Hear me out, because this isn’t armchair grumbling. It’s geometry.

A 400m track isn’t 400m

When you run round a 400m track, it’s only 400 metres at one precise point in the lane. That point is 30cm in from the inside of lane one, and 20cm in from the inside line of every other lane. That’s the measurement line. Run exactly on it and you cover the advertised distance. Run outside it and you don’t. You run further.

Let me show you the working, because this is where it gets tasty.

A lane is 1.22m wide. On a bend you’re running an arc, and the length of an arc grows with its radius. Step out by one lane width and your radius grows by 1.22m for the whole curved section. The extra distance for a full lap is just the extra circumference: 2 × π × 1.22 = 7.67m.

That’s not a rounding of mine. It’s exactly why the staggered start exists. Look up the official lane lengths and they go 400.00m, 407.67m, 415.33m, 423.00m, and so on. Each lane out is 7.67m longer than the one inside it. The stagger is the sport formally acknowledging that the outside of the track is a longer way round.

Now, nobody drifts a whole lane wide. But say you run half a lane wide, about 60cm off the racing line, which is easily done on a tired bend. Half of 7.67 is 3.83m per lap. Split across the two bends, that’s 1.92m of extra ground on each bend. Call it two metres a bend. In an 800m, two laps, drifting half a lane wide the whole way, you’ve run 807.7m. You entered an 800 and ran 808. What about breaking from lanes early in the 400m or 800m, magnetised to the edge, rather than running a straight line - again you run further distance.

Now hold that against the margins. Gold and silver in these races are often settled by a hundredth or two of a second. At a finishing speed of roughly 7 to 8 metres per second, one hundredth of a second is 7 to 8 centimetres of track. A tenth of a second is still only about 70 to 80 centimetres. So the athlete who drifted wide and ran eight extra metres lost by a margin far smaller than the ground they threw away. They didn’t get beaten. They ran further and called it a defeat.

“Taking the long route round”

Here’s a frustration. The commentary team will watch an athlete run wide and say, breezily, “they’re taking the long route round,” as if it’s a minor stylistic choice. It isn’t. It’s a physical penalty, and framing it as a charming detour rather than a cost gives a quiet competitive gift to everyone running tighter.

Now, you might reasonably say tactical racing is messy. Athletes run wide to avoid getting boxed in, and that’s true. Sometimes a metre wide is the price of not being trapped on the rail with nowhere to go. Fair enough.

But that defence disappears when you’re first or second and running faster than the rest of the field. If you’re at the front, on the shoulder, with clear track, there is no good reason to be out in the second lane on the bend. You’re not boxed. You’re just wide.

You might also say the winning margin doesn’t tell the whole story, because the winner may have eased up over the line. In these cases I don’t buy it. Which leaves an uncomfortable third possibility. The athletes either chose to run wide, or didn’t fully grasp how expensive it was. And if we keep calling it “the long route round” instead of “an eight-metre penalty paid two metres at a time on every bend,” we’re helping them not grasp it.

The bit the science nails

There’s a lovely, short paper by Andy Jones and Brian Whipp from 2002, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, that lays out exactly why this matters. Their point is simple and brutal. If you run wide and cover more than the race distance, you move the intersection of your velocity-time curve and the distance-time curve down and to the right. In plain terms, the extra distance lowers the best average speed you’re capable of holding for the race.

So you can run at a genuinely faster speed than your rival and still cross the line slower, because you ran a longer race. Faster pace, longer distance, worse time. That’s the trap.

And it bites hardest right at the end, because the final 100 metres of a 400 or an 800 is always the slowest part. That’s where fatigue is deepest and every wasted metre from the bends comes due, at the exact moment you have the least left to pay it with. Or run an efficient race and this is where you will overtake (not a final ‘kick’ - slow down less than your opponents).

Execution is a skill, not an afterthought

Michael Johnson, who knew a thing or two about running a 400, put it plainly on the podcast. He talked about race execution as the whole game. “You go into the race with a plan,” he said, “and your primary focus is on how you execute that plan.” And the mindset underneath it: “controlling the things that we can control, and making sure that anything we can control, we actually are controlling.”

Your line on the track is as controllable as it gets. It’s not the weather. It’s not the draw. It’s where you choose to put your feet.

This is the part that needs saying. Holding a tight line under fatigue, when your body and mind are in competition mode and the temptation is to drift, takes real confidence. It takes understanding the bioenergetics well enough to trust that the disciplined line is the fast one, even when it doesn’t feel like it. That’s a trained skill, and it has to be part of race delivery, not left to instinct. If you spend 300 days a year preparing and then give a competitor a several-metre head start through sloppy running, that isn’t a mature high-performance strategy. It is growing the plants, but not enjoying the fruit.

Where this lands for the rest of us

Here’s why I think this matters well beyond a track.

We can add enormous sophistication to how we prepare. The training, the due diligence, the what-if planning, the investment in recovery. I bang on about all of it, and I mean it. But preparation is only half the job. The other half is being efficient and ruthless in the delivery, and that often gets far less attention.

I see the executive version constantly. Teams that have done superb strategic work and then execute it wide. The project that takes the scenic route to a decision. The meeting that runs an extra lane wide because nobody held the line. The effort poured into distance that was never going to count, because people were working on low priority work. All that careful preparation, and then metres given away in the delivery that no amount of planning gets back.

The winners aren’t always the ones who prepared the most. Often they’re the ones who wasted the least on the day. Who ran the tight line when it would have been easier to drift. Who understood that being brilliant in training and sloppy in execution is just a slower way to lose.

So by all means do the deep preparation. But then run the race you prepared for. Stay tight to the bend, don’t waste you’re hard earned capacity. Don’t run a longer event than your opposition.

Because you can out-train the entire field and still lose by the length of the track you didn’t need to run.

Quotes from the Supporting Champions podcast: Michael Johnson (Ep123). Reference: Jones and Whipp, “Bioenergetic constraints on tactical decision making in middle distance running,” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2002. doi: 10.1136/bjsm.36.2.102

I stole that line from James Glover (who may have stole it from someone else), a brilliant performance lifestyle advisor turned consultant who now specialises in purpose. It’s been rattling round my head ever since, because it’s one of those definitions that looks obvious until you actually sit with it.

