And I Ran...

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I recently read "Ultramarathon Man" by Dean Kamazes. I understood this guy completely - I'd run marathons myself. Not physical ones, marathons of the mind.

Once upon a time, I was the hero coder. The guy who was there in the morning when you came into work, the guy who was there in the evening when you left. I was King of the Critical Path. You couldn't have a meeting without me, you couldn't ship without my parts being done. I worked seven days a week, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hours a day.

This didn't happen all at once. Like a marathoner, I had to train. I took on multiple jobs. I volunteered for the software equivalent of suicide missions. If nobody else could figure out how to do something, I was the guy who got the project. In the beginning, I took sundays off. If I tried to work seven days a week, I fell apart on day ten.

I loved the work. I loved the mental gymnastics of it. I loved thinking about a problem and the tools I had to solve the problem and how to coax the tools into doing what I needed. A giant puzzle, everything connected.

I'm a pretty bright guy, but I'm not necessarily the smartest guy in the room. I've been lucky that way, learning a lot from people who knew more. I also worked hard not just to keep up with people who were smarter than me, but ideally to stay a step or two ahead.

I loved being this guy. I got really good at being him. I was well paid. I also was also overweight, lived on colas, potato chips and asprin. I don't need a lot of sleep, but everybody needs more than the hour or two that I got. People guessing my age were off by years and not in a good way.

Reading "UltraMarathon Man", I could see myself. This guy ran from Sonoma to Santa Cruz. This is my home territory, I know how long it takes to drive that. He ran 100 mile marathons. He ran a marthon at the south pole. He trained to endure. I understand that.

One day, I blanked. I was giving a presentation. A two cola presentation, which meant I brought along two colas to help keep myself awake while I was talking. It was morning, who knows how many colas I would consume throughout the day, a day which probably had me leaving the building around 2 a.m. It would take about an hour to get home. I'd probably be back before ten the next morning.

The presentation wasn't going that well really. I was fine, doing the full on mad scientist thing, leading the group through a series of complex abstractions without any notes. They weren't really following. My presentation wasn't bad, but it was difficult material and I was talking non-stop and writing furiously on the white board and they just weren't up to the task of following and I wasn't up to the task of simplifying.

It was a dazzling performance. I was the hero coder.

And then I blanked.

I was exhausted. I was on autopilot. I wrote up on the board: function name. Open paren. Then, nothing.

There should have been a parameter name. Instead, just white space. White space on the white board, white space in my head.

I stood there at the white board, pen not quite touching the surface, waiting for the next token.

Nothing.

I stood there, pen poised, I have no idea for how long. I didn't panic. I didn't think. A little ways into this, one of my collegues said, "Give him a minute, he's really sleep deprived right now." I didn't really understand what she'd said, I just recorded it. And continued to stare at the white void.

The moment passed, finally. I have no idea how long I'd stood there, it seemed like forever. And then suddenly the flow clicked back on and away I went.

But afterwards, thinking about the moment. I wondered what it was I'd really become and decided that was no longer the person I needed to be. I was ready to move on. I could run the marthon, I didn't need to run the marathon. I had run it, further and better than most. It took a long time to change gears. I continued to be hero coder, but I was because I was, not because I tried to be. And now, I'm the next thing.