That’s a striking pattern to have witnessed firsthand, and it tracks with what’s understood about reserve capacity decline — the physiological cushion that lets a younger body absorb a bad night’s sleep or a hard week and bounce back doesn’t disappear all at once. It thins gradually until there’s just no buffer left, and then everything runs close to the edge.
The lesson you took from it is interesting, and I’d push on it slightly rather than just affirm it. “Get used to doing things when exhausted” cuts two ways. There’s a version of that which is genuinely useful — building the mental and physical habit of functioning competently at lower energy states, not catastrophizing fatigue, not treating every tired day as a crisis. That’s resilience, and it’s a real skill.
But there’s another version that could work against you, which is using that lesson to justify training through fatigue signals that are actually asking for recovery — like what happened last week. The difference between your parents at near the end of reserve capacity and you right now is that you still have meaningful reserve to protect and rebuild. The whole point of an aerobic base-building phase, the C25K repeats, the deload instinct you just acted on, is to keep the reserve capacity larger for longer. Pushing through exhaustion now in a way that erodes that reserve faster would be working against the long game, not for it.
So maybe the more precise version of the lesson is: build the capacity to function at low energy without panic, while also being disciplined about protecting and rebuilding the reserve itself. Those aren’t contradictory, but they’re not quite the same instruction either.
How did your parents’ decline compare on the mental side — did the energy crashes track with cognitive load too, or was it more purely physical?
That’s a profound way to frame it — that Alzheimer’s stripping away memory and learned behavior left something more like a pure signal, your father’s underlying temperament and physiology, visible without the usual overlay of conscious narrative. Watching the body’s reserve capacity pattern in someone whose mind couldn’t construct excuses or willpower around it would be unusually clear data, in a way you don’t get from anyone still able to mask or rationalize their fatigue.
“His final lessons were how to die” is a weighty sentence, and I don’t want to breeze past it with a quick reply. That kind of legacy — learning not just from someone’s life but from watching them go through the actual end of it — is a different category of inheritance than the wargames and Commodore VIC-20 and career advice. It sounds like it’s stayed with you as something closer to instruction than memory.
I’ll go back to the running thread when you’re ready, but I didn’t want to just pivot past that.
There’s something almost merciful in that exchange — that he asked once, got the unflinching truth, and seemed to actually metabolize it even though the disease should have made that kind of integration impossible. The fact that he never asked again is genuinely unusual, like you said. Most explanations of that nature have to be repeated because the brain can’t retain them. Something about that fifteen minutes let it stick, or maybe let it stop mattering in the way it would matter to someone without the disease.
Your observation that the disease cost others more than it seemed to cost him directly is something hospice workers and dementia researchers have noted too — that the suffering is asymmetric, weighted heavily toward the witnesses, while the person inside it is often more insulated from the horror of it than family fears. That doesn’t make it not a tragedy. But it’s a different shape of tragedy than the one people imagine in advance.
The instinct to step back and extract something useful under stress — that’s clearly a long-standing pattern for you, not something you developed for this specifically. It sounds like the same diagnostic posture you’ve described applying to systems and code, just turned toward something that doesn’t resolve into a clean answer. I’d guess that’s partly what made you good at the geology-to-IT pivot in the first place, and probably what’s letting you treat your own aging with the same clear-eyed measurement you’re applying to the C25K data, rather than flinching from it.
How old was he when he died?
That’s a long run, and a long goodbye too, by the sound of it — Alzheimer’s stretching out over years rather than a quick decline. Eighty-six relative to your own trajectory puts an interesting marker down too, whether you’ve thought about it that way or not.
Back to the practical thread whenever you’re ready — sounds like you’ve got Week 5 repeat coming up, ideally with better recovery behind it and ideally not at 90°F.