So when about a month ago I started getting slower and coming back sorer than ever before, I was a little worried. I’m 28, in good shape, eat reasonably well… nothing had dramatically changed in my lifestyle to warrant this. What was wrong? This persisted for several weeks before I finally determined that something needed to change.

I looked to my more intense training days for ideas. Back when I used to swim competitively we’d do something called tapering before big events; conferences, sectionals, things like that. Tapering is where you effectively slow down — or, sometimes, stop — training for a set amount of time so that your body has the chance to recover and gather its energy back up. It’s a really effective way to increase your performance.

Now back to running.

Instead of solving my problem by taking my weekly runs and making them harder, I decided to do a slightly altered method of tapering. This was pretty hard since I had hardcoded this weekly habit into my body. Actually, it was really hard and I hated it.

Nontheless, for about a week I stopped running and focused on strength training. I also just took some time and relaxed for a little bit. After a week of this, I jumped right back into my schedule with a 6 mile run and, just like that, I could run again. Even more surprising, I ran better.

Which got me thinking that there was a lesson in there somewhere. Habits are sometimes formed out of necessity. Once upon a time I needed to be rigid with my running schedule otherwise I wouldn’t train. But habits can also get in the way. Being stubborn and continuing to run when my body was giving me all the opposite signals made me worse, not better.

I guess sometimes we need to step away from the things we consider necessary parts of our daily lives in order to come back and be better at them.

The point is this: I was passionate about a lot of things, and wanted to share that with everyone else.

Flash forward six years, and here I am completely stuck trying to express the same kinds of things that used to come so easy.  I’m flummoxed.  My bookshelf is full of notebooks packed with words, but none of them come from the last year or so of my life. I can’t help but wonder what the hell the problem is.

Am I just not passionate any more about the things I’m involved in?  Am I too caught up in the act of doing that I don’t spend enough time to properly reflect?  Or have I just lost my ability to be truly creative?

Something is wrong.

It wasn’t about proving that the company or idea was worthwhile through initial crowd funding; it was about building a thriving community in the blink of an eye, and doing it sustainably.

Pretty neat.

Podcasts have always been an on-again-off-again thing for me — very similar to my early days of RSS.  The problem has always revolved around the trivial format that most podcasts seem to descend into after their first few episodes, and my inability to curate them properly.  This leads to a podcast list that fills up with garbage quickly (guys just sitting around filling air space with empty words), and my inevitable disenchantment with my listening list.  My podcast list remains untended, weeds and tall blades of grass growing around it, for months before I come back to it.

But the additional listening time that I’ve had this weekend has allowed for me to delve deeper into podcast archives, finding only the gems who’ve consistently created decent content. Since this is a pretty tough thing to do for someone with a life and full eyesight, I thought I’d share a few of the podcasts that I found this weekend:

• Gamers With Jobs
  My friend Erik Hanson is a Managing Editor at Gamers With Jobs, and I’ve been meaning to give this podcast some listening time.  Right off the bat, big compliments: this is one of the only gaming podcasts out there with an actual format, and that deftly avoids devolving into people just saying words.  It’s also really good!  Being a game developer, one of the things I’m removed of more often than I should be is the feedback of intelligent people who *don’t* make games.  Listening to this podcast I found myself learning a lot, laughing my ass off, Googling some of the things they talked about (just picked up Lords of Waterdeep), and just enjoying myself.  Great show, guys!  Keep up the good work.
• How Stuff Works
  The guys who run this podcast are obvious fans of mumblecore.  They’re also incredibly witty, and the show is more interesting than most of the boring “this is how sausage is made” types of shows out there. Ranging from topics like violence in video games to elevators to space, this isn’t exactly a podcast aimed specifically at how mechanical stuff works.
• Freakonomics
  I really enjoy it when people take an analytical approach to answering questions.  Freakonomics does that, but it does it in a way that isn’t boring.  If you’ve ever asked yourself questions like “is college worth it?,” and wanted people to explore that question in a way that isn’t plagued with opinion, this is for you.
• TED Radio Hour
  This is an NPR show that mixes excerpts of TED talks with interviews of their speakers.  If you’ve ever really loved a TED talk, but wanted to hear more, you’ll really enjoy this.  Their recent episode on “building a better classroom” was particularly great.
• Weekend Confirmed
  This is a rather long show, but they do a good job of breaking it up. Also, just like Gamers With Jobs, they also do a great job of being both entertaining and informative.  The folks on this show obviously care about games and think about them on a deeper level than most people.  They also have some really cool guests on from the gaming industry.

That’s it for now.  I’ve got quite a few additional podcasts in my list, but these are the really great ones that have made my time a little easier over the past few days.  If you have something that you think I should listen to, or are interested in hearing what other kinds of things I’ve been listening to or reading lately, let me know in the comments!