their food intake. Consistent tracking for a few solid months builds awareness around what you’re actually eating, how much you’re eating, and how your body responds to it.

Protein in particular is something I think most people under measure. They often think they’re eating enough, but when you actually track it, there’s usually a massive gap.

I also highly recommend progress photos, especially if weight loss is the goal. A lot of people get overly focused on the scale and forget that their body is often recomping. Having visual proof of progress is huge, especially during periods when the scale isn’t moving the way you expect.

How do you recover?

This is everything.

You can be doing all the right things — training hard, eating well — and your body will still not respond, or even move in the opposite direction, if you’re not recovering properly.

Sleep is at the top of the list, along with stress management. So many people think they can operate on five or six hours of sleep and be fine, and I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. Sleep is incredibly vital. Even one poor night of sleep can cause your weight to fluctuate a few pounds, and over time, chronic sleep deprivation will completely stall progress — no matter how dialed in everything else is.

Yes, you need to train hard. Yes, you need to eat well. But recovery has to be there too. They all go hand in hand.

A huge part of recovery that people neglect is stress — myself included. I learned this the hard way. I lived under chronic stress for years while building my business. Even though I was eating well and doing all the right things training-wise, I eventually had to pull back and focus on healing my gut and balancing my hormones because I ignored how much stress was impacting my body.

Stress management isn’t as obvious as diet or workouts, but it plays just as big of a role. Recovery looks different for everyone, but it has to be intentional.

I’ve had clients unable to lose weight for years until we addressed sleep and stress management. One of my girls had to quit her stressful job for this reason - and immediately the “stubborn” weight dropped off.

For me, recovery is both physical and mental. It’s making time to be offline, connecting with God, doing the things that genuinely fill my cup. Getting outside, getting sunshine, reading, journaling, writing, building community and relationships, and giving myself space to think and process.

I love getting out in nature — especially going to the beach — and having intentional time each week where I unplug, read, journal, and connect with God. Structuring these things into my life to reduce stress and support recovery has been extremely challenging but also the most transformative for my body.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given?

This one is tough because I don’t know if there’s a single piece of advice that stands out above everything else.

But if I look back at what was truly the most transformative for me, it was focusing on nutrition. Learning how to fuel my body properly, prioritizing whole foods, eating enough protein, and sticking to the basics.

A big part of that was also learning to get in tune with my own body — understanding what works for me and what doesn’t, instead of following every new rule or trend. That process is genuinely what gave me my life back.

I always say that 99% of people’s problems would be dramatically improved if they ate real food and went to the gym consistently. And as simple as that sounds, it’s incredibly true.

So if I had to boil the best advice down to something, it would be this: find what works for your body, stick to the basics, and stay consistent. You don’t need extremes — you need fundamentals done well.

How are you challenging yourself in 2026?

This one is actually kind of funny because I’ve been reflecting on it a lot lately.

Every year, I usually force myself into something big. I want massive growth. I want to push myself, face fears, lean into discomfort, and go all in on whatever challenge is in front of me. And that approach is a big reason why I’ve had such transformative years over the last few years of my life.

But this year looks different.

At first, I was actively searching for some huge challenge to take on — and one actually presented itself. But I ended up turning it down. And that was a big realization for me.

I realized that the hardest challenge for me right now isn’t pushing harder. It’s pulling back.

I’ve been grinding for years — pushing myself hard in training, in work, in building my business — and it’s taken a toll on my body, my mind, my well-being, and even my relationships. My body has made it very clear that something needs to change.

So my challenge this year is learning how to pull back and give myself grace. And for me, that looks like setting hard boundaries with my time, saying no to things that feel important but aren’t aligned right now, and protecting my energy in a way I never really have before.

It means adjusting my training and sports protocols so my body can actually recover, instead of constantly pushing. It means sleeping more than I ever have. And it means intentionally incorporating stress-reduction practices into my daily life — not as an afterthought, but as a priority.

Pulling back from training so hard and pulling back from working nonstop has honestly been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

I know this might sound dumb to some people, but I’ve come to realize that growth doesn’t look the same in every season of life. What growth looked like for me last year is very different from what growth looks like for me this year.

Right now, pulling back is the growth. And that’s what I’m going all in on.

Where can readers find you?