Productive is such a compelling word. How can we be more productive? It’s the question I hear so often. And if we pinch the thinking from elite sport, it connects straight back to last week’s piece, “Tired isn’t the target.” We know working hard gets more done. But being productive is even more cherished than being busy, and the two get muddled all the time.

So let’s take a look at the sentence.

Two words

Making progress = Getting stuff done.

Against meaningful goals = Stuff that actually matters.

That second half is where most of us come unstuck. It’s easy to make progress. It’s much harder to make progress against the things that count, because it means being ruthlessly discerning about what counts in the first place. Plenty of people are brilliantly, exhaustingly productive at things that don’t move the needle an inch.

(I previously shared an example of how, with laser focus I was able to complete a PhD in under 3 years - part-time)

Choosing what matters

There are loads of tools for this. Priority lists. A single focus for the day. The Eisenhower matrix, urgent against important. Most of them are genuinely powerful and worth a look.

The one I’m using at the moment is the not-to-do list. And it’s doing more for me than any of the others. Rather than another column of things to chase, it’s a short, deliberate list of things I’m actively stopping myself from touching, because they’re not meaningful, however tempting or satisfying they’d be to tick off. It turns out the discipline isn’t in choosing what to do. It’s in choosing what to ignore.

Where the best put their effort

Choosing the right goals is half of it. Where you then point your effort is the other half, and this is where I keep coming back to something Mark Williams told me on the podcast.

Mark has spent his career studying how the best learn to be better, and he draws a sharp line between the experts and everyone else. It isn’t the hours. He said, “Experts spend longer periods of time practising the things that they’re not good at, whereas sub-expert performers spend more time practising things that they’re already good at.”

So, the rest of us gravitate to what we’re already good at. It feels productive. You get the reps in, you get the little hit of doing something well, you finish the session feeling capable. And you’ve made almost no meaningful progress, because you’ve spent your time in the place you’d already mastered.

He defines the meaningful stuff precisely. “Deliberate practice may be defined as individualised, specific and focused training with the intention of improving some aspect of performance.” Individualised. Specific. Focused. Aimed squarely at a weakness that matters. That’s not comfortable and probably, for most of us why we avoid it. Mark is honest about the cost. Experts fail more in practice than everyone else, because they’re forever working at the edge of what they can do rather than the middle of it.

That’s at the heart of the definition stolen from James Glover. Meaningful progress usually means working on the hard thing you’d rather avoid, not the easy thing that makes you feel good. Busy is practising your strengths. Productive is practising your weaknesses.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

So what does being productive actually look like in practice.

It looks like picking the two or three things that genuinely matter this week and being honest that the rest is noise. It looks like pointing your best hours at the hard, uncomfortable thing you keep dodging, not the satisfying busywork you’re already good at. It looks like blocking time that holds your attention, phone in a drawer, one thing at a time. And it looks like a not-to-do list you actually respect.

I personally like to start the day thinking about what energy I want to bring to the day, who I want to connect with and then what do I want to move the needle on. Then I think about how much time, when I am going to do it and then schedule it there and then.

None of that is about doing more. It’s about pointing focused effort at the right things with a clear head, which, if you read last week’s piece, is a familiar theme.

Being busy is easy. Anyone can be busy, and most of us are busy at the things we find easy. Making progress against the things that actually matter, especially the ones we’re not yet good at, is the rarer, harder, more valuable skill. And it starts with being honest about which is which.

Productivity is making progress against meaningful goals. The “meaningful bit'“ is the the meaningful bit!

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*Quotes from the Supporting Champions podcast: Mark Williams (Ep076). Definition credited to James Glover.*

I was once working with a triple jumper. World level. For a medical reason he’d had a muscle biopsy, which is a rare thing to get your hands on, so of course I had a look at the results.

No surprises. Type 2 fibres, 85%. Mostly fast-twitch, which is exactly what you’d expect from the thigh of a man who leaps for a living.

He looked at it and said, “So what?”

So what

Fair question. I told him it shouldn’t change a thing. Keep spending most of your time doing explosive work, because that’s what that muscle is built for. He said thanks and started to move on.

But there was a but. There was a recent paper by a researcher called Per Aagaard, and it was pointing at something that hadn’t quite landed in the sport yet. Type 2 muscle needs far more rest to adapt and get more explosive than we’d assumed. More than anyone was giving it. The very fibres that make you powerful are the ones that want the most recovery to become more powerful still.

He asked the obvious thing. “What does that mean for my training?”

I said I think you should do fewer jumps in a session. Right now you finish a rep and you think, one more. And another. And another. And by doing that you’re quietly turning an explosive session into an endurance session. That’s not what 85% fast-twitch legs are asking for. It’s October, you’ve go nothing to lose. Let’s take some measures, jump height, reactive force, the gym numbers, and see if you track any differently.

He agreed. Reluctantly.

It’s a bit easy, mate

Two weeks in, the phone goes. “It’s a bit easy, mate.”

I said stick with it. Let’s meet in a fortnight.

We meet at the four-week mark. First thing he says, before he’s even sat down, is that he doesn’t like this training. I ask why. He says, “I don’t feel like I’m working hard enough. I’m not tired. My legs haven’t got that familiar heaviness. It feels like I’m ready to compete.”

So I ask about the measures. And he half admits it. “Yeah, they’re all good. Better than I’d normally see at this time of year. Close to where I’d be in December.” Then straight back to the complaint. “But that’s only because I’m having it easy. I could go harder.”

Which is the whole thing, isn’t it. He was on track, ahead of schedule even, and he couldn’t stand it. Because he’d been taught, somewhere along the way, that the feeling of being battered is the proof that the work is working.

Another two weeks. Six weeks in now. He says, “I can’t bear it. I’m bouncing around with so much energy. I don’t feel tired from training at all. I feel like I should be competing.” How are the measures? A pause. “Well. I’ve broken all my PBs. By a distance.”

So it’s working, then.

“Well, yes. But it isn’t what I’m used to.”

What are you actually training for

That’s the moment I asked him the question I’d ask anyone.

What are you training for? To feel tired? Or to perform? Why can’t you take feeling fresh as the signal that this is exactly what you need to be at your best?

He was training the heaviness. Not the height. He’d swapped the actual goal for the sensation he’d learned to associate with it, and when the sensation disappeared he assumed something had gone wrong, even as the numbers told him the opposite.

