Sam Tackeff 👋

If you don't have enough time this week.... quit something. Seriously. I love updating my "not doing" list. Do you have one? It's liberating.

Apocalypse sun situation with the smog from the Canadian fires here in Boston.

Cautionary tale. I've been part of a vibrant group for years that had a beautiful simple membership where the monthly content was dropped each month in PDF and videos. Group was full of people engaging with content and asking good questions. But the people BEGGED for an app. BEGGED. (Having now built apps for a living, I really hoped they did not switch over._ App finally launched last year and it's... not good. Buggy. Borked. Features half baked. Data doesn't regularly save. App has trouble opening and crashing. Now almost all content in the group is people complaining about app not working and the small team's focus seems to be now 90% support related. (And one very long time team member has left.) Every so often I think about shifting over to an app model, but man life is more flexible with a web app.

Good Things this week. samtackeff.substack.com/p/weekly-good-…

@maiab Happy Birthday ◡̈

I always like to make big moves around my birthday

Genuinely can’t understate the amount of *joy* this weekend with Scotland in Boston for the World Cup. Fenway last night was one of the best of my life. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I’m a STH in the bleachers! This is the loudest the bleachers have been at a @redsox game since the 21 AL Wild Card Game! God Bless the @TartanArmyGroup! @BBisntBoring #redsox #dirtywater

I am fairly sure the @TartanArmyGroup would like to bring @jtkantor back to Scotland with them!

Engagement boosting in 2010: - #ff @jack - recommend someone everyone should follow - PLEASE RETWEET - bit.ly memes - coffee or tea? Engagement boosting in 2026:

@SeaCee15 I think it makes a nice base! I also use as a mixer for my electrolytes 😁

@alphaprep My husband loves it! I wasn't sold the first time I tasted it, but maybe I'll give it another go. (I'm a diehard Lime Ginger Nixie fan).

**Strong recommend** to @drinkspindrift Island Punch as contender for top summer beverage option. (It's basically POG seltzer and not sweet.)

@cyantist 👋 would love to stay in the loop on this.

There are few things I love more than sharing something magical I’ve discovered with others. Joy Safaris are the culmination of years of experimentation with ideas, attention, and playful constraints. After trying many different approaches, I eventually found a formula that is surprisingly repeatable and helps people quickly access a mental state they may not have experienced in a very long time, or perhaps never learned how to reach reliably: a state of childlike wonder. It’s not easy to create, but it’s an incredibly fun practice, and one I highly recommend. Mike (@zmwang ) and I are launching a site soon, and we’ll be training guides to lead these experiences. The dream is that Joy Safaris become something you can find almost anywhere in the world, a shared language of wonder that people can drop into, or start themselves, wherever they happen to be. Imagine traveling to a new city and knowing that somewhere nearby, a group of people is gathering to rediscover curiosity, delight, and awe together. That’s the dream.

@SoniaBaschez A dentist best described dental insurance to me as more like [a coupon] vs. how we traditionally think of insurance, which was helpful. A lot of folks get dental insurance through a workplace, so I think this model for self-employed seems like a great fit..

found a dentist that does a membership for 2 cleanings a year plus savings on everything else and it costs about the same as dental insurance... so what is the point of dental insurance??

@WayneOWastes @itsme_urstruly “Red berries”

@itsme_urstruly with strawberries though. don't forget the strawberries!

Anyone else remember when Special K created their own diet and it was basically just eating two bowls of Special K every day and everyone accepted that as medically sound?

I've been getting bloodwork 3-6 times a year since 2014. I have 51 panels going back twelve years. I spent a decade at InsideTracker, the main innovator when it comes to blood analytics. And I still didn't notice that my ferritin craters every summer. The data was never the issue. Having something that could hold all of it in working memory at the same time was. I wrote about what happened when I pulled 12 years of Strava, 51 blood panels, and my full training log into Claude and asked it to tell me what was interesting. Here's the short version: IRON My ferritin craters every summer and I never noticed. Moving to Colorado dropped my average ferritin 19% permanently. Altitude forces your body to make more red blood cells, and that process drains your iron stores as a structural tax whether you're training hard or not. My best performances cluster around my highest ferritin readings. My worst effort ever; Four Pass Loop, no power on any climb; was ferritin 45, Tsat 19%. My marathon PR of 2:59 was run with ferritin 17 points below my career average. I don't know what I left on that course. INJURY Most predictable trigger across 8 years: a travel-related volume drop followed by a full return to normal load with no adjustment. 50 mile week → 18 mile week → back to 50. Something breaks every time. October and January are my highest injury months. The fix: never exceed 1.25x your 4-week average after a down week, no matter how good you feel. SAUNA 331 sessions logged since 2018. Weeks with 2+ sessions correlate with a 36% lower injury signal the following week. When already dealing with something, sauna weeks resolve 35% faster. My best fitness years had the most sauna. I'm currently at 3.6% of days and my hip is flaring. Not a coincidence. FITNESS VO2max 63.3 at sea level. LT2 at 6:19/mi. Both tested September 2025. Controlled HR at 142 bpm while training at 5,280 feet. I'm probably in the best aerobic shape of my life and haven't had the right race to prove it. RUNNING PARTNERS Pulled pace and subjective feel scores across every logged run, classified by partner. Two people consistently get me to 7:44–7:49/mi on what should be easy runs; highest feel scores in the dataset. Running is measurably better when you're not doing it alone. WEATHER 0.27 seconds per mile slower per degree Fahrenheit on road runs. Below 45°F I average 8:24/mi. Above 75°F it's 8:50/mi. November is my fastest month. June is my slowest. All of this is the easy part. Pattern matching is becoming a commodity. The hard part is what happens next; someone accountable who can examine you, order the follow-up test, and adjust the plan when your labs come back. That's what I wrote about this week, and it's what @Eternal is built to be: longrunlabs.substack.com/p/what-i-learn…

HELL YES AUBRY

@canva Shout out to the engineer who fixed this ◡̈ 👋

@alphaprep Following up on your issue regarding emojis in your downloaded PDFs, Sam. This issue was already escalated to our team. For now, you can try using the Emojis within Canva or use the Elements tab.

There's an annoying @canva regression where emoji no longer render in PDF downloads. Was working in early March, broken sometime before I did flyers for April. (This was one of the best things they had fixed a few years ago, and now we're back to the dark ages 😭)

@checkpluss *or rage bait

@checkpluss "fun"

Why?