000025 — What the watch missed

Earlier this week, when I got home from a birthday ride, I went to stop the workout on my watch. Instead of giving me the option to stop, it showed me “resume.” The watch had not recorded the part I most wanted it to remember. That is such a ridiculous sentence when I slow down enough to hear it, because I was there, my body was there, the climb was there, the work was there, the breath was there, the earned ache in my legs was there, and still the first feeling was this little flash of disappointment that the data had not caught the thing I knew literally just happened. 

What happened was I stopped midway through my ride for water to refill my water bottles and have a snack, and forgot to restart the workout on my watch going into the exact hour of the ride where I had committed to doing a real effort, a sustained effort, the kind where you stop negotiating with yourself, you lock in a cadence, keep your head up, form optimized, and target holding a wattage that would have been my best of the season so far, or close to it. I could feel it while it was happening. That hard earned feeling where your body is doing something it could not have done the same way a month ago. Then I arrived home, looked down, and there was no perfect record of it. There was a ride, sure. There was data, yes. But the part I wanted witnessed was gone, and something in me started asking for evidence. Did it happen if it wasn’t recorded? Did it count if there was no graph? Did I get stronger if the system did not say back to me, yes Darryl, here is the proof, here is the climb, here is the file, here is the clean little receipt of your effort.

The annoying thing is, I knew the answer immediately, which made the disappointment more irritating because now I had to be honest twice. I had to be honest that the ride counted, and I had to be honest that some part of me still wanted something outside of me to confirm what I already knew inside of me. 

A lot of my formation is happening in that small space between knowing and needing confirmation, between the thing that happened and the artifact that proves it happened, between being changed by an experience and wanting the experience to hold still long enough for me to point to it. I literally said to myself, well Darryl, why are you riding, to have perfect stats or to know that you got stronger, and I hated how useful the question was. I hate when the obvious question is the right question. It feels disrespectful to the complexity I worked so hard to create. I did not need the watch to tell me I had worked. The version of me at the bottom and the version of me at the top were not identical, even if the record was incomplete.

That scene has stayed with me because the weeks leading into it were full of things I wanted to record, lessons I wanted to name, moments I wanted to publish, and didn’t. After writing about the mornings, over a month ago, about the hours before the world gets loud, I went quiet here. The notes did not keep stacking, I was off my target publishing schedule; this was different from older gaps, because older gaps often came from getting swallowed by life, work, leadership, pressure, noise, the whole machine. 

This one was stranger, unfamiliar, and better. I was busy living. I was riding solo through LA and the Santa Monica mountains, staying near the beach, watching people move through the world with this ease that got into me. From the hotel I could see those high rings where people swing from one to another almost like they are flying. I tried. I did not fly, ha. One evening I walked past four guys playing volleyball using everything except their hands, only feet and shoulders and heads, this strange mix of control and play that made me stop because no one looked like they were trying to make a point. Just four dudes who one day said, let’s play this way, and then actually got good at it.

Later in the week, riding down toward Venice at sunset, there were roller skaters moving like the city had made a private agreement with them to advertise play, I’m not even kinda kidding, it was like a set how perfectly they were all skating and dancing. That big LA sun was hanging over everything, glowing in that way I have also felt in Texas, where the evening does not seem to end all at once; it somehow keeps giving itself away slowly. Colorado gives me that more in the morning because of the mountains, the way the light has to climb its way into view, and LA gave it to me at the other end of the day, over the water, over the traffic, over all that motion.

That is what’s returning in me; I am remembering motion without the immediate requirement to interpret it. Riding fast through a city woke up the kid version of me, the one who would rollerblade or ride across town because miles did not feel like training back then, they felt like freedom. I could go anywhere. I could move through the world on my own accord; I could cross distances under my own power and feel the city change around me. On this last trip to LA, some of that came back, and it came back with the very funny adult irony that I was also putting down some of my best sustained efforts, and my VO2 max improved and the post ride statistics were saying, yes, this is working, and yet the part that gave me the most life was not the optimized part. It was the alertness. The near misses, the many, many near misses of getting hit by a car, which sounds insane to write, call me a junkie, but it brings me back to riding my fixed gear brakeless in college. A side mirror with a face in it that told me the door might open. A stoplight about to change. A pedestrian stepping out. The tiny calculations that happen faster than language. That was aliveness, the actual nervous system version, where the world is speaking quickly, and you either pay attention or pay the consequence.

This is where the ride, where riding started connecting to writing for me, because writing publicly has started to feel like another form of moving through the city, starting first nearly two decades ago with journaling, which was, and still is, a way of sitting with myself. It gives me an internal instrument when I desperately needed one. It lets me watch thoughts without being ruled by every one of them. It lets me find the upstream belief, the repeated sentence, the emotional loop, the place where something old had become policy in my life without my awareness or consent. 

