There’s a kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. You wake up with it already installed. It feels less like exhaustion and more like static. Too many tabs open in the mind. Too many unfinished gestures. Too many tiny negotiations with the day before it has even started. For a while I thought this was just adulthood. Or work. Or the news cycle. Pick your villain.
There’s something mildly absurd about modern running tech. Every brand talks about AI now. Smart coaching, predictive training plans, readiness scores, recovery scores, stress scores, you name it. My watch apparently knows my future. It just doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago.
Today is January 1st. Not a good day for looking back on the year that has just ended. I’ve already spent a lot of time doing that — revisiting what I experienced, the successes and the wounds, the progress and the setbacks, taking a closer look at encounters and goodbyes, taking stock. Today, I don’t want to do it again.
The room in that unassuming, almost ugly office building smelled like spilled beer and sweat. Concrete walls, neon lights, cables running along the ceiling, a cheap PA system humming somewhere in the corner. People leaned against each other on folding chairs, scrolling through their phones, waiting for the next person who would walk on stage and say the one thing we are all trained not to admit: »I failed.«
The first time I read about Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I was sitting in a café not unlike the one in the book — quiet, a little narrow, the kind of place where time seems to gather rather than pass. Outside, the city was still in its morning hurry, but inside there was only the soft hum of the espresso machine and the faint clatter of cups.