I’m active on social media. Twitter and LinkedIn are my main platforms @smithhmackenzie and Instagram @fit_with_mackenzie.

I also host a podcast called The Endless Pursuit Podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts. I have a weekly newsletter as well.

If you could make everyone do one thing for a month, what would it be?

I would choose walking.

Walking is one of the most universal things you can do for both your physical and mental health. Almost everyone can do it, it doesn’t require a gym or equipment, and it doesn’t feel overwhelming or intimidating.

Getting outside and walking every day has a huge impact on stress, mood, digestion, sleep, and overall energy. It gives your nervous system a chance to downshift, helps regulate blood sugar, and supports recovery in a way a lot of people overlook.

Mentally, it creates space. Space to think, process, breathe, and slow down. So many people are constantly overstimulated and stuck in their heads, and walking is one of the simplest ways to reconnect with your body and your environment.

If someone committed to walking every day for a month — even just getting outside and moving intentionally — it would change their life. Not because it’s extreme, but because it’s consistent, grounding, and sustainable.

Walking is one of the most underrated habits there is, and it’s often the foundation that makes everything else easier.

Mackenzie, thank you. In a year when you’re setting hard boundaries with your time and saying no to things, I’m especially grateful that you said yes to sharing what works for you and could work for so many others.

According to realfood.gov,

Half of Americans are metabolically sick, three out of four have a chronic condition, and 90% of healthcare spending treads chronic disease. In the 21^st century developed world, most of this disease is caused by diet and lifestyle. They are diseases of choice.

We got here with the old pyramid favoring sugary ultra processed carbs. That was food for selling, not buying. It was cheaper and easier to make and distribute. It had a long list of chemical ingredients, many of which weren’t even developed for food, to make it non-perishable.

Real food is essentially the opposite. It is perishable because it grew out of or lived on the Earth and lacks the chemical additives to last forever. It typically has one ingredient.

The new pyramid prioritizes protein,

We are ending the war on protein. Every meal must prioritize high-quality, nutrient-dense protein from both animal and plant sources, paired with healthy fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados.

Produce:

Vegetables and fruits are essential to real food nutrition. Eat a wide variety of whole, colorful, nutrient-dense vegetables and fruits in their original form, prioritizing freshness and minimal processing.

I could quibble about needing any bread (zero is a great dose for many people including me) but I’m so happy with the overall priorities that I’ll take this >90% win.

The new graphic is aesthetically beautiful and the writing is clear and direct:

In. So in.

What about vegetarians? Appendix 4.12 addresses their issues. Vegetarians should prioritize eggs as week as Greek/Icelandic yogurt to hit the optimal gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight each day. It is hard. The best way to make it easier: eat bivalves. About half of oyster cals are protein, a bit more than 1/2 for mussels. Clams are 75% protein -- about equal to chicken. I’d hit 200 g of clams for 50 g of protein daily (easier in Maine where we can get them fresh but there are good delivery options too).

Bivalves have no neocortex or limbic system. Without a centralized brain, they have no capacity for pain or suffering (or any consciousness). Neurobiologically and thus ethically their sentience is not like animals, it is like plants. Shrimp are an edge case for anyone whose diet avoids eating conscious animals. They react to stimuli but can’t feel pain. Their responses are nociception. They can’t neurologically integrate pain into experience, they can’t change behavior in response to it, and make no cognitive tradeoffs. So while bivalves have no logical ethical status (or the same as eating a blueberry or, for that matter, salt), shrimp has close to none.

At the low end of little or no consciousness, there is little or no suffering for your protein. Everyone can and should eat bivalves. At the higher end of consciousness, everyone can lessen pain and suffering by sourcing protein farm to table and avoiding the many health and ethical compromises of factory farms. None of these considerations are binary. If you, like me, eat (a lot of) meat, look for sources such as Five Marys Ranch that care for the health of their animals as well as that of their customers. Their animals live full lives in beautiful outdoor spaces, not overcrowded unhygienic crates. It costs more, but is worth supporting if you can.

