Sahil Bloom

And then after it ended, I didn't really have a new one.

And so I started to sort of get antsy and I took up running in 2023 and I decided I was going to try to run a marathon in under three hours.

That was going to be my big goal, my big ambitious thing, right?

And, you know, along the way in the race itself, the most interesting realization that I had was that there was this almost euphoric moment for me, not when I actually crossed the finish line and when I had achieved it, which I did, I ran 257.

The euphoric moment was maybe 10 minutes before the end of the race when I realized that it was going to happen.

Like I was actually going to do it.

That the work that I had put in and these things that I was doing, I was in the most pain I had ever been in my life.

Really like in the depths and darkness, my peripheral vision had closed in all of these things.

But I knew that it was going to happen.

And I was like, I just need to continue enduring this and it's going to happen.

I'm going to go and do this.

I recently was reading this new book by Nicholas Thompson, your Atlantic colleague, who speaks about this beautifully, almost poetically.

It's a beautiful book, The Running Ground, it's called.

And he sort of references this idea across all of it.

He actually had this beautiful line that was something to the effect of, in order to do it, I had to first forget that I couldn't do it.

It was this idea of how often our brains hold us back from enduring the struggle long enough to get that benefit.

And I have just found a lot of wisdom and life learning in the pain that we can kind of create in our own lives through these physical pursuits.

100%.

I think I'm countercultural in a lot of things.

I've been sort of an 80-year-old man since I was in college in a lot of ways.