Stephen Seiler has spent a career studying how the best endurance athletes actually train, and he described the same trap on the podcast. He talked about the discipline it takes to hold back.

“Sometimes it is not failure. It is part of smart training to say that I don’t want to waste this day or this planned hard session when my body is not ready. I would rather give my body another 24 hours or 48 and come back and then execute the stimulus that I want. But that takes real nerve, and it takes real confidence in the program.”

Real nerve. To do less. That’s the bit people miss. Backing off when everything in you is screaming that backing off is weakness takes more nerve than grinding does.

Stephen’s other line stuck with me too. The best athletes have …

“the discipline to keep easy, easy, even when somebody runs past you.”

The amateur can’t help themselves. They chase the person going past, they turn every session into a medium-hard slog, and they end up permanently tired and permanently average.

Wake up

Here’s my point, and it’s not really about triple jump.

I meet athletes and I meet executives who are still, in this day and age, prioritising hard work and more of it over quality. If you’re charged with producing excellence and you are constantly fatigued, wake up.

If the ramifications of your decisions land on people, profit, reputation, performance, and yet you’re not designing for your own performance the way you’d design it for an athlete, you’re leaving a huge amount on the table.

And I find that genuinely exciting, because it means there’s another level right there for the taking. Reverse engineer for quality. How you plan, how you sleep, how you eat, how you move, how you focus, how you switch off. Do that and there’s no doubt you can go up a gear.

You’ll just have to get comfortable with feeling fresher. More engaged. With energy in the tank rather than heaviness in the legs. For a lot of people that feels wrong, in exactly the way it felt wrong to my triple jumper while he was busy breaking every record he owned.

Hard work is correlated with performance, in most sports and most careers. But only up to a point. Reach that point and you don’t just get to keep grinding. You get an opportunity most people never notice, because they’re too tired to look up and see it.

Tired isn’t the target. It never was.

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*Quotes from the Supporting Champions podcast: Stephen Seiler (Ep070).*

I sometimes try this in a room full of executives. I offer them a bet. We flip a coin. Heads, I give you £150. Tails, you give me £100. The odds are firmly in your favour. Over time you’d make good money taking that bet all day long.

Almost no hands go up.

The maths says yes. The gut says absolutely not. And the gut usually wins.

The wiring

This isn’t people being timid. It’s how we’re built. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky worked this out back in the seventies and called it loss aversion. Losing £100 hurts roughly twice as much as winning £100 feels good. Not the same amount in the opposite direction. About double.

That asymmetry is deep in the system. There’s work from a group led by Benedetto De Martino showing that people with damage to the amygdala, the bit of the brain that handles fear and threat, stop being loss averse. Take away the threat response and the bias goes with it. So this is not a character flaw you can be talked out of. It’s biology. We have systems in place to avoid the downside and chase the reward, and the avoid-the-downside system shouts louder.

Fine when you’re deciding whether to poke a snake. Less helpful when you’re trying to do something remarkable.

Risk management is both halves

Caspar Berry has spent a career on this. He played poker professionally in Las Vegas before becoming a speaker on risk and decision making, and he had a lovely way of framing it on the podcast. He said, “Whilst things can go very wrong unexpectedly, things can also go incredibly right unexpectedly, and you need to be in a position to capitalise on those as well. And that’s what risk management is really about.”

That’s the bit loss aversion makes us forget. We hear “risk management” and we think about covering the downside. Insurance. Contingency. The panic room in the shed (with some nice organisers for tools and tins0. But it’s two halves. Protecting yourself when it goes wrong, and being positioned to grab it when it goes right. Manage only the first half and you’ve not managed risk. You’ve just avoided it.

The baton

Here’s a nice example, the relay race.

The objective looks obvious. Run fast. But the thing you’re actually racing is the speed of the baton, not the four individual legs added up. And the baton is at its most vulnerable in the handovers. If you’re Jamaica and you’ve got three of the fastest men on earth, you can afford safe, conservative changes and still win. If you’re fighting for a medal without that raw pace, you can’t. You have to stretch the changeovers. The incoming runner starts earlier. The outgoing runner reaches back further. The baton never slows down.

That’s faster but it’s also riskier. You chance dropping the baton your race is over.

So you take the risk, and sometimes it doesn’t come off, and the headline the next morning writes itself. “GB drop the baton. Again.” Nobody writes “GB correctly adopted a higher-variance handover strategy appropriate to their competitive position, and the outcome was in keeping with this risk-managed strategy.” The drop is what people see and talk about. The good decision underneath it isn’t understood.

Don’t judge it by the drop

David Joyce made exactly this point on the podcast, and it’s one of the most useful things I’ve heard on decisions. He said, “You and I will both have countless examples of where a really poor decision making process has luckily got to a good outcome, and equally there’s been really good decision making that has led to a bad outcome. Just looking solely at the outcomes is too blunt. Far too blunt. We see that all the time in sport.”

That should change how you read a dropped baton. The question isn’t “did it work this time.” It’s “was that the right amount of risk for where this team sits.” Sometimes the brave, correct, well-prepared decision loses. That doesn’t make it the wrong decision. It makes it a decision that didn’t come off, which is a different thing entirely.

The flip side is just as common, and worse. The team that goes one-nil up and immediately throws on three defenders to protect the lead. Loss aversion in a tracksuit. It feels safe. It looks responsible. And it hands the initiative straight back to the opposition and often the game with it. Failing to take the chance to actually win is a decision too. We just don’t punish it in the headlines the way we punish the dropped baton.

The top tip

So here’s my one piece of advice from 30 years of watching people perform under pressure.

Make these choices before the pressure comes on.

Decide how much risk you’re going to take when your head is clear, before the emotions rise, before the eyes lock onto the prize, before the crowd is on its feet and the whole thing narrows down to fear. Because in that moment, loss aversion is running the show whether you like it or not, and it will always, always tell you to protect the lead and play it safe.

The best teams I’ve worked with had already had that conversation. In the quiet. On the whiteboard. Weeks out. They’d decided what level of risk the situation called for, done the work to shrink the downside as far as it would go, and built themselves enough of a plan that they could hold their nerve when it mattered and still adapt if the picture changed.

Being comfortable taking a risk isn’t bravado. It’s the reward for having done the preparation that makes the risk survivable. You earn the right to be bold by doing the boring work first.

The coin bet is still a good bet, by the way. Heads £150, tails £100. You should take it every time.