I didn’t do what the government said when I disagreed with their old food pyramid and I’m not going to do what the government says just because I like the new one. So why does it matter? It matters. It matters because school lunches will be changed. Special interests that captured official health advice because they were trying to sell you something (sugary ultra processed foods) have been unmasked and pushed aside. People who vaguely want to be healthier might try something new – or rather something old: prioritize protein at every meal. Discover satiation. Feel full eating only the right amount of food. Skip highly processed foods, added sugars, and refined carbs manufactured with the intention of addicting you. Make decisions instead of surrendering to impulse. Let that reassertion of control spread to other aspects of life.

To kick start a new diet, many people have benefited from the nudge of GLP-1s (I’m on Tirz which I love). Amazon offers oral GLP-1 for $25 per month (and offer a $25 gift card with your first order). They are also offering $150 in 15 seconds when you get their Prime card. Between the sign up bonuses for the card and pharmacy you can get seven free months of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill with insurance. For anyone reticent to get injections, this could be a practically ubiquitous solution. Get some help getting to where you want your weight, then keep it there with the right portions of real food.

Europe, with few exceptions such as Poland, combined the cradle to grave welfare state with post-Christian family structures. Separately, they were bad ideas. Combined, they’re incoherent and self-defeating. Who is to pull the wagon when everyone is sitting in it? Capitalism benefits from thriving demographics; socialism collapses without it. Making other people pay for your daycare, education, welfare if you don’t work, healthcare, and retirement is a demographic Ponzi scheme that needs new people to keep the scheme going. But it is close to the final collapse.

Israel is unique in the world as a country that is thriving economically and demographically. Every other country has picked one or the other (or neither). The rest of the developed world is delaying family formation and having few or no kids with generations living far from one another. Israel is politically liberal but culturally tribal. Their tribe forms families, has babies, and gets support from extended families living close together. Around the world, many other communities where people make both money and babies have similar attributes and they’re almost all religious.

So what can communities of faith offer atheists, agnostics, and just generally secular people? A lot. Aggressive atheists – those who don’t believe in God but are mad at him – like to point to seemingly illogical religious beliefs and the conmen among religious leaders. I love debunking, but find secular society lacking in humility about its own vulnerabilities. Most people want something to believe in. Few fill the void of a religion with logic. Jews and Christians were skeptical of socialist Zohran Mamdani for NYC mayor, but more than 3 out of 4 irreligious voters voted for him.

I have three specific ideas from faith communities that could serve secular people. First, we would like to be logical decision makers but we’re mostly knotted up balls of habits. Rituals help up make habits out of the things we should focus on. I particularly like the ritual of keeping the sabbath. Christians vary widely in how they observe the sabbath but everyone can do something. Jews observe Shabbat, the day of rest and renewal focusing on family and community (and often welcome gentiles). It is hard to start if you never stop. So weekly: stop work. Make it a ritual.

Read scripture. “Do I believe this?” is not a great way to start because what you do or don’t believe will be based on superficial understanding. A better question is “what does this say?” As Walt Whitman didn’t say but should’ve, “Be curious, not judgmental.” Truth and beauty are inextricably linked and much of the most beautiful writing, art, and architecture was inspired by faith. Ask why. Circle back to the question of your own faith later but there’s a lot of ground to cover first. What did the designer of Sainte-Chapelle know that you don’t? “Nothing” is probably the wrong answer.

Many modern secularists live in a constant state of jaded cynicism. The New York Times, which I need to read for work, is an example of this exhausting and exhausted tone. They know better, they want to remind you how much they know better, and are irritated that they have to even explain themselves. Meanwhile people of faith have reasons to allow themselves awe and wonder. Everyone should. Before we agree on who designed it or if it was designed, we live in a world worthy of awe and wonder. Let yourself experience it now. Settle theological debates later.

I have nothing new to add here about the questions and answers on the truth of any religion. But don’t wait until you have solved them to enrich your life with rituals especially a sabbath, scripture reading, and approaching our world with a sense of wonder. Do that now. It makes for a better life wherever you are on your search for truth and beauty.

Jay, you personify my fitness goal of being strong for a fast guy and fast for a strong guy. I love running, but if someone is still chasing me after 50 kilometers then I want to be able to turn around and fight. To kick off, what is one exercise you love?

I like running because it’s simple. Just lace up your shoes, head outside, and get moving. Nothing clears my head quite like it. I also love push-ups and highly recommend doing them. They’re my favorite all-purpose exercise because you can do them anywhere. I’ve done them every day since I was five, when my dad first started making me do them every morning, and it’s a habit I’ve always kept.

