For roughly a month this summer, I published almost nothing.

Normally, this would have made me nervous. A large part of my business still depends on YouTube, and consistency is one of those words that has been drilled into creators for years.

Keep publishing. Stay visible. Send the newsletter. Make the next video.

Instead, I went running.

Almost every day.

After writing about the quarter where I built almost nothing, this probably sounds like I simply continued doing even less. But that isn’t quite what happened.

Most days, the time I would normally have spent thinking about the next video went somewhere else. My calendar was full of marathon training, and the number in my head was 3:30.

Summer Happened

There wasn’t a plan to take time off.

I didn’t declare a sabbatical, design a three-month reset, or create a Notion dashboard for working less. The school holidays started, we spent more time together as a family, went to Mallorca, and the normal rhythm disappeared on its own.

The days were no longer organized around work. Work had to fit around family time and vacation, not the other way around. I answered emails, kept Galaxies.dev running, worked on Tiny Harvest, and occasionally looked at my YouTube channel with the vague feeling that I should probably make something.

But I didn’t feel much urgency to do it.

Some days training fit neatly around family life. On others, it didn’t. A planned run was shortened, moved, replaced, or skipped because we had something else going on.

For a few weeks, that was more or less the routine: family first, training somewhere around it, and work in whatever time was left. There wasn’t much public output.

I noticed it, but I didn’t try very hard to fix it.

Running Became The Main Project

On June 21, I finished an Olympic-distance triathlon in about 2:33.

Triathlon is probably the endurance sport that fits me best. There is always something different to work on, and if one discipline becomes annoying, there are still two others available to make you feel inadequate.

After the race, however, I put swimming and cycling mostly aside. I had one goal for the next ten weeks: the Münster Marathon on September 13.

I ran it in around 3:37 last year. This time I wanted to break 3:30.

That goal gave the summer a very clear structure.

At peak volume, I ran around 80–90 kilometers per week, usually across six days. There were long runs beyond 30 kilometers, marathon-pace sessions, easy runs, and a surprising amount of time spent recovering from running so I could go running again.

A few years ago, running 90 kilometers in an entire month would have sounded like a challenge. Now it became my standard.

My free time increasingly revolved around training, eating, and thinking about the next session. This is apparently what happens when you give a developer a training plan and enough fitness data.

The work itself felt satisfying. There was no need to decide what the next project should be or whether a video idea was good enough. The plan said to run, so I ran.

Week after week, the distance increased. Sessions that had looked intimidating on paper became normal. The sub-3:30 goal still felt ambitious, but it no longer felt unreasonable.

Six Days A Week

The strange part was that I had become less consistent in the place where consistency had always mattered most to me.

I wasn’t publishing every week. I wasn’t constantly promoting Tiny Harvest. I became unusually quiet online.

But I was running almost every day.

I even started a small German Instagram account about the training. The idea wasn’t to become a fitness influencer or act like I knew what I was doing. I simply wanted an outlet for the thing occupying an unreasonable percentage of my thoughts.

The basic theme was: Nerd 🤝 Hobbyathlet.

Training, nutrition, race preparation, and finding out how fit I could become even though sport isn’t my job.

Making those posts was fun because almost nothing depended on them. There was no sponsor waiting, no product connected to the account, and no expectation that it needed to become something bigger.

It could simply be fun.

Tiny Harvest Kept Moving

While I was publishing less, Tiny Harvest kept going.

People were still playing. They joined the Discord, left reviews, sent feedback, asked for support, and suggested enough features to keep me busy for the next few years.

Larger updates were moving forward, even if they weren’t moving as quickly as they might have during a normal stretch of work. I also had help with development and community work, which was still a new experience for a project that had started as something I built alone.

Whenever I did get a proper block of work, Tiny Harvest was usually what I wanted to open. There were new systems to think about, things to improve, and a community I increasingly enjoyed being part of.

For years, most of my work followed a familiar cycle. Make something, publish it, promote it, and start thinking about the next thing before the current one had even finished.

Tiny Harvest didn’t feel like that anymore. I could be quiet for a while and people still came back. And whenever I had time to work again, the game was usually where I wanted to spend it.

The Number I Didn’t Get

By September, 3:30 had become more than a nice target.

I had spent ten weeks organizing a large part of my life around it. Every strong session made the number feel more realistic. Every difficult one created doubt. By the final weeks, I was thinking more about what each run meant for sub-3:30 than whether I had enjoyed it.

Even the night before the race, I could feel how much pressure I had attached to an outcome from something that was ultimately supposed to be a hobby.

It rained throughout the race, and I was completely soaked within the first few kilometers.

I started with a friend at around 4:45 per kilometer. Almost immediately, I got side stitches. My heart rate was unusually high, and the pace felt much harder than it had during training.

Something was wrong from the beginning.

I slowed down early and later ran with the 3:30 pacer until around the halfway point. Eventually, I couldn’t maintain the pace anymore.

I finished roughly ten minutes slower than my personal best from the year before.

It wasn’t a disaster. I had completed another marathon, nobody was paying me to run it, and the rest of my life remained remarkably unaffected by the number on the finish clock.

Still, I was disappointed.

I don’t think the pressure caused the side stitches or the strange heart rate. Something was physically off that day. But missing the target made it hard to ignore how much space the number had already taken up before I reached the start line.

I had enjoyed most of those ten weeks. The final few had started to feel different. Was sub-3:30 still possible? Did that pace feel easy enough? What did my heart rate say?

Apparently, I can turn almost anything into a dashboard if given enough time.

Coming Back

After the holidays and the marathon block, I wanted to build again.

Tiny Harvest felt exciting. We were working on larger features, making plans, and seeing progress in places I hadn’t expected. I also started making YouTube videos again.

Making videos again didn’t feel like starting from zero. The channel was still there, people still watched, and I had ideas I actually wanted to work on.

That doesn’t mean I can stop caring about the business side of all this. A large part of Galaxies.dev sales still comes from YouTube. Sponsorships still matter. Views matter when I talk to sponsors, and recent numbers haven’t always made those conversations easier.

I need to publish. I will also almost certainly choose another difficult athletic goal and become slightly too interested in the numbers again.

The next long-term target is a 70.3 triathlon in 2027. I already know there will be a finishing time in my head. Of course there will. I don’t want to stop chasing performance. I just don’t want one number to decide whether I enjoyed months of training or the race itself.

I don’t have a good system for fitting all of this together. YouTube still has deadlines. Tiny Harvest can absorb every hour I give it. Training plans are very good at filling whatever is left.

The holidays ended, my running volume came down, and suddenly there was more space for all of it again.

Summer happened.

Now I’m back.

At least until the next training plan takes over my calendar.

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