Most of us won’t. That’s the whole problem, and it’s worth knowing it’s there before you next go one-nil up.

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*Quotes from the Supporting Champions podcast: Caspar Berry (Ep064), David Joyce (Ep105).*

Here’s a number: 50-60%.

That was the pre-tournament probability of England needing to play at altitude in this World Cup. It’s a straightforward calculation. If England topped their group (bookmakers gave that a 70-75% chance) and won their Round of 32 match against a third-place qualifier (another 70-80%), they were heading to the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. 2,240 metres above sea level. Multiply those through and you get somewhere around 50-60% chance.

Thomas Tuchel said this week that the team haven’t had time to prepare for altitude. That statement interests me. Not because of what it says about England specifically, but because of what it often reveals about how teams think about probability. (BTW, I wonder if there’s a decent chance they HAVE prepared but they’re not saying they have!)

The Physiology

At 2,240 metres, the air has the same proportion of oxygen as your back garden. But the atmospheric pressure is lower, so less of it gets into your lungs. VO2 max, the ceiling of your aerobic engine, drops by roughly 7-10%. That means fewer high-intensity sprints, slower recovery between efforts, and a compounding fatigue effect as the match wears on. England’s pressing system runs on oxygen. At the Azteca, there’s meaningfully less of it.

Timing

It can be prepared for. The science is established. Sleep at simulated altitude for three weeks using tents in the bedroom, train normally during the day, and the body adapts. It builds more red blood cells. Carries more oxygen. But the timing is fiddly. After you stop the exposure, you get a good first week, a dip in week two, then the real benefit arrives from weeks three to six as the new red blood cells mature. Get it wrong and you arrive in the dip, not the window. That’s manageable with planning. It just requires you to have started.

Responders

Then there’s the other problem. When you first test a group of athletes at altitude, some respond well. Some don’t respond at all. Some get worse. This has been known for decades, and it has become the go-to excuse for doing nothing. “Responders and non-responders.” Shrug. Why bother?

I’ve sat through this dinner table conversation on every altitude camp I’ve ever supported. Ten camps and many more planning a trip to altitude - same debate. And it always comes down to a choice. You can look at the spread of responses and say “it doesn’t work for everyone, so let’s not bother.” Or you can look at the same spread and say “why don’t the non-responders respond, and what would we need to change?” In the British system, alongside colleagues like Jamie Pringle and Gareth Turner, we chose the second question. Worked through the individual variables. Adjusted protocols person by person. Got nearly everyone responding positively. It took curiosity and persistence. Innovation personified.

That choice - shrug or problem-solve - is the one I see commonly replayed in every organisation I work with. Not about altitude. About anything complex enough to be inconvenient.

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Impact

Here’s the bit that should tip the decision. Altitude preparation doesn’t just protect you at altitude. It improves sea-level performance too. More red blood cells means more oxygen delivery everywhere, at any venue, in any match. So even if England had dodged Mexico City entirely, the preparation would still have made them better. The probability of needing altitude was 50-60%. The probability of benefiting from the work was 100%.

But…

Implementing this risk mitigating and performance benefitting strategy - is complex and operationally difficult. That’s why most HIGH-COMPLEX or HIGH-RISK / HIGH-REWARD projects don’t happen. You’d need to start 18 months out. Testing players at their clubs. Screening individual responses. Timing the blocks to peak when they mattered. For a team heading to the World Cup and a knockout fixture at altitude like that would be a serious project to commit, scope, finance, implement. IMaybe that’s a good reason not to reveal your hand - if you had done it! Keep it secret. Know you’d done it, feel the benefit and leave the opposition thinking they have the upper hand - only for the team to come out and perform well in the thin air. There’s every chance that’s what’s happening.*

What if?

Most teams prepare for certainties and ignore probabilities. ‘What if’ planning is essential. It is rudimentary for performing when it counts. It is a rigorous process that scopes out risks, plans for addressing the big ones.

If there’s a 50-60% chance of something hard, that’s not a risk to watch. It’s a preparation problem to solve. And if the preparation also makes you better for everything else, which, in my experience, it usually does, then the probability barely matters. You do the work anyway.

The question is never “will we face this?” It’s “what’s the probability, and does it warrant acting on?”

If the answer is anywhere near a coin flip, you already know.

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* Full respect for a great team England BTW
**For the deeper physiology behind altitude preparation, the responder/non-responder problem, and my personal history of embarrassing collapses at height, read Top 10 Applications No.2 — Altitude Training

***Hit me up if you want to plan for 2030 World Cup performance

If you find yourself piloting a rocket at the moon, you’ll probably find the rocket is only pointed at the moon for a fraction of the journey. The rest of the time it’s off course. Slightly left, slightly right, slightly long, slightly short. What keeps it heading in the right direction isn’t the destination. It’s the telemetry. The constant stream of data telling mission control where the thing actually is, how fast it’s moving, and whether the current trajectory will get it where it needs to go.

These are two pieces of vital information. Position: are we on track or off it? And rate: are we ahead of pace or behind?

The best teams in sport and business do this well. Even the Chuckle Brothers do this well (”To me, To you, To me, To you”). The underperforming teams let this crucial daily adjustment slip. But it’s the bit that keeps people engaged, motivated, on it.

Often teams point themselves at the destination, get their heads down, and think about what they need to do today. Those are important perspectives to hold. But constant calibration with the outside world, with the results you’re actually observing, is essential too. Without it, you’re flying blind and hoping the wind hasn’t changed.

Peter Vint, who led performance analytics at the US Olympic Committee, put it this way on the podcast.

“It’s that gap between what we have and what we know and what in the world will we choose to do with that. How will we make that useful and actionable and impactful? That’s what separates organisations.”

Most organisations collect the data. Dashboards, KPIs, quarterly reports, performance reviews. The data exists. The gap is what happens next. Does anyone actually use it to change a conversation?

Here’s how I’ve seen it done well, in both sport and business.

If you’re behind your goal, or tracking away from it, you use that information to open a conversation with key people about what’s necessary to course correct. What needs to change? What’s getting in the way? What would it take to improve the rate? The telemetry gives you permission to have that conversation without it feeling personal. It’s not a case of pointing the finger and saying “you’re failing.” It’s more “we’re off track, let’s look at why.”

