I hit 188 lbs on January 4, 2024, and immediately understood that the cut was just phase one. Losing weight is a subtraction problem. Building something on top of it is a different challenge entirely — and honestly, the more interesting one. The scale has been climbing since. 188 → 205 → 218-229 lbs as of early 2026. That's not a setback. That's the plan working.

The Speediance became the anchor of phase two. In the seven months between July 2025 and February 2026 alone, I logged 125 sessions and moved 1,296,447 lbs of total volume. My best single session: 35,305 lbs in 50 minutes on February 2, 2026. Top lifts tracked by the machine — barbell lat pulldown at a 294 lb 1RM, bent over row at 198 lbs, bench press at 90 lbs via the cable system. These aren't estimates. The machine logs every rep.

Running got rebuilt from scratch in parallel. I started with 1-mile sessions — genuinely just trying to not stop. By early 2026 I'm doing 5-mile runs. 111 runs logged over the past year: 84 outdoor, 27 treadmill, 2 open water swims. 265.1 miles total. Not fast. But consistent, progressive, and building. The weight going up isn't something to explain away — muscle weighs something. That's the point.

Every training decision now runs through the stack: WHOOP gives me a recovery score each morning, 8Sleep tells me how the night actually went, and the AI assistant I built on OpenClaw reads all of it — Garmin activity, sleep data, HRV trends — and generates a daily readiness recommendation before I decide whether to push or pull back. The system makes the decisions defensible. No guessing, no going on feel when the data says otherwise.