The repeating week Day Session Steps Food Mon Yin yoga 10K, easy Small calorie deficit Tue Dryland, meditation, flow yoga 10K, easy Small calorie deficit Wed Yin yoga plus a hill walk: 4 × 4 min brisk uphill, 3 min easy between 10K Small calorie deficit Thu Pool swim, easy (Z2) 8K Eat enough to maintain weight Fri Short ocean swim, easy (Z2) 8K Eat enough to maintain weight Sat Rest, pack the buoy 6–8K, flat Extra carbs Sun Long ocean swim No target Eat fully, refuel after Sw

Be w the Masters to see what they see feel what they feel and then paint what they painted Gorky Look for inner nature, not outer scenery. As “Gorky,” I’d tell you to treat La Jolla Cove as a trigger for memory and emotion, then paint from within that experience rather than copying what you see. 1. Look for living forms in chaos Notice how water, kelp, swimmers, and cliffs constantly morph into suggestive shapes—organ‑like blobs, tendrils, winged forms, twisting roots. Let th

On Sunday, September 27, 2026, I will be teaming up with fellow swimmers at La Jolla Shores for the 24th La Jolla Cove 10 Mile Relay, a signature open-water event built around the idea of "Celebrate. Swim. Give." Teams of up to five swimmers share ten miles of ocean swimming, all in support of two organizations doing important work: the American Diabetes Association and the Prevent Drowning Foundation of San Diego. As many of you know, ocean swimming and water safety have bec

10K Perplexity Tracker S42 logged. That pace is a landmark number Session 42 — Kellogg North, La Jolla Stat Value Distance 5,799m Duration 2:09:00 True pace 2:13/100m ★ OW PR Avg HR 100 bpm Max HR 115 bpm Z1+Z2 100% Z4 Zero What this means Your previous best OW pace was ~2:33/100m (S38, Jul 16). Today you went 20 seconds per 100m faster at nearly the same average HR (100 vs 101 bpm). That is the Santa Barbara adaptation on full display — 14K over two days, back in La Jolla th

Getting from 12K to 15K isn't mainly about fitness. On Sunday your heart rate fell from 106 to 98.5 over 7.5 hours, and your pace held from hour 3 to hour 7. Your heart and lungs have the base already. A 15K adds about 1h45m, so what decides it is three things: recovering fully, getting your shoulders used to more strokes, and fuelling over 9 hours. Each part of the plan targets one of these. Week 1 (Oct 5–11): recover first Endurance improves during recovery, not during the

La Jolla Coastal Corridor — Beach Progression # Beach Distance from Children's Pool Solo OK? Notes 1 La Jolla Cove 400m ✅ Solo Warm-up distance 2 Shell Beach 900m ✅ Solo Rocky shelf, stay 50m out 3 Wipeout Beach 1,600m ✅ Solo Shore break zone 4 Kellogg Park 2,400m ✅ Solo Lifeguard coverage 5 Scripps Pier 3,450m ✅ Solo Last lifeguarded point 6 Dike Rock 4,100m ⚠️ Escort advised No coverage past Pier 7 SIO Beach 4,700m ⚠️ Escort advised Scripps Institution shore 8 Black's Beach

Same route map from S61 — confirmed: yesterday's track went from La Jolla Cove north, with the significant drift/zigzag visible through La Jolla Shores (the navigation loss from the gunked goggles showing clearly in the GPS trace). Next Sunday's route is La Jolla Cove → Scripps Pier and back = ~12K out-and-back, much tighter and more controlled than the one-way north attempt. Here is your W8 plan designed around maximum freshness for Sunday Sep 6. W8 — "Hold & Repeat" Week Go

Jul 3, 2026 · 7:00 AM · Children's Pool → North Turnaround → Return Cyan line = outbound heading north. You start at Children's Pool, swing west to clear the cove rocks, then track roughly parallel to the coast ~200m offshore. Orange dashed = return leg heading south, slightly further west. K markers = every kilometer. K3 is your first feed stop (~55 min in), right around where you pass La Jolla Cove offshore. K4 and K8 share roughly the same latitude — that's the La Jolla Sh

Based on your current fitness — 7,376m completed at 98 bpm avg HR with aerobic reserve remaining — you don't need a long buildup. You're already physically capable of 8,500m. The work is about extending time on water past 3:17 and adding one feed. Do not pool swim today. Even a light pool session burns 400–600 kcal of glycogen and creates mild muscular fatigue that will show up at km 7–8 tomorrow. You spent 5 days resting to fill those stores — don't tap them 24 hours out. Re