If you’re on track or ahead, you have a different conversation. What’s working? How do we maintain it? Can we get more of whatever produced this result? That conversation gets skipped far too often. People celebrate being ahead of target and move on. They don’t stop to understand why they’re ahead, which means they can’t protect it. As Stuart Laing, performance director and expert talent scientist, once said to me, “Unexplained winning is a sin.”

Sue Campbell, who built UK Sport’s funding and accountability model, described exactly this system on the podcast.

“We literally got the media in every three months and showed them: these are red, these are green, these are amber. If they’re green they’re telling us they’re on their medal target. If they’re amber there’s something wrong with the system. If they’re red they’re in trouble. Our job at UK Sport is to spend our time on red and amber, not on green.”

Red, amber, green. That’s position and rate. Telemetry turned into action. Simple, public, honest.

Alistair Brownlee described his own version.

“That kind of direct feedback loop. I did a race. This went badly. Is that linked to that decision or that decision? Right, what am I going to do about that decision?”

No committee. No quarterly review. Immediate telemetry, immediate adjustment.

Many teams don’t have a goal problem. They have a telemetry problem. They know where they want to go. They just haven’t built the feedback loop that tells them whether they’re getting there. By the time the result tells you something is wrong, you’ve already lost the time you needed to fix it.

So. What are you tracking? How often are you looking at it? And what conversation does it create when you do?

To me. To you.

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*Quotes from the Supporting Champions podcast: Peter Vint (Ep074), Sue Campbell (Ep100), Alistair Brownlee (Ep084). Stuart Laing quoted from personal conversation.

Start with what.

Don’t start with why.

What? But why, I hear you say!

Let me explain. Am I even allowed to say that? So indoctrinated have we become in the search for purpose that I wonder if we’ve lost sight of providing clarity about the steps ahead.

Recently, I sat in a room with a CEO who was on fire. “We’re going to be the world leader. We’re shooting for the stars. We’re going to be in 50% of households by 2032. We’re going to change people’s lives for the better.” The room was nodding (some genuine). The energy was real.

Then came the moment to change the lens. To shift from where we’re going to what he needed from his team. The objectives. The detail. And it fell into platitudes. His people were left floundering. They shared his vision about getting to the summit, but they needed a bit more about what route options were available. Were they allowed to set the route themselves? What resources did they have? What were the constraints?

Instead, a fist on the table. “I need your teams to align to this vision.”

Yes. But what next?

We’ve been told to find our why for a long time. Socrates said the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Aristotle thought the whole point of being alive was eudaimonia, human flourishing, achieved through living virtuously. The Bhagavad Gita says find your dharma. Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Frankl built an entire therapeutic model around it. And then Sinek gave the whole thing a boost with his concentric rings on a flipchart.

I’m not arguing with any of them. Purpose matters (see below for bad purpose joke). At inflection points it really matters. A restructure. A crisis. A new team finding its feet. Those are the moments where why is the right place to start.

But between those moments, which is most days, what people need is relentless clarity about what’s expected of them. Most people I meet don’t recite their purpose as an opener, or reveal company values on knuckle tattoos. They want to do good work and be rewarded fairly for it. They need to make daily progress. They need to know the task in front of them.

And here’s the thing that CEO missed. Purpose is easy to articulate. “We’re changing the world” takes 30 seconds. Clarity is hard. “Here’s exactly what I need from you by Thursday, here are the constraints, here’s who you’ll need to talk to” takes genuine thought about someone’s actual work. It requires you to have done some thinking yourself, first. Many leaders haven’t. So they reach for purpose instead, because it’s quicker and it sounds impressive.

If you’re making an ask of me, let me just run a few checks before I clear my diary to get this new thing done. What do you want me to do? How does this fit with my current priorities, so I know how to manage my week? When does it need to be delivered? What risks can I take? What budget do I have? Who else do I need to collaborate with while I’m doing this?

That’s six questions. Practical, immediate, answerable. I’ve asked hundreds of executives and athletes what they need from their leader on a given day. Nobody has ever opened with “a compelling vision.”

Tom Geraghty made this point on the podcast. He said, “We need clarity about what is expected of us, what we are trying to achieve, what we are supposed to be doing. What is outside of our scope and what is inside of our scope. If we can define really accurately what we’re trying to do, we can achieve anything.”

Neil Chugani went from coxing for Great Britain to leading teams at Google. He described the thing that transferred most directly. He said, “Every single training session had a clearly defined purpose. After that training session we would review how well we delivered on that purpose, how well we performed relative to our intent. That mindset is helpful in a business context as well, because it makes you more disciplined about the way that you use time.”

Notice what he’s describing. Not a grand vision. A clearly defined purpose for that session. The what. The task in front of you. Reviewed against intent. That’s the discipline most organisations skip because they’re too busy pointing at the stars.

So perhaps rather than casting people’s horizons to the skies, we could try hitting the ground running with deep, deep clarity. Set out the expectation. Answer the six questions. Then, at the end, connect it:

“...and the reason I’ve made this ask of you is so that you contribute to...”

That’s where purpose enlivens. You can try it at the start of the conversation - but back it up. Both are context for the ask, not a replacement for it.

Look back at what Nietzsche said. “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” For most people, most days, purpose, distal goals, BHAGs and hopes are a touch point. Something to remind yourself of each morning. That helps. But most of us are just being asked to do interesting work, not tolerate an unbearable load (you may argue you are, read Frankl and come back to me).

Chest-beating, flexing, and existential purpose is a light worth shining sparingly. Casting your eyes to the summit is all very well, but pay attention to the steps right in front of you. Guide people to take those clear steps and you’ll make great ground.

Does a porpoise know its purpose? Dolphinately not.

---

*Quotes from the Supporting Champions podcast: Tom Geraghty (Ep109), Neil Chugani (Ep044).*

Just walk. That’s it. That’s the prescription.

I’ll say more in a moment. But this last week has seen another round of influencers telling us about their optimised lifemaxxing stacks and I just want to be sick when I hear it. These people are preying on the vulnerability that we haven’t got things right. They’re wasting our time talking about cold plunges for two hours, caffeine enemas at half four in the morning, reading classic books rather than actually enjoying life. I hope they’ve had a good night’s sleep, though. Nice.

My prescription is different. Just walk.

As Professor Stuart Biddle expressed on the Supporting Champions podcast: “Always take your dog for a walk even if you haven’t got one.”

