A city asked nothing more of me than that I arrive

On Easter Sunday morning I left my phone upstairs in the room, took my Fuji, and walked slowly uphill through cobbled streets towards Jardim do Torel.

The streets were quiet in the way a city can be quiet only on a holiday morning: sun already warming the stone, shutters half open, a few voices drifting out from cafés, the sense that the day had all the time in the world. Below me the city tilted towards the river. Around me were families, couples, groups of friends beginning their day.

And then there was me.

A man away alone, in a good hotel, on a holiday weekend, with no conference badge around his neck, no lecture to give, no dinner to host, no cover story of work.

What surprised me was not the aloneness. It was the ease.

I was not lonely. I was in solitude.

That distinction matters more to me now than it once did.

This was not an escape. It was an intentional decision to find the state shift I needed.

The stretch from ECCO in mid-February to DDW in early May has been one of those compressed phases of life where almost every domain is live at once. Clinics. Research. Team leadership. SENTINEL. Grants. Talks. Writing. Finishing the house. Rebuilding my body after a ridiculous back spasm in January that forced a slowness I did not welcome and could not ignore. Trying to train properly again, not as theatre, but as part of becoming more fully myself.

At home in Edinburgh, much of it has been good. More than good, often. The work is real. My team is alive. The house is slowly becoming the place I want it to be. The body is coming back under me again, with Paul Giblin setting the running, José holding the strength work, and TransRockies in July giving the next block a shape and a reason. But good work and a good life are not the same thing as spaciousness.

Easter arrived with Holly and Cameron making their own plans, a four-day window in the diary, and the sort of weather forecast that makes Edinburgh feel more like duty than delight.

So I left.

Two nights. Direct flights. A dawn departure from Edinburgh on one of the usual budget airlines, with all the familiar indignities that still somehow remain worth it. A sixteenth-century palace converted into a hotel. A city with light, hills, tiled façades, good coffee, proper fish, and the sort of air that changes your breathing before you have quite admitted that you need it.

There was something faintly decadent about going just as the work was quickening pace.

That mattered too.

The team had momentum. The ideas were getting sharper. The tools and data assets we have built were beginning to feel less like promise and more like infrastructure. SENTINEL, in particular, was moving from concept towards implementation at precisely the moment AI is accelerating at a pace medicine has barely begun to absorb. I did not leave because the work had gone flat. I left because it was becoming more alive; and I wanted to meet that next phase with more clarity, not less.

This was not a weekend against the work. It was a weekend in service of it.

In the past, I thought there were only two honest ways to achieve a state shift.

One was dark and expensive. Intensity for its own sake. The wrong kind of romance. Hedonism that felt vivid at the time and left the soul slightly dimmer afterwards.

The other was more socially acceptable, even admirable. Endurance. Long weekends of “active recovery” that were really their own form of extremity: trail running, mountain biking, mountains, exhaustion, and the private satisfaction of pushing beyond what was sensible because it felt cleaner than collapse.

One was obviously self-destructive. The other often looked like health.

Both were driven by the same nervous system.

That is what this weekend showed me most clearly.

I should say this plainly: I am not turning against the endurance line. Quite the opposite. Running has saved me more than once, and the current return to training matters deeply to me. There is something profoundly right in waking early, putting on shoes, and letting a body remember what it is for. There is discipline in it, but also release. Precision. Humility. Joy. Endurance still feels like one of the cleanest ways I know to come back to myself.

But like everything powerful, it can be used well or badly.

Sometimes eating properly, hydrating, running, lifting, mobility work, recovery and sleep all feel part of one coherent rhythm. Sometimes, especially in the current culture of endless optimisation, they can begin to feel like a nagging list of essential things to do just to remain basically functional. Even healthy systems can become strangely airless when they are asked to do too much.

This weekend suggested a third way.

Not grim abstinence, efficiency, and tighter routines. Not darkness and its aftertaste. Not active recovery pushed so far that it becomes another respectable form of escape.

Something else.

Recovery through beauty.

Through architecture and light. Through a room that felt calm the moment I walked into it. Through the quiet competence of people who prepared food, changed sheets, drew curtains, brought coffee, arranged transfers, and asked nothing of me except that I arrive. Through being held, for once, by quality and service rather than by another person or by work. Through a lingering breakfast, a long run in the heat of the afternoon sun, a swim in cold water, the strong hands of a gifted massage therapist, a book by the pool, a camera in my hand, and a cold crisp white with enough depth to hold the meal and the evening.

These are surface details, yes. But not trivial ones.

I spend much of my life holding. Holding patients, teams, decisions, vision, logistics, children, atmosphere, momentum, myself. To be held, even briefly, by competence, beauty, and care is not decadence. It is medicine.

That was the real gift of the weekend.

Not the city itself, exactly.

Not the hotel.

Not even the sun, though that helped and was definitely part of the prescription.

It was the discovery that pleasure does not have to end in collapse.

That solitude does not have to mean absence.

That a man can leave home on his own, stay somewhere beautiful, eat well, run well enough, sleep imperfectly, read, think a lot, write a little, and return more fully himself rather than less.

By the end of the weekend I found myself thinking that not every important trip needs a cover story. Some of us do not recover only by subtracting. Sometimes we recover by choosing better inputs: better light, better rooms, better food, better movement, better silence, better beauty, better ways of feeding an appetite that would otherwise go looking for darker fuel.

That, for me, is the strategic lesson.

The work ahead is too important, and the next month too alive with possibility, to keep asking an exhausted nervous system to improvise its way through. The team is moving. The ideas are sharpening. What we are building in data, algorithms, clinical tools, and implementation is becoming more real by the week. The return to training matters deeply to me too - the full embrace of the endurance lifestyle.

This weekend was not a break from that build. It was part of it.

A city had asked nothing more of me than that I arrive.

And in that simple demand, I found a way of returning to my own life more intact, and more ready for what comes next.

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