I have written through shame, control, marriage, fatherhood, leadership, ambition, faith, money, identity, old labels, new identities, and enough private contradiction to fill more rooms than I could count or imagine; literally stacks of notebooks, millions of words digitally, thousands of hours of voice memos. That work is real. I do not need to diminish it to say something else is starting to pull on me now, that new pull is writing and publishing. Writing in public is not the same as journaling with better punctuation and structure. It is a different kind of risk. The private page asks me to be honest. The public page asks me to be honest while accepting that another person gets to enter the conversation and misunderstand, receive, flatten, connect, resist, be helped, be annoyed, be moved, or walk away with a version of me I did not authorize.

That is the part that makes me careful, because I have seen people flatten what they do not take the time to understand. I have seen it in rooms with consequences, in business, in change-of-control conversations, and in the way institutions can turn a whole person into a sentence that serves the story they already decided to tell.

That instinct does not stay in boardrooms. It follows you into public thought. It is part of why I hesitate to write more openly about God and faith, because one theological word can invite an entire architecture of assumptions before someone has even walked through the front door.

I want to write with conviction, and I do not want conviction to become branding. I want to contribute something real without becoming a character in someone else’s lazy story about me.

That sounds like a big claim because it is true enough that I cannot hide behind false modesty. I have done the work. Far from perfectly, not in some elevated way that makes me better than anyone else, and I have been working on my interior life for a very long time. Over and over and over again. I have learned how to open the program and see some strings of code and say, that one is old, that one is governing more than it should, that emotional output has an upstream input, that belief has become policy, that pattern can be changed. In a world struggling with change, adaptation has become one of my deepest skills, and the next edge is trusting that skill enough to offer it without needing the offering to become another form of proof...

Proof. 

That word, and all the emotion surrounding it, keeps coming back. The watch missed the ride, and I wanted the file. The stream of what I thought were some of the best notes I’ve written went quiet, and some part of me wanted the archive to reassure me that the work was still alive. I spent years writing privately and now I can feel myself enjoying writing out in the open, and immediately the question underneath the question is whether I am expressing or proving. That distinction is upstream. It begins before the sentence. It begins in the originating motive such as, you guessed it, a bike ride can be play or performance before the first pedal stroke, a hard effort can be training or punishment, a field note can be expression or a little audition for validation. The action can look almost identical from the outside, while the source is completely different. That is what makes it tricky. Wanting feedback is not wrong. I want the loop. I want to know if something helped. I want a message from someone saying they felt less alone or saw something differently or finally had language for a thing that has been living unnamed in them. I want that because connection is good and will allow me to iterate and improve. The danger is when feedback stops being a gift and becomes oxygen, when contribution quietly turns into dependence, when the audience becomes the watch, and I start looking down after every climb to see if the effort counted or was good enough.

This is also why the last few weeks matter, even though I did not immediately turn them into writing. Olivia’s Spring Formal mattered. The exhausting and complicated logistics mattered. Picking up Charlotte, Texas Roadhouse, hair appointment, photos, Lauren and I squeezing in dinner with friends in the middle of the movement, picking up Olivia and five friends for a sleepover, all of that ordinary dad life mattered in a way that does not need to become content before it becomes real, it was already real and lived. I did not want Olivia to be an accessory to my musings. I wanted to be available to her life. 

Pulling Noah out of school on a whim to ride pump tracks on BMX bikes mattered too, hitting up 7-Eleven for snacks and waters to arrive at a mostly empty park in the middle of a school day, doing something spontaneous and unnecessary and good because we both enjoy it and because sometimes play is the most responsible thing available. The harder Noah moment weeks before mattered, maybe more. Him tired and unregulated and still telling the truth, in a fit of rage and tears, saying he had spent the day asking to play with me and I kept coming up with excuses, and then when I wanted to do something and he said no, I got upset. That one stayed. I lost my breath in that moment, because that very morning I had been journaling about wanting more play, more aliveness, more ordinary joy, and there was my son offering the exact thing I was asking for while I was too wrapped up in my head processing the desire for play instead of playing. That is so painfully me, I almost have to laugh to keep from taking myself too seriously.

I do want to write more openly, and I am surprised by how much I enjoy it. I want to have opinions. I want to contribute. I have something meaningful to say, and yes, that sentence still makes me want to qualify it seventeen different ways so no one mistakes confidence for arrogance. And at the same time, the work has to count before the watch or the world catches it. Life has to count before the post. The conversation has to count before the essay. The private formation has to count before public validation. The ride has to be worth taking, even if the file is incomplete, because otherwise, I am not riding; I am collecting evidence. I do not want to collect evidence of being alive. I want to be alive, and then write from that place when the writing is ready.

I keep thinking about the hour the watch missed, I know Lauren is tired of hearing me lament. I can still feel the frustration of it, and underneath that frustration, I can feel the relief of having the question exposed so plainly. 

Do I trust the work if the system does not confirm it? 

Do I trust the strength if the graph does not show it? 

Do I trust the voice if no one has applauded it yet? 

Do I trust the life while I am living it, or only after I have turned it into language? I do know I do not have that fully solved. I probably should not. I just know the climb happened. I know I was there. I know I got stronger. And for now, that is enough to make me keep riding, and enough to make me keep writing too.