Walking is the foundation of all your physical pursuits and it empowers your mental pursuits too. (Obviously assuming that you can walk.) It is the only physical activity skill we’re born with as a motor pattern. It’s already there. You don’t need a coach, a gym membership, a gadget, or a stack. You just need to go outside and move.

If you’re an exec you need a simple outlet each day. Walking is it. If you’re an elite athlete, we can call it ‘active recovery’ if you like - extra blood flow without the muscle damage. Walking.

Here’s how to get more in your life.

Walk an extra loop from your car to the office. Get off one Tube stop early and take an extra five minutes. Walk an extra loop at lunchtime on your way to Pret. Walk up more flights of stairs. That’s it. None of this requires a plan or a programme or a bloody podcast. Just a bit more walking than you did yesterday.

And don’t just take my word for it.

Take breaks from your deep work every 30 minutes and walk about for five minutes. It restores brain blood flow and sustains cognitive performance. If your thinking has gone flat by 3pm, you probably haven’t moved since lunch.

Walking increases creative ideation by 81%. That’s not a marginal gain. That’s a transformation. Oppezzo and Schwartz showed this at Stanford. Walk to develop new thinking.

Walk when you’ve become stuck. The ancients had a phrase for it: *solvitur ambulando*. It is solved by walking. Darwin used three loops of his garden at Down House to clear his mind and process his ideas. Newton was famed for walking the grounds of Trinity while working through problems. The mechanism wasn’t mystical. Movement shifts the brain out of the rut it’s been grinding in.

And walking is one of the best ways to reduce all-cause mortality, comparable to jogging, swimming, rowing, calisthenics. You don’t need to run. You don’t need to suffer. You need to walk, regularly, for a good amount of time, preferably during the day when it helps your working performance too.

Just take a walk. Do it every day.

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References

- Paluch, A.E. et al. (2024). Daily steps and all-cause mortality. BMJ Medicine, 5(1). [bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/5/1/e001513]

- Oppezzo, M. & Schwartz, D.L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40(4). [pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24749966]

- Wheeler, M.J. et al. (2019). Distinct effects of acute exercise and breaks in sitting on working memory and executive function in older adults. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 54(13). [pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29878870]

In 1996, Arsene Wenger arrived at Arsenal and introduced stretching. Stretching (!) a technique shown to be effective as far back as the 1940s. Wenger was considered revolutionary. Players who’d spent their careers warming up with a rub of the hands and a jump or two were suddenly being asked to hold hamstring stretches and think about what they ate. It seems quite twee now. But in many ways this was the starting gun for systemised sports science in sport. Sports science lived and breathed before but was mainly the preserve of Olympic sport.

I started working in elite sport the same year. And since then, I’ve watched the breakthroughs arrive one after another - each one promising to be the edge that separated the best from the rest.

First it was sports science itself. Heart rate monitors. VO2 max. Lactate thresholds. For the first time, you could measure what was happening inside the athlete and adjust accordingly. The GDR had been doing versions of this for decades (tangled up with the doping, but the science was real). The rest of the world caught up.

Then equipment. Synthetic tracks. Carbon fibre. Aerodynamic skinsuits. Hybrid pitches that played faster and recovered quicker. Marginal gains! And for the nutritionists ‘marginal grains’ (bu bumh - tish - I thank you)

Then data. Moneyball. GPS tracking. Expected goals. Wearable sensors that could tell you an athlete’s training load to the decimal point. The numbers were supposed to give you the edge. And they did, until everyone had them.

Then psychology went mainstream. (Marginal brains? I’ll stop now) Visualisation, mindfulness, mental health. The mind as performance variable rather than inconvenience.

And more recently, the super shoes, the ones that turned road running upside down and made every personal best from before 2018 look like it belonged to a different species.

Not all of these are or have been done well. Some were done badly, dressed up as innovation while the fundamentals were ignored. Plenty of organisations adopted each wave as a badge rather than a tool. Bought the tech, hired the staff, ticked the box, changed nothing. But each one moved the needle for the people who used it properly.

And now we’re at the next one. Culture.

Not culture as a slogan. Culture as the actual operating environment — the conditions in which all of those other breakthroughs either land or don’t.

Rosie Mayes put it simply on the podcast. “Culture is the thing that really underpins performance. In a really simplistic way, it’s these are things we do around here and these are things we don’t do.”

That sounds straightforward. It isn’t.

Because culture is the one breakthrough that requires you to look at yourself. The signal through the data is imperceptible. Sports science doesn’t judge you. Data doesn’t have an opinion about your leadership style. A skinsuit doesn’t care whether your team trusts you. Culture does.

And that’s why it’s harder to crack than any of the others.

Start with dogma. When an organisation has been successful, the methods that got it there become sacred. Katelyn Ohashi, six time All American gymnast, described it on the podcast — “It’s what my coaches grew up knowing. If that produces results, then you’re like, okay, that’s the one way to produce results. It’s a mentality of it’s my way or the highway.” Success breeds rigidity. The more you win, the less you’re willing to examine why. And anyone who questions the method gets treated as a threat to it.

Then blame. Mandy Hickson, former RAF fast jet pilot, told a story about speaking to a room of 300 police officers. She asked who had made a mistake. Silence. All 300 of them, silent. Then she asked who had a brilliant event to share. Arms shooting up everywhere. That asymmetry is the signature of a blame culture. People will share success all day long. They won’t share failure, because failure gets punished. And when failure can’t be discussed, it can’t be learned from.

Then silence. Eva Carneiro was direct about this. “I think we need to change this perception of by not saying anything I’m actually not doing any harm. Actually you are. Silence is extremely harmful and it’s what allowed very powerful and very evil individuals to continue doing what they were doing.” Ideas die in silence. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because nobody felt safe saying them out loud.

Then risk. Amy Edmondson, the person who coined the term psychological safety, explained it this way: “We have wiring and socialisation that lead us to be very concerned with what do other people think of us. And then we’re under the delusion that the best way to do that is to not have imperfections.” Innovation becomes invisible when the cost of getting it wrong is higher than the reward for getting it right. So people stop trying.

Then rest. Cody Royle made the observation, “We are surrounded by people whose job it is to be experts in human performance, who know that. We give those ideas to our athletes and say you need to go home and rest and recover. I’m going to stay and absolutely obliterate myself to the point where I can barely talk, I can’t sleep and I can’t think and I can’t make good decisions.” Long hours get valorised. Presence gets mistaken for productivity. And the people who should know better do it too.