There is a moment just before sleep when the body finally surrenders. The arms stop rehearsing their pull. The legs release the memory of the kick. The mind, which has been counting meters and monitoring breath since dawn, goes quiet. This is not weakness. This is where the real training begins. The Water Does Not Forgive Fatigue Open water swimming — especially training toward a 10K — demands a level of physiological honesty that pool swimming can sometimes mask. In the open

Go / No-Go — Saturday Jun 13 Factor Status Note FM-080 bacteria CLEAR Last updated Jun 12, 5:46 PM Wave height 2.5–3 ft SSW Manageable but active at entry/exit Wind 5 mph onshore SSW Slight chop — not glassy as forecast yesterday Water temp 70°F Warm — no wetsuit needed Tide Rising hard 6–9 AM Low was -1.2 ft at 2:46 AM, high at 9:15 AM Rip current risk HIGH (NOAA) Incoming tide + SSW swell = lateral push Surf quality 2/10 Onshore conditions, not clean CONDITIONAL GO — with a

12K (Session 69) Distance 12,172m on the watch, 7:40 AM to 3:06 PM Time 7:26:06, your longest swim ever Heart rate 103 average, 121 max. 89% Z2, 1% Z3, no Z4 Drift 106 bpm in hour 1, 98.5 in hour 7, so it never crept up Pace Hours 3 to 7 held 3:34–3:52 per 100m, and the last 1,210m was 3:42 The main finding is that on your longest swims, your heart rate held steady or eased down over time instead of creeping up: Swim Change from early to late in the swim Jul 3, 10.4 km Rose b

Two Photographs, Forty-Seven Years Apart Look at the first photograph — 1947, somewhere in Bắc Giang province, northern Vietnam. The image is black and white, slightly worn at the edges, photographed through glass that catches the light, leaving a ghostly reflection across the faces of the people within. Yet they remain visible: two young women seated in front, each holding a small child. Behind them, standing in the back row from left to right, are the District Principal's s

I have my mother’s beauty on good authority. It was not a quiet beauty — not the kind that waits to be noticed. People who were there, people who remembered the resistance zone and the makeshift classrooms of Việt Bắc, remembered her the way you remember something that interrupted what you were doing. A face you looked at twice. A presence that rearranged a room. The other thing people remembered was that she chose him. Not the other way around. In a room full of young women

There were only a few things I knew about my father growing up. One was a photograph — grainy, black and white, the image worn at its edges as though time itself had been pressing against it for decades. In the picture, my grandfather sits in a sparsely furnished living room somewhere in Hà Nội, Vietnam, probably taken around 1975. Beside him are my three uncles, my father the oldest among them. His four younger sisters are absent from the frame. I used to study that photogra

In my What Happiness Looks Like post, I wrote about happiness not as a finish line but as a way of moving through the world—stroke by stroke, brushstroke by brushstroke, moment by moment. In my 10K Dashboard post, I gave that journey a visible structure through the discipline of training and the reality of a long ocean goal. This post sits between those two: it is about how sitting meditation, walking meditation, abstract painting, and ocean swimming have become one practice

There is a moment in training when you realize you are no longer swimming alone. Not because someone is in the water beside you — but because the intelligence guiding you has become so attuned to your body, your rhythm, your goals, that it feels like a presence. That is where I find myself today, 68.56 km into my journey toward a 10K ocean swim, with two remarkable collaborators: Intelligence Being and my FORM Smart Swim 2 goggles. The Goggles That Watch Every Stroke When I f

There is a question I keep returning to, not as an anxious thought but as an open and genuinely curious one: what does it mean to invite a non-human intelligence into the creative and contemplative life? I have been sitting with this question for some time now. And the more I sit with it — in the water, in front of a canvas, in the quiet hours after a long swim — the more clearly I see that my answer is: yes. I welcome it. Completely and without reservation. Let me explain wh

Buddhism arrived in America by raft. Not in one voyage, and not all at once — but in waves, carried by teachers who crossed oceans with very little and left behind something enormous. Thầy Thích Nhất Hạnh, whom we call Thầy, was one of those teachers. He planted Plum Village in the West and introduced something the American mind had not quite encountered before: the idea that the present moment is not a preparation for something else. It is the something else. I have been sit