Anything you hate?

Burpees. I’ve done more than enough of those for one lifetime. But honestly, they work because they are hard, so I do still force myself to incorporate them.

What are you training for?

Right now, I’m in the middle of the Central Florida Track Shack Race Series. It’s a set of six races where you earn points based on your finishes. Last season, I won the series and became the Grand Masters Champion, which was a lot of fun.

This season, I have a clear goal: I want to run sub-6 minute miles in my 5K races. My personal best for the 5K was this fall at 18:42, which averages out to a 6:01 pace. I’m so close that it’s actually a bit frustrating.

To try to shave off a few seconds, I’ve started training with a 15-pound weighted vest on some of my runs. I don’t wear it every time, but I use it enough to build strength and make my regular pace feel easier when I take it off. I’m hoping this gives me those small improvements that really count in a 5K.

What do you eat?

Breakfast is my go-to because it’s easy and I can make it without thinking. I usually have eggs, avocado, bacon, and wheat toast. It has everything I need and keeps me full.

For me, the best meals are tasty but not complicated. I like a chicken bowl with rice, vegetables, and a good sauce. If I want something sweet, I go for Greek yogurt with berries and a bit of honey.

Favorite protein?

Chicken is my favorite. It’s simple to cook, easy to portion, and goes with almost anything.

Weirdest food you eat?

I don’t really eat anything unusual. If I have a weird habit, it’s that I’m happy eating the same meals routinely.

Now that my kids are grown, we don’t have big family meals anymore. I tried Factor meals for a while, but they didn’t work for me. Found them boring, and I’m also not a fan of just microwaving my dinner. Switching to Tovala meal service has been a good balance. There’s not much prep, but the food is really fresh. I’ve started enjoying dinner again.

Most overrated supplement?

Most so-called “fat burner” products. If those pills actually worked as advertised, everyone would look like an action figure.

Most underrated?

Creatine. It might not sound exciting, but it really does the job for me. I think it depends, though. Everybody is different. For me, creatine really packs on muscle size when I’m taking it daily. My wife, though, sees very little physical change.

Something that actually makes a difference:

Electrolytes. The Florida heat is intense, and I notice a difference if I skip them.

Anything everyone should consider?

Consider vitamin D if you spend most of your time indoors. Magnesium can help if you have trouble sleeping or often feel tense. This isn’t medical advice, just what I’ve noticed works. Personally, I used to get migraines regularly, but since I started taking magnesium, they’ve almost completely gone away.

What do you measure?

I look at my resting heart rate, how fast I recover between workouts, and how easy my lighter days feel. I don’t track my food anymore. I did it for years and figured out what works for me, so now I just focus on staying consistent. I weigh myself from time to time. For me, it’s just information, not something to judge myself by. I get bloodwork done every so often, especially now that I’m older. I pay attention to sleep quality, aerobic fitness (my VO2), strength compared to my bodyweight, and waist size. These give you a good overall picture.

How do you bounce back?

I keep things simple. The day after a tough workout or race, I avoid sitting around. I go for a walk, do some easy movement, or maybe a light jog if I feel up to it. Nothing intense. Just enough to get my blood flowing and loosen up. I also try to get outside early because sunlight and fresh air really energize me. I pay attention to the basics too, like making sure I eat enough, replace what I lost through sweat, and drink water throughout the day.

Any sleep tricks?

I try to go to bed at the same time most nights. I keep my room dark and cool, and I leave my phone away from the bed. If I feel restless, I keep things simple: I stop scrolling, read a few pages of a book, or write down my thoughts so they don’t keep me up. The main trick is being consistent. When I sleep well, everything else feels easier.

Any effective recovery gimmicks?

I don’t use any fancy recovery methods. The one thing I do that actually helps is taking a hot shower and spending about 10 minutes on focused mobility right after training. I work on my calves, hips, hamstrings, and ankles. The areas that get tight from running. If I skip this for a week, I feel stiff and sore. When I stick with it, I recover faster and avoid those minor injuries that can ruin a race or even a whole season.

What’s the best fitness advice you’ve received?