Then values. Ben Ryan, who coached Fiji to Olympic rugby sevens gold, has seen it everywhere. “People go, let’s do something about a team charter, or they go on an away day and they come up with some lovely sentences. But they don’t find a way of managing them. They print them off and they’re on a wall and they don’t end up living by those.” Values on posters. Silent in rooms.

Then simply sensing - this is good, this is bad and being willing to do something about it.

Every other breakthrough in the list above can be bought, hired, or installed. Culture can’t. It has to be built, and it has to be rebuilt, because the moment you stop tending it, the defaults creep back in. The dogma. The blame. The silence.

So if culture is the next competitive edge, the question isn’t whether your organisation talks about it. Most do. The question is whether the person at the top is willing to be changed by it.

Expect more from your leaders. Expect harder conversations. Expect it to be inspiring. Expect performance on the pitch and in every quarter off it.

The phrase “control the controllables” has been bouncing around sport for as long as I can remember. It originates from Stoic philosophy, most notably Epictetus, writing around 100 AD. His argument was simple: some things are within our power and some things are not. Most of our misery comes from confusing the two.

Stephen Covey turned this into the model most people in performance will recognise. Three concentric circles. The inner circle: what you can control. Your effort, your preparation, your response. The middle ring: what you can influence. Your team, your environment, the people around you. The outer ring: what you’re aware of but can’t do anything about. The opposition, the weather, the draw, the referee.

Good model. Almost everyone nods along when they see it. Nodding and doing are different things.

I’ve spent 30 years watching people prepare for the biggest moments in sport. The ones who hold up have decided what sits in that central circle and they refuse to waste attention on what doesn’t.

I can remember preparing for an Olympics with one team and we spotted opposition members videoing from a nearby hill. The lead coach was told. He shrugged. “Let them obsess over where we are. We’ll control where we are.” Back to work. A clear focus on the central circle. Let the opposition burn their attention on the outer ring.

The outer ring still matters. Awareness matters. Global trends, interesting research, tactical shifts over time. But there has to be a strong filter on what gets to demand your attention. Knowing that a certain player might be injured is different from restructuring your entire game plan around it.

Alison Maitland put it well on the podcast. “You can’t control your thoughts actually, but you can absolutely control your behaviours and your actions.” That’s Epictetus made practical. A filter for where you spend your energy.

And here’s the bit that gets missed. When you over-prepare for a specific scenario, when your game plan is built around what the opposition might do, you take decision-making away from the people on the field. I’ve watched it happen for years. The field event thrower who completes their attempt and immediately looks at the coach for feedback, before they’ve even processed what they felt. The player on the pitch waiting for instructions from the stand instead of reading what’s unfolding in front of them.

Your job as a coach or leader is to build people who can read the situation and respond. Coach your athletes and players to lead the information charge back to the bench. That reduces the lag on tactical changes. More importantly, it builds people who think for themselves. If you’ve spent all week obsessing about what the opposition might do, you’ve spent all week telling your people that the answers are somewhere else.

Worrying about what others are doing is an infinite game you can’t win. There are too many players, too many conditions, too many factors that go into a result. Focus on what you can do to increase the probability of success. Do it ruthlessly, intentionally, thoughtfully, caringly.

And when the paranoid, neurotic, obsessive voice pipes up (and it will), go back to Covey’s circles. Where am I spending my attention? If the answer is the outer ring, pull it back in. Channel the diligent, disciplined, confident version of yourself instead. Healthier performance follows. So does a healthier you.

Dr Mehdi Kordi, cycling coach and director of performance, breaks down the 1 kilometre time trial event.

“You can look at all sorts of angles — the start, the acceleration, the peak speed, the deceleration, fatigue management on the physiological side, propulsion, mass off the line, rolling resistance of tyres, aerodynamics. At 60 kilometres an hour, over 98% of the resistance comes from aerodynamics. At peak speed — close to 80 kilometres an hour in the world record — it’s almost entirely about aero drag.

Then there’s gear selection. A bigger gear means fewer contractions per second, which fatigues the muscle less. But you still need the power to get to that peak speed in the first place.”

In a sport famed for its marginal gains — where pernicketiness about sock length is headline news — Mehdi focuses on something else entirely. Massive gains. He explains that cycling performance is characterised by two things:

Pushing the pedals harder.

And cutting down aerodynamic drag.

That’s pretty much it.

For the last 30 years, I’ve watched the best athletes and coaches express prioritisation to a ruthless level. One thing. The thing that moves the needle the most. Everything else gets managed, tolerated, or ignored until that thing is handled.

On the other hand, most of us are terrible at it.

A week doesn’t go by where I don’t encounter something along the lines of:

“I don’t have enough time.”

“There’s so much to do.”

My response is always the same. “What is the priority?” Typically, the answer is a further list. To which I ask again, “And out of that list, what is the priority?” Rinse and repeat until you get one. Not priorities — plural. Priority. What is first? Then what special focus am I going to give this area? Could that be a ring-fenced hour each day? Could it be improved goal setting? Could it be the one area I’m going to invite feedback on?

Should your designated priority command total and absolute focus? Almost certainly not. We are real people living complex, multi-factorial lives. But can your priority sit at the top of the pile, be a guiding force in your decision making? If you want to make meaningful progress against the area you’ve identified as able to move the needle the most — then yes. It doesn’t need everything. It needs first.

Danny Kerry, gold medal winning field hockey coach, reflected on this in my conversation with him.

“At times, I didn’t get this balance right. You’ve got to know where your priorities lie, where the ultimate form lies and prioritise a little bit better each day.”

A simple, honest recognition that balancing priorities is a constant shift, review, iteration. Danny sees that he didn’t always get this right. None of us ever will. But that point of reflection — to adjust, to look again, to establish with greater clarity what is the priority and how to focus more effectively on it — that’s the work.

We talk about prioritisation as if it’s about balance. It isn’t. It’s about being willing to let the other things be unbalanced.

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”More is not necessarily better. Efficiency and effectiveness — being more discriminating about what you want and why you want it.” — Dr Jamie Pringle, Sports Scientist and Aerodynamicist

The best fighter pilots in the world kept dying on the way home.

