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February 27, 2026
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The Days Are Long, but the Years Are Short
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Andorra has turned to what feels like summer. Last week we were skiing fresh powder. This week I’m riding in shorts, climbing through 18 degrees, snow still lining the higher passes. I guess in California people are used to surfing in the morning and skiing in the afternoon but here it feels properly surreal.
I came across the headline while researching for a podcast episode and it stayed with me. The obvious layer is parenting. By the end of most days I feel wrung out. There’s always one more question, one more request, one more negotiation about bedtime which I kind of love. But I’m aware that this phase won’t last long. At some point the noise will fade and I’ll definitely miss it.
But what caught me more was how badly I still misjudge time. I expect too much from a single day and far too little from five years. Always have.
As an athlete, I often treated individual sessions as verdicts. If the numbers were good, the day felt meaningful. If they weren’t, something felt off. I attached weight to isolated performances as if they carried more influence than they actually did. Let’s not even talk about missed sessions.
Over time, and largely thanks to my long-term coach Dan Lorang, I began to see it differently. Dan never cared much for spectacular sessions if they compromised the following day. He wasn’t interested in heroics. He was interested in continuity. The real metric was whether I could return tomorrow and do the next piece of work.
Fitness didn’t arrive in dramatic waves. It accumulated in repeatable efforts. So did resilience. So did confidence. Five years of disciplined training reshaped my physiology and my expectations in ways no single season ever could. None of it felt monumental while it was happening. It felt routine.
I’m noticing the same pattern now in areas that have nothing to do with racing. Building something new. Learning how to operate in rooms I never needed to enter before. Trying to become competent at skills that once felt foreign. There are days that feel productive and days that feel scattered. By evening it can be hard to tell what moved forward or if anything did at all.
What steadies me is the longer horizon. When I look back at certain chapters of my life, they appear compact and coherent. In reality they were stretched across countless unremarkable days. The mind edits out the repetition and keeps the result. I remember the arc, not the accumulation.
I still fall into the trap of wanting proof by sunset. Wanting clarity by the end of the week. Wanting a sense that something definitive has shifted. Most of the time nothing dramatic has. I suspect most meaningful progress starts that way?
A day carries unreasonable expectations. You wake up believing you will fix something fundamental. Improve your fitness meaningfully. Make strategic progress. Have the important conversation. Move the needle. By the evening, most of what you have done looks unimpressive. You answered emails. You trained. You handled logistics. You cooked. You tried to be present. Nothing dramatic shifted.
That is why days feel long. They ask for effort without offering transformation.
During my career, I often walked into training convinced that this would be the session that made the difference. In reality, it was usually another brick in a wall no one could yet see. The improvement was invisible, incremental, occasionally boring. One workout did not change my physiology. One race did not define a career. One winter of rehab did not end anything.
But five years did.
Five years of repetition changed how my body responded to stress. Five years of disciplined training altered what felt normal. The shift never happened in a single dramatic moment. It happened quietly, while I was busy focusing on the next 24 hours. Or sometimes the last.
I’ve always treated five years as an abstract block of time, too distant to influence today’s choices. Yet it is exactly long enough to redefine a career, a company or a relationship. The compounding is rarely visible while it is happening. Only in hindsight does it look inevitable.
Years feel short because the mind compresses them. When I look back at the final stretch of my career, it appears condensed, almost tidy. In reality, it was messy and stretched out. The days were full of doubt, repetition, minor setbacks, admin, recovery sessions, conversations that led nowhere. None of it felt cinematic. Together, it became decisive.
Now, building something new, I catch myself falling into the same trap. Expecting clarity by dinner. Expecting proof by the end of the week. When it doesn’t arrive, the day feels heavy. Perhaps that is what the phrase is trying to say, stripped of sentiment. The day is granular. It demands attention to detail and tolerates little drama. Five years are structural. They reward consistency more than intensity.
The mistake is trying to extract five-year results from a single Thursday. So I force myself to ask: if I repeated today, with slight improvements, for the next half decade, where would it lead?
The answer usually lets me dream up something much bigger than anything I can force before sunset.
Jan.
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