My 2025 Was Awesome Let’s Go!

What can I say about 2025?  For me it was a really good year.  Mainly because 2024 was really shitty, so any movement was likely up. 

First and foremost in spring of 2025 I fully retired from my long career, which was about 4 years in the private sector and 29.5 in the federal government.  In addition to that main career I simultaneously worked 17 years as an adjunct faculty member of a major university in the DC area. 

On April 7th of 2025 I started my new life as a “W2 retiree”.  I call it that intentionally because of the annoying retirement police who are apparently still out there on patrol.  It was the first time since I was a teenager that I was not collecting a paycheck from an entity under the W2 employee system. Yes I have a graphic design business and continue to “work” in design, but I don’t really consider that work.  So I’m retired with a fun hobby that does bring in some dough.

But what else happened in 2025?   

It’s Getting Better All The Time

I won my first big regional bike race late last summer and got a 3rd place podium at another.  For a guy who was obese as a kid and well into his 30’s and who never played on a sports team in his life this was a massive achievement. 

I still look at the podium picture of me standing on top from time to time to remind myself that I’ve come a long way and that hard work pays off.  I know that could seem more than a bit narcissistic to some, but to me achievements build on momentum.  Celebrating and appreciating your wins keeps moving that ball.

I also finally got back out West to the high mountains after a break that started intentionally but went way too long.  If you’re not familiar with my story I’m into mountaineering and have climbed most of the highest peaks in the US including all 58 peaks in Colorado over 14,000ft high, or the “14ers”.  The high mountains are a sacred place to me and ground me.  Last year I did a blissful 2 week trip out West and climbed 5 or 6 big mountains, including a 14er in California.  I could feel what I call “vitamin mountain” flowing back into my body. 

Ultra Painful

I ran my first ultra-marathon in 2025 as well, a 32 mile technical trail race that I didn’t have time to properly train for as it came only a month after my big bike race.  But I finished, painful as it was.  Sometimes I like throwing all caution aside and just diving in.  I have no doubt I can run that race a lot faster if I trained properly for it, but it’s also fun to just show up and figure it out.

I met a lot of new people in 2025 who I now call friends, mostly from cycling or running groups.  It’s a manifestation of my theory that if you focus your social circles and friendship networks around health-related activities and exercise, then you take most of the barriers and sting out of workouts.  Workouts become just hanging out with friends, and who doesn’t want to do that?

Go Fast, Now Pump The Brakes

Going fast in bike races is awesome, but as a yang to that ying I also focused on slowing down in in 2025.

When I first semi-retired in 2017 I initially spent a lot of time detoxing from full time work.  A key part of that was riding my bike to the library or coffee shop and just reading, designing, blogging, or people watching.  No rushing, no worries.  The ‘chillax’ lifestyle. 

I kind of got away from that somewhat over the past 5 years, so I brought it back in 2025. 

Last years version focused more on outdoor spaces.  Ride bike to park, find nice tree, sit beneath tree and read.  Enjoy life.  I learned to appreciate park benches and track the best ones.  When I do this there is of course always a nagging voice in my brain saying “you’re not being productive!”.  I’m getting better at telling that voice to fuck off.

The urge to do this chillaxing is no doubt a reaction to our increasingly hypersonic world.  I hope to do a separate post on this, but my “Between Chaos And Peace” post from 2020 which was one of my most popular now reads as almost cute and innocent in it’s naivete considering where we are now in 2026. 

AI, robots, everything changing every week.  Life couldn’t be more awesome, but at the same time there’s an underlying nervousness and apprehension about where these things are taking us.  Maybe more on that to come, maybe not 🙂 

In the end I hope you had a great 2025 and start to ’26 and thanks for reading!