What I’m Digging This Week:
|+ Tracksmith’s No Days Off campaign. This is year three (or maybe four, I can’t remember) of NDO and I love everything it stands for: A commitment to consistency, patience, and purposeful, process-driven training. This message had a huge influence on me in 2017 and helped me log one of my most consistent years of running in a long time. It also served as inspiration for my #allin2018 initiative I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Now, I personally don’t take No Days Off literally but I do take the spirit of the campaign seriously, meaning that every day—even a rest day—has purpose behind it, forces me learn something about myself, and brings me one step closer toward my goals.
+ Ted Talks Daily. I recently discovered—and am really digging—these short-form episodes from TED. These archived excerpts cover a wide range of topics and are refreshingly poignant. A few recent favorites include writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Your Elusive, Creative Genius,” Robert Waldinger’s “What Makes A Good Life?” and Luvvie Ajayi’s “Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable.”
+ Overcast.fm. A few months ago I just couldn’t take the Apple Podcasts app anymore so I took to Twitter and solicited suggestions for a new podcast player. The overwhelming winner was Overcast and I couldn’t be happier with the move. Overcast is free (there are small, unobtrusive ads at the bottom of your screen), it syncs across all your devices, allows you to create better playlists, has some cool features like Smart Speed and Voice Boost, and is just generally easier to use in every way. It was made by Marco Arment, who created (and eventually sold) Instapaper, which is my go-to offline reading app.
+ The @firstrun Instagram feed. To be fair, I’ve been digging it for quite a while now but Knox Robinson and crew’s recent excursion to the high-altitude environs of Mexico caught my attention recently and is worth trying to better understand. Great storytelling around an interesting adventure that falls under the ambiguous umbrella known as running culture. “At its apex in the first millennium AD Teotihuacan was the largest city in the hemisphere and the sixth largest city in the world,” Robinson writes, “as you’re recovering from the run and the brain slowly by slowly comes back to itself, it’s impossible not to consider that if indeed we were made to be runners—as running was an essential part of the human toolkit that precipitated our exodus from southern Africa however long ago—then every run is part of a continuum reaching way back to our origins as a species: a conversation on who we were then, who we imagine ourselves to be today and where we might head, together, tomorrow.” (Bonus: Read my “Going Long” interview with Robinson from last January if you haven’t already.)
+ Buffer. I just started using this service to schedule Tweets and I think it’s going to save me a lot of time—and attention—moving forward. Best part? It does everything I need it to do for free.
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