The Working Form · No. 01 ·
Am I just hardware?
I spent most of a Sunday afternoon building out the training plan for next July, and somewhere around the second block I noticed I had been using the word programming for about two hours without once thinking about what I was saying. In fitness, programming means writing a set of instructions and protocols to be completed over a duration. In software, which is what I do every day, programming means writing a set of instructions to be executed over a duration. Same word, and after years of writing the second kind I don't think I had ever consciously connected it to the first.
Once I noticed it I couldn't stop noticing it. The plan I was writing has a structure I recognize. There are loops, four week blocks that repeat with the volume incremented each pass and a deload as the exit condition. There are conditionals, dependencies, and even error handling! I was writing a program. The only real difference was the runtime.
So I asked myself the obvious thing,
If the training plan is a set of instructions written now, to be executed later, what is actually different about it from the code I deploy every day?
Where the comparison holds up
More of it held than I expected. The body takes an input, it does something with it, and it produces an output I can measure, and the whole loop is observable if I bother to instrument it, which is exactly what a heart rate monitor, power meter, and a pace field are. The adaptation isn't mysterious either, it is a response to a load applied at a frequency over a period, which is a specification. I can write that specification down eleven months in advance, hand it to the system, and have a reasonable expectation of what comes out the other side. I have done that with software many times and never once thought of it as remarkable.
The recent humanoid hype is what pushed the thought further. With the latest developments in AI, more and more companies are exploring opportunities for humanoid robots to enter the workforce. If I set aside the human emotions, the self perception, and the conflicting priorities, it starts to look like the physical body may be glorified hardware. Actuators, a power system, a control loop, a maintenance schedule, and a set of tolerances that degrade when they get exceeded.
I want to be careful here because there are vast interpretations of what a body is, from the purely physical to the deeply spiritual, and I am not equipped to argue any of them and I am not trying to. I am interested in a much narrower version of the question, which is whether I can treat my own body as a system that accepts a protocol, and what happens over eleven months when I do.
Where it falls apart
It falls apart in at least one place I can already name. Hardware degrades under load. Every mechanical system I worked on back in my mechanical engineering days had a duty cycle and a fatigue life, and a good part of the discipline was about managing the rate of decline. Biology does the opposite under the right dose. You apply a stress, the system fails a little, and it rebuilds past where it started. That is not a property any hardware I have ever specified has, and it means the analogy is inverted in the one dimension that the whole plan depends on.
The other place it falls apart is the part I waved away in the first place. The three things I set aside to make the comparison work are the three things that decide whether the protocol gets executed at all.
I can write a perfect eleven month plan on a Sunday afternoon. Whether the 5am swim happens on a Tuesday in February is not a question about the hardware, it is a question about emotion, self perception, and competing priorities, which is to say a business, family life, prior commitments. In software the deploy either succeeds or it fails, rather binary. Here the compiler can decide it doesn't feel like it.
So the honest position is that the comparison is useful for the parts of the system I can specify, and it goes silent on the part that determines whether the specification ever runs.
What I'm actually going to do about it
I'm going to run the protocol and see. The plan covers roughly eleven months and ends at Ironman Lake Placid, which as the course reads is a 2.3 mile swim, a 111 mile bike with 7,432 feet of climbing, and a 26.2 mile run. I could not come up with a better test of this hardware, partly because it is long enough that nothing I do in a single week matters and everything I do across forty six weeks does.
I am also using LLMs heavily for the planning and the week to week adjustment, which makes the whole thing a little recursive, one program writing another program to be executed by a third thing that may or may not be a program. That is the part I am most curious about. Not whether the training works, plenty of people have proven training works, but whether treating myself as a system with a specification actually changes the outcome compared to how I've trained before, or whether it just changes how I feel about the training.
I don't know yet. I'm forty six weeks out and the only data I have is that the plan exists and I have only begun executing.
Next
The swim, and overcoming buoyancy and preconceived notions.
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