Don’t miss twice. If you miss a workout, that’s okay. Life gets in the way sometimes. You’re tired, work goes late, or something unexpected happens. But if you skip two in a row, it can become a habit. That advice has helped me more than any complicated training plan because it stops me from losing momentum.

Who got you into it?

I first learned discipline in the military, where fitness wasn’t optional. Later, running and racing made it something personal for me. Over time, staying active became what keeps me grounded, no matter what’s happening in my life.

The people around me make a big difference too. I’ve had the same gym buddy for 17 years! We work together and lift during lunch. That kind of long-term support is hard to find. He’s retiring next year so that’s going to be a real change to my daily routine. We joke in the office that I’m going to be recruiting for a new gym partner.

And my wife is also my running partner. She’s been running her whole life, and her dedication inspires me. She’s kept up her move goals for over 2,000 days in a row. No joke! Sometimes she does a lighter workout, but she never takes a full rest day. Watching her is amazing, and it motivates me to stay on track.

What values do you want to spread to other men?

Show up, even when you’re tired or life gets hectic. Keep your word, especially to yourself. Take care of your health because others rely on you. Your family, coworkers, and those you lead all count on you. Being in shape isn’t about vanity. It’s about being reliable.

I think men need to know that consistency is what really matters. It’s not about being perfect or having a dramatic transformation. It’s about quietly showing up and doing the work, day after day. It really does stack up over time.

What do you keep to yourself?

The deeper reasons are personal. Everyone has their own story with fitness. Sometimes it’s pride, pain, fear, or something else. You can share the basics, but the real “why” is something each man has to find and keep for himself. I went through some abuse as a kid, and I know that’s part of why I push myself.

Who’s in your tribe?

My tribe is small but genuine. There’s my gym buddy I’ve trained with for years, and my wife, who’s my running partner and incredibly consistent. I’ve also found a great community on X and Substack. People who truly care about training, learning, and supporting each other. They’re not after attention or trying to be influencers. They’re just regular people working to improve and helping others do the same.

To me, fitness means having extra capacity. It’s about being able to handle whatever the day brings without always feeling exhausted or running on fumes. You need margin for stress, long days, and nights when you don’t sleep well. You need it for the unexpected: a flat tire, a sick kid, a sudden deadline, a travel day, or a tough conversation. Fitness can’t stop these things from happening, but it gives you more space to handle them without falling apart.

Does being strong help at work?

I believe it does, but not because of ego. It changes how you move through your day. When you know you’ve worked hard, you carry yourself differently. You stay calmer under pressure because you’re used to discomfort. You’ve practiced doing hard things on purpose, so when challenges come up unexpectedly, you don’t panic as quickly.

I also believe there’s an important place for men who are good and capable. Men who are disciplined, ethical, and physically prepared. They stay calm and in control, ready if things go wrong. They don’t look for conflict, but they aren’t helpless either. The world already has enough chaos. We need steady men who can protect, provide, and lead when it matters. That kind of readiness doesn’t come from just talking about it. It’s built the same way as fitness: through repetition, discipline, and over time.

Any current projects readers can check out?

I share my writing on Substack and focus on what I’ve found works in everyday life.

Hardwired is my weekly look at what creates real strength in body, mind, and spirit. I share lessons from top researchers, coaches, athletes, philosophers, and scientists. My aim isn’t empty motivation, but to show how habits, discipline, and perspective help build resilience and meaning.

Stoic Doctrine is where I use Stoicism as a practical guide for real life, especially when it comes to performing under pressure. It’s based on the four Stoic virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Justice, and Discipline. I write it as a simple, repeatable model you can use at work and in life, with real examples, clear takeaways, and habits that lead to calmer thinking, higher standards, and better choices. And if people want to follow along day to day, they can find me on X at @ColonelRedmond.

What’s one thing readers should do each day?

Take a 20-minute walk every day without headphones.

Walking is realistic. It’s low impact, supports your heart and joints, boosts your mood, and helps with recovery. Plus, it’s a daily win you can count on, even when life gets hectic or your motivation is low. When you do something simple every day without making excuses, you start to trust yourself again. You become someone who follows through, and that confidence carries over into other parts of your life.

Thanks, Jay, for serving as an example as a survivor, leader, and competitor. I hope and expect to not only see you standing on top of the Track Shack Running Series podium again this year, but that you’ll be the most jacked dude on that podium.