Adjust the Timeline

Hey {{first name | reader}},

It’s Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #24. This week instead of my usual long hike on Saturday, I watched other people exercise. 

By that I mean I spent several hours watching soccer and basketball with friends at a bar. A Spurs fan from my hiking group, surrounded by a bar full of fellow Knicks fans we'd just met — the kind of instant community that only forms when something historic is happening on the screen. I spent the better part of Game 5 of the NBA finals screaming at the top of my lungs.

I watched two of my favorite teams compete — the Brazilian soccer team in the World Cup, and the New York Knicks in the NBA finals. One team seemed to be phoning it in, and the other brought home the championship to NYC after a 53 year absence.¹

Basketball was the first sport that I played. I was the only girl in Earl “the Pearl” Monroe’s summer basketball camp for two years. I was a small girl, and I did not play well against the boys who were both older and bigger. I spent a lot of time getting blocked by boys who were taller, faster, and very happy to remind me of both facts, however, I did develop a fondness for the game and for smaller players. As a child my favorite players were the small quick guards like Nate “Tiny” Archibald. Flash forward to 2026 and watching the 6’2” guard, Jalen Brunson, elevate his team to the national championship was absolutely exquisite. 

Listening to him talk about his dedication to preparation, the strength of his work ethic, his commitment to the team, and the fortitude of his will — the Knicks had to make up a point deficit for each of the four games they won in the finals — was inspiring not just in how one can think about training, but in any hard thing that a person wants to achieve.

My time at basketball camp gave me the skills to manage my high school’s basketball team and the ability to understand referee calls when watching a game. I would love to have the speed and agility of a basketball player, but that's not where my natural gifts lie, and it’s not what I train for. That said, we can all learn something from Brunson — he set a goal for himself, and he put in the work to achieve it. That’s how I think about my own fitness although my goals are both smaller and more personal.

The thing I admire most about athletes isn't talent. It's the willingness to keep working on something long after the novelty wears off. Which brings me to my own goals for 2026.

Approaching the halfway point in the year, it’s a good time to take stock and look at the progress that I’ve made toward my own goals. I set three goals at the start of the year: 10 pullups, bench press my body weight, squat twice my body weight. 

I'm making real progress on the first two. The third is humbling me.

It's not that I'm not getting stronger — I am. It's that travel keeps interrupting the one lift that requires equipment I can never find on the road. Hotel gyms have dumbbells. They have treadmills. They occasionally have a cable machine from 2003. They do not have squat racks. So every trip sets me back slightly, and the goal that requires the most consistent heavy loading is the one I can least protect.

I'm deciding whether to extend the timeline or reclassify this as a multi-year project. Brunson won a championship in year twelve of his career. I'll give my squat until December.²

Question: What can you do to keep training when you don’t even have a hotel gym to use?

Answer: When there's no gym:

That's it. Not because they're fun. Because they work.

For the burpees I do a count up to 10 and a count back down. So first set, I do one burpee rest for 15 seconds, then 2 burpees rest for 15 seconds, until I get to a set of ten. After the set of ten I do descending sets back to a last set of one. It starts off easy, but by the last one it’s a struggle.

Pushups, I do sets of 10-15 alternating with the wall sits, which I hold for 60-90 seconds. Ideally five rounds. I do full pushups. If you can’t do full pushups, rather than doing them on your knees, do them with your arms on a table or a chair to get a better range of motion.

Myth: If you're not hitting your goals on schedule, you're failing.

Reality: Goals are hypotheses. You set them with incomplete information — about your travel schedule, your recovery, your body's actual rate of adaptation. The Knicks didn't win a championship on a predetermined timeline. Brunson didn't become Brunson by June of a specific year. He just kept working until the conditions were right and the team was ready.

Missing a target date isn't failure. 

Stopping is failure. 

Adjust the timeline, keep the goal.³

Kale, white bean, and tuna salad

A meal that requires no cooking and approximately five minutes of assembly.

Massage the kale briefly with the olive oil — this softens it without cooking it. Add everything else. Toss. The white beans add protein and substance; the onion keeps the texture honest.⁴

As a long-suffering Knicks fan, I have watched every replay and read every piece I could find about this championship. This article, “Knicks Win First NBA Championship Since 1953, Toppling Spurs in Game 5”, from the New York Times captures what made this run feel different — not just the win, but what Brunson built and what the team believed about itself even when they were down.

For non-basketball fans: it's really a story about preparation, belief, and what happens when a team decides that the gap between where they are and where they want to be is closeable. That's a fitness story too.

Burpee Challenge. 

Burpees hate us.

We hate burpees.

This is one of the few truly mutual relationships in life.

Do them once this week. Complain loudly. Repeat next week.

Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}

P.S. Fifty-three years is a long time to wait. Worth it.