Kevin Dutton told me about this. He studies psychopaths — not just the criminal kind, the functional kind. The people who can switch off emotion (if they ever have empathy switched on) and zoom in with terrifying precision. And he described research on combat pilots who were extraordinary in the air. Ruthless. Cold. Relentless. They racked up kills.

Then they ran out of fuel.

They’d zoned in so much on the fight that they forgot to check the gauge. The thing that made them lethal, total, absolute focus, was the same thing that killed them. Not the enemy. Their own intensity.

I’ve been thinking about that story ever since my conversation with Kevin. Because I keep seeing a version of it everywhere I look.

The athlete who obsesses over split times, but has no focus on diet. The coach that copies the gurus, but doesn’t reflect on their own plan. Climbers who die on the way down not on the way up.

The executive who spends tens of thousands on a first class seat, but isn’t prepared to take breaks in meetings. Good in places, not in others. Able to perform, but not able to survive. Critical and discerning in some aspects of life but unprepared for change in others.

This is a strange entity that has baffled me over the years. A contradictory kind of performer. Stiffer. Flatter. Mono-dimensional.

These aren’t random failures. They’re signatures. Personal, repeatable, predictable — to everyone except the person doing them.

Tess Morris-Patterson left a career in sport science to train as an astronaut. Early in the process, she noticed a pattern in selection. The candidates who’d done the deep self-awareness work — who’d looked at their insecurities, their triggers, their blind-spot, things they instinctively avoid — stayed functional when everything went sideways. The ones who hadn’t? They had a strong tendency to freeze or fire off under pressure, sleep deprivation or simple disagreement.

What does this look like for you as a coach coaching an athlete? As a leader leading teams? Or as you, being you, each day under different conditions? Do you want to be the one who coaches for four years only to under-prepare your athlete for the big moment? The leader who points the finger of blame at behaviours but hasn’t been able to coach people to improve ? Or do you want to be the one who performs heroics but then royally messes up?

There’s a phrase I keep coming back to: predictable to yourself.

I'm not talking about being calm, resilient, omnicompetent. Predictable. “Know yourself” is a well-worn trope so much so it sounds like a fridge magnet. Socrates said it. Every leadership book says it. Your therapist probably says it. It’s so familiar it’s become invisible.

But here’s what I’ve noticed after 30 years and 169 podcast conversations: the people who actually do the work to reflect and reflect well, are rare. And the gap between them and everyone else isn’t talent, or effort, or luck. It’s information. They have data on themselves that other people don’t — not because the data doesn’t exist, but because most people would rather not look.

Jenny Rogers is an executive coach. She told me the self-aware leaders she works with don’t ask “what do people think of me?” They ask “what am I avoiding?” Different question. Much harder to answer. Much more useful.

Because we’ve all got something we’re not looking at. A conversation we keep postponing. A pattern we keep repeating. A reaction we keep explaining away. And until you name it, it runs you. You’re not managing your performance. You’re managing around the thing you won’t face.

The people who stay calm when it counts aren’t tougher than you. They’ve just done something you probably haven’t.

They’ve become predictable to themselves.

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*Tess Morris-Patterson, Kevin Dutton, Jenny Rogers, have all appeared on the Supporting Champions podcast. If “know yourself” has always sounded soft to you, their work might change your mind.*

If this resonated, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person who'd find it interesting

Medals. Pitches. Promotions. The contract. The corner office. The PB they’d been chasing for a decade and finally caught.

And here’s the bit nobody puts in the highlight reel: the win isn’t the interesting part.

The interesting part is what comes after. The Tuesday morning two months later when the medal is in a drawer and you have to work out what kind of person you want to be when nobody’s watching. The team that won the league last season and can’t quite explain why this one feels harder. The CEO who hit the number and is staring at the ceiling at 4am asking what the hell it was all for.

That’s the thing I’ve never been able to look away from. Not the moment of winning. What’s left when the winning is over.

If you’ve been near anything calling itself “high performance” in the last decade, you’ve probably been sold a thousand answers to this. You can hack your morning, optimise your sleep, journal your way to greatness, and ice-bath your way through a divorce. There’s an app for it. There’s a podcast about the app. There’s a £3,000 retreat in Portugal where someone in linen will help you find your why.

Mostly nonsense. Some of it useful. Almost none of it the actual point.

The actual point — and this is what the book is about — is less marketable. It’s about the things that hold up. Not the things that get you to the top. The things that mean you’re still standing when you get there. And the things that mean the people around you are still standing too.

That’s What Persists as a question. What lasts? What kind of performance compounds, and what kind hollows you out? What can you build that doesn’t fall over the moment you stop holding it up?

I’ve been chasing answers to this since 1996. First as a sport scientist with British rowing — three Olympic cycles, a lot of erg tests, a lot of difficult conversations with men twice my size about why their lactate values weren’t where they needed to be. Then leading the support operation for Team GB at London and Rio. Then the last decade taking what I learned in elite sport into rooms full of executives at Google, McLaren, Samsung. Most of them very smart. Most of them under pressure. Most of them asking some version of the same question I was.

Some years back I started a podcast called Supporting Champions. It was meant to be a side project. It’s now 150-plus episodes deep, and somewhere in there is the raw material for most of what I want to say next.

The athletes. The coaches. The operators who built dynasties and the ones who watched their own collapse. The conversations that taught me things I now think are obvious but couldn’t have articulated five years ago. Most of it has never made it onto the page.

That’s what this newsletter is for. Pulling on those threads. One a week.

Here’s what you’ve signed up for.

One post a week, most likely Tuesday. Sometimes a chapter sketch from the book in progress. Sometimes a thread pulled from a podcast episode. Sometimes a pattern I’m seeing in the work I’m doing right now with a team. Occasionally a piece that’s rougher than it should be — that’s deliberate. I’m building this book in public, which means you’ll see the working. The wrong turns. The ideas I’ll later abandon. If you want a polished finished thing, wait for the book. If you want to watch one get made, this is the place.

No motivational gloss. No “five leadership lessons from the Olympics.” No exclamation marks (I checked). I write in plain English about things I’ve actually seen, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and the parts I’m still trying to figure out.

If that’s not for you, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom and works in one tap. No hard feelings.

If it is for you — welcome. Hit reply on anything. I read everything, even when I can’t get back quickly.

Steve